"Where's Spain?" Cochrane inquired. "Or the Soviet Union?"
"Somewhere in the murky middle," answered Wheeler. "Maybe by the end of 1940 we'll have it all straight."
Cochrane opened a file drawer and fingered a few cards to familiarize himself with the format. Then they were out into the hall again, nearing a right-angle turn in the endless corridor, strolling deeper into the belly of Section Seven, when Wheeler sniffed the air and stopped in his tracks. His feet shuffled, almost in the manner of an Ozark brown bear pawing the ground.
"Who the hell is smoking a cigarette on this floor?" he bellowed. "Standing orders. No cigarette smoking in any section I have anything to do with!" He continued down the corridor and around the corner. "Who is the malefactor?"
The culprit was no less a personage than tiny Mr. Hay himself, who was discovered stuffing a smoldering butt into a potted hallway plant.
"Mr. Hay, you little gnome!" Wheeler roared, not half as angrily or aggressively as he might have. "Are you trying to asphyxiate us?"
"No, sir."
"Then why don't you scramble back upstairs before the cat catches you!"
"Yes, sir," said Mr. Hay, who drew a nasty bead on Cochrane, then returned a terrified defensive gaze to Wheeler. "Right away, sir. Just delivering files for the CAR Division, sir."
"Go!" ordered Wheeler. "Vanish!"
The dwarf scurried back to the elevators.
"But you're smoking," Cochrane said softly to Wheeler.
"I'm smoking a pipe. Pipes, yes. Cigarettes and cigars, no, on my floors. Power is wielded arbitrarily and unfairly in this Bureau."
They arrived at another door. Wheeler pushed it open without knocking. "This is Deciphering and Cryptology," said Wheeler, leading Cochrane into a large room that was a messy warren of desks and small plywood partitions. "Also known as our history and Romance-language department."
Present today were perhaps a dozen loyal workers, most of whom glanced up when Wheeler passed. All were obsessed with various forms of code evaluation, mostly from sequential series of intercepted dots and dashes passed on to them by the pilfering Bluebirds. Many worked with wire recorders, playing back the unidentified blips, and others worked with pens, pencils, papers, notebooks, or improbable-looking little black and gray slide rules.
Among the drones of the D amp;C Chamber were one civil engineer, two math instructors, one high school history teacher, two housewives who were said to be good at solving mathematical puzzles, and a bespectacled, adenoidal eighteen-year-old chess grand master from Brooklyn, New York, named Lanny Slotkin. The latter was currently pursuing his doctoral studies in chemistry at George Washington University.
"I'm a genius," Lanny said to Cochrane upon introduction, simultaneously munching a cream cheese sandwich. Then he went back to his work.
"I love little Lanny," Wheeler said evenly, moving away from him, "almost as much as I love going to the dentist. But he is smart, the little bugger."
Then they came to a Chinese-American woman named Hope See Ming, who smiled very politely, offered Cochrane a dead fish of a handshake, and interrupted her work on an abacus to answer a question in perfectly textured English. Out of her earshot, Wheeler said she was the most able person in the room.
"Hope See Ming is our own little China doll," mused' Wheeler, holding the door open for Cochrane as they departed. "Lanny is our pet Jew. Adam Hay is our pet squirrel. Don’t feed any of them without permission. They have special diets.”
He closed the door and they were back in the corridor.
"But you know what?" Wheeler continued. "They're smart as whips, all of them. Never met a dumb Jew in my life, if you want to know the truth, Bill. Anyway, none of them wouldn't be here if they weren't sharp as tacks. Imagine what we could do if we could trade information with other intelligence services. British and Canadian are formidable, but we can't even admit we're in the same line of work."
"Don't you think they might soon figure it out?"
"So what if they do?" Wheeler shrugged. "We still have to lie. Neither Hoover nor Roosevelt are ready to go to the great unwashed American public and admit that we're running a spy service. That's just politics, William."
Wheeler led Cochrane onward, introducing him first to Roddy Schwarzkopf and Elizabeth Pfeifer, known as Hansel and Gretel in Section Seven, and who abruptly stopped talking when they saw Wheeler. Hansel and Gretel were an infiltration team that Hoover and Wheeler were getting ready for something but no one knew what. Wheeler motioned down the corridor to a private office.
Therein was Bobby Charles Martin, a fingerprint expert formerly of the Ohio State Police, whose hobby was cartography, and who now merrily spent his days assessing recent European maps and navigational charts. "Just in case we have to send a few lucky souls abroad again," Wheeler said as he handled the introduction.
Dora McNeil, the secretary of the D amp;C Division, looked up as they approached and gave Wheeler a sweet complacent smile. Then she stared at Cochrane, and fixed her posture. Dora, Wheeler explained much later, was the house floozy whom no one had the heart to fire. This month she was a strawberry blonde. She was a more than competent secretary, blessed with an ample bosom, good legs, and a pair of buttocks which, when snugly nestled into a form-fitting skirt, had just the proper air of provocation. Dora, in Bureau parlance, was that good time who'd been had by all. Her blouse never seemed to be buttoned quite properly and at least once a week her eyeliner would be slightly off or a speck of lipstick would spend several hours on a front tooth.
But no one complained.
So Dora McNeil flounced around Section Seven at will, occasionally typing a letter or reheating coffee. J. Edgar Hoover did not know about her, and Lanny Slotkin was in deep, unrequited love with her. To him, at age twenty-five, she was a classy older woman.
"Hi," Bill Cochrane said to her as they passed.
"Hi," Dora returned with an eager smile and a twinkle in her green eyes.
"Introductions later, Dora," Wheeler grumbled with sudden curtness. Dora answered
Wheeler with a downward turn of her smile.
"That's something else," Wheeler brooded. "The Bureau rule book, again. This city is filled with young secretaries who can't keep their knees together after six in the evening. But do your prowling somewhere else. No dirtying sheets with another employee, hear?"
"I understand."
“Do you?”
“Maybe.”
Then a smile emerged and Wheeler became the backslapping, beer-guzzling good ole boy again. "Heck, Bill, I wouldn't mind if little Dora back there gave me a few tumbles. But we all got a directive two months ago over J.E.H.'s signature. One of the field agents from Chicago-Racketeering was in town for a month, just long enough to impregnate one of the file clerks from Central Recordkeeping."
"These things happen," said Cochrane generously.
"She happened to be the daughter of a big shot over at Senate Budget and Appropriations," Wheeler said. "Frank Lerrick got a call asking us what kind of orgy we were running over here. J.E.H. went through the roof and made us all monks and nuns. The man hates hetero hanky-panky, you know. Well, anyway. That's the entire show. I guess you can see how this all works."
Cochrane said he did, but Wheeler recapitulated anyway.
Bluebirds were the thieves who plucked the signals out of the airwaves. Then they sent them to Deciphering and Cryptology where people like Lanny Slotkin and Hope See Ming tried to find a pattern. "Letters, numbers, hieroglyphics, cuneiform, anything," Wheeler said. "There's only one principle involved. If a man can think up a code, another man can pull it apart."