He strolled down the platform and listened to the sound of his own feet. Then his footsteps were drowned out by a chorus of upraised voices.
A trio of uniformed British sailors appeared on the platform and began to move toward him, singing raucously and off-key. They filled the rafters of the old train with their intoxicated voices. They braced each other with interlocked arms and sang:
"Twenty-eight bottles of beer on the wall, Twenty-eight bottles of beer…"
Their voices grew louder as they weaved in his direction, singing twenty-seven, twenty-six, twenty- five bottles, one insufferably after another, all doomed to slip and fall. Then they were right next to him. The sailors were little more than boys, fresh-faced and cleanly shaven, the oldest probably being no more than twenty-one. On their caps they wore the markings of the HMS Adriana. They grinned at Cochrane.
"I'd buy you all a beer," Cochrane said in return, "but I don't think you need it."
They laughed.
"Where you all from?" Cochrane asked.
"I'm from the capital of Ireland," said the first sailor. "We all are," said the younger boy to his left, a rosy cheeked youth with short brown hair.
"The capital of Ireland!" shouted the third, much too loudly.
"Dublin?" Cochrane asked.
"Bloody Liverpool!" exclaimed the first. All three broke up and Cochrane laughed with them. The sailors continued down the platform, lurching, supporting each other and occasionally throwing Cochrane an uncaring dumb smile as they continued to sing:
"If one of the bottles should slip and fall-1-1,
Twenty-four bottles of beer on the wall-1-1, Ooh-h-h…"
Cochrane walked a few feet to a newsstand where he read the headline of the final evening edition of the Washington News. Hitler was demanding Danzig now and the Poles were trying to negotiate. Elsewhere there was a suggestion from a Republican senator that the framers of the Constitution would never have approved a third term for any President.
Cochrane turned away. The sailors lost count of how many bottles were left and were burying their fears in a very real pint of brandy. How many more months, Cochrane wondered, before these boys would be at sea? Hitler would have Danzig, just as he had had Austria and Czechoslovakia. If no one gave it to him, he would grab it. Hitler's own words: Today Germany, tomorrow the world. When was someone going to stop him?
"The only ones who want America to enter a European war are the Jews, the English, and Franklin Roosevelt," Colonel Charles Lindbergh had told a rally of America First legions at Madison Square Garden earlier that same week.
If only it were that simple, Lindy, Cochrane thought. If only the politics of Europe were as rudimentary and predictable as the six-cylinder engine of a monoplane.
Cochrane suddenly realized: it was Hoover who had depressed him. In his usual crafty way, the F.B.I. director had manipulated him into a no-win position. Catch the saboteur, and Hoover would grab the credit. Fail, and Cochrane would take the blame.
"Hey!" thundered one of the sailors from a hundred feet down the platform. "What did the Belgian amputee say to the German farmer's daughter?"
Cochrane tuned them out. Besides, his train was coming now, chugging up from the south end of the track, its lone headlight like a giant Cycloptic eye casting a blinding yellow beam along the two rails.
All right then, Cochrane decided. Just this one final assignment. The people in New York would have to wait for him. National interest and all that. High priority. Totally secret. This job would be within the borders of America, he told himself. No Gestapo pursuing him into Switzerland, no long boat rides from Palestine to Bermuda. Nobody trailing him or ripping through his luggage.
The things he held dear would count: cleverness; judgment of character; intuition. He would combat the enemy on his own home ground this time, and that would make a world of difference.
This time, he reasoned with great confidence, things would be much easier. The assignment was more finite: catch a spy. There would be no murders, he told himself, and he would not get involved with the wrong woman at the wrong time.
The red and gold cars of the Pennsylvania Railroad rolled by as the locomotive chugged past him. Even the voices of the sailors from the Adriana were drowned away. The wheels squealed and the engine wheezed as the long night-train ground laboriously to a halt. Cochrane boarded, his ticket back to Baltimore stuck in his jacket pocket. He found a seat and was secure in his decision.
His spirits were magically lifted. He was back in the spy game for a final time. And now, he concluded foolishly, he would be the master of his own destiny.
ELEVEN
Siegfried was ready for the Adriana.
Smoking a Pall Mall, he drove resolutely northward to Boston on U.S. Route 5. The road was a new two-lane highway that wound its way from Connecticut into Massachusetts and onward into northern New England.
The spy carried a Delaware driver's license in the name of Andrew Glover. Siegfried had forged the document himself. It was flawless. To complete the identity, he had decided that he was a schoolteacher from Wilmington, single, and on his way to visit his summer cabin in New Hampshire.
Oddly enough, though he was known in New York as a clock manufacturer in one quarter and as an inordinately gifted, arrogant, and intense spy in another, Siegfried had the habit of easing into whatever role he was playing. His cover identity was both a discipline and something which he maintained a readiness to convert into at any given moment.
On arrival, Siegfried browsed leisurely through several scientific and optical supply houses until he found a suitable establishment called Lebow Opticals on Reade Street in Cambridge. Siegfried examined Lebow's strongest telescopes until a short balding salesman named Mr. Kiely appeared quietly at his side.
"What I'm looking for," Siegfried explained, assessing a powerful Swiss-made instrument, "is something that will allow me to peer right into the craters of the moon."
He turned toward the salesman. For a moment the spy towered above the smaller man and glared down at him. The salesman felt a flash of fear. Siegfried set down the telescope that he held. The smaller man struggled with his strange reaction to his customer.
Rallying, the salesman said, "If you'll follow me, sir…"
Siegfried gave Mr. Kiely the creeps.
But the salesman led his customer to his most expensive line of optical equipment. "I'm not sure how much you intend to spend, sir," said the clerk, now relieved that other salespeople and customers were nearby.
"Price is not a consideration," Siegfried said.
"Very good, sir."
The clerk removed from a display case an eighteen-inch-long American-made telescope called the Celestron 1000. It was the latest and most compact device in the store.
Siegfried hefted it in his hand and admired the feel of the instrument. He elongated the scope and examined the crystal at both ends. Then he turned to the clerk.
"May I?' Siegfried asked, motioning gently toward the front window.
"Of course," Mr. Kiely replied.
Siegfried stood in the front window of Lebow Opticals and tested his telescope. He peered through his left eye down Reade Street. At one hundred yards, on the eyepiece's second adjustment, he could read one-column headlines on the Boston North American. He stretched out the scope to its greatest power, leaned forward slightly to give himself the proper angle, and trained the scope on an apartment building that he estimated to be a mile away, rising above several lower buildings.
Siegfried watched moving figures within distant buildings for several seconds. He could discern facial features. He would actually have recognized these people if he had encountered them an hour later. The spy thoughtfully pursed his lips.