The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  “Let’s go, let’s go and get this over with. Thank God for the candles, no one will really notice her face—Christ, she looks like she just went through fifteen minutes with the Swedish Angel. Roeschler, you get our coats, we can’t go tear-assing out into a blizzard without our coats.”

  We went down the stairway like Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious. Peterson was in the lead, Roeschler at the rear, and he veered off to get the coats while we moved along the wall beneath the candles. We stopped well short of the door. They were there, blocking our exit. Siegfried stood with them, watching us, his blond hair dulled in the gloom. People moved sluggishly on all sides, laughing and chatting wearily, queuing up for their wraps. It was almost one o’clock.

  Roeschler loomed up with coats. He helped me on with mine, trying to camouflage Lise’s indisposition. We wedged her between us as I struggled into the sleeve. I smelled her perfume again in the close, hot crowd. Peterson got into his coat and turned to Roeschler.

  “Okay, do it,” he said and Roeschler took the lead as we moved toward the door.

  Siegfried finally made a move, bypassing Roeschler and confronting me and Lise.

  “Where are you going, Lise? Where is Gunter?” His voice was too high. “You are not to leave,” he said to me.

  Roeschler was at the door talking with the oversized palace guard. They were listening. He gestured back to us and looked worried and the men looked our way, too. One shook his head, frowning. Peterson kept pushing us forward, pushing us into Siegfried, who was also looking very worried.

  “You must not leave,” he said. He was becoming shrill and an elderly couple turned, taking notice with arched eyebrows. “Lise,” he said insistently. “Where is Gunter?”

  Peterson had had enough. He reached around and grabbed at Siegfried’s waistcoat, his hand out of sight, and yanked him tight against us, smiling into the matinee idol face.

  “Get lost,” he said. “Understand? Just go away. We’re leaving. She’s coming with us and if there’s any problem your balls will be the very first casualty.”

  Peterson shoved hard below eye level and Siegfried stepped back, mouth open, gasping.

  We were at the door and Roeschler turned, confusion on his strong features. It wasn’t working. The guards weren’t buying it. We stood staring at an impasse.

  “Do these people understand English?” Peterson asked.

  Roeschler nodded. Siegfried stood with his back to the wall deciding if foolish bravery were required; no one knew quite what was happening. Except Peterson.

  “I’ll negotiate,” he said. We were knotted closer, Peterson staring at the Adam’s apples of the three men who didn’t want us to leave. I heard every word because he was speaking very slowly.

  “If we don’t go out that door four people are going to die in about two seconds. First, my friend here”—he indicated me—“is going to kill Frau Brendel. While he’s doing that I’m going to kill all three of you. Bang. Bang. Bang. I’ve got nothing to lose. You can buy back your lives by letting us out the door. You follow us—and the nice lady dies anyway.”

  The three impassive faces stared ahead at Peterson.

  “It’s up to you.”

  Peterson motioned to me to go through the door. He was right. We were out of alternatives and I was glad. I walked Lise to the door. Roeschler opened it. Outside it was cold and white and clean and I didn’t look back.

  Lise turned her face toward me and shielded herself from the blowing snow. It was slippery and we took tiny, cautious steps. I didn’t know what was happening behind us, I just kept walking the length of the way to the parking lot. Where the hell was the car?

  I looked back at last. Roeschler, Peterson, and the three men were behind us, the three being marched along between. Snow was covering their dreary black suits. They didn’t know what to do.

  The parking attendants took a step toward our procession and stopped. Peterson smiled as he reached them, dangled his keys, and said, “It’s all right, I’ve got the keys. It’s the first car.” He called to me as they went back to their shelter and cigarettes, ignoring us: “Cooper, over there, to your left, first in the rank.”

  The seven of us, including the three coatless and shivering men, stood by the car while Peterson unlocked the front and back doors. The lights popped on inside. When he turned back to us he was holding a gun with a bulbous canister on the end of the barrel.

  “Okay, Roeschler, get in back, move it.” Roeschler hunched clumsily in the back seat.

  “Cooper, load her in next to him.” Peterson’s gun steadied against the three men, who moved from foot to foot, rubbed their white hands. “If you follow us, if you do any goddamned thing in the world to interfere with us, Frau Brendel dies. Do you understand?”

  They nodded in unison.

  “This is not what you think it is,” Peterson said. “Before you make a terrible mistake, find Herr Brendel. When you find him, then ask him what to do—Herr Brendel will explain the whole thing to you. Have you got that? Now, come on, give me a great big smile. Come on, let’s all smile together.” He motioned with the gun. “Smile. I’m going to smile.” He gave them the bared teeth, wolflike.

  Finally they smiled, teeth chattering.

  Peterson cuffed one on the shoulder, comradely.

  I climbed in, slipping on the ice and snow, grabbing the door for support. He slammed the door. I pressed the button to lower the window. Peterson was enjoying himself.

  He handed me the gun. “Hold it in your left hand, rest it on the window. They’re going to wave bye-byes.” He moved gingerly around the front of the car, slid in behind the wheel, and started the engine. Bending toward me, he flapped a hand at them.

  They were backing away, waving.

  “Fucking Katzenjammer Kids,” he said. “You gotta have a good time, it keeps you from realizing what you’re doing.” He chortled in the dark. “There’s a paper bag on the seat, Cooper. Reach in and get me a sucker.” He sighed heavily. “Go ahead, take one for yourself. Celebrate.”

  As we drove back into Munich, Roeschler explained to us what lay ahead. First, the death of Brendel would go undiscovered for at least a few hours, enough time for us to make our getaway—the same escape route he had provided for my brother. It entailed a drive southward and on up through the Alps to a schloss well out of the way.

  Second, no guilt must attach to Roeschler. After apparently killing Brendel, we kidnapped him to make good our escape. The following morning, his housekeeper would find him roped to his bed.

  Third, we would remain at the mountain retreat until he got word to us.

  “As to the rest of their movement,” Roeschler went on, “I simply can’t be sure. Brendel’s death will confuse them—momentarily. They took their orders from him but he was like any other leader. Replaceable. Alfried Kottmann may assume leadership or, and this is the problem, Siegfried may make his move.” He sniffed in the cold and blew his nose. The headlights poked warily into the billowing clouds of snow. “Siegfried is difficult to evaluate—he is a mercurial young man, but is he a dilettante or does he have real strength behind him? What land of money does he have access to? Surely not the Madrid sources. I doubt if it will stand up now that Brendel is dead. Without Brendel, Siegfried may find life’s realities a bit harsher than he expected. I’m rather worried about Siegfried’s reaction to all this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I expect he will add up his situation and see that the connection to Brendel was his main pillar of support. Which may turn him to a last resort, namely, Frau Brendel, the widow of the great man. He may or may not have feelings for her—he is a very modern fellow, whether or not he has feelings at all I cannot even guess—but he may choose to make her a symbol. If he can recover her, he may feel he can reestablish his role. He knows that Kottmann has no time for him and St. John is in Kottmann’s camp, the sly old bastard.

  “They may try to get rid of Siegfried themselves. They may want to shore up the
situation and stay on schedule, forget Lise and erase Siegfried. After all, what do they need either of them for? They’ve got their timetable and men die—but timetables are made to be kept. Siegfried may realize they are his natural enemies. If he does, he’ll either go underground or try to recover Lise and pose as the hero, the new Siegfried Germany has been waiting for.” He sneezed, trying to muffle it.

  Peterson found the narrow street and Roeschler directed him to a side street, intersecting an alley which ran behind his house. Lise stumbled groggily, but made it down the slender thread of snow and into Roeschler’s warm, sweet-smelling kitchen. She mumbled distantly, tears welled in pink corners of her eyes, and I touched her hair in a frail attempt to comfort her. Peterson was watching me grimly. There was blood caked beneath her nostrils and speckles on the white fleece lining of the coat. I sat down, hungry and tired, my eyes burning, and watched her.

  I must have dozed. Peterson was shaking my shoulder.

  “Come on, John. We’ve changed license plates on the car. Now we’re just another black Mercedes. But we’ve got to get moving. We’re not safe here.” He was pulling on his gloves. “Everything’s in the car. All the bags, everything. It’s all taken care of.”

  Lise had slumped across the table and Roeschler was getting her ready to go. The room smelled of coffee. Peterson slopped brandy into a mug and shoved it at me. I sipped it and it burned my tongue.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Cooper,” Roeschler said, shaking my hand firmly. He bowed slightly, dignity about him like a cape.

  Peterson handed me the keys to the Mercedes.

  “Take your sister”—he grimaced at that—“take that crazypants with you.” He followed Roeschler out of the kitchen. I heard them on the stair.

  I put her in the back seat and started the car, got the heater switch into the On position, got back out, and slid in beside her. She leaned against me. Helpless, reduced to her simplest animal self. I put my arm around her. But when I tried to think about her, the masks she wore, I kept seeing Roeschler pressing the silencer to Brendel’s head.

  I heard Peterson stomping down the steps into the snow. He got in and peered back at us. “Okay,” he said. “We go.”

  We stopped in Bad Tolz at something past four in the morning. It was dark and the snow was fine and dry, whipped down the empty streets by a sharp wind. The houses were gabled and painted brightly but there was little light of any kind and no movement. We got out to stretch, left Lise in the snug rear seat. Peterson clenched and unclenched his hands.

  The cold felt good. We sheltered in a doorway.

  “How did you get us out of Brendel’s house?” I asked.

  He brushed the snow out of his mustache and turned up his coat collar. Snow blew down the street in clouds, like ghosts.

  “It’s a matter of leverage more than anything else. It was more important to us to get out than it was to the goon squad to keep us there. Now the goons, they were supposed to keep us there, but if we told them they might die trying to keep us there, their choice became one of choosing to let us go and living for sure or keeping us there and maybe dying.” He snuffled and clapped his hands for circulation. “Now you give a man that kind of choice between living and dying and most of the time he’ll choose to live. The leverage, of course, is the guns. You’ve always got to be able to back up your threats. If we’d said, let us out of here or we’ll beat on you with our tiny fists, forget it. They’d have fed us to the dog for breakfast.”

  He pointed the Mercedes on through the town, which was nothing but a blur behind the snow.

  “Roeschler’s map says we angle off this main road and head back up into the mountains. We stop short of Austria but we get pretty well hidden in the Alps. We’re about halfway there. The place we’re going, this schloss, belongs to Brendel and it’s deserted now. Roeschler says there’s a tiny village where the road becomes impassable and a man named Lindt will take us the rest of the way.”

  Light comes quickly to the Alps, even the gray blur of that morning with the fir trees like black cones and the snow banked higher than the top of the Mercedes. It comes up out of Russia and the East and unaware the world takes shape, even the blunted gray-white crags and the endless towers of snow and tree and rock fading, disappearing in the snowstorms high in the mountain passes.

  There were road signs posted frequently, jutting out of the snow, barely visible.

  Frostschaden

  Schlechte Wegstrecke

  Verengte Fahrbahm

  We were somewhere between Bad Tolz and Garmisch, where they do all the skiing. By the looks of it outside I couldn’t believe anyone would be out skiing. It would have been so simple to simply glide off into the snow and be gone forever.

  A small castle, stubby and squat, rose up quickly like an apparition and Peterson said, sighing with evident relief, “That’s it. We’re here.” He pitched a sucker out the window and slid the car to a quivering halt before the largest of several smallish structures clustered around the foot of the castle.

  He hurried off to knock on the door with all the gingerbread around its frame. It opened immediately and he ducked inside.

  I woke Lise, who came to like a child, rubbing her eyes with her fists and moaning in a tiny voice. For an instant there was a glint of terror in her eyes, then she recognized me.

  “John,” she said slowly, as if learning again how to control her tongue, “I have to use the toilet, please.”

  I helped her up to the doorway and pushed inside.

  Peterson was talking with a gray-haired, gray-bearded man of fifty or so who wore a red-and-black checked shirt. Wind whistled in a large, blackened fireplace where coals smoked. Lise went away.

  “Herr Lindt is ready to take us to the schloss. He says the snowmobiles have been rented but that we will be much warmer and more comfortable in the sleigh. I said okay. We couldn’t keep crazypants on a snowmobile anyway.”

  Lise came back and Peterson went to the bathroom. Lise took my hand and held it to her face, smiling.

  Lindt threw a log on the kitchen fire. She drank coffee from a huge chipped mug. Lindt went outside to ready the sleigh. Peterson came back and I went to the bathroom. I wondered if she even remembered that her husband was dead. The monster of the night had turned into Goldilocks and the problem was I wanted to hold her and kiss her.

  Someone pounded on the door.

  “Get your ass out here,” Peterson said. “It’s time. Donner and Blitzen and Cupid are chomping at the bit.”

  Peterson rode in front with Lindt. Lise and I burrowed in back beneath blankets which covered our faces. We could hear the horses snorting and the runners hissing and the wind moving on the crust. Her hair was in my face and she turned her face up, her cheeks fresh and dark glasses over the mouse by her eye. She grinned. Her mouth was wide and impudent. I kissed her. Her mouth didn’t move, she didn’t lass me back, and I knew I was making an awful mistake.

  I don’t know how many times I pressed my mouth to hers, how many times I wanted her to respond. But she didn’t and I kept touching her face with my lips, the scab on her lip, the marks where she’d been struck, the snow on her forehead.

  The sleigh finally stopped and I heard Lindt and Peterson get down, puffing, staggering in the snow. Peterson opened the tiny door for us to climb down and he went off with Lindt. The schloss had a balcony and looked like something from a guidebook. I stood up and saw an incredible panorama stretching below, beyond the line of fir trees. Far below, with the sun glinting on gray ice and snow, lay a lake. Great tufts of snow and fog hung above it but there it was, miles away and a long way below, huddled among the mountains like a picture from a jigsaw puzzle box, and it occurred to me that Gunter Brendel would never see it again.

  I pulled Lise up and she saw what I saw. She shrugged and lowered her eyes.

  “But am I your sister, John?”

  A fire blazed in the grate. The stone fireplace took up half of an entire wall and heated the large room. The electric light
s didn’t work. Lindt was carrying logs in from a shed outside and Peterson had opened several cans of stew and canned brown bread. He was doing the cooking on the stove, which drew propane from tanks. The house was warm enough to shuck our coats. Lise was curled on a couch before the large fire, her sheepskin coat thrown across her lap and legs, a brandy snifter in her right hand. Lindt began carrying logs up to the bedroom, which opened onto the balcony circling the main room on three sides. It was very hard to believe it was anything but a vacation.

  Peterson heard me come in and spoke without turning to look at me.

  “Delicacy is not my strong suit, Cooper. You know that by now, right? Right?”

  “Sure. You’re insensitive. It’s too bad but you have other good qualities.”

  “So let me get it right out there. The lady you’ve been necking with has two big strikes on her for sure, before you even start looking at her hard. One, she may be your sister. Two, she is a nut case. Am I right?”

  “The question is, is it any of your business?”

  He plunged a long wooden spoon into the pot on the stove.

  “Nobody likes a smartass, Cooper.” He dropped the spoon on the stove and ground pepper from a mill into the pot. “So I’m suggesting, man to man, that you think twice before messing around with the widder lady. That’s all.” He turned and looked at me. “I’m talking to you as a friend. I guess I’ve come to think of you as a friend of mine. I just think you should leave her alone. Treat her like the sister you thought she was. That’s all. Otherwise, she’s all trouble, and a mile wide.”

  “Look, I’m having a hard time handling this—it wasn’t what I meant to do.”

  “She can make it worse for you, believe me.”

  “What if I said I just can’t help it?”

  “I’d understand that and I’d be sorry. Because right now, regardless of what she means to you, she’s dead last on my list of priorities.” He sighed and rubbed his stubble of beard. “And you’re a nice guy, an innocent. I want to see you come out the other end of this nightmare. I don’t care if she makes it through the afternoon.”