The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  There was no word at all from Buenos Aires in response to Peterson’s inquiries.

  The box sat in the middle of the desk. Peterson nudged it. “The problem is this thing. We’ve still got it. And they still want it. It’s no good to us because we don’t know what it means.”

  “Are they prepared to kill us all?” Aho pursed his lips.

  Peterson shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “They think they’ve killed Arthur,” I said. “They must have figured that he might have seen the contents of the box and understood what it meant.”

  Brenner blew his nose and coughed. His cold was worse than ever. He looked his age just then, slumped in a chair in the corner, his muffler wrapped around his throat. Peterson pulled a flask of brandy from his desk and handed it to him.

  “They don’t know where the box is,” Peterson said. Alice brought more sandwiches and coffee. “Why don’t you go on home, Alice? It’s late.”

  “I’m afraid to go out,” she said. “It’s cold, murderers are lurking in the streets, and I’m not going out. I’m staying right here until the storm is over.” She was determined.

  “Take a room at the hotel,” he said. “On the town treasury.”

  “Well, thank heavens. I will, but I’ll wait here awhile yet. You may need me.” She went back to the outer office. We could hear her talking to other women who worked in the building, gathered now around her desk.

  “Cozy,” Brenner said.

  “They don’t know where the box is,” Peterson said. “I think we had better leave the damn box here, lock it up, get to the hotel, and as John Wayne used to say, make our stand there.”

  No one had a better idea. So we piled back into our gear, closed up the courthouse, and fought our way through the storm to the hotel across the street.

  I bedded down in a double room with Arthur. We all drank brandy and stayed together until midnight. The talk was desultory. We were all tired. At midnight, when I could no longer keep my eyes propped open, Peterson insisted that we all get to bed.

  Arthur was snoring almost immediately and the close air smelled of the lemon toddy he’d drunk in bed. I was so tired that it was impossible to think. It was a good thing.

  Nineteen

  THE NIGHT CAME UNDONE WITH a racketing explosion which brought me awake, sweating in the overheated hotel room. Brenner lay breathing deeply in his bed. I shivered with a chill. My stomach turned. For an instant I wondered why I had wakened; then I heard the continuation of the explosion, which was no quirk of my imagination. It was real and I unwound myself from the bedclothes, went to the window. The streetlights shed a yellow light through the falling snow, and past the snow the courthouse was burning. I heard the whine of snowmobiles, saw only the jagged flames at the windows of the courthouse. There was another detonation, the window before me rattled, new flames were jerked up out of the dim shape of the courthouse.

  Brenner stirred. I went into the hallway and began rapping on Peterson’s door. He called to me to come in. He was sitting in an armchair by the window staring out across the street. Past him, I saw the flames in the night. Aho stood in the doorway to the white-tiled bathroom, where a light reflected brightly.

  Peterson did not turn to me.

  “Well, Cooper, what do you think of that? They just blew up my goddamn courthouse.” He chuckled bleakly. “Tenacious bastards. I’ll give them that. They come out of the night with the weather ready to kill them, forty below zero, they come out of the night on their snowmobiles and they go after that box. And they blow up my courthouse.”

  Aho sneezed and swore.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  A match flared, I smelled Peterson’s cigar.

  I looked at my watch; it was three fifteen. My body ached; my head hurt. I shook with a sudden chill. The hotel was beginning to produce sounds as townspeople trapped for the night by the storm came alive, began emptying into hallways.

  “Come in here, out of the hall, for Christ’s sake,” Peterson said. Brenner was up, sniffling behind me, wrapped in his heavy overcoat. He followed me into the room without speaking.

  Silently, the four of us stood watching the fire grow through the storm. Flames ate their way through the structure. A wall, damaged by the blasts within, made a crunching, sliding noise and slipped away. A furnace was revealed, yellow and orange, flickering away into the night.

  “I wonder if they got the box,” Peterson mused. “I put it in the safe in my office. I wonder if they cracked the safe first, got the box, and decided to blow the place up as a kind of gesture. Or if they just blew it up and figured they’d get the box that way? I wonder. …”

  Aho said: “I do not believe this. Cooper’s Falls is being destroyed. That courthouse was over a hundred years old.”

  “There’s nothing we can do about it,” Peterson told him. “We don’t even see them. They use the snow. They come and do their work and disappear and the snow covers their tracks. Anyway, there must be several of them, at least two more than the guy you killed, Cooper.” He puffed the cigar. No one spoke. The fire burned on. “I don’t think we’ll ever find them. They’re operating on us and getting away with it is part of the operation.”

  Aho sneezed again.

  From far away there was another sound like an explosion.

  “What was that?” Aho said. He was beginning to sound timid about the whole thing. “Did you hear that?”

  “I’d say it was the library,” Peterson said, standing up and stretching. “I’d bet they just blew up that lovely little library. They’re not taking any chances.”

  “What the hell should we do?” Aho said.

  “I’m going to get dressed and go see what happened at closer range. This town must look like one hell of a Fourth of July.”

  Arthur Brenner wisely decided to go back to bed. His cold was bad. He was stiff from being flung about by the explosion at his house. He was not as young as he once had been.

  “There’s nothing you can do, John,” he said as he pulled the covers up to his chin. “Why don’t you go back to bed, too?”

  “I don’t know, I just want to see this through, Arthur.”

  “I should say the world has gone mad,” he wheezed. “This is utterly insane, the devil’s handiwork.”

  There was nothing tremendously instructive to see. The night’s cold and wind chopped at us; we gasped in the cold. Three walls of the courthouse had collapsed, the inner stairways had created an inferno, the street between the hotel and the courthouse was littered with wreckage and black soot and ashes had discolored the snow, were thickening the atmosphere with acrid smoke, bits of debris. The fire roared over the ripsaw of the storm. It looked like a photograph from World War II.

  At the end of the street a glow colored the snow, giving it the look of a pink halo. Peterson had been right; jogging, slapping our bodies to keep warm, we found the exquisite gingerbread library demolished, scattered across the snow crust, burning out of control. Everything was lost, all the books and newspapers, all that Paula had left behind her. Books, intact, lay on the snow, something salvageable. Bits of molding had been driven into the crust like stakes.

  No one said anything against the wind.

  When morning finally came the snow had stopped. The sky was a clear metallic blue, and the sun shone with a blinding intensity. The surface of the snow glared like a polished stone. We gathered for breakfast at the hotel. The dining room was full: the world seemed to bustle, cars moved in the streets, the people of Cooper’s Falls stood in the bitter glare looking with astonishment at the smoking husk of the courthouse, the blackened crater of basement where the library had been and where the mountains of books burst into random flames at odd moments.

  Peterson’s assistant joined us for breakfast, his mouth agape at what had been happening while he’d taken to his girlfriend’s bed with flu the day before. Together we all seemed to sense that the siege was over. Whoever they were, they had the box, or had destroyed it, and there
was no way to pick through the wreckage of the courthouse. The volunteer firemen had given it a try at daybreak but the water from the town’s main supply had frozen in the hoses, had never reached the nozzles, and several hoses had snapped like kindling, the rubber instantly frozen. In the morning’s gleam automobiles sat in banks of exhaust, motors left running; there was no assurance a car would start once its engine stopped.

  Peterson swung into action with an easy sense of efficiency. With the wind and snow abated, the crews were out repairing telephone lines and he immediately got in touch with the Minneapolis FBI office, the state police, and God only knew what other law enforcement agencies. He prepared for the influx of television and newspaper reporters which was bound to follow and took long involved statements from me, from Arthur Brenner, and from Richard Aho.

  He continued trying to check with the Buenos Aires police as to Cyril’s movements while there. He contacted Doctor Bradlee about the matter of the bodies which had been accumulating. He released the bodies of Cyril and Paula for funeral arrangements, met with Paula’s mother, consulted with Wisconsin officials about the attack made against me on their highway system. He set about reducing the horror and carnage of the days of the storm to recognizable, factual events expressed on official forms, in official files. Alice fairly jumped from typewriter to telephone to filing cabinet, all set up in a suite at the hotel.

  In the late afternoon official cars began to arrive from the Twin Cities. The governor of Minnesota arrived by helicopter with several aides. The reporters arrived by car and helicopter. They were joined by a mobile television unit. Peterson was swept away from us in this flood of humanity which had so quickly filled the empty, desolate, frozen world of the past few days. But before he gave himself over to public officialdom, Peterson sequestered me in Arthur Brenner’s office suite in the hotel. And once he was gone, Arthur and I sat in his bay window overlooking the Breughelesque panorama of the crowded street below us; sat where Paula and I had gone to him for advice, and we talked and smoked and sipped sherry and had food brought to us. It was a warm, snug world; it took time to adjust to the quiet, to the end of the war. And that was clear: by reestablishing our contact with the outside, by surviving the storm and coming out in the clear sunshine, the siege, the war, the attack at Cooper’s Falls was over.

  Shortly after our dinner, Doctor Bradlee dropped in for coffee and to check our various conditions. He noted acerbically that we both, in all probability, would survive, but as we began our coffee I found myself yawning uncontrollably.

  “The best thing you can do,” he said, sipping, “is to get to bed. You’re physically exhausted. You’ve been operating under terrible pressure, emotionally and physically, John, and about all that will get you back in any reasonable condition is rest.”

  Finally under the covers in one of Arthur’s twin beds, I lay still with my eyes closed, listened to the murmur of voices from the other room. The two old friends were chatting over their coffee, quietly, undoubtedly considering the altogether unheard-of events of the past few days. I lay quiet but sleep was beyond my grasp.

  I knew that I was going to do something, take some positive action. I had decided that the gaunt man was not the only murderer, that he may not have killed anyone at all—having failed with me. There was, I felt sure, far more to it than what had been revealed so far. The fingers of the past were reaching out toward me as sleep finally came and I welcomed them. There was comfort in the past, and danger, but that was where it all would end. I knew that as I went to sleep hearing the low voices from the other room and, for me, the past held no fear.

  Twenty

  THEY USED JACKHAMMERS TO DIG the graves. The graveside service was mercifully brief: no one could stand the cold for long, even with the tents that had been erected over the two grave sites, and the electric heaters from the funeral home. The crowd was very small: most of us moved from one burial, Cyril’s, to another, Paula’s. The sun was bright. A harsh wind cut like a scythe. Flaps on the tents whipped; cars were left running on the path. They were buried on a high bluff overlooking the falls itself. We had come from a very brief church service directly to the cemetery and, the icy wind hurting our lungs, directly back to town.

  In the town smoke still rose from the courthouse and the library. We had seen it, like a mist, from where we’d stood at the cemetery. Someone said the fires would burn for days. Everywhere, even at the cemetery, there was no escaping the smell of burning.

  Peterson asked me to stop at his improvised office. He stared at the graves, his cheeks burned by the wind. He wore huge sunglasses against the snow-glare.

  Later I followed him down to the hotel dining room. He shook his head at two newsmen who started across the lobby toward us. We went in for coffee.

  “What are your plans?” he asked.

  “I’m not satisfied with all this,” I said. “You and I know … it’s a Swiss cheese, it’s all holes being held together by some acts of violence. There must be an explanation.”

  “Of course.” He nodded. “But it’s not your business.”

  “Well, that’s debatable, isn’t it?”

  “So what do you think you’re going to do?”

  “I’m going to Buenos Aires.”

  “Why? What for?” He toyed with his spoon.

  “Because something rather significant has occurred to me,” I said. “About the box, about all that stuff that Paula found, about the men who tried to get it back.”

  “And what is that? Tell me, what has occurred to you?”

  “I can’t figure out how these people, these killers—”

  “Go on, Cooper, I hang on your words.”

  “I’ve been wondering how they found out about the boxes in the first place. Paula told Cyril and that was all, Cyril made no mention of them to me. Paula told no one until I got home. But I’ve been thinking of the boxes as the key—to everything—” I searched his face. He nodded slowly, eyebrows beetling together. “They tried to kill me but it wasn’t because of the boxes. All they knew was that I was coming home and the only way they could have known that was to have known the contents of the telegram. And the only way they could have known the contents of the telegram was to have been watching Cyril. And Cyril was in Buenos Aires. In Argentina, for God’s sake. We don’t know why he was there but he was there and they knew it; they knew the telegram’s message. The boxes didn’t come into it until later … unless they tapped his telephone and heard the conversation with Paula. Surely they wouldn’t have Paula’s telephone tapped, she was nothing but an innocent bystander, an accident.

  “So, whichever way I look at what happened, I keep coming back to Cyril in Buenos Aires. It had to start there, at least for the rest of us. And I want to know what it all means, Peterson, I want very badly to know. I don’t see any other way to find out. I’m going to Argentina, I’m going to find out what Cyril was doing there. I’m going to search for Cyril’s past.”

  “You’re very foolish,” Peterson said.

  “But I’m right.”

  “You probably are but wouldn’t it be safer to leave it alone?”

  “Why?”

  “These are dangerous men. They have very nearly destroyed a town in the middle of the world’s most powerful nation, they have murdered and looted and … and you want to find out why.” He shook his head. “More guts than brain.”

  “But I am right.”

  “Oh, yes, I expect you are.”

  The coffee cups were empty.

  It never really occurred to me not to go to Buenos Aires once the idea had presented itself. Why not? I was in a state of psychic shock, of course, and I had gone off the wagon. It seemed to me that the worst thing I could do was get in the Lincoln and drive back to Cambridge and try to reestablish my normal schedule. My novel could wait but I didn’t believe I could simply turn off my thoughts about the war I’d lived through in Cooper’s Falls. I didn’t want to start thinking the lonely death thoughts. I didn’t want to start drink
ing again. I was going to keep busy. I was going to Buenos Aires and calmly try to find out what my brother had been doing there. There was no plan beyond that. Curiosity was feeding me.

  The inexplicability of what had happened confused me. I had myself done an awful thing: I had killed a man.

  That, coupled with the murders of Cyril and Paula, seemed to have soiled me. It had sucked me in to this remarkable situation and revealed an aspect of myself which I could not have believed possible; I did not want to leave it unfinished.

  And I was haunted by the sight of the man in the snow, the wind sifting the snow down from his broad shoulders, the echoing explosions of my shotgun, the wreckage of the man, the frozen shreds of matter from the stump of neck and shoulder. I had done that to him and I could not shake it from my mind.

  Peterson told me he was totally unidentifiable. The black Cadillac had disappeared. No one had been found: no snowmobiles, no trail, no evidence of anyone at large in the storm, no trace of camping, nothing … except three dead bodies, a house with a door blown off, a courthouse and a library burned to the ground.

  My gaunt man was beyond recognizing. He doesn’t exist in any official sense, Peterson had told me, and most of his face is scattered all over the snow in your front yard.

  I wanted the answers and I was going to Buenos Aires. Perhaps they were there. I had no place else to begin.

  I spent my last night in Cooper’s Falls with Arthur Brenner. The storm was over, the night air was clear and glacial. The wind chill factor was seventy degrees below zero, but the Lincoln had been attended to by Arnie Johnson and purred in the cold. Carpenters had been at work boarding up the front of Arthur’s house. The wings of fire blacking extended beyond the patchwork, streaking the white front of the house. A temporary door had been installed and Arthur greeted me in a cheery Pendleton plaid shirt and heavy corduroy work trousers. He was smiling and reassuring, settling me on a comfortable couch before a flickering fire of birch logs with their white bark peeling away, turning to flame.