The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  She was alone and at rest and I sagged onto a bench and knocked ashes from my pipe. I was exhausted, my head ached from being constantly alert to her moves. I felt a great warmth for her, possibly just because I had spent a day with her, with her constantly in my mind. I felt close. I was attracted to her, to her life, to her attitude in the ballet class, to her walk and to her style and her life as I had seen it. I was tired and my reserves were low and I envied Brendel his closeness to her. … I was sure she was my sister Lee.

  Near the Westminster Bridge she stopped and stared at something chalked against the bridges facing. Once she moved on, I reached the place where she’d stood and peered at the printing in white. The words, in German, were, incredibly, a quotation from someone, perhaps the only words of German I could have translated without a dictionary: I have not understood but I have lived.

  What seemed like hours later I hurried panting through St. James’s Park, along Birdcage Walk toward Buckingham Palace. Rain spattered onto dead leaves. There was more people about now and streetlamps were flaring.

  Exhausted and sweating, I stood in Belgravia Place, looking up at the windows as she snapped second- and third-story lights on. I imagined her undressing in the bedroom, stepping into a hot shower, washing her perspiration in rivers down her strong, slender body. I huddled in a doorway.

  Only a few minutes later a man in a black trench coat turned past me from Pont Street, stood for a moment in a wedge of lamplight in front of me, nipped across the street, and let himself in at the Brendels’ door without hesitation. He had moved quickly but I’d seen his face: blond long hair, a strong, long-nosed profile, full, chiseled lips, a broad mouth, a hard face, handsome, indeterminate age. A spoiled, rich face, a cliché, too pretty to be taken seriously, a male model’s face putting you in mind of exquisitely groomed, bickering homosexuals.

  Cold and wet, the street deserted before me, I trudged off. I wasn’t thinking: I was registering the sights of Green Park, while the fog seemed to grow up from the ground. An occasional figure sat on a bench like a sodden lump of clay, umbrella canopied, still.

  “Oh, I say, Cooper! Mr. Cooper, hold on—”

  I turned abruptly, startled, and one of the lumps came to life, disengaging itself from its bench. Stubby, squat in a Burberry with a Henry Higgins slouch hat, it came toward me repeating my name, puffing.

  “MacDonald,” I said. “Is it MacDonald?” I peered under the rim of black umbrella. It was a small world.

  “Of course it’s old MacDonald,” he said, clapping my arm, pulling me toward him so that we were both sheltered. “What a small world it is!” he exclaimed, eyes pinched together by his smile.

  “Out selling insurance?” I was unreasonably glad to see someone I knew, however slightly, after the extraordinary isolation of a day spent peeking covertly at someone else’s life.

  “Trying, old man, trying. Making some calls among the idle rich, following up some leads—we call it ‘prospecting’ in my trade—you never know what might turn up. Belgravia, Mayfair, some large policyholders. Damned nasty weather, though, could die of influenza, that’s certain. Ah—thank God I’m a policyholder myself, won’t be leaving any loose ends when I depart this life, struggle, treadmill. …” He looked up at me, chuckling merrily in the face of impending doom.

  Whether on an airplane with whitened knuckles or sitting in the rain, MacDonald seemed never far from death, but then, that was his business.

  “Always love to stop for a moment in Green Park,” he went on, walking beside me, “been doing it for years. But the day’s gone all nasty, hasn’t it? Lovely sunset not so long ago, but now look at it. Nasty.” He thrust a hand out, palm up, to demonstrate the effects of the rain.

  I told him where I was staying when he asked. He nodded knowingly and unwrapped a raspberry-flavored throat pastille which bore an unmistakable aroma. He said he was probably already late for an appointment with a potential client and really must be off. I nodded. “But I’ll be getting in touch with you, old man. We’ll bend an elbow together. I know all the good places. …”

  He scuttled away in the rain, his coat too long on his round frame. The fog erased him like a formula which hadn’t quite worked out on a schoolroom blackboard. He was the only insurance man I’d ever seen without a briefcase.

  “Nothing like Havana leaf,” Peterson growled hoarsely, blowing a gust of blue smoke toward me. “Civilized English realize that. Probably the main reason they still trade with Castro—no point in cutting off your supply of Havana leaf over sillyass politics. Sense of proportion—”

  He was threatening to continue the rhapsody but my uncontrollable need to yawn cut him short. His throat was still sore, but he argued the medicinal value of expensive Cuban cigars.

  He watched me bring my yawn to a successful conclusion and switched his attention to the lengthening ash.

  “All right, all right,” he puffed, “on to business. First, the credibility of Colonel Ivor Steynes. I guess I’m happy to say that it’s very high—I was circumspect, of course, didn’t want to give him and his games away altogether, but my friend Bertie Redmond at the Yard gave me a hell of a queer look when I asked him—and then went on to say that Steynes was held in very high regard at Ten Downing among other less-imposing addresses and could be trusted. I got the feeling that we were both being cagey as hell, pussyfooting around the Colonel, but he said Steynes’ fascination with Nazis was well known to the Yard and the Foreign Office, that Steynes had in fact been used on more than a few occasions to help fill in serious blanks which led to people the government wanted to—ah—question.

  “Bertie gave me a rundown on Nazi activities in England since the end of the war. Concrete examples but no real significance. Bertie says they’re dying off, that they’re curiosities now—old men, a few fanatics, no followers to speak of. I couldn’t tell what he was holding back but he seemed pretty open about it all. He showed me a slender little picture file of known Nazi supporters still alive. Of course, it meant nothing to me. Except that I’ve pretty much committed them to memory.” He sneezed. “You’d better have a look at them—you saw those two men in Illinois before they tried to kill you.”

  “I saw the gaunt man. The other one—I’m not so sure. I don’t think so.”

  “Well,” he said impatiently, “well, take a look.”

  I nodded.

  Peterson went on to tell me that he’d called Buenos Aires. Roca told him that there’d been no progress: the airplane which had carried Kottmann and St. John northward had still not been found. But a friend of Roca’s in Santiago, Chile, reported seeing a man he thought was St. John with a prominent Chilean general. Roca was following it up.

  He also talked with Doctor Bradlee back in Cooper’s Falls, checking on the condition of Arthur Brenner, who was still in a deep sleep, but strengthening steadily, life signs good, slowly coming out of it. “Bradlee called it a healthful rest,” Peterson summed up slowly, inspecting his ash again. “Remarkable man, Brenner, been through a lot for a man his age. As long as I’ve known him, I’ve always thought of him as a goddamn rock—what these bastards did to him makes me about as mad as any of this crap.

  “I also talked to the FBI and the Minneapolis boys and none of them knows what the hell is going on. The confusion was just satisfying as hell—they don’t know. And Washington is just leaving those government men out there on the vine. One of them asked me if anybody new had tried to neutralize you—no, honest to God, that’s what the guy said. Neutralize. … Wanted to know if we knew who was trying to kill you.” He sighed and shut his eyes against the smoke. “And now, tell me about your day, Cooper.”

  I went through the recital, slowly because I was terribly tired, and Peterson listened, head back, eyes closed.

  I told Peterson about MacDonald.

  “The same man who sat with you on the plane to Glasgow?” Peterson’s eyes were still closed but there was a sudden rather intimidating edge to his voice and his arm had stopped on its w
ay to the ashtray, cigared with its chimney of smoke trailing away. “The same man?”

  “Yes, short, chubby fellow—sells insurance, scared of planes.”

  “The same man you ran into in the tavern in Glasgow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now you run into him in the fog in London. …”

  “Its a small world.”

  “Cooper, it’s not that small.”

  “What do you mean?” My mind was turning over, but slowly. “What else but coincidence?”

  “When MacDonald calls you—and pray that he calls you—you arrange to meet him for a drink. I want to see Mr. MacDonald.” He pulled on his nasal inhaler. “Because Mr. MacDonald is no coincidence.”

  The morning sun hung low, a metallic disk beyond the haze, and water stood in placid springlike pools in the street. It was early, but we’d finished breakfast and were drinking the last from the silver coffeepot. We were arguing and tension clawed at my shoulder blades, the base of my skull. Peterson wanted me to go around to New Scotland Yard to see Bertie Redmond and look at the Nazi picture file. I wanted to get back to resume my surveillance of Lee.

  “I wish to hell you would begin seeing this for what it is,” Peterson said, eyes narrowed and oddly disconcerting. “Your brother didn’t get murdered because he found your sister—if she even is your sister. If. … That’s not a reason for killing anyone, Cooper, not if she’s just your long-lost sister. He might have been told to go to hell, to stop bothering her—but he wouldn’t have been killed, for God’s sake. People just don’t kill people. Do you see that? Are you with me so far?”

  I nodded, scowling.

  “If he didn’t die because he found your sister, then he died for something else, some peripheral matter he stumbled on in his search for your sister. It appears that we now know what that peripheral something is—the survivors of Nazism, or the New Nazis, or the New-Old Nazis, whatever the hell they are. Now, it’s not Springtime for Hitler, not a comic opera, it’s not the Harvard Lampoon, it’s not a joke, it’s murder and God only knows what else.

  “So we’ve got Cyril and a woman who may be your sister and a pack of Nazi remnants. But we’ve also got a network, Buenos Aires and London and Munich—your brother visited each city; there are apparently Nazis in each city. Then we’ve got the avenging angel of Cat Island and your brother was there too.

  “Now, goddamn it, let’s just see it straight for a minute. There’s only one sane conclusion to be drawn from all this—these Nazis, crazy as it sounds thirty years after their big sendoff, are killing people … they are killing anybody who gets too close, anybody who threatens them. I mean, my goodness, what the hell else can we assume? Jumping to conclusions is one thing, but we’ve been steadfastly jumping away from conclusions. And now, Cooper, I’m scared. …

  “I couldn’t sleep last night. I can always sleep, always. But not last night, not the night before. And I wake up sweating and scared. I’m scared of this situation and I’m scared of these people—I’m scared because I’m not doing anything, because they’re watching us run from place to place, waiting to see what we do, if we’ll finally give up and go home.

  “And more than that, I don’t know if going home will save us either! And I say ‘us’ because it’s my ass now, as much as it is yours. We’ve been poking around in their little hole and they don’t know for sure how much we know but they’re worried. You know what I think, Cooper? I think they’d like to know how much we’ve found out before they kill us. That’s what I think. They don’t know what we may have told other people.” He sipped loudly at his coffee. “God,” he muttered, “how I love cold coffee! Love it, love it. … Life’s little pleasures and I want to keep having them.

  “The Nazis are trying to kill you and they’re doing it badly. Maybe they don’t want to kill you—I don’t know. Maybe they only want to scare you off. But I don’t think so. I don’t think they want you to go on living knowing what you do.”

  “But what do I know?” I asked. “Really?”

  “Not important. You may not even know that you know it. Alive you’re just a terrible, unnecessary risk. You’d almost think you’re being protected by someone—simply because you’re still alive. God, maybe.”

  He got up and paced the room, flexing his muscles, doing his little isometrics routine. He stopped at the bureau and threaded a striped tie beneath the collar of his white shirt. Both items had been purchased the day before: he found time for everything and I always wound up hot and sweaty.

  “Now is that all—what we see right up here on the surface—is that all there is?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Think about it for a minute.” He zipped his pants back up and smoothed the tie down over his shirtfront. The pinstriped vest came off the rack next. “Nobody bothered you until you were headed for home. They didn’t kill Cyril until he got home. They killed Paula. Who never left home once she returned. Home. Cooper’s Falls. I don’t know—but there’s something there. Maybe those boxes. They were stolen and to get the one they missed they damned near blew up the town. Sounds to me like a hell of a murder motive, if motive is what I mean. …” He slid the vest on, fitted it snugly across his chest, buttoned it up, and reached for his coat.

  “Which leaves those papers my friend at Columbia deciphered, that old plan for taking over the United States from within once the Germans won the war, the whole Austin Cooper thing.

  “Now, I didn’t set a hell of a lot of store in that. Oh, I believed they planned it and so on, but it seemed like childish stuff—be the first Nazi in your block to rule the world, crap like that.

  “But—now, listen to me, Cooper, damn it, what if they all believed it all, what if it was all a long-term reality? I mean, Jesus, what if Steynes isn’t just mopping up survivors, like shooting German sailors in the cold, black water? What if Steynes is trying to stop something? What if Cyril was going to blow the whistle? And Dolldorf? What if something, something real is happening now? Well, I mean to tell you, you’d better get your ass over to the Yard and look at those goddamn pictures and get your head in the game. And cut out spending all your time thinking about the woman in the case.”

  I went with Peterson to the Yard, clasped Bertie Redmond’s thin cool hand, and looked at the Nazi file. Nothing. No familiar faces, no gaunt man, no stubby helper. But I tried. Peterson had shaken me.

  We left the Yard and taxied back to the street where Brendel had his office and where I’d left the rented Audi. Having obliged Peterson by accompanying him to see Redmond, I had some arguing room. In the back of the cab I made my case.

  “You think I’m making too much out of the woman—Lee,” I said, trying to repress the emotions I felt when I spoke of her.

  “My point is that Lee is our handhold, the place we can begin to pry things loose. Cyril must have felt the same way—after all, she’s one of us, even if she doesn’t know it. And Cyril pushed closer and closer to her. We just don’t know how close he came. He may actually have confronted her—”

  “And that may be what got him killed,” Peterson said flatly.

  “Well, they already know about us. We can’t make our situation any worse.”

  He nodded, grumbling. He was wearing a bowler. New. If they killed him they’d be killing a well-dressed man.

  “Don’t forget the telephone calls to Paula,” I said. “Munich. He called her from Munich. Brendel and Lee live in Munich—that’s Cyril’s only connection with Munich.”

  Peterson kept nodding as we paid the driver and marched briskly down the street to the Audi. I pointed out Brendel’s office but he ignored me. “Okay, okay,” he said abruptly when I got in behind the wheel. “Let’s see this woman. I want to see her.”

  I looked up, focused out of my reverie, and saw them.

  She was wearing a forest-green pantsuit with a matching band in her hair and he wore a dark-green sportcoat, black slacks, black turtleneck, and they were headed for a matching dark-green Jaguar XKE with
the organlike exhaust signifying the new V-12. It was the man from last night, the handsome model-type in the black trench coat. Together now, laughing, they looked like lovers from a television ad. They were young and beautiful and rich and they were happy because they didn’t smell bad and if you would stop smelling so rotten you’d be just like them.

  “Okay,” Peterson said, all business, “let’s tail them. Maybe they’re off to blow up the Tower of London, strike a blow for the Fourth Reich.” He snorted, but he wasn’t kidding. His face was tense, grappling with the situation. I could see him changing during the morning: he was going on the offensive and I hoped I could stay free of flying debris. Looking at him in that instant before I switched the ignition, I was more frightened of Peterson than I was of all the rest of them.

  They wandered among the French Impressionists at the Tate, moved on to the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square, and stood transfixed before one Canaletto after another and then strolled into the street, his arm around her shoulders. She didn’t laugh, or even smile often, but occasionally she presented her face for a kiss and his lips nonchalantly brushed hers and then her smile would come, her arm would curl around his waist, and the Jaguar would slide off into the traffic.

  In Burlington Street they visited a small gallery and somberly inspected an exhibition of Francis Bacon’s visceral, brooding nudes. She spoke with a man, indicated one of the paintings, spoke to him while he wrote down instructions. They left talking seriously, animatedly. Art lovers.

  “Lovers, too,” Peterson said. “Just plain lovers. Herr Brendel goes back to Munich to mind the store or the Reich and his wife gets it on with a handsome stud. Not exactly a new story. Unless—” He paused to light a cigar. We were sitting in a small restaurant where they were lunching, hands touching on the linen. “Unless, this guy is a fag—which is possible from the looks of him. Some women—married women—hang around like this with art-loving homosexuals and the busy husbands don’t really mind. Figure it’s safer than having a young wife on the loose.”