'Ah, who the hell cares, anyway?' Cochrane scoffed.
The bartender drew a stein of beer for Slotkin, gave the younger man an indulgent grin, and departed.
'You bust your ass for the lousy F.B.I. and they put you on the street,' Cochrane said in more subdued, sorrowful tones. 'Well, I'm through busting mine. You just look out for yours, Lanny. That's tonight's advice from this old war horse.' Cochrane lifted his mug.
'Cheers.' He drained it.
'Cheers,' answered Slotkin, not knowing what else to say. He sipped generously.
'I hear that Frank Lerrick has taken over my game,' said Cochrane in a low, confiding grumble. 'Well, we'll see what he can accomplish that Bill Cochrane couldn't, right, Lanny?'
'I suppose so.'
Cochrane received a refill on the beer.
'The trouble with Frank Lerrick is the same as the trouble with Hoover,' Cochrane rambled unsteadily. 'They never get laid, 'cept maybe with each other with Clyde Tolson sandwiched in between.'
'Cochrane! Would you cut it out?'
'A man's got a right to squawk about his former employers, Lanny.'
'Yeah, but I come here every night,' Slotkin snapped back, trying to hush Cochrane. 'Now, knock it off.'
Cochrane was silent for a moment. 'Every night? How come I've never seen you?'
'Because you never came here. Until now.'
'That must be it!' Cochrane slapped his side. Slotkin tried to move away but Cochrane planted an arm around his shoulders.
'Not so fast, Lanny. I want you to tell me your secrets.'
'What secrets?'
'Hope See Ming. That's the lady's name, isn't it?'
'What about it?'
'What about it?' rejoined Cochrane, repeating. 'You sit there looking at her the whole time. Do you mean you can't tell me about it now? What do you do in the evenings, anyway?
Play with Sally Fivefingers?'
'Cochrane, you're really smashed!'
'I can't believe you, Lanny,' Cochrane said in astonished tones. 'Hope's Chinese, right?'
'So?'
'So her you-know-what is sideways, Lanny. You mean you didn't know that?”
Slotkin turned crimson. Cochrane held him with an arm like a tentacle.
'The sideways ones are the best, Lanny. You're a genius and you didn't know that? Haven't you even tried to get into her?'
'Cochrane…'
'What about little Dora McNeil, Lanny? You work with her all day. You got anything going there?'
Slotkin was searching for an escape. There wasn't one.
'Do you know what little Dora puts behind her ears to make herself attractive to men, Lanny?'
'What?' Slotkin asked unwillingly.
'Her ankles,' Cochrane replied drunkenly. 'She puts her ankles behind her ears.'
Slotkin started to physically struggle against Cochrane's arm. It was hopeless. 'What's the matter with you, Lanny?' Cochrane asked. 'Two lovely ladies and you haven't serviced either of them. Are you a pansy, Lanny?'
'I'm not a pansy!' Slotkin snapped. Three heads turned in his direction from the far end of the bar. 'I don't want to drink with you, Cochrane,' Lanny howled. Cochrane let Slotkin push his arm away, 'I don't want to talk, either. You're roaring drunk and-'
'Some thanks I get.'
'I don't owe you thanks for anything.'
'No?'
'No.'
'How about the time you leaned on poor little Mr. Hay? Hoover was looking for names. I could have mentioned you, Lanny.'
'That was your idea.'
'You didn't have to go along with it.'
'Cochrane, what do you want from me? What are you doing here, aside from making a spectacle of yourself?'
Cochrane recoiled with sudden earnestness and sobriety. Then his expression was one of mournfulness. 'Lanny, I want nothing from you except sympathy,' Cochrane said. 'I lost the best job I'd ever had. Hell. It hurts. I'm sorry if I'm sounding off. I've been over-served here by a sadistic barkeep.'
Slotkin was off stride from Cochrane's mercurial shift in mood. 'Hey, no offense,' he said. 'I understand.'
'The thing is,' said Cochrane in confidence, 'we had those numbers lined up. The naval code? I think I had it,' he said drunkenly. 'I was going to go through some of the old intercepts and try out my numbers. Now Wheeler or Lerrick's going to try it and grab all the gravy.'
Slotkin's ears twitched and stood up straight. 'What numbers?' he asked.
Cochrane took a long appraising look at Lanny Slotkin. 'What the hell. You did a favor for me once, pushing around Hoover's pet dwarf.' His voice went very low and he withdrew a fresh yellow pencil from his jacket pocket. He took a cardboard coaster from the bar.
'I think this was it, Lanny,' Cochrane said. 'But play around with it. Don't jump to conclusions. And for Christ's sake, don't say where you got this. You'll get yourself fired.'
'I won't say anything.'
'And you promise you'll wait two or three days?'
'Promise.'
Cochrane blinked, as if to clear his brain. Then he wrote on the coaster in a labored, stumbling scrawl: Four. Two zero. Eight nine.
'I think that's the additive, Lanny boy,' Cochrane said.
'Where'd you get it?' Slotkin asked, accepting it, staring at it, and placing it within his coat pocket.
'I got lucky. Trial and error. What else works in life?' Cochrane reached for his beer. 'Cheers, Lanny.' He raised his mug. 'Wear your glory in good health.'
Slotkin raised his own mug and couldn't believe his good fortune. 'Cheers,' he answered. 'Yes, cheers.'
*
So this was it, Laura thought the next evening. The irrefutable evidence. The smoking gun. Her husband was what they said he was. That, and more.
Laura stood in the cramped hollow behind the wall within the spire of St. Paul's. Downstairs, Cianfrania and Hearn had secured the doors of the church, front and back respectively, while Whiteside and Bill Cochrane had led her upstairs. They had pried loose the outer panels of the chamber with a pair of butcher's knives-they broke one steel blade in the process-and had then, once the panels were loose, simply removed the nails.
And there, behind a second set of board, were the instruments of Siegfried's transmissions. The streamlined, gray metal transmitter that could fit into a small suitcase, the electrical wire, the receiver in a wooden crate, the copper antenna leads, and a German naval code book, fresh and complete, unlike the one at Bureau headquarters.
Whiteside and Cochrane hooked a sixty-watt bulb into an overhead light and reassembled the transmitter.
'We should send at seven in the evening,' Cochrane said. 'That's when Siegfried used to send.'
'Who has the steadier hand?' Whiteside asked toward six-thirty. 'You or I?'
They dummied the transmission key and took turns trying.
'It has to feel like Siegfried on the receiving end, too,' Cochrane said. 'Or no one's going to buy the act.'
Cochrane's hand was steadier. Laura watched and said nothing, taking it all in, alternating her thoughts between her husband, Bill Cochrane, and Whiteside.
