The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  He carefully poured cream into my coffee and spooned sugar. It was bitter and thick, bracing.

  “Your journey was satisfactory?”

  “Yes, it was very beautiful.”

  “I am prone to these early meetings because I seem to be an early riser. I work the ponies most mornings, enjoy my beautiful environment, my flowers, have my coffee, shower, and find that I am really quite primed for the day.” He leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, held his cup and saucer on his thigh. He wore whipcord jodhpurs and high brown riding boots, a red polo shirt with a towel draped around his neck. His boots were creased with age and toned with years of polish; they were flecked with moist black earth and wet grass. The only things missing were the dueling scars and monocle.

  “I was terribly sorry to learn of your brother’s untimely passing, Mr. Cooper. He was here such a short time ago and now, so abruptly, I learn he is dead.”

  “Someone murdered him.”

  I could hear the wind in the trees. It carried the voices of the people by the pool: a child leaped into the water, there was a splash, children shouted happily. I had not thought of the fact of Cyril’s death for several days and now, for some reason, it came to me with a jolt. He was gone.

  “Your brother called on me here, Mr. Cooper,. … My life has changed so little, I still ride the ponies each morning and have my coffee … and your brother is dead.” He shook his head gravely. “In the midst of life, eh, Mr. Cooper? We never know.” He looked at the back of his hand. “I stay fit, stay out of doors as much as possible. Yet, there are liver spots on my hand. I am sixty-eight and there’s no pretending with Father Time, is there?”

  “You look younger,” I said.

  “It is my young wife.” He smiled briefly, gesturing at the group over his shoulder. I had thought it was his wife, his children, his grandchildren, but I’d been wrong.

  “In any case, Mr. Cooper, I understand that you are curious as to what your brother was doing here in Buenos Aires. Mr. St. John arranged for him to meet me. I saw no reason to see him at first but then my curiosity prevailed. I am not a particularly public man. I live quietly, see my old friends. But I decided I might as well meet your brother. Perhaps it was because Mr. St. John had told me who Cyril Cooper actually was, the grandson of Austin Cooper. Now, I certainly knew about Austin Cooper’s friendship with Herr Hitler and all the rest of those fellows. Your grandfather was not looked upon as an American traitor in Germany, by Germans—on the contrary, he was felt to be simply a friend of Germany, a man of vision who saw a strong, rebuilt Germany as the key to the strength of Europe. Many sophisticated Germans saw your grandfather as one of the bulwarks in our hope of staving off the Russians, you see … quite apart from the Second World War.”

  “What did my brother want from you?” I asked.

  “So I saw him,” Kottmann went quietly on. “It was not so simple discovering why he wanted to see me. I had the feeling he was not being perfectly frank with me. He said he was a journalist, that he was interested in the German community in Buenos Aires, how we all got here, how we managed to live down the Nazi stigma. …” He sipped the coffee, tweezed a piece of turf from his boot. He caught my eye and seemed to be looking through me.

  “It was my duty to inform him that I felt there was no Nazi stigma to live down, that Germany and Argentina had enjoyed close relations for a great many years, and that if there was a stigma to live down it was a stigma borne by South Americans generally for the hideous manner in which Germans of all sorts were persecuted during the late thirties and early forties. You see, that was the truth of those years, Mr. Cooper, an unpleasant fact ignored in your country. All Germans were looked upon as agents of Herr Hitler, regardless of their own beliefs—being a German was enough. You see, Hitler claimed that even if your blood was only one-quarter German, you were all German, all Nazi, surely poised to take up arms for the Nazi cause … anywhere in the world. He said there were three hundred thousand Germans in Argentina in 1942, each of whom sympathized with Nazi aims, and the world actually believed him. He said that there was the framework of an entire Nazi state within the borders of South America and the rumors spread and were frequently reported in the press. Even La Prensa here in Buenos Aires swallowed some of it—secret airfields in the Andes, immensely powerful jungle radio stations. Nazis high in the various governments. In Montevideo, if you were a German, you were lucky not to be jailed on mere principle.

  “In reality,” he said, plucking the end from a croissant and moistening it with coffee, “what you actually had was a band of swaggering would-be SS and Gestapo boobs hanging around cafes loudly letting it be known they were German agents and discussing absurdities along the general lines of taking over the Panama Canal from secret bases in Colombia and going to war with the United States.” He smiled a trifle sadly and ate the morsel. “Can you imagine that? Those blithering nincompoops were the Nazi threat in South America.” He shook his head.

  “Why did you come here, then? If it was such an inhospitable place?” I was beginning to feel secure. I knew he was lying, or at least embroidering the truth to his own benefit.

  “Ah, well, Mr. Cooper, I’m exaggerating the peril and, in any case, by Christmas of 1943 the situation had calmed down a good deal. Argentina was still neutral, but within three weeks the United States demanded that she give up her neutrality and come in on the Allied side … and there was relatively little opposition. Argentina did as she was told and the people realized that the Nazi threat, if there had ever been one, was over.

  “When I decided I had to leave Germany, I believed the war was lost. And I knew enough history to realize there was a more than passing chance that I might be considered a war criminal during that curiously vicious period which follows the arrival of peace. And I did not relish the fate of war criminals. I once had a rather oblique conversation with Krupp about it but Krupp’s attitude was one of total arrogance. Whoever wins, he said, they’ll need me—and not in jail. Well, history gave its own answer to Krupp.” The wind stirred the treetops, sun flashed through the leaves. “And he turned out to be more or less right.” He sipped at the coffee, tasting it before swallowing. The children laughed.

  “So I cast about for ways to escape with as much money as possible. That was the hardest part, I assure you. But I scraped a bit together and instituted a few discreet inquiries. I began to think quite seriously about Colonel Perón, whom I had met a few years before when he had been military attaché to Rome.”

  He slid a pair of tinted aviators glasses from his pocket, put them on, and turned to stare in the direction of the pool. A child began to cry. The older woman had begun to comfort him.

  “My wife’s mother,” Kottmann said. “She’s younger than I am, oddly, but she is my mother-in-law. Life,” he said to no one in particular, “is marvelously peculiar.” He enjoyed another bite of croissant.

  “Perón. … Yes, I did tell your brother something I thought might interest him. And you, too, perhaps, if all this antique matter doesn’t bore you. I once met both your grandfather and father … and curiously enough Perón was there, as well.” He paused to watch the expression on my face. “That surprises you, Mr. Cooper?”

  “You mean that my grandfather and father actually knew Colonel Perón and you?” I felt myself grow pale and I drank a sip of coffee to draw attention away. I tried to smile. “It’s a small world.”

  “Knew … no, that is too strong a word. They may have known Perón, I cannot say, but they did not know me. We merely met at a party and Frau Goering introduced me to all three of them at one time—”

  “My father was killed in the Battle of Britain,” I said. “Flying for England. We are not all Nazis in our family.”

  He smiled, nodded his head. I saw myself looking pinched and tiny in his opaque glasses.

  “I know all about your father, Mr. Cooper. An exceedingly brave man, I am sure. In any case, I was interested in meeting your famous grandfather, who seemed, I must say, r
ather austere. Goering kept slapping him on the back and laughing but he did not seem to find Goering terribly amusing.” A smile on the thin mouth. “Your grandfather struck me as far more of a Junker than was normally found at such gatherings.

  “But I was intrigued by Perón. He seemed a clever, alert fellow. He must have been about forty then and somehow he impressed me as being … crafty, you see? So, in 1943, with craftiness in mind, I thought of Perón. I felt he was sympathetic and accessible and clever. Shortly thereafter Martin St. John, who really defies classification, entered my life, arrangement for passage and payment were made, and so”—he sighed—“I am here today.”

  “You were not a Nazi, I take it?”

  “Oh, my, no,” he said, a glimmer of surprise gone at once, barely recognized. “I rather sympathized with their war aims, of course, and at the beginning they seemed very competent men. After all, the going was easy and I was making a great success—or, more accurately, my father’s firm, and my firm by birthright, was doing very well out of it. But the war didn’t continue at the level of an operational training maneuver, you see. And with stiffer resistance it seemed a less good idea and our leaders no longer had immunity in my eyes.” Irony clung to each word. “They were all rather unsavory, quite suddenly, and I saw that they were losing the war—well, I have no patience with that sort of thing. Then I began to get fairly accurate reports on the extermination camps—so impractical, so perverse, so childishly malicious. It was time to leave.”

  A small boy came running across the grass. He was wet, holding a towel. “Excuse me,” he said with six-year-old gravity. “Papa, when may I ride? You did promise, Papa. Mama said I should ask.”

  He clapped his son’s arm affectionately.

  “Very soon, Hans, very soon. You have one more quick dip and then—”

  Kottmann stood up, lean and hard.

  “My family requires my attention.” He ushered me ahead of him onto the path. His boots crunched. “Is there anything else? Let me see. … Your brother had some very nonsensical notions about the Nazis, I’m afraid. He attributed some very grandiose schemes to them, saw one lurking behind every jacaranda tree. He was pleasant about it, talked about the young Siegfried only sleeping and waiting to come alive again. Terribly Wagnerian. He said he felt Argentina would be the home of the Fourth Reich.” He spread his hands in the air before him and shrugged. “I didn’t know what to say.”

  We walked across the veranda and into the hall. There was music coming from concealed speakers. It was the second time I’d heard a Beethoven quartet in two days. I recognized it: the same Beethoven quartet.

  “Is there any chance Perón may come back?” I asked.

  Alfried Kottmann looked at me patiently.

  “Juan Perón is seventy-seven years old, Mr. Cooper. He lives in Spain with a young wife, his third, and his half a billion dollars, whatever it is. Why in the world would he come back to Buenos Aires?”

  We stood in front of the immense house. The forest green Mercedes was waiting. The sky had darkened again and smelled like rain.

  “I am sorry I haven’t been more help,” he said. “But that’s all there was to my meeting with your brother.”

  The door was open; the chauffeur was waiting.

  “One last thing,” I said. “Did my brother show you a clipping? A newspaper clipping?” Kottmann’s face changed; it was as if he’d slipped a mask over his friendliness.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And did you recognize the people?”

  “No, I did not.” He bowed slightly. “Now I must go. Good-bye, Mr. Cooper.” His heels clicked across the stone as I slid into the back seat. It rained hard all the way back to Buenos Aires.

  The air was heavy and hot and wet when I got out of the Mercedes. I went into the bar, drank a quick gin and tonic, congratulated myself on the way I’d been handling my liquor, and went back outside. There was a thick haze, but the Plaza San Martin was crowded, people moving slowly. Even the pigeons were droopy and tired. They staggered. I joined them, sat on a bench, looked back across the Calle Florida to the beginnings of the shops. In the afternoon, motor traffic was prohibited and people swarmed in the thoroughfare.

  I tried to collect my thoughts. I loosened my tie.

  Unless there was a run on Beethoven quartets, St. John had not only lied to me about having seen Kottmann after meeting with me, but had in fact been with him when he called me. I remembered the second echoing click when he hung up the phone. Kottmann? If so, why? Whatever was the reason for lying? Disassociation from one another perhaps.

  And why had my question about the newspaper clipping so obviously irritated Kottmann?

  I still didn’t know what prompted Cyril’s visit to Buenos Aires.

  It was thundering again. A little girl aimed a thoughtful toe at a pigeon and missed. The paving was wet and the rain gentle. The clouds made it dark. The lobby was bright coming in from the purple afternoon.

  I sat at my window thinking, watching the rain and hearing the breeze blowing it. Cyril had wanted to know about the Nazis, the Germans in Argentina, about Kottmann in particular. What else was there? If it hadn’t been the Nazis, what had he been after? I drew a blank trying to cope with alternatives. But everyone was chuckling indulgently over the Nazi thing. St. John had called it “ancient history.” So had Brenner. It was romantic nonsense, product of an overworked imagination, an obsession with one’s grandfather: the Nazis were a part of history, something quaint, as unlikely in the far greater dangers of the atomic and computer age as something from another century.

  Cyril’s newspaper clipping bothered me. I wanted to see it. St. John would have to show it to me.

  The telephone rang. It was Ramón Roca again. I thanked him for arranging my meeting with St. John and told him I had been to see Kottmann.

  “It was helpful then, seeing Kottmann?”

  “I wish I knew,” I said. “But I don’t.”

  “Well, we have come up with one more lead.” His voice was restrained, very quiet, sibilant. “Your brother made another call in Buenos Aires. He saw Dr. Hans Dolldorf, a professor of economics living in retirement here in the city.” He gave me the address. “Perhaps you will want to contact him. I leave it to you.” I wrote down the telephone number and thanked him. He said it was nothing.

  The apartment building was very high, very new, and very expensive. I checked the tenant listing. Dolldorf was on the nineteenth floor, but no one answered my buzz. I asked the doorman if he had seen Professor Dolldorf go out. He fixed me with a supercilious smirk and said that yes, in a way, he had. He spoke with a Middle European accent which seemed to contain a well-practiced insult.

  “In a way,” I repeated. “What does that mean?”

  “What I said.” He busied himself with a pigeonholed cabinet full of keys.

  “Look, you silly shit,” I said conversationally as two elderly women approached, “explain yourself. Or I’ll have your balls for breakfast, make no mistake.” I stepped up close to him as he reached for the door. The ladies passed. I pushed him back into the corner of the entryway. “Talk to me. Now.”

  He looked at me as if I were insane. I stared at him.

  “He came out dead. On a stretcher with a blanket over him.”

  “When?”

  “Day before yesterday.”

  “Open the goddamned door,” I said. He held it open.

  Her eyes were huge and dark beneath thick dark eyebrows, long brown hair curling on her shoulders, and she was biting her lip and had lipstick smudged on a white tooth. She was wearing a black sleeveless dress and behind her the drapes were drawn across the window. She listened as I fumbled through an explanation. I was flustered by the eyes. There was a tracing of wetness on one cheek.

  “A couple of weeks ago my brother, Cyril Cooper, an American,” I ended, “visited your father. I wondered why, that’s all. And just now I heard of your father’s death. I’m sorry. My brother is dead now, too. …” She turned arou
nd and walked away from me. She was tall and strong and her name was Maria Dolldorf. She stood by the window in the shadows. The room was lined with books and there were papers and magazines everywhere.

  “I have just come from my father’s funeral,” she said formally. “I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

  “I’m sorry. I had no way of knowing.”

  “It’s all right. I am stupidly emotional. We are given to excessive grief here.” She tried to smile and shivered. “You have come a very long way to ask your questions. I must ask you why is it so important, Mr. Cooper?”

  “I can’t see you,” I said. “It’s so dark.”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s a sedative. The light hurts my eyes. Please sit down.” We sat side by side in two chromium and cane chairs, very expensive. “Why?” she asked again.

  “My brother was murdered and I think what happened to him was involved with what he did here in Buenos Aires. We don’t know who killed him.” I felt faintly foolish; it had become such a long story. She sat with her hands in her lap; tanned fingers in the dim light, plain nails. “So I’m trying to find out what he was doing here before he came home to be killed. Do you see?”

  “Your brother was here, yes. He talked to my father. My father told me about it. My father was terribly upset. Terribly.”

  “Why?”

  “His health had been failing, his eyesight going. He was nervous, almost afraid … of everything. I came in the evenings after my work and we would have dinner together or go out to Palermo and sit in the evening sunshine. And we would talk or I would read to him. The night after your brother was here he was very nervous, hadn’t slept, his hands were shaking. He’d been drinking brandy all day and he babbled on about the American who’d come to see him. …” She was twining her fingers, turning several rings.