The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  Arthur lit a cigar from the candelabra and swallowed sherry. A cut-glass decanter stood before him. In the flickering light he looked older, cheeks hollowed, eyes set flat on the skull, but his voice was strong and his mind nimble.

  “I am Barbarossa, John, I have always been, ever since the war was obviously going to be lost. Hitler had botched his chance and they turned to me. I was a government official at the time, in the State Department, I was honored and respected, I was thought to have real ‘bottom’ as my Southern colleagues called it. I was utterly sane and quiet and sound in my thinking—and was known to be uncommonly effective. The council made known to me their joint will—that I was the man they wanted.

  “I was at my desk in Washington at the time. It was spring, and I said that I would have an answer by evening of the same day. I knew the risks and I knew the stakes. I went for a long walk beneath the cherry blossoms and I considered what it meant, what a long-term undertaking it was. It was not an easy choice but it wasn’t so terribly difficult either; it was more a matter of coming to grips with what it meant. And that evening, in a lovely Georgetown home, in a library full of leather and brandy and cigar smoke, I accepted, and when it was clear what my decision was and I had been wished well—why, then we rejoined the ladies for bridge.” He smiled distantly, memory sweeping over him. “Almost thirty years ago … and, of course, the character of the movement changed completely. We let the war run its course because we knew it would condition the world properly—Nazis had lost the war and the hope for domination of Europe and the Far East; they would vanish in disgrace from the face of the earth. …” He looked up and through the smoke and the candlelight caught my eye. “But only the name would die, John. Only the name.

  “In any case, to return to our discussion of this afternoon, while I was incapacitated by my heart problems, Herr Brendel went ahead with his attempts to protect himself from you. He’d face up to the worry of dealing with me later … if I even survived my illness. He may have thought I was a dead man, hanging on by an unraveling thread. In any case, the man was out of his mind with worry, not only over the movement being revealed but with the fear of losing his wife—he saw you as the final, awful threat to his entire existence. You had to be stopped whether you were the last of the Coopers or not. And I was no longer able to protect you.”

  I listened and remembered the pale gray eyes like flat stones and the serious face only infrequently visited by a smile.

  “They lost you when you went to Cat Island. Very few of us know about Colonel Steynes and Brendel had no idea at all, neither did Kottmann. I know about the mad Colonel; he has been useful to us from time to time—throw him the bait and watch him and his man Dawson, they’re very quick on the scent. Gerhard Roeschler knows of him, and has gained his trust over the years, done some work for him. Which is, in light of his most recent assignment, rather an understatement. But only a few of us know—your father was one, John.

  “Steynes has never really been a problem to us and he has helped us, unwittingly of course, rid the movement of the sort of people we want no part of. He’d always held off on Brendel. After all, Brendel was not covered in gore by any means, not the sort of creature Steynes was interested in—‘New Nazis’ the mad Colonel called Brendel and his people, and he wasn’t interested. Yet you got him interested, you and Peterson, and he went to Roeschler … and Roeschler killed him.”

  “Will you have to kill Roeschler, then?” I asked.

  “Ah, no, I think not,” Arthur said patiently.

  “But Roeschler works for Steynes—he helped us escape from Brendel. …” My voice was trailing off because I was beginning to catch the rhythm of the motives and realities.

  “He helped you because I ordered him to, John. I ordered you sent back here, I arranged for Peterson to be briefed in Washington. John … listen carefully. Doctor Roeschler is one of us. He is head of our European enterprises.”

  “But the White Rose?” Nothing was what it seemed. “What about his Jewish wife?” I heard my voice cracking, the voice of another man I no longer knew or cared to know.

  “All true,” he said, “all true. He hates the old Nazis, hates their butchery of Jews. He was happy to accept his commissions from the mad Colonel.”

  “Does Steynes know about Roeschler?”

  “No, no, Roeschler’s identity is exceedingly well guarded. He, like me, is a secret—a very important secret. I am his only superior in the movement. He is number two, John.”

  He got up from the table and came around and stood beside me.

  “My God, Arthur—my God.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, his heavy hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry you ever had to learn the truth. A good deal of effort has been spent to keep it from you.” He shrugged. “But this is the way it is. Come on, John. Let’s go outside. A walk will do us good, settle our stomachs and ease our burdens. Come on, son.”

  We put our coats on and went outside. It was wet but the rain had stopped. In the quiet night, if you strained, you could hear the falls, a soft roar muffled by the cliffs.

  “What happens now?” I breathed the cold air and it reminded me of the night we went out in the snow and found Siegfried, kneeling and manacled and frozen like a boulder in the trees.

  “Well, I will be gone soon. I won’t see it happen. Of course, you don’t actually know it all. You don’t know our timetables, you don’t know how we will go about our operations, how we plan to deal with this country. You don’t know who our man is in this country nor the men we are considering for my place and Doctor Roeschler’s when he is gone. And you don’t know the man we’ll eventually put in the White House. Oh, you know his name, everyone knows his name—you just don’t know he’s our man.” He was walking with the help of a cane, his free hand shoved deep in his coat pocket. I watched him out of the corner of my eye: he was leaning into the moist breeze. As I heard his last words, I felt myself cringing inside.

  “What I want to know now,” he said, “is what you think about it, about all that you’ve heard today. I need an idea of your attitude, John. Do you understand? I need to know.” He coughed and pulled his hand out of his pocket, tugged his muffler up to his chin, and pulled the collar tighter. God only knew where he got his strength.

  “What do you expect me to think, Arthur?” I sighed and tried to get my breath. “Everything I believe in has been proven a lie, everything I had ever looked to as an anchor in my life. Nothing is what it seemed. There’s just nothing left—my brother is dead, my sister rejected me after I caused the deaths of several people while I tried to find her, I learned that my father was a Nazi agent instead of a war hero. Roeschler, the one man I met in my travels whom I truly trusted, is one of them, or one of you if you prefer.” I got my breath again and went on: “I have been told with some authority that my own country is part of a worldwide conspiracy or plot or movement, the goddamn Fourth Reich—and now, Arthur, the one final sure thing in my world, the last thing I clung to—you, Arthur—you’re one of them, too. What do I think, Arthur? I want out. I don’t want to know any more, I don’t care, take the world and good luck with it, it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. I feel dead, Arthur. I’m not going to tell anybody, I just don’t care, and who the hell would I tell? The FBI? the CIA? For God’s sake, who? The New York Times? The Washington Post? Hell, I’d be better off telling Punch. You’re telling me that this is the way it is and the way it’s going to be and I say okay. It’s all right with me.” I put my arm on his sleeve and stopped him in the muddy road. The falls was louder now and somewhere far away I heard the sound of a car. “The trick for me, the one thing left for me is to try to put my world back together again. You’re safe from me, you’ve succeeded. I just don’t care. All of you, you’re just another big corporation. What do I care now?”

  He moved on. I was slightly behind him. He was a huge shape and above us the moon came and went, low in the sky. The quiet night was really full of sounds.

  “
If only Cyril had felt that way”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wouldn’t have had to kill him, John. If only he’d accepted what I told him, if he’d only said, The hell with it, what difference does it make to me? The whole thing would have been avoided, no one would have died, life would have gone on—”

  “Arthur, what are you saying to me?”

  “But he didn’t believe I’d kill him, he didn’t believe I could bring myself to do it, he told me he would have to tell you and then he’d have to find a way to get the truth out.” He was speaking into the night, as much to himself as to me. Maybe he was trying to settle accounts with the infinite. Maybe he was insane. It didn’t really matter.

  “We were sitting in the bedroom, the fire roaring, drinking our brandy, and I told him the whole story. And he was outraged, he didn’t see the logic and the inevitability behind it all. We talked for a long time but I couldn’t dissuade him. He said he was going to talk to friends he had in the press, he was going to drag it all out again. Do you see, John?” His voice was growing weaker. “I had no real choice. He died painlessly, he didn’t know it was happening. And I had to do away with poor Paula, too. You thought I was napping at the hotel but I went to the library and killed her.”

  He turned to start back. I couldn’t speak. My eyes burned and I was covered with cold sweat. Nothing had been this bad. The best was last. Sweat turned to ice on my forehead.

  “I can’t tell you how horrible it was, not in a way that would make you understand. I’d never killed anyone.” He was speaking erratically, more and more to himself, as if I weren’t there. “I was upstairs in the bedroom when you got home. I held my breath, not knowing what I’d do if you came upstairs. Cyril was dead or at least unconscious and dying—I prayed—and then you went away. I waited for a while and then I walked back to town to the hotel. The snow was blowing and I knew it would fill in my tracks. No one saw me on the road, it was so cold no one was out in it, no one saw me come in the private back door at the hotel; it was darkest morning.” He coughed again, deep and rattling in his throat and lungs. “I knew I was ill. Then, when I had to walk to the library, I knew it was getting worse … and the attack on my house, the explosion, we rigged it to convince you and Peterson, Milo and I did before he left—I’d hidden him in my house, in the attic. It was all so absurd, I felt so foolish, so melodramatic, God knows it never occurred to me that I’d ever have to kill anyone and now I’d killed poor Cyril—”

  He broke off, held onto my arm, his weight heavy. I staggered. He was shaking, the great hulk trembling. He wept and I watched him.

  “I had killed Cyril Cooper … and now you were in it, too, and so help me I wanted you out of it. I never thought you’d hang on so … but you insisted. I was lost—but my word was final in the movement. I thought I could still protect you wherever you went. I thought you’d find a dead end in Buenos Aires—then St. John gave you the picture from the newspaper—he didn’t know,” he gasped, “he didn’t know what he was doing, there’d been no communication. How could he know what it meant? No one knew everything. Not even I. …”

  I helped him walk. The story was over at last. I was empty and sick and tired. Life had gone to the rim, then one step more.

  Neither of us saw the black Cadillac parked behind my silver Lincoln. We didn’t know it was there until the rear door swung open and the lights snapped on.

  “What?” Arthur said, a great white hand up to shield his eyes. “What?—Cyril!” He called my dead brother’s name. “John! What’s happening?” He was dazed, jerked away from me.

  “Get away, Cooper!” I couldn’t see who spoke and I slipped on a patch of ice, flailed my arms for balance, and felt myself going down.

  There was a terrible flash from the car and a roar that enveloped me as I hit the ground. I’m dead, I thought, thank God, I’m dead. …

  Above me Arthur’s coat flew away, shreds of cloth in the arcs of light, and the great body surged backward. Another flash and roar and Arthur collapsed backward, bent in half at the middle, bent backward like an enormous rag doll. I felt ice cutting my knees and my hands. I was on all fours in the wet and somebody was coming toward me. I hung my head waiting. I had no breath, no sense of anything but pain. I dug my palms into the ice, cutting my flesh like jagged glass.

  An enormously strong arm took hold of me, pulled me upright, moved me toward the car. Whoever it was had only one arm. The other was in a sling. The sound of the gun blasts had demolished my hearing, my eyes were blurred with sweat and pain and fear. The man with the sling pushed me heavily into the car. I sprawled into the back seat, in the dark, and I felt my face on someone’s leg. I gagged, grasped for a hold on the seat, and pulled myself up.

  “Good evening, Mr. Cooper.”

  The voice was metallic and there was the hint of a smile in it. I looked toward the voice in the front seat. Colonel Steynes was looking back at me. Dawson was sliding in behind the wheel.

  I hauled myself all the way up onto the back seat.

  “Well, Cooper, it’s good to see you.”

  I turned and he was staring at me.

  “Olaf,” I said.

  Epilogue

  WRITING OF LONDON, T. S. Eliot had called it “the brown fog of a winter dawn,” a phrase which always appealed to me. I was thinking of it as I braked and moved the silver Lincoln into a parking place on Marlborough Street in front of the four-story town houses which peer somewhat warily down the single flights of stairs to the sidewalk and the everyday world. The morning fog had pretty well burned off and behind the clouds the autumnal sun glowed like a reflection from burnished brass. The leaves were amber and crimson and crackled dryly underfoot. It was a good clean morning, late October, and I felt fit in a tweed jacket and gloves. I had covered myself in normality, including my shiny cordovans and blue button-down shirt from Brooks and my rep tie. Doctor Moss, whom I see three times a week in Boston, tells me that a performance of normality is well along the road to actually being normal. She may be right. Between my Harvard associate professor costume, and long walks by the Charles, and work on the book about the tame agonies of murder amid college unrest, and regular dosages of Thorazine, I can act as normal as the next man, if that is reassuring. I was thinking about being normal as I stood on the corner of Arlington Street, taking deep breaths and trying to be glad to be alive.

  Across the way, near the Frog Pond, a woman in a blue cloth coat sat on a bench reading a book. A small boy in a harness attached to the bench had gotten to the end of his tether, as far from her as possible, and was peeing into the leaves, a beatific smile on his round face. I noticed the scene, the world around me, and when I did I’d been told to make a point of it to Doctor Moss. That inevitably brought a reassuring smile from Doctor Moss. She had been worried about me through the summer: I hadn’t been much in contact with the world. Now I was noticing things like the weather and the smell of the leaves and the pastels revealed far across the Public Garden and the Common as the fog lifted. She’d told me to get back in touch with the world and I was trying.

  I saw him standing in front of the Ritz. It was so like him to come to Boston and matter-of-factly stay at the Ritz. I made a point of noticing what he wore, the light gray herringbone suit, the white shirt, the foulard tie in red and blue, the silver collar pin. He turned as if telepathically controlled and saw me coming toward him. He faced me and waited, smiling a bit off-center.

  “Cooper,” he said, and self-consciously shook my hand. “How are you?”

  “Normal,” I said. “My shrink tells me I’m normal. Or almost normal. She tells me that’s the way she wants me.”

  Peterson grunted, his face swarthier than I’d known it. He’d spent a summer in the sun.

  “It’s overrated, this normality stuff.” He was checking me out, looking into my face to see what he could see, looking for scars on the old psyche.

  “How the hell would you know? You’ve never spent a normal day in your life.”
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  We laughed together, not quite friends but at the least a couple of people who had been together during a time of stress. It was like war buddies meeting when the war which had held them together was finally over. There wasn’t much common ground and what there was lay there, brooding and dark, in the past.

  “My wife has gone shopping with an old friend,” he said. “I’ve got to meet them for lunch, probably some goddamned tearoom with doilies and little old ladies in mob-caps.” We were crossing the street “Shopping,” he muttered. “Thank God she’s rich, thank God for that.”

  The grass was brown and the ground was hard from frost. There were always people in the Public Garden and on the walkways of the Common. I could smell pipe smoke. You could always smell pipe smoke in Boston. We walked in silence for a while and I felt healthy. No psychic shocks from seeing Peterson again. I remembered what had happened, what I’d seen him do, and it was all right. It was a test. Doctor Moss would have had a fit if she’d known I was seeing him even now. But I was all right.

  “Tell me about Cooper’s Falls,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said after a lengthy pause. “Oh, it’s back to normal. They’re talking about a new building where my office used to be, they’ve got to have something. Aho is running around making little impromptu speeches. Same with the library. You know how it goes. They’ll build some glass box, put some shelves in it, a bunch of modern furniture, call it a library. But it won’t be the same.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “Otherwise, everything’s pretty … normal.” He glanced at me. The mustache drooped, the eyes flickered like pieces of anthracite.

  “Did they ever find out who killed Cyril and Paula? And poor Arthur?”

  “No, they—we never have. Not a clue, or what clues there were went just so far and came to dead ends. The Feds were with us again but they weren’t worth anything either—just an isolated footnote to history, I guess. Worlds full of them, I hear. People getting killed all the time, nobody ever gets caught. Happens all the time.”