Tinkertoy was her pet, her primary computer.
“Tinkertoy makes a cross reference of Crohan to the Competition.”
“Langley?”
“Yes. Archives section where they stored the trash before they went into business in 1947. All the old OSS stuff and some of Wild Bill Donovan’s meanderings before that. I rang up my opposite number over there.”
“At Langley? Was that wise?”
She glanced at him sharply. “You said this was routine, Hanley. Strictly routine. We do cooperate from time to time, you know. It is the same government.”
“I’m not all that certain CIA is convinced, let alone NSA or the defense boys.”
“I know what you mean. Remember the Hamburg business six months ago when Langley bollixed it?”
“It’s still on my desk,” Hanley said, one bureaucrat explaining to another by a simple phrase showing how tedious it had become. “I can’t shake it off on anyone.”
“Well, the interesting thing, Hanley, is that they claim to have absolutely nothing on the business. I didn’t talk with Mrs. Carruthers, though. She’s normally the one I talk to. She was off. Terrible speller. Isn’t that funny? She runs one hundred fifty people and two hundred machines and couldn’t spell her way out of a paper bag.”
“Mrs. Neumann,” Hanley interrupted.
“His name was Wallace, said he was filling in. He wanted to know why we wanted to know.”
“About Crohan?”
“Of course.”
“What did you tell him?”
Mrs. Neumann swallowed a bit of carrot in gravy and smiled. “What the hell do you think I told him, Hanley?”
“I don’t understand this,” Hanley said, almost to himself. It was not the first time he had said it or thought it since he sent Devereaux to Helsinki.
“Eat up, man. You’re the one who insisted on lunch,” Mrs. Neumann said. She was in good humor because she saw Hanley’s confusion.
“I was hungry,” Hanley said with petulance.
“So I see.”
Hanley shoved his unfinished plate aside. “Inedible.”
“The lot of the civil servant,” Mrs. Neumann said. She reached for Hanley’s salad and pulled it toward her. “I thought he was very interested in our business.”
“Wallace.”
“Yes.”
“Did you demand the file under rule thirty-eight?”
“No.” Mrs. Neumann was silent for a moment. She held her fork against the remains of the stew as though contemplating either the act of eating or what she would tell Hanley next.
She looked up. “There’s something funny going on, Hanley. With the Competition at Langley, I mean. I told this Wallace the name had come up in a routine cross reference and we had no file. It didn’t satisfy him, but he can go to hell. What could he make of it? For that matter, what do I make of it?”
“Exactly.”
“You haven’t told me anything,” she said.
“I know.” He had the secrets but he did not understand them and was reluctant to let them go until he knew what they really meant. Each secret was an unfired gun and when it was triggered, it demanded action. Hanley was frozen in the matter.
“This is some business lunch,” she said.
“I should tell you.”
“Suit yourself, Hanley. It seems to be your pickle.”
Mrs. Neumann was the only person in headquarters who addressed him flatly by his last name, save the Old Man himself. Mrs. Neumann meant no disrespect; she called any man by his last name and would not have been offended to be plain old Neumann in return.
“We received a message from one of ours in Helsinki nearly a week ago. It came in the middle of a routine matter. It was not expected.” The words fell reluctantly and slowly. “It pointed to the existence of Tomas Crohan, still held by the Soviets in the Gulag.”
“Who is Tomas Crohan?”
“I remembered. Vaguely. Just after the war, when I came in, there was talk about an operation in Nazi Austria… some of the older hands at OSS. Then it was disbanded and we were all floating around from one establishment to another until Truman put the CIA together.”
“Fascinating history of American Intelligence.”
Hanley looked up sharply. “Damn it, Mrs. Neumann. I want to explain to you.”
“Explain.”
“I checked with some of our retired people after I ran his name through a routine comp search—”
“You could have told me about it.”
“Mrs. Neumann. You are in charge of a vast division inside the Section. It hardly seemed worthwhile to tell you about it. Not at the time.”
“What did the retired spooks tell you?”
“Enough to make it a puzzle.”
She waited. Her plate was clean.
“Crohan. He was Irish, suspected of being behind the continued existence of the Irish Republican Army in the late 1930s. Viciously anti-British and the bad feelings were returned. Also a bit of a Nazi.”
“Sounds like a lovely fellow.”
“Well, it was explained to me that the parts were all tied in to his absolute hatred of the British. Ireland came up neutral in the war — the Irish Free State — and the Nazis were all over Dublin. They curried favor with the De Valera regime and they were using the country as a listening post on our operations in the Atlantic. Not that we weren’t there as well, to do our bit. We worked on the Irish, pointed out our ties, and all that. This was the State Department, I mean, and the OSS. It was a delicate game. At the same time we were dealing separately with the Irish, holding off the Nazis in Ireland, we had to hold off the British. They were absolutely rabid when it came to the subject of Irish cooperation with the Americans. They kept thinking we were cooking up deals behind their backs for American support for Irish unity after the war.”
“Were we?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. Though I should think we were promising them anything under duress.”
“And how did Crohan fit in?”
“He was a perfect man. Irish neutral with valid visas to Nazi-occupied Europe. He could become our agent.”
“How? When?”
“I don’t know. Memories of old men just fade at that point. I hoped there would be something in Tinkertoy. And then I hoped you could somehow wring the information out of Langley since they have charge of all the old OSS files. It distresses me that this… this problem has come up, that nothing has come of your research.”
Mrs. Neumann narrowed her shrewd eyes. “That’s the point, isn’t it, Hanley? Something did come of it. Absolutely nothing.”
“I don’t want to be left in the dark on this,” Hanley said. Annoyance scratched at his plain Nebraska voice. Both were from the Midwest, different states at different times, and both had an annoying directness in their speech that offended others and attracted them to each other inside R Section, despite their separate temperaments. In that moment, Mrs. Neumann instinctively understood the lostness Hanley felt.
“What happened to Crohan?” she said in a raspy whisper.
“He was in Vienna when the Soviets marched in. He was trapped in the city but he wasn’t terribly concerned. After all, we were all on the same side. The Russians just arrested him and he disappeared. After a year or so, they acknowledged they had him but said he had died, too bad.”