She stood in the rain. At the far end of the platform was a small building where the tickets had to be sold. She walked in that direction, hoping to find a timetable.
She opened the door and there he was. Standing behind the door, holding his shopping bag, gazing into her eyes from six feet away.
"Charlotte?" he said softly.
She was speechless. She stammered for words.
"I can't believe this," Mr. Bolton said. He seemed genuinely glad to see her. "I thought it was you on the train. So I came back." He reached to her. "I'm sorry I hit you," he said. "I never should have."
She could hardly believe it. Away from the tensions of the city, he was a different man. So friendly. So relaxed. He took her in his arms.
"My wife is away for a week," he whispered. "Come to my house. Come right now. We can make dinner and make love all night."
It sounded so wonderful. It was almost dark outside now and the rain was torrential.
"Do you have a car?" she asked.
"No need," he said. "I live near here. I always walk to the station. There's a short cut."
"You must get soaked," she said.
"We'll get toweled off together," he said. He took her arm. "Of course," he added suggestively, "it will take some time for your clothes to dry out. You won't be getting dressed again right away."
Charlotte was thrilled. And his wife was away. Maybe the Boltons were separating. Maybe the world wasn't so cruel after all.
He led her down a quiet country lane where there were no houses. Then he motioned to a pathway just off from the road.
"I'm sorry about this part," he said. "The path cuts through a few feet of woods. We're behind an old churchyard. But this saves us about a quarter mile of hiking."
Like a gentleman, he offered her his hand. There was just enough daylight left to see. "Watch your step, Charlotte," he said, leading her. "Don't twist an ankle."
It hardly seemed like a path at all. The footing was treacherous, filled with twigs and stones. Suddenly her man was very quiet. Seconds earlier it had all been a thrill. But now she felt herself turning against this. This was no path at all. And now he was stopping. Why? He turned. They were far from a road and she saw no church and no churchyard. There was just a man standing before her, his hands on her shoulders. And suddenly she was very cold and very wet. She was very aware of the rain and very frightened. There was something horrible in his eyes…
"Fred…?' she asked. She was aware of his size; His strength. His hands. He was touching her differently now. There was a scream brewing if only she could summon up the courage to-
"You should never have come here, Charlotte," he said in perfect English. "I don't know what possessed you to follow me. All the way from Thirty-fourth Street. Foolish bitch!"
The scream was in her throat now but hardly any of it rose beyond her lips. His hands were beneath her jaw, and it felt as if someone were wrapping a steel pipe around her neck.
She scratched at his face but he pulled back a hand, formed a fist, and punched her directly in the face. The pain was excruciating. She felt something warm and wet dripping to her mouth. Her whole head throbbed.
But all that was secondary. No air! He is killing me! The horror of it wrenched hersoul and for a moment she saw her girlhood again. She imagined the family that she would never have, and then a vile vision was upon her of Brooklyn, alcohol, and a thousand ugly, dirty men defiling her.
And this man, she thought as she died, was the ugliest and dirtiest of them all.
*
The orders for arrests were issued above J. Edgar Hoover's signature, though drawn by Frank Lerrick. They were confined to the East: Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and the occasional freight stop in between.
Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation struck in the early morning while their targets slept. In Boston, the owner of a small bakery was taken into custody, as was his wife and younger brother. They protested that they knew nothing about Bund activities. Their warrant said otherwise.
Similarly, a mechanic in Philadelphia, a film importer and distributor in New York, and the owner of a small foreign-language bookstore in Bridgeport, Connecticut were all arrested for espionage-related activities.
There were others, too. But the only one of significance was arrested two days later when the SS Panama docked at Pier Thirty-four on the Hudson River. He was the chief butcher on the ship and had long been suspected of being a Gestapo courier. His name was Wilhelm Hunsicker.
He was on the deck at the time of his arrest, speaking to a South African who had been born with the name of Fritz Duquaine but who had been through various aliases since.
Duquaine stepped away when he saw the federal agents approach. And when Hunsicker put up a vicious fistfight, Duquaine valiantly offered to call the city police. The city police never received the call, and Duquaine, unrecognized by the agents to whom he had spoken, drifted into the pedestrians on Twelfth Avenue and disappeared.
A team of four special agents drove Hunsicker by armored van from New York to Washington. Cochrane was at the Bureau at 10 P.M. when it arrived. Frank Lerrick supervised.
"What's going on?" Cochrane asked. "Is he my suspect?"
"Not until he makes a statement."
"I'm the case officer, am I not?”
"Cochrane, for once in your life, would you control yourself?" Lerrick snapped. "We turn him over to you when he's ready. Not before. You get a transcript of everything."
"I'm so glad," Cochrane answered.
Hunsicker's arrival coincided with the arrival of two men whom Cochrane had never seen before: Jack Burns and Allen Wilson. "Burns and Allen," Dick Wheeler liked to call them. They were from Ohio, knew Bobby Charles Martin from previous intrigues, and were nowhere nearly as funny as the real Burns and Allen.
"Professional interrogators," Wheeler mumbled to Cochrane toward midnight. They had already guided Hunsicker to a room in the basement. Cochrane shuddered, called it a day, went home, and slept fitfully.
TWENTY-FOUR
Cochrane left Washington in the morning and was driving through Pennsylvania farmland by early afternoon. The sky was clear as vapor, though a few cumulus clouds rolled in toward 3 P.M.
The needle of the gas gauge was perched insistently toward the big white E of empty, so Cochrane pulled his 1937 Hudson into a town called Mahanoy City. It was a town like the others of the area, several churches, factories at each end, an enormous anthracite breaker at the outskirts of town, and mountains of black silt bracketing the highway which led in and out. Farmland had given way to coal country.
Cochrane stepped out of the car at an Esso station. The day was cool. The heat of the summer had finally broken and brown leaves in coiled whirlpools hissed and swirled near the two red and white gas pumps.
"How much farther to Ringtown?" Cochrane asked the attendant, a young man in overalls and a green flannel shirt.
The attendant motioned down the road. "Bout fifteen miles," he said. For three dollars, he filled the car's tank, checked the oil and washed the windshield.
MahanoyCity. Frackville. Shenandoah. Shamokin. The towns got tinier as Cochrane drove through them: row houses built by the Reading Coal Company, churches, shops and trees. Ringtown was the smallest, with one main street.
Cochrane stopped at the police station, entered, and found Police Chief Stan Zawadski, a tall thin man with dark hair, with his feet up on the desk. Chief Zawadski glanced to the stranger from the sports pages of the local paper. "Yeah?" he asked.