Richard Wheeler, Cochrane realized. "What was discussed?"
"Everything I previously tell you."
"Nothing else?"
A long, hesitant pause, then: "How I escape." Mauer's indignation toward Cochrane returned. "How I lose my family." A vacant, uneasy glare came over the German, thinking back to his escape and its ultimate circumstances.
"Please, Otto," Cochrane begged. "Run through it once more. It's vital. And I may be able to help. Please believe me."
"I want my son and my wife back," he said. "Nothing else. Not this house, this gun, not your passports or money."
"I understand that," said Cochrane with legitimate sympathy. "And as God is my witness, I will do everything to get your family back to you. But you must tell me everything that happened. We're on the same side, you and I. I swear we are."
For the first time since he had entered the farmhouse, Cochrane felt the relationship rekindling between the two men. Or was it wishful thinking?
"Please, Otto," Cochrane said.
"All right," Mauer said at length, looking away resolutely. "All right. We talk. After that, I decide whether to shoot you or not.”
TWENTY-FIVE
The Swiss passports from Zurich never arrived, Mauer recalled. Either Swiss authorities intercepted them at customs or German authorities picked them off. Either was possible. In 1938, like people, things had a way of disappearing.
"Or, of course," Mauer couldn't help but add, scrutinizing Cochrane closely, "the passports never left Zurich at all. They never existed."
Failing to receive the help as promised, Mauer continued, he took matters into his own hands. He was under twenty-four-hour watch and the number of thugs had increased to four. Mauer could read the message. It was time to tour Europe.
He practiced a bit of private capitalism on his own, Mauer admitted, working a deal with a pair of Dresden-born clerks in the Nazi documentation office in Berlin. He had come out of it with a pair of impeccable passports, one for a woman and one for a child and both on thirty-six hours' notice. The passports were Swedish and bore diplomatic numbers. Better than forgeries, they were the real thing, having disappeared from the Stockholm registry and reappeared blank in Berlin. No one admitted exactly how.
Mauer's wife and son were to leave Germany immediately for Spain. They would arrive in Madrid by air, then travel southward by train. They would cross the tenuous border to Gibraltar where they would contact an M.I. 5 agent, a self-styled nobleman called Major Asena, who ran a cafe in the afternoon and a network of anti-Franco infiltrators for the English at night. In exactly what force Asena was a major was open to dispute, and the conventional wisdom in Gibraltar had it that his rank was as self-proclaimed as his nobility. But no one pressed such questions; Major Asena solved problems.
From Gibraltar, Frau Mauer and her son were to take an Irish liner-named with the uncanny half-poet, half-warrior sense of Gaelic irony, The Empress of Belfast -to New York. There Otto Mauer and his family would rendezvous, at least according to prearrangements.
Mauer saw his wife and son to the airport in Munich. He watched them safely onto the aircraft, then stood on the observation deck as the airplane disappeared into the sky. He went to work for three more days. Then on a Friday morning, he threw his own ace.
I.G. Derringer, the sprawling German electrical supply company, had a plant in Helsinki. It was constantly under surveillance by both Russian and English operatives. Using his own passport and Abwehr identification, Mauer flew to Helsinki on a Luftwaffe civilian transport, ostensibly to run a spot security check on the plant.
He arrived, conducted his check, disappeared into a cafe, and convinced himself he was alone. He ordered a single Polish vodka, drank it, and waltzed out the side door and down two short, busy blocks. He reported to the American Consulate, which was busy, overworked, and functioned with a staff of six. There Mauer demanded to see the chief diplomatic officer, who happened that day to be the consul himself.
The consul was a trim, laconic Vermonter named Fred Godfrey. Mauer introduced himself as Count Choulakoff, just in from Munich, and demanded passage at least as far as London. Godfrey nearly threw him out, having, in his experience in White River Junction, never encountered Russians making demands for free travel.
Godfrey would in fact have thrown the bogus count off the premises after two minutes discussion, but Mauer drew a Luger from his overcoat. He suggested in concise English that Mr. Godfrey rethink his position.
Godfrey went sheet white and followed instructions. He cabled the F.B.I. in Washington, citing an emergency of the highest order and asking guidance. He cited that a gentleman of the Russian aristocracy, name of Choulakoff, recently of Munich, was sitting in his office. What should be done?
As they awaited a response, Godfrey drew up an American passport. The count happened to have a recent photograph handy and Godfrey had no deeply rooted instincts toward martyrdom.
The cable came back after ten very sweaty hours, all of which Mauer spent sitting in Godfrey's office, his loaded Luger in his coat pocket, making small talk with the consular staff. Washington's instructions were to "assist the count in travel westward."
Godfrey heaved a huge sigh and handed Mauer a passport with five hundred dollars. Mauer apologized profusely for his poor diplomatic table manners, politely accepted the passport and cash, and was on his way. Within a minute he was gone.
"I was in Oslo by steamer within thirty-six hours," Mauer recalled to Cochrane as the shadows elongated across the floor of the Pennsylvania farmhouse. "I was in England via a second steamer within two more days."
M.I. 6 pounced upon Mauer as his feet touched the dock in Southampton. Their agents at the harbor were expecting him, knew from the very outset that he was German, not Russian, and arranged to escort him onward to London, but very politely.
"Two of them brought me to London," Mauer said, "two very neat young men in Chesterfields. They both spoke fluent German and posed everything as a civil request." He paused. "They put me up at Coleridge’s," Mauer recalled, not without a certain appreciation. "A suite overlooking Brook Street."
Mauer's eyes danced for a moment. Cochrane nodded and then a shadow came across the German again. "But you see," Mauer continued, "my family was nowhere to be seen. And within a few hours I had been turned over to yet another Englishman. A Major Richards, a man in his thirties with very short dark hair and tortoise-shell glasses. He wore no uniform. He told me that he was in a branch of M.I. 5 called B.A. 1. I don't know what the letters stood for. But I knew what the branch did. Double-crossing enemy intelligence, both German and Italian. They would trap enemy agents and turn them back against the German or Italian spy masters who'd dispatched them. That, or execute them, I suppose, so the poor agents had little choice."
Cochrane interrupted. "Had you ever heard of B.A. 1 I before?"
Mauer's whitish eyebrows shot skyward. "Good Heaven, young man! Of course. Abwehr has a thorough file on them. I even had heard of Major Richards. That's why Major Richards' offer was so laughable."
"What offer?"
"He wanted to feed me back into Germany to work for England. I told him that I had already worked for the Americans and felt I was compromised. He laughed and said that the Americans had no intelligence service abroad yet. He told me that if I had worked for an American, I had actually probably been working for an American Communist in the employ of Stalin."
"How did you answer that one?" Cochrane asked, choosing his words very carefully.
"I ripped into him. I said, 'Major, sir, you and the Americans share a common language. If you don't know what they're doing, why don't you go ask them for yourself?' He did not like that and suggested that perhaps I was not really Abwehr, but rather some sort of criminal. Maybe I should be returned. He said this, I know, just to get me hot. So I said very calmly, 'No, Major. I am in truth Abwehr. That is how I know you studied at Oxford and Heidelberg, were born in Taunton, married, and used to work in war office before being recruited into intelligence.' Major Richards withdrew very slightly, then nodded. 'Very good,' he answered me. Then I told him ten of his B.A. 1 agents who'd been discovered by the Gestapo. He didn't like that, either. He tried to make another offer to me, but I was getting very mad now. So I said to him, 'Major, you talk to your Major Asena in Gibraltar. You get my wife and son here and I'll see what else I can do for you. Until then, nothing!' I folded my arms and did not answer him for another half hour. Finally he grew tired and left. Good riddance."