Mauer looked at him glumly and his own voice was defensive again. "No theories," the German said. "I know."
"Then tell me."
"From the very start, young William Cochrane," Mauer said, "Gestapo had your number in Germany. And I should have known. But Abwehr didn't know at all. Only Gestapo. Trouble is, how do they have you before you even set foot in the Reich? How are they watching you every step of the way?"
"Exactly," Bill Cochrane answered.
"Better still, how did you escape when few others do?"
"I don't know."
"Then I tell you."
"Go ahead."
"You got very lucky, boy," Mauer said. "That's all. Like I said, Americans are bumbling amateurs in matters of intelligence and security. No match for Germans at all. When you get into the war-and make no mistake, England and France will drag you in again-you're all in great trouble. No doubt."
"We'll see."
"Ah." Mauer waved his hand contemptuously and dismissively again. "I show you!" he snapped, very angrily.
Impulsively he grabbed the shotgun again and whirled it upward as he remained in his chair. The moment seemed frozen in both time and horror to Cochrane because when the gun came up it was trained directly at Cochrane's upper chest, where it would blow a hole where his heart was. "I show you for sure!" the German said.
The German snapped the weapon open to check the ammunition and then clacked it shut again. "Ready?" he asked, and Cochrane did not have a half second to move before both triggers of the double-gauge were squeezed. There were two clicks. Two of the loudest clicks Cochrane had ever heard in his life. He stared at Mauer.
"When your Bureau gave me a weapon, they gave me no ammunition," Mauer said. "Fools!" He reached to his jacket pocket and pulled out a pair of shells. He opened the weapon and slid them in. "Now, you go. You help me if you think you can. But you remember. When I am ready to shoot someone, I will be prepared, also."
A long final silence and then: "Remember, I could have shot you. You owe me your life. Bring me my family in return. Your own words once, 'One gentleman to another.' Now, go. We still have our agreement.”
*
Silence, darkness, and loneliness were the three great interrogators. Before them, a man's soul was bare and vulnerable. All three worked upon Cochrane as he drove the winding, black highway through the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania. It was night now and he had left Mauer standing on the farmhouse doorstep, cradling the shotgun, seeing his visitor off. The image stayed with Cochrane. But now the entire sky was the color of Mauer's eyes and mood. And the darkness accused.
The headlights of the Hudson shone a frail yellow beam on the road ahead, but Cochrane saw the road only absently. Other visions descended. Distant voices asked questions.
Why had his own Bureau endeavored so carefully to keep him away from Mauer? Similarly, why had he been discredited in Mauer's eyes?
Why was Hoover personally guarding Mauer's file?
Was Mauer telling the truth? If so, how much? If not, how much? Why had neither Lerrick nor Wheeler ever admitted that Mauer was in the United States in Bureau custody?
Cochrane worked the stories forward and backward, and turned everyone's account inside out. He searched for the details that did not fit, the subtle imperfections or the gross inconsistencies. He found none. He found instead only other images and other voices. And other questions.
Along the dark two-lane interstate, a vision came to him from somewhere deep in his own childhood. He was a boy again on a muggy summer day and he was skipping flat rocks across the river outside Charlottesville. Every once in a while he would throw wrong. The rock would plunge and not skip.
A smooth circle would emerge on the water, followed by another and another, round and concentric from the point where the rock had disappeared.
The perplexities now before him reminded him of the rocks that did not skip-disappearing into a fathomless surface, with other, deeper concentric questions rippling out from the epicenter.
At what point in 1937 had Cochrane actually been compromised in Berlin? And by whom? And how? Or was Mauer's "defection" a clever design to suggest just such unnerving questions? The purpose? To provoke America's embryonic intelligence service into jumping at its own shadow?
Cochrane turned on the car radio, trying to cleanse his mind of Otto Mauer, Germany, Siegfried, and how they linked together, if they did at all. He lowered the window to draw some fresh air into the car, and, as the radio warmed, first there was a rush of static and then a high pure swath of big band music from some ersatz ballroom in New York or Philadelphia.
Glenn Miller filled the car and Cochrane felt a momentary joy, almost a euphoria, disconnected from all the thoughts of this and previous days. It lasted for several minutes as, seemingly in a dark void, propelled by the evenness of the car's engine, and drawn forward apparently by the two yellow beams of light, he sailed smoothly through a universe separate from any other.
But then the purity of Glenn Miller's sound receded, just as Mauer's story had, and it was replaced by a screaming all-night preacher on KDKA in Pittsburgh who wanted to tell Bill Cochrane about salvation.
It occurred to Cochrane that he should be tired and he considered stopping. But then he realized that he wasn't tired at all, so instead of looking for lodgings, he drove like a banshee past the sleeping coal towns, figuring he could see the Washington Monument by dawn.
The static began to suffocate the preacher, too, and Cochrane took his eyes off the road long enough to look to the knob of the radio. And when he looked up again, like a mirage, there was a massive stag leaping into Cochrane's lane from the grassy divider in the highway's center.
He swerved wildly and his tires screeched. Somehow he missed the animal and then it was gone. Cochrane's heart was leaping like the stag, then-his heart still pounding-he wondered if he had been nodding off and it had all been a dream, sent from somewhere, to keep him awake.
He did not know. There were a lot of things, he reminded himself, that he did not know.
What was Siegfried's final, ultra-secret mission?
Why did Mauer insist that a Gestapo agent would not be working alone? Why, when Cochrane himself had seen the proof: the dead body of Ensign Pritchard?
What, in fact, did any of this have to do with Siegfried?
After weeks of investigation, Cochrane hadn't a clue.
He arrived in Washington just past dawn. He parked in front of his own house and, bordering on spiritual and physical collapse, climbed the stairs and slept.
Like Police Chief Zawadski in Ringtown, Cochrane parked in front of a hydrant. But unlike Chief Zawadski, Cochrane drew a summons when he slept past 8 A.M.
TWENTY-SIX
"You're a bachelor, Mr. Glover?" Mr. Fields, the rental agent, asked as they moved through the hallway.
"That's correct, sir," Siegfried answered. "Single." He managed a boyish smile. "Came close once or twice, but never married."
"Lucky you," said the rumpled little man in shirt sleeves and suspenders. "You've saved yourself one enormous pain in the ass, if you don't mind my saying."
Mr. Fields owned the apartment house in Alexandria, Virginia, and lived downstairs with his increasingly corpulent bride of thirty-eight years. Mr. Fields was tart-tongued, smelled of sweat, and had a small apartment for rent at forty dollars a month,
Fields turned the key in the door and flicked the light switch as they entered the apartment. Nothing lit.
"I'll get you a new bulb if you take the place," Fields said. "Look around. See what you think." He glanced at his watch. Fields had fringes of hair on the side of his skull, somewhat like a monk, and nibbled from a bag of salted peanuts.