“Possible,” I granted. “But it could be just the opposite. Homosexual husband gives wife a bit of freedom—equally old story.”
“She doesn’t look her age,” he said, “if she’s your sister.”
“Nobody does anymore.”
“No, I suppose not.”
They returned to Belgravia Place late in the afternoon and we went back to the hotel. The telephone was ringing when Peterson pushed the door open.
I picked up the telephone.
“Ah, you see, I’ve not forgotten you, have I? I promised I’d ring you up and, lo and behold, here I am.” Followed by a cascade of chuckles.
Peterson stared at me, mouthing the word “who?” with elaborate impatience.
“MacDonald,” I said into the mouthpiece. “How nice of you to call.” He chatted amiably, much of which I missed because Peterson was, if not exactly dancing, doing an animated prowl punctuated by tiny leaps, his fist slamming into his palm, whispering, “Hot damn! Hot damn! Leave it to good old MacDonald,” he muttered happily and disappeared into the bathroom. His head jerked back into the doorway. “Make that date. I want to see him. Tonight.”
The pub, if not actually squalid, lacked any sense of flair or style other than that attributable to the curry parlor next door. It wasn’t far from the docks and the smell of the Thames and fog and rain and unwashed barges hung over the premises like Fred Hoyle’s black cloud. Through the smoke, MacDonald clung to the bar surrounded by taller and presumably disagreeable ruffians.
He waved jovially, his red-faced smile verging on the forced, his hand pudgily clamped on a pint of brackish-smelling stout. The odors of the place were in constant battle and I rather liked it after a moment of getting accustomed.
I introduced Peterson, who shook hands with a warmth so uncharacteristic and phony that I expected strangers to stop and stare. MacDonald bought it, though, and Peterson hovered, occasionally bumping into him, excusing himself, reaching for the counter, buying drinks, throwing bills around like a maddened keeper of revels. Peterson was bubbling with conversation: How did MacDonald find Argentina? Oh, you weren’t in Argentina, well, it must have been Cooper, then, I know someone was in Argentina—his voice slightly drunken and gravelly, his speech slurring like someone in a bad play. But in the stifling air and noise of the pub Peterson must have seemed to MacDonald a gregarious, friendly, half-drunk American.
“Have another,” Peterson kept saying, filling his new friend with stout. From time to time I caught MacDonald’s eye. He winked, a desperate smile playing, then Peterson was at him again, asking questions about the insurance business and what was MacDonald’s territory and did he ever get to Germany and what was Germany like?
“Like any other place, I suppose,” MacDonald said. He flashed a soiled, once-white handkerchief across his round glistening face. “You hear a lot of rubbish about the Germans, of course, but they’re like everyone else, I’d say.”
“Ever meet a Nazi?” Peterson asked curiously. “I mean, hell, Cooper and I are just leaving for Germany in a couple of days and I was wondering. … Missed that war, too young, but I’ve always been fascinated by the period. Now, I hear there are still Nazis in Germany. …”
“Well, really, I travel there so seldom,” MacDonald said, his face beginning to blanch. He licked his lips and he came away dry. “But I think the talk of Nazis is bunk. There was a new Nazi party, called something or other, a few years ago, that had people worried.” He wiped his face again. He was quite pale. Peterson pushed his stout at him. “But, but—” MacDonald lost the thread of his remarks for a moment, then pushed on, lower lip trembling. He did not look well. “But they got point-oh-six percent of the vote in the last elections—”
“Remarkable you should remember that,” Peterson said admiringly. He wiped his face with his hand. Sweat seeped at the edges of his hairpiece, his mustache drooped. He was the bandit again. “Remarkable! Are you interested in politics, MacDonald? Or history?”
MacDonald was ashen by now and I couldn’t make eye contact. His eyes had gone fishlike.
“MacDonald,” I said, grasping his sleeve. “You don’t look well. Are you all right?”
“Not feeling too chipper, old boy,” he muttered.
“Have another stout,” Peterson said, almost shouting into MacDonald’s fading gaze. “You’re off your feed—some nice hot curry’ll put some life back in you!” He slapped MacDonald on the back and shouted to the bar-keep down the line that we needed more stout. “Come on, Mac, drink it up, nice warm stout good for the tummy. …”
MacDonald’s hand was shaking as he reached for the mug Peterson was shoving at him. He opened his mouth but was too dry to get the words out. He loosened the blue scarf at his neck and flung back the coat. It was inevitable. “Excuse me,” he muttered and pushed back through the crowd, urgent but weak, with one saddened backward glance.
“Jesus, you were hard on him,” I said. “He really looked awful—what was your performance supposed to prove, anyway?” I was irritated. I’d never seen his manic routine before but MacDonald, even in our conversation about him at the hotel, had served to excite him.
“Tut, tut,” Peterson observed laconically, sliding a long bulging black leather billfold onto the counter. “I do not trust nor do I much like your Mr. MacDonald. So I put some rotten stuff into his awful warm stout, awful rotten stuff that makes your mouth and eyes and joints dry up like they’d been calked—always leaves you just enough strength to get to the crapper where you puke up everything down to your shoelaces. And then you collapse. Puts a great strain on the old ticker and generally renders the recipient pretty well hors de combat—”
“What? It doesn’t make you go blind and your cock fall off?” I glared at him.
“No, Cooper, it’s jerking off that does all those things. And worse.” He opened MacDonald’s wallet and slid a handful of cards into his heavy hand with the black tufts on the knuckles. “MacDonald!” He spat in disgust. “Christ. His name is Milo Keepnews, he lives in Madrid … and he, heh, heh, works for something called Mandoza Imports. I’ll bet Mendoza Imports—”
“Keepnews,” I said. “Milo Keepnews. …”
Peterson thumbed through more cards, scraps of paper.
“The question is, who the hell does he work for? Us—that is, the CIA, or them—the Brendel bunch.” He glanced up. “I’d say those are the primary alternatives.” He saw the puzzled look on my face. “Big leagues, Cooper, and I’d say offhand old Milo Keepnews here is either in the market to watch you and kill you … or watch you and keep you from being killed. Either way, he’s dangerous because he can’t possibly protect you and he draws the opposition and tough guys like me like flies to shit.” He tilted his stout and drained it off.
I stared at him because I didn’t know what the hell was going on. “CIA?” I muttered.
“Fingers in everything. They look at each other on Monday mornings and they say, well, hell, somewhere out there there’s somebody doing something bad. And then they start poking around and they notice a murder here or a town getting blown up in Minnesota or an old Nazi professor gets knocked off in a Buenos Aires high-rise and they say now, there’s something bad, and away they go. So maybe old Milo is one of them. Organization man, whoever he is. Look at all these credit cards, Eurail pass, airlines, oil. We just don’t know whose organization. But he’s holding iron, I know that, and I think we’d better go see how he’s doing.”
I followed Peterson’s thick back as he bulldozed through the glut of people. The door to the toilet was chipped and the spring was broken on the outside, hung loose from a nail. Keepnews had remembered to lock the door. Ear to the thin wood, we heard him retch, heard him move and groan.
“MacDonald, old boy,” Peterson called. “Are you there?”
No answer.
Peterson stared at the doorknob, which rattled when you leaned on the door, but would not turn. Then he grabbed the knob, gritted his teeth, and with a short, stiff yank ripped i
t through the door, held up both knobs for me to see, and pointed to the jagged rip in the door. “Strong, huh?” he said with a nasty grin. “Come on, MacDonald, you old sumbitch, how you keeping in there?” He pushed the door open and the first thing I saw in the dim light was the muzzle of a revolver pointed at my guts.
Keepnews was sitting on the floor, which was a damp layer of dirt accumulated since Shakespeare’s youth. He was wedged between the filthy toilet bowl and the wall, his arm resting on the excrement- and urine-stained receptacle. One fat leg was thrust out before him, the other bent under him. Vomit—and food and the foam from stout—covered the front of his coat. His round face had a greenish touch to the pallor and was sunk into the folds of the muffler. The tiny room reeked. Keepnews’ eyes rolled, trying to keep us in focus, the gun wavered. I stood still. Peterson closed the door and told me to lean on it.
“Going to shoot us are you, Milo? Well, pull the trigger.” Peterson stepped closer and the gun tried to track him but fell short, wound up pointing at the wall between us. “Ought to be ashamed of yourself, Milo. Really.” Savagely, from an excess of energy, Peterson kicked the gun out of Milo’s hand, the toe of his shoe pinning the hand backward against the washbasin. A strangled cry from Milo, vomit foaming at the corners of his mouth, speckling the muffler. The sight and the smell made me want to vomit: I didn’t know if I could hold it back.
“Who you working for, Milo?” Peterson asked conversationally, reaching down and calmly lifting the round man to his feet, which flailed hysterically for a foothold. Peterson held him against the wall, the round head lolling forward into the muffler. There was something. … I moved closer, my hand over my nose. Something. …
Peterson’s hands ripped the coat all the way back, buttons popping against the walls. He fumbled in another inside pocket, then another, came out with a worn-looking passport case.
“Why, Milo,” he said. “You have so been to Buenos Aires, you little devil.” Milo’s head hung lower. Again, without warning, Peterson slammed him against the wall and the tiny mirror jumped off its nail and shattered in the basin.
“Wake up, Milo,” Peterson said. His hand swished past Milo’s cherubic face and when it came away the nose looked funny and a gout of blood spread along the upper lip, outlined the corners of his mouth. “Who do you work for, Milo? Do you work for Brendel?” His hand flashed again and the lip split open, a row of bloody teeth showed. I turned into the corner and threw up, trying to lean away to keep it from getting on my clothes. “Or do you work for the Agency?” Peterson harped.
Finally he said, “Oh, shit,” and I heard Milo collapse down the wall. I turned and immediately recognized the face, round and sunken against the navy blue scarf, the hair plastered down with sweat like a tight-fitting beret.
“I know him,” I said.
“What?” Peterson was rinsing his bloody hands, beginning to curse because there was nothing to wipe them on.
“I said I know this man,” I repeated. It was almost the same land of shock as when I recognized Lee’s picture in the clipping.
“So?”
“He’s the man on the highway. He was with the gaunt man when they tried to kill me on the highway.”
Peterson looked at me and then down at the man.
“He was wearing a navy blue coat that night and I remember its collar coming up around his chin—and now, look at him, the muffler, the way it frames what’s left of his face. It’s the same guy.”
“God, he must have been confident you wouldn’t recognize him.”
“Well, it’s him.”
Keepnews groaned, his hands fluttered briefly in his lap like birds too heavy to fly. Peterson watched him. Finally he said: “He’s had it, Cooper. He’s broken. I’ve seen it happen before. Go back to the bar and bring me a mug of stout.”
Not knowing why, I went and got one and returned to the toilet. Peterson was leaning against the wall going through the wallet and the passport. “Buenos Aires. He was there when Dolldorf was killed. Glasgow. He was there when Campbell was killed and somebody tried to kill you. United States. He was there when your brother got it. He’s been moving fast lately. Dangerous man, Milo Keepnews. I wonder where he’s from? London, maybe. I wonder what he was like as a little boy?”
“He didn’t seem so bad,” I said. “He was frightened on the plane.” But he was the gaunt man’s companion. No doubt now.
Peterson was grinding a powder between his fingers, letting the stuff sift into the stout. When he finished, he set the mug down on the washbasin, crunching bits of mirror. He handed me a piece of folded newspaper. “Look at this.”
I unfolded it, the creases greasy, the newsprint smudging back on itself.
It was the photograph of Lee from the Glasgow paper. Everybody seemed to have them. And this one tied Milo Keepnews tighter than Peterson’s vest.
“It was in his wallet.” Peterson leaned down by the inert, crumpled figure, so helpless tubby, inoffensive-looking. One of Peterson’s blows had smashed Keepnews’ round spectacles and driven a spoke of metal into the bridge of his round and now shapeless jelly of a nose. I’d never seen anything like that happen to a man.
And then I remembered what I’d done to the gaunt man that night in the snow.
“Come on, Milo, old boy,” Peterson said, lifting the mug of stout to the limp mouth. He cradled Milo’s head and leaned him forward. “Down the hatch.” He tilted the mug and the stout ran down the vomit-caked chin. Reflexively Milo sucked some of the stout into his dry mouth with a gasping, wheezing sound.
Eventually the mug was empty and Milo had sagged back against the wall, groaning softly, eyes closed. The stench was stomach-turning. I went into the dim, chipped hallway. A door at the back stood open a crack. When I peered back into the little room to see what was taking Peterson so long, I saw him sponging at spots of vomit on his coat where he’d brushed against Keepnews. Finally he finished his dabbing, folded the damp handkerchief, and replaced it in his pocket. He appraised himself in a long, thin splinter of mirror. He touched his hairpiece, adjusting a lock or two at the front, and stood back to look down at the body. One of Milo’s sleeves had slipped off the toilet bowl and his hand was amorphous, a blob, in the scummy water. His eyes were open. He stared unblinking at the floor, mouth drooping.
“Good-bye, Milo,” Peterson said matter-of-factly as he pulled the string on the one bulb.
A wet fog had come up outside, scurried along the pavement. I followed Peterson numbly, unsure of what to say. We were walking away from the river.
“He’s dead,” I said.
“Oh, yes, I’m sure of that.” Peterson was calmly puffing on a cigar, hands in pockets.
“Something in the stout.”
“Mmm.” He nodded.
“My God.”
I felt myself getting queasy again and Peterson, sensing it, pulled me into a brightly lit coffee bar and got us two hot cups of coffee. I sipped coffee and listened closely, because he was speaking very softly.
“Milo Keepnews was our enemy, John.” I could not recall his ever using my name before. “I’m sure he killed several people—probably including Paula and your brother. He killed Professor Dolldorf, set fire to Maria’s apartment, and killed Alistair Campbell. At least twice he tried to kill you, both times very nearly succeeding.” He paused and dripped cream into the coffee. “He was not a nice man. He was setting you up for something. He was following you—he was following you while you were traipsing around after Brendel’s wife and he was probably following us today. He was carrying a gun and I found the silencer in his coat pocket and tonight he would almost certainly have killed us both. So, please, try to see this thing the way it is. Naturally, normal people don’t go around having this sort of thing happening to them. But you’re not normal, not anymore, and my normality is not even a faint memory.” He sipped the coffee, his dark eyes boring into mine, his voice strong and reassuring. “Our lives are out of kilter, John. There’s nothing left for us now but to
see it all the way through, survive or die. It’s very basic—but we can’t remain passive. That’s terribly important. We can’t let things happen to us anymore. We have got to start happening to other people. Keep them wondering what’s going on.” He sighed into his muffler and put his hand briefly on my arm. “Tonight we happened to Milo Keepnews. And that’s going to bother hell out of them. The idea now is to keep the pressure up. They know you’ve been watching Lee—Milo certainly got that word to them. And they may know I’ve been to Scotland Yard. And they may know that we’ve deciphered most of what was in those boxes. And they know we’ve been to see Steynes. And I expect they’re nervous about all of it. The one point of strength we have, John, is speed and surprise. The fact is, I don’t believe they’re ready for our full-fledged counteroffensive.” He patted my arm again. “Now, come on, we’ve got to keep moving. We can’t slow down to think about it now.” He was smiling at me, but I kept seeing Keepnews gaping at the floor.
Peterson talked all the way back to the hotel and I heard his voice, the tone and enthusiasm and thrust of it. He was happy, almost bubbling over, and I was sick. Sick of what I had just seen, sick of what Peterson had done. But, God knew, sick of what Milo Keepnews or MacDonald or whoever the hell he was had done. I was confused and nauseated and whatever happened to right and wrong? More casualties, I supposed, just more of the night’s dead. …
Peterson uncorked a bottle of Courvoisier and settled back on the bed, pillows plumped up behind him. He splashed some brandy liberally into a snifter, rolled a mouthful around on his tongue, and gave me a grin. The knuckles on his right hand, which he had clamped around the snifter, were raw where Keepnews’ glasses had sheared through the skin. He crossed his boots at the ankle and lit another cigar.
A happy man.
I woke up and heard his voice: “What?” Incredulous, cigar ash dribbling on the flyfront of his forty-dollar shirt. “What are you saying to me?” He was whispering at the top of his lungs. I blinked and shook myself, stiff from napping in the chair. He saw me and pointed at the other telephone.
The Wind Chill Factor Page 25
