The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  Lise came to the kitchen table and the three of us sat like deaf and dumb mountain dwellers, scraping the bottoms of our bowls.

  Lise fell asleep on the couch in the afternoon. I sat in a deep chair watching her for a while, wondering where her mind was, remembering that I’d seen her husband die quite violently only a bit over twelve hours before. The fire was warm and the party seemed a long time ago, acted out by another cast altogether.

  Peterson went upstairs after our lunch and was gone an hour. When he came back down his face was freshly shaven and his mustache was trimmed. He wore a heavy turtleneck sweater and Levis, all from the bags which Lindt had dutifully loaded onto the sleigh from the trunk of the Mercedes. He looked reasonably fresh and he was carrying two rifles from a case on the balcony. Both were mounted with telescopic sights and rested over one forearm. In his hand was a large box of ammunition. He sat down at a long trestle table behind the long couch where Lise slept and laid the rifles lengthwise. He began to play with them but I didn’t want to know why.

  It was dark when I woke up. Lise lay on her side asleep, her mouth slightly open, an arm jutting outward from the couch toward the fire. The rifles lay on the table.

  He looked up when I went back to the kitchen.

  “Stew,” he said. “Brendel must have loved stew. There’s enough in the cupboard to feed the entire Fourth Reich.” He tossed the corkscrew to me. “Open another bottle.”

  “What about Lise?”

  “Let her sleep.”

  We ate quietly, exhaustion everywhere. Peterson had developed a low cough and had a row of pills arranged on the tabletop.

  “Can I take these with wine, do you think?” He picked them up, rolled them in his palm like dice. “Roeschler gave them to me for my throat and cold and incipient pneumonia.”

  Later, we took a bowl of stew to Lise and the three of us sat in the firelight talking. He was quite civil to her and she seemed reasonable if impersonal. We were all tired and said nothing of the events of the previous evening. Less than twenty-four hours before, Peterson and I were setting off for the party.

  Peterson and I smoked cigars and drank Brendel’s port and stared sleepily into the fire. Finally Lise took a candle and said goodnight, climbed the stairs, and disappeared into one of the bedrooms. I watched her go.

  “How long do you think we’ll have to wait?” I asked.

  Peterson shrugged. “I don’t know. Tomorrow, the next day. There may not even be a way to reach us. It would be easier to say if I knew who to trust.”

  “What do you mean? We’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys.”

  “But who’s who? All we know is what people tell us. St. John told you things, Kottmann told you things, Alistair Campbell and Ivor Steynes and Roeschler and Lise—they’ve all told us things. But who the hell knows what’s true? We keep hearing about things, a plan, coming to a head. Money in Madrid. Magical submarines, plans to take over the world, a group of conspirators called the Spider.

  “What I want to know is just this: If this is so goddamned big and powerful and menacing, why hasn’t someone else, the CIA or the Russians or somebody, discovered it and stopped it? Why Cyril? Why us? We’re accidents, Cooper, not spies. We weren’t looking for any of this, we stumbled into it. I’m beginning to wish we could just stumble on out. But they won’t let us. It’s all very strange. An accident.”

  “Maybe that’s the explanation. Accident. It’s hard to prepare for accidents.”

  “Sure, sure. We may have penetrated by accident. But why the hell didn’t they just kill you? Or us?” A log fell, sprinkling sparks on the hearth.

  “Somebody up there likes us.”

  Wind ate away at chinks in the chimney.

  “I think you’ve got it,” Peterson said. “Somebody somewhere is watching over us.”

  It was pitch-dark when I opened my eyes. Someone was speaking to me but I couldn’t make sense of it. The square window took shape, the fire took glowing form, the smell of the smoldering embers made sense, jogged my memory. I looked up at the figure leaning over me, the hair draping down. It was Lise. She was speaking German, her voice edging toward hysteria.

  She was wearing the sheepskin coat. It hung open, the lining brushing my face.

  “What’s the matter?’

  She shivered. Her legs were bare. She pulled the coat tight.

  “I woke up, all alone. I didn’t know where I was. I called for Gunter, then I realized I was alone, and I began to cry. I didn’t know where anybody was and I thought I heard someone outside.” She sniffled. “I was thinking about Gunter. Is he all right? Someone told me he was dead, maybe in my dream. I’m so confused, I’m so tired. I woke up thinking he was dead and then I couldn’t remember how I got here. Someone had hit me, Gunter I think, and then someone told me he was dead—” She peered at me.

  I lit a match on the bedside table and fired the stubby candle I’d brought with me from the kitchen. She was covered with goosepimples, her arms, her legs.

  “Where is he? Please … John.”

  “He’s dead, Lise. He was killed at your party.”

  “Your brother is dead, too. Isn’t he?”

  “Yes, he’s dead, too.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She sniffled again and touched her lip.

  “Who cares, anyway? Do you know?”

  “When I found my brother dead, I cared then. And then, each time someone else died, maybe I didn’t care quite so much. Now I don’t know … I cared about finding you.”

  She looked at me. Her eyes were wide, remote, vacant.

  “I had to find you,” I said. “If you were my sister it was worth anything and I just wouldn’t stop looking until I found you.” I reached out and took her hand. Christ, who was she?

  “Why?” she asked tonelessly, her hand limp and cold. “I don’t know who I am, I don’t know why I’m here, my husband is dead.” She slumped inside the heavy coat. “You kissed me in the sleigh. … And was it all worth it?’

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you glad you found me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did you do it? What was the point?”

  “My brother was dead. And he had your photograph.”

  “So was it worth it?”

  “Are you my sister?”

  There were tears on her cheeks, like icicles. “Maybe I never knew—”

  “If you are, it was worth it.”

  “Why would you kiss your sister that way?” She was watching the candle’s twitching flame.

  “I couldn’t help it, that’s all.”

  “Do you want to make love to me, then?”

  “Yes … I don’t know, Lise.”

  She pulled back the comforter and got into bed, lay straight beside me. She was ice-cold, quaking, rigid. There was no desire in me. I looked at her face, white, stark, staring at the ceiling. Her eyes were open, fixed like something in marble. She lay like a corpse, unnerving, inanimate. I leaned across her, felt her bare leg next to me, felt her breath on my neck. I blew out the candle. What a waste it all was. I kissed her cold, dead lips. I put my hand on her thighs, felt the smoothness and the wiry hair between her legs. A tremor shook her body.

  “You were right,” I said at last.

  “What do you mean?” She spoke to me from some other place.

  “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  We slept. We didn’t touch. It was like being dead and knowing it, being awake in the box and hearing the dirt being shoveled in on top of you. I was too tired to cry out for help.

  When I woke up it was still deep night. Lise was gone. I got up, put on pants and shirt, and sat by the fire, huddled inside the comforter. I wrapped it around me and went to the window. The clouds had broken and the moon dangled like a coin over the mountains. Snow blew noisily in the trees and stretched away unmarked. Below, past the trees, the lake lay like a second coin, a reflection of the fi
rst.

  My Rolex said 5:10 and I was trying to get the chronology of the past thirty-six hours straight in my mind. Twenty-four hours ago we were driving away from Munich toward the mountains and Roeschler’s housekeeper must have found him later that morning, say, twenty hours ago. Once they found him, what would have happened? Would the police have been notified of Brendel’s violent death? Or would the Nazis have hushed it up, attributed it to natural causes, and arranged for a certificate of death from one of their own doctors—perhaps even Roeschler himself? The irony fit so beautifully. I smiled stupidly in the night, staring out my icy window. To think that Roeschler had been Colonel Steynes’ man all along. Nothing was what it seemed, nothing from the very beginning. Not even my little sister Lee.

  And now, what must be happening in Munich? I poked the coals, watched sparks flare and shower, threw another log on the fire. Even if the Munich police were not looking for us, Brendel’s associates surely must have assumed we’d murdered their leader and kidnapped his widow; surely, they must be looking for us—we’d penetrated their operation and we were loose somewhere and they couldn’t know what we planned to do. As long as they couldn’t find us, they had to fear us.

  At first I thought it was a log slipping in the grate, a rustle of bark. But it continued and it was coming from outside on the balcony overlooking the main room. There was a shuffling and a sob and I went to the door, listened again. Quiet. I opened the door an inch and it was shoved hard against me, the knob smashing into my stomach, the flat wood ramming against my face. I felt my nose erupt, blood gushing back through the tunnels into my throat and flowing down my upper lip. I slipped backward and fell on the hardwood floor, the edge of a chair taking a bite out of my back.

  Siegfried Hauptmann was standing in the doorway, the dim light behind his golden hair. One of his arms was clamped around Lise, who was dressed in worn Levis and a denim shirt. Cradled in the other arm was a machine gun sort of thing with a stick clip of ammunition protruding below the barrel and a metal handle like a gunstock in outline with no wood. I touched my nose, trying to stop the blood.

  “Up,” he said, whispering, gesturing with the gun. “Stand up and shut up.” Lise moaned and he yanked her tighter. “Please,” he said to her. “Please, Lise, be quiet—” She sucked in her breath, her mouth shaking like a child’s, fighting back the urge to whimper. I stood up on rubbery legs.

  “Downstairs,” he said.

  I staggered out of the room. Candles were lit along the balcony railing and the fire downstairs was roaring and bright but the light died as it hurtled toward the corners of the room.

  They followed me down the stairway and across to the fireplace.

  “Sit down,” he said. I sat on the couch and Lise crumpled into a large chair. She fumbled with a box of matches, lit a candle on the table beside her.

  “Where is your friend?” His hands were shaking, the guns muzzle fluttering in a rather terrifying manner.

  “I don’t know.” I put my bloody hands on my knees and bent my head back the way my nanny had taught me in the nursery and the blood slowed to a trickle.

  He put the machine gun down on the mantelpiece and took a pack of Camels from the inside pocket of his costume. He was wearing a silver snowmobile suit. He clicked a lighter and immediately inhaled, relaxing.

  “It was all I could think of—this place. A possibility that she might bring you here if you took her with you. I drove as far as I could with the snowmobile on the rack behind. I left it in the trees and walked the rest of the way.” He frowned dramatically, blew smoke out through his flared nostrils.

  Lise got up and went to the kitchen. He watched her but made no move to stop her.

  “What are you going to do?” I wanted to keep him talking. Where the hell was Peterson?

  “You don’t know what I’ve gone through since you left the party. They found Gunter’s body in the morning, early, and I was still there. It’s been awful—” He was letting himself lapse into a chatty mode. He was very female in some ways. “They got tough with me, as if the special relationship Gunter and I had built could be wiped away in an instant. They made it clear I was unwelcome—”

  “They?”

  “All the old ones, Kottmann, St. John, and those idiotic old medal-bearers, broken-down generals who lost a war … lost the world thirty years ago.” He was boiling over, hate racketing inside his pipes. “Those greasy South Americans, all shiny black hair and gold braid. … Suddenly they were in charge and I was alone.”

  He shook the cigarette ash onto the floor and touched the gun reassuringly. Lise came back and hovered over me, standing behind the couch. She pressed a cold towel to my forehead.

  “So what have you come here to do?” she asked coolly.

  “I’m going to take you back. They’ll listen to me if I bring you back.” His voice betrayed him.

  “You are an idiot,” she snapped. “What do they care about me? Without Gunter what am I to them? Nothing. You have come all this way for nothing. Idiot!”

  “You’re wrong, Lise,” he said, controlling himself. “You’ll see. When I bring you back they’ll have to think. My people are not insignificant. They’ll see how much we can add to the movement. You’ll see. …” He lit another Camel.

  Lise leaned possessively on my shoulders. His eyes followed her hands, watched them touch my shoulders, narrowed.

  “Why do you think I’d come back with you? What is there for me in Munich? My husband is dead, you are a ridiculous, posturing fairy … a complete waste, a mistake. …”

  “You will come.”

  “I’m going with John, wherever he goes—” Her voice was growing shrill: she was grasping, playing another game, using me. Siegfried walked back to the mantelpiece and stood looking into the flames. She wheeled and went to stand behind him. “Go away. Leave us alone. Face all the other pederasts alone.” And she went on in German, her hands up clawing at his back.

  He turned without a word and slammed the machine gun into her side, cutting off her breath, cracking the metal against her rib cage. His face was blank as she dropped to the floor, gagging, mouth gaping. He was fumbling for the trigger, trying to turn the gun around: he was going to shoot her. I threw myself forward buckling his legs from behind, dropping him to his knees with a cry as his kneecap hit the edge of the slate hearth. The gun swung around, the barrel scraped across my nose, and the tears brimmed over, blurring my vision. The front door flew open as we lay near the fire and I heard Peterson begin to laugh.

  I lay on my back, half across Siegfried. Lise lay sobbing a few feet away. Peterson looked benignly down.

  “Amateur night,” he said. Siegfried tried to right himself. Peterson kicked him in the crotch, swiftly and economically, and he curled into a shrimplike crescent, saliva foaming a few inches from my face. Peterson kicked him again and the eyes floated back in their sockets, showing nothing but whites, and then they closed and the head lolled against the slate.

  Peterson reached down and pulled me up.

  “You’ve got a bloody nose,” he said. He bent over Lise. “Are you all right?” he asked briskly.

  She tried to sit up and winced, her face gray and pinched at the corners of her eyes. “It hurts.” I knelt beside her.

  “Leave her alone,” he snapped. “She’s probably got a cracked rib from this slimy little shit I’ve just turned into a soprano. Just let her lie there. She’ll get up when she has to go to the toilet.” He picked up the wet towel and threw it to her.

  “Thank you,” she moaned.

  Peterson ignored her.

  “Where were you?”

  “Outside freezing my ass. I saw this idiot coming across the snow from the woods. He was carrying the gun like a bottle of champagne. I went outside and waited because I wanted to find out what he had on his mind—I listened at the door, but my God, he was so slow.” He regarded the slowly reviving victim of his boot. “Creep,” he muttered.

  Siegfried cupped his crotch tentative
ly, dragged himself into a sitting position. Peterson approached and he flinched, cowering near the fire. Lise said: “Don’t kick him again.”

  “Shut your goddamn mouth. You’ve got problems of your own. This asshole’s past worrying about.”

  He reached down and yanked Siegfried to his feet like a man jerking weights. Siegfried hung forward over his groin. Peterson took a handful of the gold hair and dragged him to the couch and dropped him. Tears poured down the weak, pretty face. The matinee idol was aging fast.

  “What do you want?” Peterson asked.

  “Lise,” he gasped. “I’ll make a deal. Give me Lise and I won’t tell them you’re here. You’ll get away—”

  “What deal? You’re the one sitting here holding your nuts, not me. You’re crazy. Here’s the deal and listen hard. You tell us what’s going on in Munich and maybe I won’t kill you—how’s that for a deal?”

  Peterson went into the kitchen. We waited. Finally he came back.

  “Are they looking for us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are they sending men out to look for us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Peterson took Siegfried’s hand in his own and turned it palm up. His other hand slid across the palm and Siegfried drew back, sucked his breath in. A paring knife had sliced a deep, straight line across the open palm and it was turning a rich, thick red. I stood up, holding on to the arm of the couch. Lise watched with horror-stricken eyes. Blood welled in the creases of his palm.

  “Are they sending men to find us? Were you followed, Siegfried?” Peterson was speaking patiently. I was in enough pain to keep me from worrying too much about Lise’s ribs or Siegfried’s flesh wound. After all, that’s what it was. It just looked so awful and he’d done it so calmly.

  “Well, now,” Peterson was saying, “what else? Who is taking Herr Brendel’s place?”

  “Kottmann, I think,” Siegfried croaked. His hand was covered with blood. When I got close I could smell it.

  “And what about your own happy band—”

  “Kottmann and his people, they’re trying to force us out.”

  “I daresay that shows good judgment.”