Reilly blew his breath into a glass and polished the glass with his apron. "Well, he was an old guy. I don't know how old, but he said he fought in the last war. Tall, but up a bit. Sallow complexion. Gray hair. Looked like a thousand other old men."
"Nothing strange about him?"
"Not that I recall."
"How did he get here?"
"What? To the bar?"
"Yes. Walk? Car? With friends?”
"Darned if I know."
"You never saw a car? Or a bicycle?"
"No, but I wouldn't have. Hey, I'm busy serving when this place is open. Stay around. You'll see."
"If he didn't live around here, he couldn't have walked," Cochrane said. "Particularly if he was old."
Reilly shrugged. "Now you tell me something," he said.
"If I can."
"Is Rosenfeld going to get us into the war? He is, isn't he? Franklin D. Rosenfeld?"
"I only work for the F.B.I.," Cochrane answered, a sudden fatigue overtaking him. "I've never been to the White House."
"Seems to me there's still eleven thousand Americans buried in France from the last war," Reilly said. "And for what? Know what I think? I think Mussolini is just what the dagos deserve. I can't buy a drop of liquor in New Jersey without paying the Don Macaronis. I hear Mussolini put them all out of business in Italy. That's why they all come here. And as for Hitler… as for Hitler," he repeated for emphasis, "well if there's anything worse than the Jews it's those filthy English. So I say, let Adolf eat them both alive."
Cochrane felt anger swelling inside him and did not understand how he suppressed it. Maybe it was professionalism, because his overwhelming instinct was to knock the flintyeyed Reilly squarely in the jaw.
Instead, he flipped shut the palm-sized notebook in which he had been writing and recognized that it was time to leave. To his abiding shame, he answered Reilly. "Who knows, Buck? Maybe you're right."
“Of course I am,” Reilly muttered. “Ask anyone around here. They’ll tell you the same thing.”
A pair of brutal thunderclaps toward five in the afternoon shook the very foundations of everything that was standing. There followed a few heartbeats later a deluge and all Cochrane could think about was, there goes any clue that we missed in the woods this morning. Cochrane had taken refuge in a Red Bank guest house.
He sighed and a depression was upon him. Billy Pritchard was dead as were scores of other people. Cochrane bought an afternoon Newark Star, and lost himself in the sports.
Not surprisingly, the Washington Senators baseball team had been thrashed a second day in a row by the formidable Yankees: home runs by Joe DiMaggio, Charley Keller, and the newcomer Tommy Henrich. Then he found himself laughing out loud.
DiMaggio, Keller, and Henrich. Wait till he told Hoover, he fantasized. An Axis connection on the New York Yankees!
The rain continued. Mike Cianfrani telephoned from Newark in the evening.
"The killer used a hard, flexible tool. There were scars on the neck," said Cianfrani. "Strangled the Pritchard kid."
Cochrane lay restlessly in bed much of the night. A sense of Siegfried was beginning to emerge:
A six-foot German. Young. Strong. A talent with disguises, explosives, and probably dialects, too. The man had a car. He could work ably with a wireless and was privy to a complex code. Cochrane was certain that young Pritchard had been lured from Reilly's, murdered, conveyed to the parking lot, and dumped in the woods.
On his way back to Washington, a vision of Bobby Charles Martin, the cartographer, was before Cochrane. He thought back to the circles Martin had drawn on the maps of New Jersey, courtesy of the Bluebirds' triangulation.
Red Bank was within the circle. The saboteur had spied on the United States Navy by day and transmitted to Germany at night.
Cozy, Cochrane concluded. FDR would be apoplectic.
Cochrane returned to his office and telephoned Newark again, ordering reports of the Pritchard slaying to be sent to all town police chiefs in northern New Jersey, as well as the chief homicide investigators of all principal cities between Washington and Boston. Somewhere, Cochrane prayed, the Pritchard killing might strike a parallel with something else. Moments later, Dick Wheeler lumbered into Cochrane's office.
"Hoover's called a meeting for Monday morning," Wheeler said. "The Chief wants all the Indians present. All three of us tribe members. You, me, Lerrick."
Wheeler curled an upper lip. So did Cochrane.
"Now, more bad news," Wheeler added. "For you, that is."
"Let's have it."
"The LKW you requested. Last Known Whereabouts of one Otto Mauer."
"Yes?"
"No can do," Wheeler answered. "The Bureau slapped a red tag on them just forty-eight hours ago. From your own happy days working with that smelly little gnome up in the seventh-floor archives, you know what that means."
"Removed to Hoover's own personal files," said Bill Cochrane.
"Where they will probably sit until icicles hang in hell," surmised Wheeler. A pensive silence shrouded them both, then Wheeler concluded. "Monday morning early," he reminded Cochrane. "Second floor conference room."
Wheeler left and Cochrane suddenly felt himself very alone. The sensation made him think of Heather. He stared out the window for a moment. That odd question was upon him again. If she came back for five minutes, what would he say?
I've missed you…
I love you…
I've been given the most perplexing problem, and I cannot solve it…
"Then you had better keep working on it," he could almost hear her answer in her proper, magnolia-scented way. "Work comes first. Fun comes later."
But, Cochrane recalled, there would be no fun. Not today. Mourning ends, he reminded himself, pain sometimes doesn't. He sympathized with the family of Billy Pritchard, who that day was attending the twenty-two-year-old's funeral. The burial was in Kansas, where Berlin was something very distant. All the Pritchard family knew was that their son was dead. On the death certificate the circumstances had been "redefined," as Bureau parlance tactfully put it. Mike Cianfrani, from the Newark office, had taken care of everything.
Billy Pritchard had died, the report said, when a stockpiled harbor mine had accidentally been detonated. The military was dangerous even in time of peace, the family was begged to understand. These things did occur on the odd occasion. And everyone was so terribly sorry.
TWENTY-ONE
The powwow was scheduled for 8 A.M., Monday. In actuality, it was a war party.
Cochrane arrived at twenty to eight. The building was quiet. The door to Hoover's office was closed. But Cochrane had seen both Hoover's and Clyde Tolson's cars outside in the lot. The Director was lurking somewhere.
Cochrane entered the conference room and found Dick Wheeler already seated. "J.E.H. is furious this morning," Wheeler said. "Keep your wits about you."
Wheeler removed his pipe from his breast pocket, skewered the stem with a green pipe cleaner, and set it down on the table near an ashtray. "Just give me enough room to talk when I need to," Wheeler warned. "J.E.H. listens to me, don't forget."
Cochrane settled into a chair. "What's going on?" he asked.
"We have company. From the executive branch."
Wheeler grimaced and they both heard the door from Hoover's office open across the corridor. There were voices, including Hoover's.
A pulse beat later the door opened fully. Wheeler and Cochrane were on their feet as Hoover entered in a brisk, energetic shuffle. The Director wore a fiercer scowl than usual, and his cheeks and brow were florid. He looked angry, particularly when he spotted Cochrane. But then again, he always looked angry from a distance of fifty feet or less.
Frank Lerrick was with him and handled the introduction of a third man: tall and thin, with a squat, pug nose and big ears that almost seemed to flop. His name was Russell Middlebrook and he was an undersecretary of state. Cordell Hull's office was to be kept informed of progress in the case, Lerrick announced. Middlebrook took a place between Lerrick and Wheeler. At the table he gave no more than a nod in Cochrane's direction and settled in with a pad of paper and a pencil.