The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  “However, once the generals had got rid of Castillo, they proved to be utterly disunited. Rawson, the first of the army presidents, endured one day. General Ramirez followed him and lasted nine months. It was during this period that St. John arranged for Kottmann’s arrival. In any case Farrell followed Ramirez and lasted until 1946 at which time Colonel Juan Domingo Perón himself emerged, accompanied by his movie actress wife, Eva, and together they ruled the country for nine years. During those nine years, Mr. Cooper, Juan Perón and Eva stamped this country with their own image, for better as well as worse, and only now are we emerging from their shadows.” He swirled brandy thoughtfully on his tongue before continuing.

  “Of course, Perón lives in exile in Spain and there are those who would bring him back. But during those Perón years, Martin St. John was never far from power. And, since Perón was a great admirer of fascism, the German emigrants—many with immense wealth at their disposal—were welcomed. Perón grew immensely wealthy himself, St. John got his share, and the Germans found a safe harbor in a war-torn world which did not for the most part look on them at all kindly.” He stroked cigar ash into a glass bowl.

  “As for Kottmann, he was a wealthy industrialist in Germany, got out when the time was ripe, and has lived very discreetly here for more than a quarter of a century. Utterly impeccable, Mr. Cooper, no nasty Nazi connections … at least none have ever been found.”

  Dinner was over, the brandy gone, the cigars burned low. Roca patted the folder and removed his gold-rimmed spectacles. He folded them and inserted them into a black leather case. “It’s all here in the dossier.” He smiled, signed the check, and we left. The night was heavy and warm and struck like a fist when you left the air conditioning.

  From the shadows a small, white-faced man appeared to open the door of a black Chevrolet sedan. We settled into the back seat and the small man climbed in behind the wheel.

  “There is no particular reason,” Roca said as we slid through the night, “why you should concern yourself with the intricacies of life here in Buenos Aires. Merely exercise discretion and prudence yourself and all will be well. Argentina is a moral conundrum, Mr. Cooper. Don’t judge us. You would go mad in the attempt. Simply go about your business here, satisfy your curiosity, and enjoy our summer. All will be well.”

  Roca was a serenely sophisticated man and I liked him. He was a good host. He was full of good advice. And he was scaring me.

  “I have arranged an appointment with Mr. St. John for you tomorrow. The details are noted in the dossier. Please, let’s meet again before you depart Buenos Aires.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll look forward to it.” I meant it. I watched the black Chevrolet disappear in the flow of traffic.

  I was sweating in the night.

  “Sinjin is my name, Mr. Cooper.” A laugh full of the gravel of good tobacco and good liquor rumbled in his thick chest. “Pronounce it Sin-Jin. Americans always call me Saint John—makes me sound quite awfully Biblical, doesn’t it? And that won’t do, will it?”

  He was broad and wore a rumpled, soiled white suit with a flower in the buttonhole. He balanced a broad-brimmed straw hat with a bright band and a flat crown on his knee. There was a network of laugh lines spraying out from the corners of his soft brown eyes, and his thick unruly hair was whiter than the suit. His overall untidiness made him look older than he was: he ought to have been in his late fifties by Roca’s reckoning.

  “I hope this was a convenient meeting place, old boy. When Roca got through to me I’d already scheduled a board meeting here at the Opera earlier this morning and I couldn’t very well scratch it, could I? In any case, you oughtn’t miss the Opera.” His eyes swept the empty auditorium with a sense of pride. “Lovely, isn’t it?”

  I followed his expansive gesture. “Yes, it is lovely. Magnificent.”

  The smile turned to concern. “Roca tells me of your family tragedy, Mr. Cooper. The least I could do was give you some time.”

  From the outside the Colón Opera House is Grecian, elegant and graceful. Inside it is all red plush. We were sitting in the middle of the auditorium, where he’d led me from the lobby. Apparently St. John was one of the governors or trustees: someone responsible.

  “I was damned sorry to hear of your brother’s misfortune. But he was a troubled fellow when he came to see me. Wary, damned wary … of me, perhaps. He came to me with a peculiar story, I might say an intriguing story. He had a newspaper clipping he showed me, a photograph of a strikingly beautiful young woman and a somewhat older man.” His eyes twinkled like two mice in the broad, friendly cheese of his face. “He asked me if I knew them but I’d never seen either one of them in my life. And he wanted to meet Alfried Kottmann. I asked him why and why he’d come to me and he hedged, said that he was sure I knew damned well why he’d come to me.

  “Well, I mulled that one over a bit. After all, who was he? What did he know about me and Kottmann? Not that any of it’s a secret, of course. But for just a moment I thought he was one of Simon Weisenthal’s eager lads hot on the trail of Martin Bormann or another Eichmann. You’d be surprised how many of those chaps I’ve treated to lunch while they interrogated me as if I were some sort of Nazi flunky.” He frowned. “But I try not to be irritated. They are merely doing their work and the breadcrumbs seem fairly often to lead to old Martin St. John in Buenos Aires. I point out to them that all Germans are not necessarily war criminals and we go round a bit and they eventually toddle off.” He slid comfortably down in the red plush and let it roll forward on its ball bearings. He crossed his short thick legs in front of his comfortable potbelly, rumpling himself all the more.

  “But then he mentioned his grandfather, with whom I was familiar as anyone my age would be, and I decided he was not a fire-eating Israeli after all.” Bushy eyebrows drew together. “He never told me directly why he wanted to see Kottmann but he seemed surprised when I said that it would be no particular problem, that I would call Alfried and arrange a meeting.”

  St. John’s presence was strong, that of an actor playing a part. He was at home in the ornate, gilded theater.

  “We met several times—he was a persistent devil—your brother,” he said, grinning. “He asked me a good deal about the old days, about Perón and Eva, and I then got the idea that he might be writing a book. About his grandfather, perhaps, or the Nazi movement in the hemisphere. He wanted to know all about the Nazis. However, I’m afraid I was a disappointment to him. Finally he had to be satisfied that I had arranged a meeting with Alfried Kottmann.”

  We walked back up the aisle, through the forest of red plush and out into the sunshine and humidity. He offered me lunch and I accepted. We strolled along the crowded avenue with its ten lanes of traffic, found a small open-air restaurant. We drank cold lemon squashes with gin. I was tired; it was the heat. I urged him to continue.

  “Well,” he went on, sipping the drink and removing his splendid hat to let the breeze at his white hair, “yes, I was involved with bringing certain Germans to Argentina, anyone who cares knows that. I was rather closely involved with Colonel Perón in those days and he was quite smitten with the German style, and with Nazism, too. There’s no point in pretending he wasn’t. But Nazism has come to mean a good many things in the years since then—exterminating Jews, for example, slave labor and concentration camps and so on. That is not, however, what Nazism meant to Perón. To Perón it meant efficiency, effective leadership, discipline, and, above all else, nationalism. Nazism, fascism, whatever—it meant pride in one’s nation, the subordination of everything to the greater good of the nation. That was what impressed Perón about the Germans and he even gave it his own name … justicialismo.” He motioned for another drink and I thought of Brenner, who had said some rather similar things that last night.

  “Perón thought it would be just damned jolly to get some of the Hun to Argentina and I was to act as a conduit. And I was an eager young chap on the make.” He grinned, roguishly, candid.

&
nbsp; “And Kottmann,” I said. “Where did Kottmann fit into it?”

  “Alfried Kottmann was one of the first and one of the richest. He let it be known in certain circles that he wanted egress in 1943—actually, it wouldn’t surprise me if he were a stalking horse for those who followed, rather in the way of finding out how well it would work and precisely where he would be welcome.” He flashed me another grin, crinkling the corners of his eyes, as if we were both men of the world who understood such things. “And how much it would cost, of course. Argentina was a natural possibility because of the Nazi success here with much of the public in the thirties and with the army right on through the forties. Perón wanted to make the deal and I handled the negotiations because, presumably, he trusted me. Eventually, Kottmann was delivered to Buenos Aires and that was that. The case was regarded as proven and a flourishing little traffic was begun. But”—he smiled deprecatingly—“as I told your brother, Mr. Cooper, that is all ancient history. A game played by young men in the long ago.” He wet his thick lips with the lemon squash. The traffic on the avenue seemed far away.

  “But Kottmann was nonpolitical?” I asked.

  “Such men are almost always nonpolitical. The politicians need them, rather than the other way around, so there is no pressure to affiliate oneself with politics. The Kottmanns of the world always outlast the Hitlers. That is a basic law of history. The Kottmanns deal in Hitlers.”

  The sun was being smudged by cloud cover. The air had grown perceptibly cooler, if no less humid, and the waiter brought sandwiches. The wind tweaked St. John’s yellow buttonhole flower.

  “I never discussed politics with Kottmann. Politics!” He popped the word contemptuously. “All those hysterical and utterly bogus moral judgments, winners always having God and Right, to say nothing of Might, on their side and scurrying about hanging losers from every available lamppost after the war. All of that is trivial shit in the manipulation of real power, Mr. Cooper. Shit!” He fixed the grin but it was cold.

  “Perón was the victim of such judgments before his exile, but they were foolish. He did some of the right things and some of the wrong things, he was far from infallible, but moral judgments are hollow and false.” He pushed out his lower lip and regarded me in the manner of a sage.

  “Well, surely,” I said, “there are such things. Morality is a palpable fact of conduct—”

  But he brushed me away with the meaty hand, shook his head, said only: “Winners and losers, Mr. Cooper, nothing else. I believe in nothing else.” The hand was a fist.

  “In the end, Perón, the great leader, was the victim of what must be called a popular revolution. The country came almost in half but rather more turned against him. It was a very close thing … but it was enough.” He raised his eyes to heaven.

  Lunch was gone and we were standing back at the curb and Martin St. John was engulfing my hand in his. There was a smattering of lovely fresh lemon squash dribblings on his white suit. He squared the straw hat on his large head.

  “Well, Mr. Cooper, I hope I’ve been of some help. Your brother didn’t keep his last appointment with me. He did go to see Kottmann but he never came back to see old Martin St. John. As a matter of fact, I’ve still got that clipping.” A taxicab pulled over. “I’ll arrange an appointment with Kottmann and call you at your hotel. The Plaza, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, the Plaza,” I said. “That clipping—I’d like to see it.”

  “Of course, you will—we’ll be in touch, won’t we?”

  I nodded and he was gone. The thunder was louder now and the clouds were purple. I was very tired. I got my own cab. The day was almost gone and I felt as if I’d spent it with Sidney Greenstreet.

  I bought the Buenos Aires Herald and the airmail New York Times as I walked through the Plaza lobby and ducked into the ritzy, famous American Bar for something tall and cold.

  On an inside page of the Herald I was mildly astounded to find a brief story about “the siege of a small Minnesota town,” which they had picked up off the wire. It was brief, but the facts were there: two murders, the courthouse and library blown up, one of the attackers killed. My name wasn’t mentioned, nor was anyone else’s but Mayor Richard Aho, who had apparently made a statement. The idea of a siege was news anywhere, no doubt.

  Curious, I went carefully through the Times and there it was, right before the cultural coverage, DEATH, DESTRUCTION VISIT MINNESOTA VILLAGE: that was the head. The story said the attack was motiveless, occurred during the winter’s worst storm when the town had been totally isolated. Cyril’s name was used and the connection to our grandfather duly but objectively made. Aho and Peterson were named. Peterson was in Washington, D.C., and was unavailable for comment. Aho had obviously been instructed by Peterson to keep his mouth shut and I could imagine the reporters flocking to the scene, frustrated, angry.

  I finished my drink and went upstairs to my room. I opened the windows, took off my clothes, and stretched out in a lukewarm tub. I tried to fit all that Roca and St. John had told me into some framework with what I knew about Cyril and what had happened in Cooper’s Falls. Roca merely played his cards properly, survived several regimes, and lived to preach discretion to inquisitive young North Americans. Yet he had led me to St. John. …

  And St. John had been quite willing to go on with the story. But why not? It had all happened so long ago. They spoke of the Nazi phenomenon as if it had been cast in bronze and placed under glass. Yet, it was all I had to tie Cyril, Buenos Aires, and Cooper’s Falls together.

  The telephone woke me and I struggled dripping from the tub. It was eight thirty. St. John was speaking to me and I recognized a Beethoven quartet in the background. He said Kottmann would see me at breakfast. A car would be sent to the Plaza, if that was acceptable to me, six o’clock in the morning.

  “Of course it is,” I said, staring down at Buenos Aires in the late, slanting sunshine seeping past the dark clouds on the horizon. “Of course.”

  When he rang off, the telephone produced a click followed by another almost simultaneous click, an electronic echo. St. John was gone.

  The Mercedes limousine was forest green, longer than a small parade, and dappled with raindrops. When I came through the doors the rain-washed cool of morning touched my face. The jacaranda and paradise seemed to be the invention of a gifted watercolorist.

  Rolling through the wet, fresh six o’clock streets of Buenos Aires, I wondered if the New York Times had a man in the snow talking to Peterson and I wondered, then, if Peterson was back from Washington and what the cryptographers had learned from the contents of the box. It seemed peculiarly far away: I felt my life split in two, divided by the flight to Buenos Aires.

  We wound north from the city toward El Tigre. The sun was beginning to shine tentatively through the bunkers of rain clouds rolling from the South Atlantic to my right. On my left the greenery was thick and deep. Somewhere out across the Rio de la Plata was Montevideo. The sun came and went, rain splattered the window.

  At seven thirty we reached the estate. We had swung back from the road and up a steep incline, leveled out in a tunnel of greenery, and suddenly there was a huge iron gate towering above us, guardhouses on either side. At the approach of the Mercedes the gates began the rather tedious job of sliding open and a man in one of the buildings nodded to my driver as we eased through.

  Bright flowers exploded in color on either side of us as we proceeded on up the narrow drive of finely crushed gray stone. It silently pulled away again as I was led up the walk between the flowers and across the portico, into the echoing hallway. There were several gigantic paintings of horses and castles on the Rhine in rich dark frames and the floor was stone. The furniture was European, silk, antique.

  “Follow me, please.” The butler was far older than he at first appeared. He walked very straight but his voice was dry and cracked. “Herr Kottmann will see you in back, if you will be so kind.”

  I followed him through French doors and out across a veranda,
along another gray path between more flowerbeds. Five or six people in robes were sitting around a large white wrought-iron table near a swimming pool. A maid in a black dress which looked twenty years out of date was serving them breakfast. The mist was clearing. They did not look up at me as I was led past: an older woman, a man and woman who seemed to be in their late twenties, some children. Their voices were low. Spoons clicked on china.

  The butler led me to a spot beneath a shade tree. He produced a towel from his pocket and wiped the rain from another wrought-iron table and chairs. “Herr Kottmann will join you here, if you would be so good as to wait.” He held the chair for me and when I was seated I heard his heels come faintly together. “Coffee will be served.” He went away listing slightly to starboard but erect, holding on to his illusion of youth. I wondered how long he’d served Herr Kottmann.

  Across a tremendous expanse of emerald grass, wet and thick, a man was riding a pale horse in the shifting sunshine. He was far away and rode well, wore a helmet, and leaned down from the saddle to stroke a ball. In one fluid movement he would cantilever himself away from the horse and swing the mallet in a graceful arc through the heavy moist morning. Later the sound of the smack would come floating toward me as I watched him move off in the path of the ball, tracing it across the turf. As he came closer I saw the hooves spray divots, heard the snorting of the pony as it wheeled and accelerated.

  He finally reined in about twenty yards away and sat patting its pale neck, talking to it. Then he dismounted, shucked on the helmet, tucked it under his arm, and a groom appeared to lead the horse away. He strode toward me purposefully.

  “Mr. Cooper,” he said, extending a hand. “I am Alfried Kottmann.” He smiled through a thin mouth, white teeth glinting. He smoothed his black hair straight back. His skin was tight and tanned and fit. He turned and gave me an aquiline profile with ridges at the corners of his mouth. “Here comes the coffee.” The woman in the out-of-date black dress, her hair in a suitable Teutonic coil, carried a silver coffee service. “I’ll pour, Hilda,” Kottmann said. “Thank you.”