him.
'So what's this? Something for my memory scrapbook?' Cochrane demanded. 'What'd you bring me here for? You fired me, you know. Or did you forget?'
'Well, uh, he killed himself.'
'So it appears.'
'Well, uh, why?'
'Why? You're Hoover's handpicked detective. You find out why.'
'Cochrane,' Frank Lerrick said, 'you were the last one he talked to. In your own way, you were the only one in the Bureau who he, uh, had any respect for. What did he say to you yesterday afternoon?'
'He said he was deeply depressed. He said we were going into the war on the wrong side. He said we'd end up fighting the Russians by 1955.' Cochrane paused. 'He also specifically said that you and Hoover were a pair of feather-brained assholes.'
Lerrick was obviously disappointed. 'That's all?'
'From his point of view, that was quite enough. He also wanted to know if he had be executed for treason. He said he thought he would be. I told him he was probably right.'
Lerrick's anger flashed. 'What'd you tell him that for?'
'Because that was the truth. And he knew it long before I told him.'
Bill Cochrane took a final look at the dead man on the floor. For a moment he winced at the pain that Wheeler must have known before dying and for another moment he felt sorry for him. Then he gave Frank Lerrick a final sour look.
'I'll be out of the Twenty-sixth Street house by noon tomorrow,' Cochrane said. 'Not a minute earlier.' Then he departed.
With him went the lesson he had learned so well years ago at the National Police Academy, then under Wheeler's own command in Kansas City.
In this line of work..
In Cochrane's career, Dick Wheeler had always been the coincidence, but Cochrane had never seen it. Chicago and Kansas City, then Berlin and Washington. Always it had been Dick Wheeler, giving the silent orders, pulling the unseen strings.
When the Gestapo had known ahead of time of Cochrane's arrival, he hadn't seen the coincidence. When Siegfried somehow had learned who was on his trail, and where that 'who' lived, Cochrane had only begun to sense the coincidence.
Now Wheeler was dead by his own hand and Bill Cochrane was off the Bureau. At last, coincidence had been eliminated.
FORTY-FIVE
There were two other ghosts to lay to rest.
Cochrane flew to Atlanta on Saturday morning, and early on a chilly afternoon found himself walking through the tall grass of a hillside cemetery at Stone Mountain. Not far from a memorial to the Confederate Civil War dead, Bill Cochrane came to a granite marker of another tragedy: a smaller tragedy, perhaps, but one of equal intensity.
The tombstone read:
Heather Powers Cochrane
1912-1933
He leaned forward and laid a modest bouquet across the grave. Inadvertently, the flowers reminded him of the bouquet she had thrown as a young girl in a white wedding gown on the afternoon of their marriage.
Funny about life, he thought to himself. Had Heather not died, he would never have applied to the F.B.I.. And he would never have met Laura. Bill Cochrane was only occasionally a religious man, and the grand designs of life- what was meant to be, what was not meant to be-perplexed him endlessly.
'I'm getting remarried, Heather,' he said softly, as if as a confession. 'The second half of my life has begun. I've chosen the woman I want to spend it with.'
For more than half a minute he stood in silence, thinking not praying, observing, putting things in order. He looked at the burial plot on the peaceful Georgia hillside. His eyes focused on the bouquet he had just placed. Life's absurdities and contradictions came toward him in a final rush.
Flowers, he thought, for weddings.
Flowers. For funerals.
Flowers, he could not help but recall from the insane hours in Code Breaking with the Bluebirds. Flowers like Siegfried's, planted in a homicidal pattern across the north-eastern United States.
He turned and was gone.
He took the next available flight to Philadelphia. From there it was just a short hop on the Reading Railroad out to Bala Cynwyd, where Bill Cochrane called upon the family of the late Stephen Fowler. Cochrane found what had been overlooked for too long.
Walter Fowler, Stephen's father, still shared his bereavement with his family. But he agreed to speak with Bill Cochrane. Neither mentioned the circumstances of Stephen's death. It barely mattered now. Only the death itself was significant.
Walter Fowler was a tall handsome man in his seventies, and from a certain angle struck an image of his departed son. Fowler spoke of Stephen's life and, in doing so, shed the light that Cochrane sought.
'We lost just about everything during the Depression,' Walter Fowler recalled at length. 'In January of 1929 I was worth more than a million dollars. By the end of October, I was worth a few hundred. It was that fast. The family rallied, of course. Our business didn't go under. The railroads still had to use tracks. But we learned how quickly the enemies could destroy you if hey wanted to.'
'Sorry,' Bill Cochrane said. 'What enemies? I'm not following.'
A strange cast came over Walter Fowler's eyes. Wars and depressions come from the same source,' he explained succinctly. 'There isn't one that isn't inspired, fomented, and promoted by the great international banking combines. And these, of course, are entirely controlled by Jews. Have you ever read a pamphlet by Henry Ford called The International Jew?'
'No, sir. I haven't.'
'I'll find you a copy. You should read it.'
'Uh huh.'
And on it went for another hour until Stephen Fowler made sense. Cochrane then excused himself, saying he wished to catch the 7:23 express from Thirtieth Street Station to Washington.
So inevitably, in a perverse sort of way, all the recent events created their own scheme of logic.
*
Cochrane sat in the window of the Transworld DC-3 as it lifted off the runway of National Airport on Monday morning. The woman who sat next to him was always nervous when flying; she had been in aircraft only twice before in her life. She fidgeted her hands andCochrane placed his hand on hers.
Stephen Fowler remained something of a cipher, but Cochrane now understood enough to close his own mental books. The only son in a distinguished, wealthy family, Stephen Fowler made his peace with fascism early in life. Probably at Princeton, Cochrane reckoned, among the elite, among the other moneyed sons of Nassau, and among the eating clubs and playing fields of the American upper classes.
The Depression came an threatened to take all this from Stephen Fowler and those like him. Fowler reacted to Roosevelt's democratic-socialism with some -isms of his own. Fascism. Fanaticism. Deism. It was not, as Reverend Fowler himself might have remarked, like St. Paul falling off a horse. The force of Paul's conversion was said to propel him from saddle to roadside, where he sat basking in his new faith.
With Fowler it had to have been a longer process, prompted by what the young minister perceived to be the forces of evil in the world. Jews. Leftists. Moderates. Atheists. Democrats.
First, at Princeton he openly opposed all of them. Only later did he develop his cover. By that time he had
