The Wind Chill Factor
Thomas Gifford
A MysteriousPress.com
Open Road Integrated Media
Ebook
I am not I;
he is not he;
they are not they.
Contents
Prologue
PART ONE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
PART TWO
Buenos Aires
Glasgow
London
Germany
Home
Epilogue
Prologue
THERE WEREN’T MANY PEOPLE ON the platform. It was cold and the chill felt good, cleansed my pain. I leaned against a pillar. A few feet away a family waited, middle-aged and tweedy with a little blond girl holding her mother’s hand. She was smiling with the expectancy and excitement of the very young who are up long after their normal bedtime. She let go of her mother’s hand and began to pace ever-widening circles around her parents, until she came close enough for me to see her cornflower-blue eyes. She smiled up at me and I smiled back. She was well dressed: her coat had a velvet collar.
Tentatively she came closer, staring up at me in a child’s unrelenting manner, her smile fading. Again I caught her eye through the pain and weariness engulfing me and tried to smile. She reminded me of pictures of my little sister Lee taken many years before.
Finally, somewhat discomfited by her staring, I leaned forward to say hello. That was when she began a high-pitched screaming, a wail, as if I’d attacked her. I felt myself toppling forward, no strength in my knees, and I gripped the pillar. I was befuddled: why was she screaming? Her mouth, a cavern into which I seemed about to fall, reminded me of the wound in Alistair Campbell’s forehead.
Her parents turned to stare, her father rushed forward saying, “Here, here,” and reaching for his daughter. The woman came closer, her face scowling and full of reproaches, and then she stopped short, covered her mouth with a gloved hand, and I heard her say: “Oh, God, Henry, look at his face, he’s all bloody. …”
I wiped my hand across my face and it was sticky and my stomach turned; there was blood smeared on my fingers. I tried to hold fast to the pillar but everything was slanting and voices came to me as if from a distant echo chamber. The little girl had stopped screaming and I could see that the rain falling on the railroad track had turned to snow drifting down.
A voice near my ear said tiredly: “Jesus, Cooper, look at yourself, another fine mess.”
The voice was familiar, but when I turned, my sight was going quickly and I could see only a shape, a pinpoint of light, a face in the pinpoint, but it was too late and I saw only the snow blowing in great soft gusts, heard only the dim sounds of trains very far away and I was falling and I simply didn’t give a damn. …
PART ONE
One
IT BEGAN WITH A TELEGRAM.
I had been living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for several years, since my divorce from Digby, and found that, while I could not recapture the feelings of my Harvard undergraduate days, there was still a certain comfort in the place. I arranged for the use of Widener Library; I came to depend on the Coop for my department store needs; there were several new and used bookstores at hand, stationers, newsstands, tobacco from Leavitt & Pierce, the Crimson and the New York Times to read with breakfast, walks to take down Boylston Street, past Eliot House, where I had once lived, and along the Charles River, where I had fallen deeply in love with a woman who was destined to go away, who had been the reason for my divorce.
In Cambridge I amounted to myself: there were few aspects to my own definition there which did not stem directly from me. In that sense, it was entirely unlike New York, with its telltale evidence of Digby, who had so many friends and was so much better known than I, unlike—even more significantly—Cooper’s Falls, where our family, which had given the place its name, was in many ways public property.
On the morning in question, something past the middle of January, I sat at the table in the front room overlooking the gray, dead grass in the courtyard below, snow in patches like a ramshackle case of baldness. Coffee steamed in a mug, butter dripped into the tiny craters of an English muffin, and I contemplated with some satisfaction a pile of yellow legal pad pages full of my cramped, rather constipated penmanship. A mystery novel—set at Harvard during a student uprising and titled Tumult—was coming on nicely. I hadn’t had a drink for six months and my physician had almost convinced me that the alcoholism which had nearly ruined me was a thing of the past. I was free of women and growing happily used to it. I was thirty-four and more or less broke and sufficiently well adjusted to feel unafraid of the day ahead, the month to come, the rest of my life.
I was sitting that morning in the middle of an oasis I had made for myself: I’d managed the trick, pulled myself together, survived.
And then, to keep me honest and in my place, the telephone rang.
“Western Union calling for Mr. John Cooper,” a woman said.
“Speaking.”
“We have a telegram for you from a, hmmm, from a Cyril Cooper?”
I suggested that she read it to me, suddenly aware of that clammy chest-tightening sensation Western Union inevitably produces.
She read: URGENT YOU MEET ME COOPER’S FALLS 20 JANUARY. DROP EVERYTHING. FAMILY TREE NEEDS ATTENTION. CHEERS, OLD BOY. CYRIL.
She offered to repeat the message and I took her up on it, listened with relief: not an overt disaster, anyway. I stared into the street below wondering what the hell it meant. I asked her the point of origin.
“Buenos Aires,” she said with a perfected tone of total disinterest. I thanked her and reflexively reached for a pipe and a tin of Balkan Sobranie, stuffed the blackish tobacco into the bowl, applied a wooden kitchen match, and pulled mightily, tasting the mixture and watching the burning shreds of latakia rising above the rim of briar.
First, it was no fake. Only my brother Cyril would have wasted three words on CHEERS, OLD BOY.
Second, urgency in Cyril’s life was not a colloquial expression. It meant precisely what it said.
Third, 20 January was not an approximation. It was precisely when he wanted me back in Cooper’s Falls and there was no room for excuses on my part.
Fourth, the message was not only tantalizing: it was intentionally provocative, yet revealed nothing. Cyril never did anything without a reason and if he was being obscure there was a reason behind it.
Fifth, Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires, far from Cyril’s normal bases of operation, most of which were European. And yet Cyril would have had an excellent reason for being in Buenos Aires.
After a second cup of coffee, I had made my own calculations. Then I was packing a bag, putting my bits and pieces in order, and heading downstairs for the garage and the Lincoln.
Two
THE LINCOLN WAS A LEFTOVER from a time when money was plentiful. I had kept it and taken care of it in the face of an avalanche of personal and economic difficulties, clinging to it as a sort of talisman. The automobile was a joy, humming very quietly, gulping fuel like a Saturn rocket, warm air rising toward its predetermined comfort level. Built in 1966, my Continental reflected a gray world in its gunmetal finish, held me secure in its deep leather interior. It didn’t occur to me to get home any other way. I had everything checked:
gas, oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid, battery water, air pressure, fuses governing all lights inside and out and all other power assists.
Snowflakes began littering the windshield. The washers were full of winter solvent. The wipers, new, swept across the vast windshield with authority. I was ready.
I spent the first day out from Boston driving a paltry 380 snowblown miles, snow whipping past my vision and skittering across the highway only to disappear without accumulating anywhere. My thoughts naturally settled on my brother Cyril.
Cyril Cooper, two years my senior, was a boy and then a man of extreme affability, determination and, not to put too fine a point on it, sheerest, nakedest greed. His greed, his joy at turning his business life into a series of Harvard Business School case studies, had made him exceedingly rich in his own right. His decency had left him, presumably, without enemies, a rare condition in so rich a man. His business interests included scotch whiskey, two lines of retail clothing shops of trendy persuasion, television taping equipment, advertising, specialty publishing, shipping interests under the flag of Liberia, and land development in Great Britain, France, and Spain. He had taken a loan from our grandfather at the age of twenty-one and systematically built a stairway to tycoondom.
As I drove through the darkening afternoon, puffing on a beautifully seasoned Barling Canadian, my reflections inevitably turned from my brother, always the picture of robust thickchested good humor, to the rest of the family which had, by some peculiar thrashing of genes, produced not only him but someone so utterly different, so bookish and introspective a fellow as myself, to say nothing of our little sister Lee, who had died in the London Blitz.
Cooper’s Falls had been founded in the northern part of Minnesota, in a crook of the exquisite St. Croix River, some short distance above the bubbling foamy falls which even in the icecrack of winter never gave up their churning. The original Cooper, my namesake John, had made his fortune in the railroads and the grain which had combined eventually to give the world a goodly number of colorful millionaires and the thriving, energetic city of Minneapolis. But the Coopers were on balance a singularly retiring bunch, until my grandfather hit his stride and made up for a good deal of lost time.
My grandfather Austin was a deeply committed man who grew richer and richer as the nation prospered after the turn into the twentieth century. He knew well and was friend to the more proudly exhibited financial giants of the time: Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, Mellon. But at some point, due very likely to an unnamed psychological trauma which, like an old piece of wartime shrapnel, worked its way to the surface and finally suppurated and burst messily through, an unsettling vision overtook Austin Cooper. While visiting Germany during the twenties, he became sympathetic to the plight of the Germans suffering under what he called “the yoke of punishment inflicted by their conquerors following the Great War.” He was not alone in his feelings: many humane observers felt the same way and subsequent historians have frequently seconded the view that it was an unjust peace which produced nothing other than a second Thirty Years’ War dating from 1914 to 1945. However, reacting in his own fashion, Austin Cooper was not content with simply noting his own point of view in his nightly diary and letting it go at that.
On subsequent visits to Germany my grandfather sought out, with some perception and determination, those men he believed would be the voices of a new Phoenix-like Germany. On the one hand he allied himself with the Krupp family, socially as well as financially, operating as a bridge between various German and Anglo-American moneymen.
But Austin also courted and was eventually courted in return by political leaders he believed to have the gumption—that was his word—to turn Germany around and get it moving once more toward its own particular manifest destiny. As an American, he was useful to these new men. He could move in circles to which they were denied entrance by the force of social convention.
Thus Austin Cooper began his service to two angry and exceedingly able Germans who sought a new world. One, oddly enough was a hero of the Great War, which appealed to Austin’s reticent sense of grandeur; the other was a bit harder to take in some ways but was the most hypnotically powerful and brilliant man Austin had ever met, ever would meet.
Hermann Goering.
Adolf Hitler.
Austin Cooper.
Cyril Cooper.
Buenos Aires.
Cheers, old boy.
The names lingered and played across my mind as I lay propped on my motel bed, too tired to read or even pay attention to the television. But I was too wound up to fall asleep: I was tense from driving through the snow and, having thought so long about the family, I was developing a certain apprehensiveness about the whole thing.
It had been a long time since I’d seen Cooper’s Falls, a long time since I’d let my mind dwell so pointedly on the family. And I had so many miles, so many hours to go. I had begun to wish I’d taken a plane, but that would not have been true to my nature. Anyone who knew me would have known I’d take the Lincoln.
Finally I climbed under the blankets and listened to the wind whistling at my door until I fell asleep.
The next day they tried to kill me.
Three
THE SECOND DAY OF MY trip home was a more intense version of that first afternoon out from Boston. I drove westward into the face of a gray and shifting curtain of blowing snow which cut visibility and speed to a minimum. Shapes were constantly being overtaken and recognized almost as you were upon them, and headlights made lovely but unproductive halos on the snowflakes. The radio warned continually against any travel, reeling off great lists of school closings and canceled meetings. But I gave no thought to stopping, to the possibility of arriving late. Cyril had said the twentieth and the twentieth it would be.
In Indiana and Illinois the weather cleared and I let the Lincoln off its leash to run flat out for a while, learning by radio that the storm was ahead of me, lying in wait once I turned north from Chicago on the Illinois Tollway and headed on up into Wisconsin. But for now there was hazy sunshine and I tried to ease the tension in my arms which had accumulated during the hours of wheel-gripping zero visibility.
It seemed peculiar in 1972 to be driving along through a country which had developed its own set of new-old problems and crises while thinking back to my childhood in Cooper’s Falls with a grandfather whose name had become, through the years of German rearmament in the 1930s, a synonym for the idea of Americans who were admirers of the Nazis, who sympathized for whatever personal reasons with Nazi aims in Europe.
In the mid-30s, before I was born, the anti-Semitism being practiced within Germany was not much known in our part of the country, was not a matter of overriding concern. It was, in a widespread view, a question which would doubtless be with us always and, in the end, each nation had to deal with Jews—and particularly Jewish wealth and leverage—in its own way. In my grandfather’s view, Jews were thought of in a business sense exclusively, and if you couldn’t really trust them then they weren’t that different from anyone else. There was certainly no reason why you couldn’t coexist with them. They were a fact of life and while he would not go out of his way to rescue a Jew, neither would he have gratuitously done one any harm. They were simply a group apart and how they handled their problem was their own business. He might have said the same of the Catholics.
Austin Cooper was not, then, a crazy racist or bigot. He was, beneath the glaze of colorful and inaccurate publicity, a rather cool realist who felt that Europe was an ailing, faltering giant which must somehow be made strong again for the long-term good of both the world’s and Austin Cooper’s economy. It was his bet that Europe would best be served by the emergence of a dynamic leader, or group, which would give birth to a new pride, a new nationalism, a new confidence which would bring Europe back to her feet again. His belief grew with the Depression and so did his involvement with Fascist politics in Germany, Italy, Spain, and England. Nationalism was the answer and if it made for war, so be it
. Money survives war, thrives on war. War was no problem. There have always been wars. Mankind loved wars. The point was to make wars pay.
What concerned me, as a child innocent of politics, were the purely personal aspects of having Austin Cooper, America’s Number One Nazi as he was called in Liberty and Collier’s, for a grandfather.
My brother Cyril and I were far closer to our grandfather than might normally have been the case. We were too young to have suffered any particular shame at his exploits. For us he was a lean, exceptionally well-tailored elderly man with coins and books for us, a rather sad demeanor, a precise manner of speech, and a surprisingly quick laugh for so serious a man. He played croquet with us on the immense back lawn during the war; he was in his early sixties and wore a white shirt and black tie; by then it was no longer felt safe for him to go out in public for golf or any other occasion.
But if he was only a solemn benevolent figure to us, there were other aspects to having him around, aspects which were a terrible burden to our father, who was a grown man in the company of other grown men. They associated him with the American Nazi photographed on the front pages chatting with Adolf Hitler, riding in an immense open car with Goering and Speer and Frau Goering, meeting behind closed doors with Alfried Krupp and then coming out to engage in smiling handshakes, sealing God only knew what kind of fiendish bargain.
That was what our father had to contend with. Born in 1910, Harvard 1932: a handsome, artistically inclined man who wanted at one time to be a painter. He traveled with his father to Germany in the sparkling days of Berlin’s glories in the 1920s, again in the 1930s, when there was a somewhat different aura, met the great men who were deciding how to reshape Europe and, as sons do, he reacted violently against all they—and by association his father—stood for. So, while Austin Cooper came to stand for American Nazism, our father Edward, in his all too brief life, did what he could to oppose the Nazi wickedness. Finally, in 1941, he gave his life flying for the RAF in aerial combat over the English Channel. His Spitfire was never found, his body never recovered. There were articles written about them at the time: one the living traitor to all that America meant, the other his son martyred for freedom. It made hellish good copy, I suppose, if the men in question were not your grandfather and father.
The Wind Chill Factor Page 1
