The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  The sparks roared up the flue, sucked by the wind. Peterson stroked the drooping dark mustache, stood watching the fire. Steynes fixed another cigarette in the holder and went on, snapping a wooden match on his thumbnail with a long finger.

  “Now, it seems to me that my distrust of coincidence is justified. You tell me your brother is dead. Is he dead because Austin Cooper and Gunter Brendel, two Nazis, are calling to one another across the years? It seems possible, doesn’t it?” He stopped and stared at me with those naked eyes. “Tell me about your brother, Mr. Cooper. Tell me why you have followed his trail to Cat Island.”

  I tried to lay it out carefully for Colonel Steynes. It took considerable time. I concluded: “And three nights ago in Glasgow Alistair Campbell was shot and killed by a man who also tried to kill me. I escaped and realized when I saw your letter on my brother’s desk in London that Campbell spoke your name to me in that dim hallway as he died and I misunderstood him. We’re here, Colonel Steynes, because Campbell wanted us to come and because my brother was here … and his path is the path we’re following.”

  Steynes had blanched behind his weatherbeaten exterior and a quick tightness yanked at the corners of his mouth. He took a stiff measure of whiskey, said quietly: “So Campbell is dead. … Rum fellow, rum … and the most recent victim in a very long war. They have killed him because of you and your brother, of course. He will be avenged, I assure you.”

  Peterson caught my eye, mouthed the word “avenged” with raised eyebrows. Peterson was not impressed. I was beginning to break into a cold sweat.

  Colonel Steynes’ pale eyes flickered at us from behind the sandy blond lashes, banked and freezing fires in the maimed body. His eyes frightened me because Peterson could just be right: Steynes might be mad. The metallic voice was going on.

  “Now you tell me—if I may sum up this altogether extraordinary tale—that your brother is mysteriously murdered, that some awesome species of document has been sought by strange and homicidal men who choose to handle all matters with a maximum of violence, that these curious documents are in fact old Nazi plans for world domination—historical trivia, at this point, heh?—that a town has been sacked in a manner worthy of my ancestor Bevil Steynes, Bevil the Red, as he was known by his chums, that a harmless old professor is murdered in Buenos Aires after meeting with your brother. …” He paused for breath. Outside, the wind smote the house and it creaked and whirred like a machine.

  “You tell me that Martin St. John and Alfried Kottmann, both of whom are known to me—a point which we’ll come to in good time, that both St. John and Kottmann met with your brother, met with you, and subsequently vanished from the face of the earth. You tell me that my old friend Campbell is shot to death in a Glasgow slum in an attempt to keep him from directing you gentlemen to me. …” He sighed again, leaned back in the wheelchair, cosseted by chrome and steel and leather, the King of Cat Island.

  “I suggest that my first distrust of coincidence was correct, that we are dealing with a very specific pattern.

  “Let me further suggest that the only coincidence in this entire business was your late brother running across that photograph in the Glasgow Herald.

  “From then on, I suggest that Cyril Cooper was a doomed man, doomed because he was driven by something in his own character to find his sister. Once he set out to find her, he no longer had a chance to escape with his life.

  “And why? Why must that be so?

  “Because your brother had come too close to them, to Brendel, to Kottmann, to St. John, to all the rest of them. …”

  “Who are these men?”

  A faint smile came and went. He poured himself another whiskey and soda, wet his thin, dry lips. “That is what you are wondering, inevitably, and let me say that if I thought I could save you … I would simply refuse to tell you. But even now, only the grace of God has kept you alive.

  “In light of that and the nature of the situation you find yourselves in, I will tell you even more than I told your brother. I owe it to his memory as well as to you. I will tell you who I am and what I am, how I came to be the man I am at this moment—

  “But it is much too late in the day to begin all that now—we will start in the morning.” He smiled at us, turned the wheelchair around, and began to move off, beckoning us to follow him. “I trust that I have piqued your interest.” In the entrance hall he rolled to the bottom of the wide staircase. A chair attached to a track on the wall waited at the foot of the stairs. Laboriously he levered himself out of the wheelchair into the lift. Peterson and I stood watching. The exertion tightened his face into a grimace of effort, pain, determination.

  “Now,” he said, once he was situated, “Dawson will see you to your rooms for the night. And, gentlemen, you can sleep soundly. As long as you are here with me on Cat Island you are entirely safe. And now,” he concluded as the chair slipped from view into the darkness at the top of the stairs, “good-night.”

  Seabirds, gulls, wheeled against the gray wet sky hovering low over the Atlantic. Occasional bursts of rain spattered the windows in the room crowning the lighthouse which was built on a tiny outcropping of rock reached by a stone causeway that was crumbling slowly away over the centuries. At eye level, through the fog and mist, the shape of the high walls of the castle keep loomed over the plateau. The smell of wet ferns and moss and saltiness seeped in at every crack, the wet pungent odor of the sea. Peterson stood glumly, subdued, staring at the evidence of a distant horizon slicing like a jagged knife wound, separating the grayness of the sky and the slate flat sea which grew choppy and angry as it approached the island.

  Dawson poured us steaming midmorning coffee from an old thermos. Peterson sipped loudly, burrowed deep into his black leather trench coat, pulled a white muffler tight at his tonsillitis, sniffed. I was trying to keep my pipe lit, gave it up, burned my mouth on the wickedly strong black coffee. Colonel Steynes, in a plaid Burberry cape, was settled in the swiveling wooden chair beside the mechanism controlling the lights.

  Waiting for Colonel Steynes to begin, I tried to pick out landmarks visible on the nasty sledge of granite, like the exposed head of a hammer crashing up through the surface of the Atlantic, that was Cat Island. The Stone Age hut huddled remarkably intact on the sheltered landward side, shielded from the weather, surrounded by wet green turf like sponge, encroaching bracken, the odd thicket of bramble and remembered hedge which dotted that side of the island. Moss clung to the walls. Down the Beach Road a quarry lay like an explosion from an ancient war, eaten out of the granite. And above it the vine-covered tennis courts and the rusted fuselage of the German airplane. Driving from the main house to the lighthouse road, Dawson had swung the old Rolls on a miniature detour, stopped above the cliffs, pointed with a smile of real enjoyment at the ME 109 driven like a stake into the cliff—the plane which had pursued the Colonel through the fog and rain back to Cat Island more than thirty years before. It too had begun to green with sea moss.

  Over a hearty breakfast, accompanied by Peterson’s sneezing, the Colonel had reminisced about his career. He was half-German, had served as a courier and special operative based in Cairo before the war, had gone on to Whitehall, had engaged in the Battle of Britain, flying Spitfires and a limping old Hawker Hurricane. It was in the Hurricane that he’d run afoul of several Messerschmitts on his last flight.

  The crash of the Hurricane had crushed much of his spinal column, broken his legs, burned his body badly, left his carcass leaking blood like a sieve. He had remained comatose for several weeks while the effort was made to save his rapidly waning life. In time, of course, he’d come around. A year after the crash he’d come back to Cat Island, paralyzed from the waist down, weak as a child and almost hairless, like an aged, decrepit baby. Dawson accompanied him, had stayed on, had brought him back to health.

  At breakfast, Colonel Steynes had discussed the murder of his German half-sisters by the Nazis in 1945 as the Russians pushed toward Berlin. Their deaths were singul
arly senseless and the news came to him shortly after hostilities ceased. Subsequently, his health having sufficiently improved, he was invited to join a team of British officials sent to Germany to engage in the investigations of a few, very specific war crimes. Among them were the murders of his half-sisters: the killers, though identified by witnesses who survived, were never found. Eventually he returned to Cat Island, alone. His entire family, German and English branches, had been wiped out by the war. By the Germans. By the Nazis. “An extraordinary coincidence,” he had said, tucking into his toast and eggs, “but I have never found the pattern in it—except in the chance result.”

  Now, in the lighthouse, with the electric-heater bars growing red, he began to elaborate on his story.

  “So I watched the world in convulsion after the war. I saw Germany sick and reeling, cowering in defeat, hostile and pathetic and resentful, even more crippled than I was. I was, I believed, more or less helpless, a physical derelict—but the longer I remained in Germany the more I began to see that there was a moral difference between my weakness and theirs. And I began to harbor a more than normal distaste for the Germans. I saw my reaction for what it was—the seed of an irrational illness, an obsessive hatred for an entire race of people, the Germans.

  “I was aware that my attitude was splitting—part of me stood back and realized the unhealthy nature of my thinking, the other part was wickedly enjoying this new outlet for anger, hatred, the beast of frustration within me. I responded by summoning up my resolve and leaving this banquet for my hatred, returning to Cat Island, to solitude, to a space and time for easy reflection.

  “Now, to continue in this frame of mind would have been to court a dangerous land of madness, an obsession about an entire nation. It would have been antecedent to further frustration because I would surely not have been able to inflict any widespread hurt on an aggregate people. So I carefully began to desensitize myself about Germans, to think of them as individual human beings who had undergone hideous suffering themselves. I finally managed to expunge this feeling of group hatred.

  “Instead of spreading my obsession, my madness across several millions of Germans—I aimed it at a manageable number. …”

  Dawson busied himself refilling coffee mugs. Peterson prowled restlessly around the circular room.

  “Colonel Steynes,” he finally said with a trace of impatience, “you mentioned avenging Alistair Campbell’s death last night. And this morning you’re talking about something you call your madness, your obsession.” The tone of his voice stopped Dawson in his tracks. The Colonel smiled at Peterson. “How the hell are we supposed to know that you are not totally crazy? I mean, my God, I’m standing here in the top of a lighthouse somewhere off the nastiest damn bit of coastline I’ve ever seen, talking to a man I don’t even know who thinks he’s an avenging angel. I have the very hell of a sore throat, I’m up to my ass in unsolved murders, and everywhere I turn somebody draws a Nazi across my path. Your personal psychological problems hold little fascination for me except insofar as they pertain to the sad story of Cyril Cooper. Now let’s get on with it. Let’s cut the crap, as we Yanks say.”

  Colonel Steynes was listening patiently to Peterson, sipping the fresh coffee. When the tirade finished Steynes said: “Anything else, Mr. Peterson?”

  “Not right now.”

  “All right. Dawson, tell Mr. Peterson to shut up until I have finished. Tell him that you will throw him out of the top of this lighthouse if he doesn’t shut up.”

  Dawson laughed.

  Peterson rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. …” He turned to look out to sea. Defeat and madness stared him in the face.

  “Mr. Peterson,” Colonel Steynes said somewhat more pleasantly, “all will become clear to you shortly. My story is such that you must understand the background—otherwise you will have a good deal of difficulty comprehending my rather peculiar role in this matter.”

  The rain outside had begun drumming steadily on the roof and windows. Fog was rolling on, growing thicker.

  The story told us by Ivor Steynes challenged our credulity and intelligence.

  Having returned to England and the quiet of Cat Island, Steynes struggled to control his mania. He began to study Germany closely, its history and literature and music and humor. He also made use of his extensive contacts in the military, at Whitehall, even in Downing Street. He had access through paranormal channels to highest security files, the advantage of the old boys’ system, his family, his own lavish heroism. So, to his study of the Teutonic past, he added an unprecedented fund of information about the present, what was actually going on inside postwar Germany.

  The more he learned the more effectively he was able to plan how he might sate his desire for vengeance.

  Germany was full of Nazi war criminals who had eluded recognition and capture. In fact, the world was rapidly becoming a refuge for these sewer rats, picking their way past human detritus, the bodies of the innocent, holding enormous sums of treasure looted from the vaults of Europe. No one was stopping them, no one was even trying very hard to bring them to any bar of justice. In any event, Sir Ivor Steynes decided that he would do precisely that.

  He began carefully. Movement was not simple, given his physical condition, but Dawson was there. And there were friends, a vast network of friends. Even in Germany he had his sources, men who had been close to Himmler, men in the upper reaches of the SS, and clerks who happened to know where the bodies were buried, even a man who had microfilmed much of Reinhard Gehlen’s intraparty files. The information Steynes received was frequently one of a kind. He procured one of the East German Brown Books at a time when it was one of the most closely guarded documents in the world.

  To test his sources of information he carried out a reconnaissance mission on Doctor Rademacher, one of those involved in the extermination of Jews. Not only had Doctor Rademacher not been brought to trial, he had been concealed and protected in an elaborate Foreign Office plan. Documents and records had been falsified to save him from prosecution. If Doctor Rademacher had been revealed for what he was, then German postwar diplomats would have been implicated by the dozens—not only in the Rademacher cover-up, but in their own criminal actions during the war. Steynes knew all this and watched the machinations developing to protect Rademacher.

  Finally the doctor was accused of one of his lesser actions—the extermination of 1,500 Jews in Belgrade. He was convicted, drew a prison sentence of three years and eight months. Steynes’ resolve to take certain steps himself grew, but he held carefully to his plan: he would merely watch the Rademacher case, testing the quality of the intelligence he received from his informants.

  And, bearing out the word he received in advance, the court allowed Rademacher his liberty while his appeal pended. During this time, one of the escape apparatuses went smoothly into action and Rademacher joined the steady stream of war criminals emptying into Argentina. Once he was safe in Buenos Aires, the Nazi publication German Honor applauded his safe arrival, hailing his escape as an “extraordinary feat of rescue from the clutches of the Jewish jackals.” It was only one case, but Steynes had known what was going to happen before it happened. His system of informants had worked to perfection.

  Steynes provided us with several more very similar cases he’d followed less closely than the Rademacher affair. The circumstances were always cut to the same pattern; in his redoubt at Cat Island the research dossiers grew fat. The evidence of Nazi control in peacetime, postwar West Germany was overwhelming. In the Bundestag, October 23, 1952, Chancellor Adenauer acknowledged that two-thirds of the upper-level diplomats in the Foreign Office were former Nazis. He could not, he argued, build an effective Foreign Office without stocking it with such skilled men. And the world swallowed the story. But not Ivor Steynes, crippled and alone on his island; he saw it for what it was: the birth of the Fourth Reich.

  With the success of his surveillance of Doctor Rademacher’s flight behind him, Steynes was ready to go one
step further. His subject was Oskar Eugen Lober, alias Hans Kruger.

  A native of Regensburg, Bavaria, Lober had become a Nazi party member early on, worked his way diligently up the SS ladder, and during the war had held the rank of colonel. His specialty was internal party politics, his career a small work of Machiavellian art. Allying himself with Himmler, he worked as an aide, a backup man and late-night confidant, was entrusted to carrying out subsurface diplomatic missions in Italy, Spain, and Sweden at various times.

  He slipped through the Allied nets following the war: he boasted that a false mustache had done the trick. Having acquired a sturdy little art collection during the sacking of Jewish homes and estates, Lober had read extensively in the field of art history, made the acquaintance of certain art dealers who had counseled Goering, became a passable imitation of a dealer himself. At the same time he was establishing a false identity as Hans Kruger.

  In late 1952 Ivor Steynes’ sources informed him that Hans Kruger, resident of a modest villa overlooking the Swiss shores of Lake Lugano, owner of a fashionable art gallery, might in fact be someone else. Researches were undertaken, Kruger’s movements plotted by faithful observers. Kruger was a frequent visitor to Madrid, Cairo, and Vienna. His mail came from all those cities and many more: Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City.