He was generous with his best sherry. Actually, Arthur’s only sherry was the very best. He had been working on Flowerdieu’s Charge in his workroom, eagerly explained the various steps of working with porcelain. The warmth of the room lulled me and he had prepared a roast himself, a hearty meal buttressed with vegetables and homemade bread and robust burgundy. We ate almost without speaking of the horrors the week had brought. What we did say was circumspect, judicious; an act. We were both tired. But as I listened to him at the table, it occurred to me that he was somehow remote, untouched by the tragedies. He was old: death had less sting for him. He doubted, perhaps, the ultimate worth of life in the last resolve.
It was late and we heard the wind chewing at the makeshift work at the front of the house. The brandy was warmed, cleared my head.
I told him I was going to Buenos Aires and he looked at me sideways.
“You shouldn’t go there. You’re making a mistake.”
I told him I wanted to find out what it all meant, why Cyril had come home to be murdered. I told him what had occurred to me: that they must have been watching Cyril or they would never have known about the boxes.
“Those blasted boxes,” he said gruffly, with sudden conviction. “Better they’d never been found, left to gather dust and mold until we were all dead and forgotten … out of their reach. Whatever the hell was in them.” He whipped a match along a fireplace brick and lit a cigar, flung the match into the fire.
“Death,” he said. “Those boxes meant death, John, surely you see that—for your brother, for Paula. Stay out of it now. These men, these murderers are gone. They’ve got the boxes. There’s nothing left to frighten them, they’re satisfied, they’ve gone. Leave it, John. Let Peterson do his job, let him do what he thinks best, let the FBI do their best. But you, you stay out of it—it’s serious.”
He threw another log on the fire and poured more brandy into my snifter. We sat quietly. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed midnight. Arthur began to talk about my grandfather, about the times they had spent in Germany in the twenties and thirties. Austin was a practical man, he said, a pragmatist, but not a political man, not a theorist. I wanted to know, as I always had, what my grandfather really thought of the Nazis. I suppose I wanted to hear that he had despised them, yet I knew he was not an emotional man who despised anyone or anything. My grandfather asked only one question: Does it work? What worked fascinated him. It was simple but I never had known that Arthur Brenner thought about such things. I asked him as the wind blew, the fire’s shadows flickered on the wall.
“I can’t say I was fond of any of them individually. Your grandfather didn’t even think of them in a personal sense. For him they were politicians, no different from other politicians except that they seemed more efficient, more determined. They were undeniably impressive men in their own way. … Of course, your father had to try to live it all down. A tragedy, that. As for myself … as for myself, I felt a grudging admiration for them. Not a moral admiration, of course, but something else. I tended to try to look at them with a certain detachment, tried to see them in the long view—of history, a long view taken by some rather brilliant men. …”
He went on in this vein for some time. I had never heard him speak so reflectively on the past. In my mind’s eye I saw him as a young man, massive and blunt faced, eyes narrowing as he took the measure of men like Hitler and Goering, weighed them on the scales of historical urgency, and noted in his little book the results. By seeing them straight on rather than from behind a screen of moral righteousness, Brenner must have been of great use to the Allies during the war. I remembered how we would see him from time to time in Cooper’s Falls, how he invariably came to visit my grandfather, how the New York Times once published an article about him in which they pointed out the curious friendship between this highly placed government intelligence man and the nation’s most prominent Nazi sympathizer. It was a curious bond; surely it stemmed from Arthur’s ability to keep self-serving moral judgments from intruding on friendship.
“Everyone becomes, in victory, obsessed by the moral factor,” he said, swirling brandy in the snifter, turning his face to the fire, “and then a great deal of pure hokum is given wide currency. War, however, has never been considered immoral at the highest levels of responsibility—merely wise, or unwise in the event you lose or your aims are not fulfilled. Hitler’s war was not immoral, his attempt to bring Europe to heel—my God, it’s a perfectly rational idea in the sense of political and economic reality. Psychologically it was sound, the Teutonic peoples being what they are.” He caught my eye. “The idea of their superiority is not exactly new, nor exactly unfounded, John. Read your history. …” He turned back to the fire. “Hitler was the embodiment of a certain national will, the result of the Peace of Versailles. The thing I had constantly to argue was the absence of any moral question in his widest aims. Morality came into it with the Jews, the Gypsies, any of the people he set out to exterminate. That is, generally speaking, morally reprehensible and the one gigantic error in the thousand-year plan. How could he have blundered so badly, when the world was in his grasp? The mind quakes at it, John, the immensity of the flaw. Obviously, he ought to have included the Jews, with their enormous wealth, intelligence, acumen. By absorbing the Jews into the Reich, Hitler would have united Europe and created the most powerful economic and political union in the history of the planet.
“Then there were the mystical elements of the entire endeavor, the conception of the young Siegfried sleeping, awaiting the time when he would rise again. These, of course, bypassed your grandfather completely.” Arthur smiled, nodded tolerantly. “Myth, music, the energy harnessed at the great rallies. He was totally unimpressed, embarrassed by what he felt was ‘show,’ a vulgar display.
“I was somewhat more interested in all that. It was the use of energy that impressed me, the way the Nazis controlled the spirit of obedience. The potential for accomplishment was unthinkably immense. There is something fascinating about fanaticism, John, something compelling about men who believe deeply that they have the answer and are willing to do anything for it.” He sniffled, blew his red nose. “Nothing like that over here, of course. People are not so obedient.”
I said: “But, Christ, Arthur! They were all crazy!”
He said calmly, smiling: “Oh, no, John, they weren’t crazy. They were a half-step out of line, they possessed the great flaw, but they were far from crazy. They were strong and daring men, somewhat off course, but in another time there’s no doubt of it, they would have ruled the world. They were not thugs, John, take my word for that, and they understood a great many truths—they understood that death is not so much, after all, and they knew, knew there was truth in a kind of social Darwinism. I spent a great deal of time with them, devoted many years of my life to bringing them down, I know them well … and much of what they said is very hard to argue with.”
Before I left, Arthur tried again to talk me out of going to Buenos Aires. It was no use.
“These men may be still watching,” he said, but he spoke with a dying fall.
“Why? They’ve got the boxes. Or destroyed the last one if they didn’t actually take it.”
“Perhaps you’re right, John, perhaps. …”
“Arthur, you were my grandfather’s closest adviser. Do you know what was in those boxes, why anyone would want them?”
“No. But then that’s the mystery, isn’t it? But as you say, they’ve got them now.”
He was standing in the window waving to me as I drove away down the path. He was a warm man. I hoped I would see him again.
Peterson drove me to the International Airport just south of Minneapolis. He gave me a letter to give to a police captain in Buenos Aires with whom he’d been in contact. Nothing had been added to fill in the blanks: no traces of the attackers, no identification of my dead man, no information about his rifle. No further clues at the Cooper house, no light on my brother’s murder. As we drove up the long hill lead
ing out of Cooper’s Falls, the smoldering ruins of the library and courthouse blotted the snowscape behind us.
We had little to talk about; everything had been said.
We drank coffee at the lunch counter; the planes taxied past the bank of windows. The weather had warmed: a thick gray fog obscured the end of the runways so that the huge machines seemed to materialize, be upon us from nowhere.
“Do you know what that stuff in the metal box was?”
“No.”
“So we’ll never know, then.”
“Oh, I expect we’ll know.”
I stared at him. “What does that mean?”
“It means that I left the box in the courthouse that night, Cooper. And the box was empty. The papers I put in my overcoat pocket. I’m taking them to the cryptographers in Washington myself. The Feds have set the whole thing up. They got tremendously interested at the mention of Austin Cooper. They haven’t forgotten him.”
“The box was empty,” I said.
“The box was empty.” He smiled.
“So our friends don’t have the papers. They know they didn’t burn. …”
“I’m afraid they do, Cooper. We located the safe in the ashes and debris. The door had been taken off. The box was gone.”
“They know. …”
“They know.”
He saw me to the boarding gate. We shook hands and he smiled, his mustache curling down around the corners of his mouth like a bandit. As the jet lifted off into the fog the terminal disappeared, there was nothing but moisture beading up on the windows, streaking across them past my face. The stewardesses began to bustle about with lunch. “I’ll be seeing you,” Peterson had said. But what clung in my mind was something else, echoing in my brain.
They know.
PART TWO
Buenos Aires
FROM MY WINDOW AT THE Plaza Hotel on Florida Avenue I looked out across a green park, past jacaranda trees and vivid flowers, and felt soft, warm summer breezes. I sat in the midafternoon warmth watching Buenos Aires spread out beneath me like a green blanket.
While waiting for Peterson’s policeman to return to his office, I turned it over in my mind. They knew the box was empty; they knew they had destroyed half a town and failed.
“These men may still be watching,” Arthur had said.
Whoever they were, they had not wanted the boxes to find out what was in them. I was positive of that: they knew what was in them. They wanted to keep us from finding out.
And I was full of the unfeeling, unemotional impulse which had been growing inside of me ever since I had killed the gaunt man. Everything that followed had come so fast, so brutally: I felt as if normal reactions had been washed away. When I chose Buenos Aires and the search instead of Cambridge and the novel I had pretty well sealed it.
The telephone rang.
Ramón Roca looked like a dignified, imperturbable floorwalker in a 1930s movie but he was, instead, a captain of detectives for the Buenos Aires police. His office was on Moreno but we met at nine o’clock that evening at the Claridge Hotel Grill on Tucumán where, he had assured me on the telephone, we could enjoy an excellent and quiet dinner.
The temperature when I left the Plaza was ninety-four and so was the humidity. There was no breeze: I swam to the taxi. The night was full of bright life, people moving, well dressed and handsome. There were flashes of color in the flower stalls. The paradise and jacaranda trees lined the streets, purple and yellow. I left early enough to go for a ride down Ninth of July Avenue, with its ten lanes of traffic, the widest thoroughfare in the world.
Roca was waiting for me at a dim corner table and rose as I was led toward him. He was wearing a very dark suit, gold-rimmed spectacles, and offered a small, fine-boned hand I was afraid I’d crush. He was about sixty, with fine white hair combed back and worn moderately long. He was drinking scotch and his voice was faint and precise: he was used to being listened to.
“Mr. Cooper, it is so good to meet you. Your friend Mr. Peterson has set us an interesting task and it is now so pleasant to connect the task with a human being.” He smiled very thinly and formally beneath his fine gray mustache and lit a cigarette and exhaled neatly as if he didn’t want the smoke to impinge on anyone else. I ordered a drink.
He had ordered dinner for us: Edward VII steak, which turned out to be a mixture of pâté de foie gras, ham, and steak. While we ate and drank he talked as if he were lecturing me on a little-known smidgen of Argentine exotica.
“Your brother was in Buenos Aires for the full week ending on the seventeenth of January, when he left for Los Angeles via Pan American. At Mr. Peterson’s request we have reconstructed your brother’s visit as best we could. And, let me add,” he said, patting his thin mouth with white linen, “you have my sympathy.”
He produced a manila folder from a black briefcase and placed it unopened on the table.
“Everything I have to tell you is noted in the enclosed dossier, Mr. Cooper. But let me summarize it for you.” He opened the folder like a conductor with his score.
“We know when he arrived, that he came to us from Cairo, Egypt, where he stayed, and when he left for Los Angeles. We have learned of meetings between your brother and one Martin St. John. They were seen dining at the Jockey Club, which is our most exclusive such facility and of which Mr. St. John is, rather curiously, a member.” He tasted his wine and went on.
“Mr. St. John cuts an extraordinary figure in Buenos Aires. He is a sort of informational miracle. He knows everyone in politics and power and politics and power are his”—he shrugged, eyebrows raised—“games, you might say.
“He is an Englishman by birth but dates well back here in Buenos Aires, almost thirty years to the beginnings of the Perón period. We are not altogether certain as to what he was doing before Perón took him up. He is said to be a Cambridge man. He is said to have been seen in India and Hong Kong and Egypt before and during the war. Mr. St. John’s past is exceedingly shadowy. When he appeared in Buenos Aires he could not have been more than twenty-six or twenty-seven years old. What, or who, recommended him to Perón I have no idea. I have been fairly well aware of his career, particularly following the fall of Perón, since his protection has been somewhat less complete than before.” He finished his wine and constructed an interlocking bridge of slender fingers across his narrow, vested chest.
“Why were you interested?” I asked. “Was he a criminal or something? And what did Cyril want with him?”
“St. John saw the Perón regime from the inside, Mr. Cooper. He was not a criminal. He was, as far as we can tell, a security expert, a kind of unofficial but indispensable counterintelligence officer, yet enough of a chameleon to go unharmed after Perón’s fall. Presumably, he was useful elsewhere, too useful to suffer an ignominious death and an unmarked grave—as occasionally happened in those days.” A bleak smile faded quickly, dark eyes flickered downward to his papers.
“What one knows with some certainty is that he was important in the scheme which brought so many Germans—Nazis, of course, but many others as well—to Argentina during the latter stages of World War II and shortly thereafter. St. John, however, has always struck me as a singularly apolitical man, regardless of Perón’s admiration for Mussolini among other gentlemen of that persuasion.” Roca’s eyes skittered across the dossier again, replaced the top sheet with one from below.
“St. John saw these escaping Germans as sources of rather substantial income … but for whom?” He spread his palms open. “For St. John, no doubt, and for Perón himself—and, I am firmly convinced, some of it found its way into the national treasury. After all, we are speaking of very large sums of money and Perón was not what one might call an economic success. He needed all the revenues he could find.”
The meal had been cleared away and coffee and Napoleon brandy served. Roca also arranged for cigars and we lit them in comfortable silence. It was past eleven o’clock.
“How,” I finally asked, “do we know what my b
rother wanted with St. John? All this past history.”
“I suspect that you’ll find yourself asking Mr. St. John that question. However, there are other points we have yet to discuss concerning your brother’s visit to Buenos Aires, points which tie him rather closely to St. John’s past.” He consulted his papers and made a check mark with a ball-point pen.
“Your brother left Buenos Aires after being here only one week. It has been difficult to retrace all his movements but we were surprisingly successful with a taxi driver whose primary source of fares is here, the Claridge Hotel. Twice this man took your brother on lengthy trips.” The papers got a sharp glance across the tops of his spectacles. “Once to the polo matches at Palermo Park and once to the estate of Alfried Kottmann.”
“Kottmann—a German,” I said.
“In addition to being a deft polo player for a man of his age, Kottmann is one of the leaders of our German community. He arrived here in 1943, on Christmas Day, actually, in the height of summer, and he has been here ever since. Immensely wealthy. And thought to be St. John’s first big catch. Perón had not yet come to power but he was an immensely influential figure behind the scenes and St. John was well in with him.
“In June of 1943, President Ramón Castillo was overthrown by army generals. The army during the 1930s had come under very widespread Nazi influence, you see, as the Nazis tried very hard—very hard, Mr. Cooper—to make Argentina part of what came to be called the Axis powers. Argentina was to be the foothold, the Germany of the Americas, the beginning of the New Order in the New World. While the attempt never ultimately succeeded, within the army the Nazis had a considerable effect. The army became a very Teutonic institution—right down to the uniforms and emblems and organization, to say nothing of its attitudes.
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