The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  “Look, Cooper, remember the boxes—the empty boxes? I took the contents to Washington, to the government cryptographic center. But before I delivered them for decoding I stopped at a branch library and spent several dollars Xeroxing them, every page. Once I had my own copy I could feed them into the bureaucracy and not worry.

  “What happened in Washington was that I got the classic runaround. I was debriefed by the FBI and by the CIA, because of your grandfather’s career. I met with men who were described as being from the Pentagon—nothing more, and the cryptographers came up with nothing. They said they’d need more time, that it was a ‘toughie.’ That’s what they called it, Cooper, a ‘toughie.’ Christ, it was insane.” Peterson took a deep drink of scotch and put his feet up on the seat, stretching out with a pillow behind his head. The train rocked gently on the rails.

  “For three days they went over what had happened in Cooper’s Falls, hid me from reporters—Cooper’s Falls has been a very big story, front page stuff, the network news, the works. Anyway, when they got done with me I checked in with the cryptographers and they were still mumbling and farting around and shaking their heads.

  “I decided they weren’t going to get anywhere so I flew up to New York to see a friend of mine from the old days, a guy named Ernest Harnetz at Columbia. He’s a physics professor but he’s also what we used to call a puzzle man when I was on special duty, a guy who could break a code like a pane of glass. I laid the stuff on him and we had a couple of drinks and he looked through it and began to doodle on some Columbia University stationery.

  “About three hours is what it took him to crack it from corner to corner. ‘They’re bullshitting you in Washington,’ is what he told me. ‘They don’t want you to know what’s involved, so they’re bullshitting you.’ So he started telling me what was in those boxes.”

  I drank some scotch. “And—”

  “It sounds, funny, Cooper—”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Plans, Nazi plans to occupy, take over, countries and major cities and huge corporations all over the world—once the war was won.” He stopped and chewed the cigar.

  “Or if the war was lost, either way, win or lose. They had plans, page after page of specific plans. For RCA and General Motors and utility companies, power and gas and all that, government agencies, cities—Chicago, New York, Miami, Detroit, Los Angeles. … They had divided the United States into six sections, all absolutely clear-cut and precise.”

  “Win or lose,” I said. “What do you mean win or lose?”

  “If the war in Europe was lost, that was only a temporary setback—a delay of a generation or two, and they allowed for that, apparently, because there was a second plan full of steps for taking over all the nations and cities and agencies and corporations slowly and from within. They already had their people placed inside these organizations. A vast, really enormous network of men who would make Quisling in Norway seem very small potatoes, indeed. Harnetz said you could read between the lines and see that Quisling was a sort of trial run, an experiment on a relatively—ah—inconsequential level.

  “And it wasn’t just the United States, Cooper, it was everywhere. Africa, South America, Russia, Mexico, Canada, England, hell’s bells, they had it down pat. This was all contained in an outline of several pages. The United States was handled in great detail. Projections about time, the order in which things were going to happen—they had a timetable and they were in no hurry.

  “In 1976, the President of the United States would be a Nazi … and no one would have the vaguest idea. No one would even care. By the mid-eighties, Europe would be totally Nazified—they seemed to feel the U.S. would be the easiest target—and by the year 2000, the Nazis would truly rule the world.

  “Harnetz and I talked all night. They wouldn’t be called Nazis by then, or at least probably not, but it would be the victory of a philosophy, the triumph of their ultimate will, the justification of all that had gone before. The last section of the coded stuff, a black book, not very large, concerned the post-2000 era, the resurrection of Hitler as the New Christ … the father of us all.”

  Silence in the compartment: the countryside dark beyond the window, the rails shifting us gently from side to side. Peterson was swearing below the rim of his hairpiece. His face was curiously relaxed, he stared blankly into the night.

  “It sounds like a child’s fantasy,” I said at last.

  “Of course. But you’ve never seen the documents, the seals with the eagles and swastikas, the aged parchment, the mildewed edges, the signatures—the ink that was put there by him, Hitler himself. You see them and you smell the age on them and, believe me, Cooper, the bottom falls out of your stomach—its no child’s fantasy and the guys that put it together were no comic-opera characters in funny uniforms.” His eyes came back to me, his voice came back to life. “It was a long-range plan and they weren’t kidding. They were men, historical figures, and they weren’t pretending. They had their men—and that’s the only part Harnetz said there was no way of decoding. The code names of the men involved. They were chosen symbols which could only be known through a key, Striker equals so-and-so, Sprinter equals somebody else, Red Breast is another guy, Vulture, Siegfried, Skylark, Panther, Shark, Barbarossa, Sphinx, dozens and dozens of names coded like that—I can’t remember. …

  “Harnetz thought that the plan was intended to be more or less inviolate, that while the original men connoted by the code names might grow old and die, the code names would never change. New men in each generation would assume the old names.”

  “Who was the man in America? Could you tell, was there a key man at the top during the war?” He was right: my stomach was sliding like an accident in a gravel pit.

  “Siegfried was the American.”

  “Asleep, only waiting to be summoned again. …”

  “It was your grandfather, Cooper. It had to be Austin Cooper.”

  It was quiet for a long time in the compartment. Rain spattered the window, lights flared and were gone.

  “Washington must have it figured out,” I said.

  “I suppose,” he said. “But the question is, is it just a piece of history that came to nothing? Or is it still alive? I don’t know. But several people have died because someone took those old boxes pretty damned seriously. You just can’t ignore that one, can you?

  “We’re alone, Cooper,” he said quietly. “You started the whole thing, or your brother did, and now I’m afraid there’s no way to back up and get off. We’re alone and I’m in it, too, up past my ass. And”—he sighed—“and everyone we touch is in it. Alistair Campbell was in it for a few hours—and now he’s out of it. What I can’t account for is just this: why aren’t you dead? Surely, they could kill you with incredible ease if they really wanted to.”

  “I know, it occurred to me, too.”

  He lit a new cigar and turned on a fan. “Now, tell me what you’ve been up to. All of it.”

  And I did. Peterson had found out I’d gone to Glasgow from Roca so I traced all my actions from my arrival in Buenos Aires.

  Roca. St. John. Kottmann, Maria Dolldorf. Professor Dolldorf’s diary. The clipping. My little sister Lee. Brendel. The burning of Maria’s flat. The disappearance of St. John and Kottmann en route to Patagonia. The lies and half-truths. The constant shadow of Perón. The code names—Barbarossa and Siegfried.

  “Your sister, Cooper? Your dead sister?” He was incredulous in his own theatrical way. “Your sister?”

  “That’s what ties Cyril to it. That’s where it all begins. Cyril would be alive now if he’d never seen that clipping. I’m convinced that he began in a simple attempt to find out if the woman, Frau Brendel, was our sister. Somehow that led back to the house in Cooper’s Falls and to death.” I was caught up in my own enthusiasm for Lee. Which was more important, what Peterson had learned or what I had stumbled on? Godforsaken Nazi gibberish or Lee? But they were indivisible, one led to the other. And people died finding out.
/>   “Everywhere you turn it’s Nazis,” Peterson grumbled sourly. “Nest of vipers. Jesus. I thought that war was over. Christ, everybody you touch. …” He shook his head, repeated the German names from Buenos Aires: Kottmann, Dolldorf, Brendel. …”An English brigand, St. John.” He made a face. “What scares me is that the whole thing makes a dubious kind of sense. I wish I could get hold of it properly.”

  We finally settled into our berths in the dark.

  “There’s no progress at all in the murder investigations,” Peterson said. “And Arthur Brenner has had a stroke.”

  “What?” I’d gone rigid: Arthur was always supposed to be there, safe, unchanging.

  “At the hotel in the dining room. Just slumped across the table, Bradlee told me. Happened when I was in New York. I flew back to Cooper’s Falls for one day before I set out for Glasgow and Bradlee told me he was in a coma. He said it might have been brought on by the strain of the attack on him, or by the constant struggle with the cold and snow. Bradlee says he’s in bad shape. …” Peterson’s voice was fading.

  “I see,” I said. There were tears in my eyes.

  “What did Campbell say when he came toward you in the hallway, just before he died? Something about spots?”

  “No. He said something about finding stains. It didn’t make much sense. He was staining the wall with his blood.”

  A rain-shiny black taxi dropped us at the corner of Oxford Street and North Audley Street. A bright-red London bus was reflected in the black metal. I turned my coat collar up against the gusty wind and rain. Peterson paid, blew his nose, yanked his muffler tight at his throat. Rain beaded on his black leather trench coat, clung to the epaulettes.

  Beneath the dull gray cloud cover, Mayfair did not seem overly enthused about going on with the whole nasty charade. Grosvenor Square waited it out, black umbrellas bobbing above hunched shoulders, diplomats in bowlers, Eero Saarinen’s American Embassy bleakly brooding in its stark modernity over the patience of history at its feet. Leaves wilted on the pavement, clung to my shoes. In the center of the Square, Dick’s statue memorializing Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood manfully in the rain.

  My brother Cyril had lived in Curzon Street, not far from Berkeley Square. Up some stairs from the street, through a polished door, in a dim and gleaming hallway, there was my own waxen image mirrored in a brass nameplate engraved with the single word, COOPER. Peterson stood behind me, his features oozing down the nameplate. Abruptly he began to shake rain onto the carpet like a wet dog.

  The quiet hallway, carpeted and wallpapered and very discreetly lit, smelled faintly of wood polish and the evidence of its use reflected the bits of light from every satiny surface. Peterson surveyed the eye-level lock, bared his teeth a trifle fiercely in the manner of Emiliano Zapata, and popped the door open with a credit card properly inserted.

  The foyer emitted the slightly stale quality common to unused rooms, no matter how frequently aired and dusted. There was no smell of food and drink and smoke and sleep and rain and open windows and perfume. There was instead a quality of absence, perhaps loss. A gilt mirror in an elaborate frame, umbrellas lingering in a brass boot, motes of dust dancing in the shaft of gray light between nearly closed draperies.

  The flat was dim, quiet, waiting for Cyril’s return. Even Peterson seemed inhibited by the solemnity of the place, the fact that Cyril was never going to return. Finally, he reached for a pull in the shadows and yanked the draperies open with a clatter. Rain streaked the windows in the bay overlooking the street. He threw a sash up and there was the sound of the water running in the spouts, dripping off the eaves.

  We moved like security operatives through the rooms, the austere bedroom with a few spare garments hanging in the closet, the cluttered expensive living room mixing trendy steel-framed posters and Queen Anne furniture and a huge carved banker’s desk, a dining room with tubular steel and glass everywhere, a kitchen with everything built in, a chopping-block table in the middle, pots and pans and cutlery lining the walls like sentries.

  “What do we do now?” My voice sounded high, boyish in the stillness. The draperies rustled in the wind, rain speckled the sill.

  “The desk,” Peterson said, walking around it. “It’s got two complete sets of drawers, one on each side. As if for two people,” he muttered. He pulled a drawer; it slid quickly out. Methodically we tested them all; they were all in use, none locked. “We might as well start.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  He gave me a sour look. “I don’t know. We’re just looking. We’re snooping. Follow your instincts. Act like a detective, for God’s sake. You’re the one who started all this poking around—”

  “All right, all right, you’re making my head hurt.”

  After an hour of sorting, Peterson straightened up and fluttered a piece of paper from his broad, black-haired hand. “Clipping,” he said. “Frau Brendel again.”

  It was the same clipping I carried in my wallet. I felt a twinge inside and nodded.

  “He must have been as convinced as you are,” Peterson mused. He stared at the picture. “It looks like your sister?”

  “No, it looks very much like our mother. Or like what our sister could look like today—”

  “If she were alive.”

  “Obviously, she is. I might have had my reaction to the photograph because I knew my brother had been carrying it around with him. But Cyril—he just saw it in the paper. And that was enough for him.”

  The drawers on my side proved useless. I slumped in the chair, stared across at Peterson. His brow was knitted and he frowned beneath his mustache. He held his palms open and shrugged: nothing.

  I dug in my pocket for the pipe, knocked the bowl into a heavy glass ashtray. Next to the ashtray lay an envelope addressed to Cyril Cooper, Esq. I looked at it without thinking, then the engraved return address registered:

  Ivor Steynes, Bart.

  Cat Island

  Cornwall

  I looked up at Peterson.

  “Stains,” I said. “I’ve found stains. Campbell was talking about a man named Ivor Steynes.”

  Peterson looked at me in disbelief.

  The letter, on cream vellum, was brief:

  My dear Mr. Cooper,

  I shall look forward to meeting you here at Cat Island per our telephonic conversation.

  Cordially,

  Ivor Steynes

  It was dated late the previous fall, obviously after my brother Cyril had visited with Alistair Campbell and presumably been given the same lead the poor cagey little Scot had tried so desperately to give me.

  “We’ll have to contact him,” Peterson said.

  The telephone on the desk was fully operational and after nearly an hour of negotiating I learned how to get a call through to Cat Island, by no means a simple task. There was only a single line on the island, I was informed, and I would have to wait to get my call through. The operator would ring back when she had my party.

  I lit my pipe and we sat in the gathering afternoon gloom. Now the spidery connections traced a random pattern across all my thoughts, like an unfamiliar road map in an unknown land. I had stopped trying to make lists. I had stopped worrying about the connections because I could no longer keep them straight. There were so many names, so many threats and dangers and deaths. When my guard was down, it occurred to me to seriously wonder if I was going to get out of it alive. When I was tired, as I was just then, I wasn’t absolutely sure that I cared.

  We both flinched when the telephone rang. The connection was crackling, as if the wind and rain were blowing themselves out in the earpiece. Finally a voice came faintly across the wire.

  “I wish to speak with Sir Ivor Steynes,” I shouted. “My name is John Cooper.”

  The static began to clear after a few more words and then there was nothing until a metallic click and a reedy voice, itself metallic, came on: “Ivor Steynes here, Mr. Cooper. Can I help you?”

  “I’m Cyril Cooper’s brot
her—”

  “Aha, I see … and Austin Cooper’s grandson. Where are you, old man?” The thin voice was almost gleeful.

  “I’m in London. I want to see you, if at all possible.”

  “I see. And how is your brother?”

  “He’s dead. That’s why I’m here.”

  There was a long pause. “Repeat, please.”

  “My brother Cyril is dead. That’s why I want to see you.” Peterson was staring at the rain blowing across the sill. His cigar was dead.

  “Ah. A natural death, then?”

  “No.”

  “I’m very sorry, of course. Can you come to Cat Island?”

  “Yes, we can if you’ll tell me where it is—”

  “We?”

  “I have a friend with me.”

  The voice at the other end had lost its tinge of friendliness. “Come to Land’s End in Cornwall. Cat Island is off the coast. You will reach Land’s End tomorrow afternoon by rail or by motor. My man will meet you with the boat at six o’clock. Dawson is his name, the boat is the Lear. He will bring you to Cat Island and we will talk then. Is that clear?”

  “Utterly,” I said.

  “Until then,” he said. That was all.

  Rain was still blowing, slanting in the gathering darkness: clouds scudded like watercolors above Berkeley Square, where the nightingale had once sung. We walked back through the Square, along Mount Street to Park Lane, stood wetly staring at the slick green of Hyde Park. Peterson took a deep breath. Headlights flared in the slicks of rain.

  We made our way among the palatial Grecian columns of the Grosvenor House, obtained an enormously expensive room overlooking the street and the park. Peterson stood staring into the rain. “Cat Island … I suppose it pours all the time on Cat Island.”

  Early the next morning, fortified with eggs and kippers and muffins, lugging a thermos of coffee, we rented an Audi and set off for Land’s End, desperately dependent on a road map and Peterson’s ability to drive on the wrong side of the road. Any change in the weather was clearly for the worse. The windshield wipers beat steadily. Headlights were on all day.