“But then, all that is past, isn’t it? It’s wiser to leave it all in the past, I should think. Perhaps we should simply let the past take care of itself and bury its own, what?”
“But is it past?” My voice was shaky, my throat dry.
“Aha, there’s the rub of it. Is the past ever past?”
The dots on the newsprint separated, blurred together, seemed to move and come alive. I had been studying the photograph all afternoon.
My first reaction was that it was a photograph of my mother, as if she had been frozen in time as she had been when my father painted her so many years ago. It was true: the woman in the photograph bore a striking resemblance to my mother, yet there were differences. The corners of the broad mouth turned abruptly down even though she was smiling; the upper lip was even thinner than my mother’s, the lower enough fuller to seem exaggerated in the network of newsprint dots. The hair seemed tawnier and longer, the eyebrows more of a flat line, less arched. There was the same broad flatness to the forehead. It was all so familiar, as if I had been waiting all my life to see it.
It was my little sister Lee.
I now knew why my brother Cyril had begun the long journey which led all the way back to the snow piling up in Cooper’s Falls and death in the master bedroom.
He had held the same clipping in his hand. I knew it had fluttered the same way as his hand trembled. He had seen Lee’s face and he had set out to find her. I knew I had to find her.
I had the beginning and I knew the ending. But what had come between?
Buenos Aires. But there was more. There was the list Paula had recited. Glasgow … and I knew what Cyril had found in the Glasgow newspaper. From Glasgow he’d gone to Munich. Deep into Germany, deep into Bavaria. I shivered in the heat, thinking about Lee.
The phone rang. I picked it up.
“I’m afraid.”
It was Maria Dolldorf. A message had been waiting for me at the Plaza when I returned. I was to call Miss Dolldorf. She was still at work. There was a tremor in her soft, bitter voice.
“I’m afraid. Something is happening. I don’t know what, but it’s not right. …”
“What do you mean?”
“I got a call today, here at work. It was a man, but not a voice I recognized. He told me I was being watched, that I was never alone. He said I should be very careful whom I saw, what I said, and he asked me if I understood what he meant.”
“Did you?”
“No. He said old friends were best, that I should be careful about making any new friends. He meant you, John. He must have meant you. You’re virtually the only person I’ve seen outside of work—in a long time. And they knew it.” She paused to clear her throat. She was nervous; her voice trembled. She couldn’t keep it steady. “John?”
“Yes?”
“They’re watching you too. I’ve spent the afternoon thinking about it. That’s how they got to me … I was nothing until I met you. There could have been no reason to watch me.”
“There was a reason to kill your father.”
“Your brother—”
“What language did he speak?” I asked her, knowing the answer.
“German,” she said.
“Look, are you afraid to see me?”
“I don’t know … I’m not making sense.”
“Come here, then. We’ll have a drink and get things calmed down.”
After a couple of drinks and a light dinner during which we thrashed our way back through the matter of her father’s death, his diary, and the warning she’d received—all more or less to no avail, she pursed her lips and cast her huge eyes downward. She was embarrassed: would I see her home? I understood. If someone had gone to the library with Paula Smithies she’d not have died.
The sensations came all at once, held to the earth by the heavy, water-soaked air: the sound of fire engines, the smell of burning, the sight of thick smoke billowing over the trees.
“My God,” she said softly and the Mercedes lunged ahead. The street was clogged with two fire engines trying to make the turn into the narrow driveway leading to her carriage house. She pulled the car over and I jumped out, followed as she ran toward the driveway. A crowd had gathered from the neighboring houses. Flames jerked up over the trees, bright orange and yellow against the rich darkness.
Maria had been stopped by a fireman halfway up the drive. She was talking to an elderly man in shirt sleeves. “It was too far along,” he said, “when I noticed it.” He spoke English. “I called the firemen but it’s too late.”
The carriage house was an inferno. The heat struck in a wave, the air was filling with pieces of ash, sparks. He acknowledged me. “I am Maria’s landlord.” He nodded toward his own house. The firemen were on his roof wetting it down. Maria clung to my arm.
“My books,” Maria said. “My books are all burning up.
She stood there staring at the fire, tears welling up and lacing her cheeks. Her mascara ran. It wouldn’t have happened to her if I had not found her. It was my fault as much as if I’d struck the match.
Shadows danced against the house. I could smell the flowers by Maria’s windows burning, the honeysuckle shriveling, curling, blackening to ash.
“Did you hear or see anyone at the carriage house?”
He stared at me. “No.”
There was no stopping the fire; all that could be done was to keep it from spreading to the main house. The shadows of the trees and shrubbery cavorted on the lawn as the flames licked out through the windows. Standing downwind from the carriage house, I smelled gasoline, faintly but distinctly. It was incredibly obvious. It was obvious because they wanted Maria, and through her me, to know they could do whatever they wanted with us. The fire was a display for our benefit.
I drove the Mercedes back to the Plaza, with Maria huddled in the passenger seat, giving me directions. She was still shaking when we got to my room. I had her lie down on the bed and covered her with a pink blanket.
It was almost two in the morning. She had been threatened, her house had been burned down, her father murdered. Now she was having trouble keeping her eyes open. Her hair drifted out across the pillow. She licked her dry lips and I poured her a tumbler of ice water.
“John, I’ll have to buy new clothes. …” I wiped dried tears away with a wet washcloth. She was breathing deeply.
I sat back down. I tried to fall asleep but it was no good. I stared at the clipping for a long time. Could it be true? I wondered. Could little Lee somehow be alive? Or was I coming apart, dreaming? After all, it was nothing but an imperfect newspaper reproduction. And countless people in the world looked exactly like one another. How could I possibly tell? My earlier confidence waned. My head ached unmercifully, throbbing, moving around toward my eyes from the base of my skull.
But Cyril had seen the photograph, too. And he had carried it with him through one city after another until he showed it to Martin St. John and Alfried Kottmann in Buenos Aires. I unfolded it again and spread it out on the desk top. Cyril had actually held this piece of paper. …
He must have seen Lee in it as I did:
Gunter Brendel and his wife are shown above at a reception celebrating the new arrangements initiated between Brendel’s firm and a Glasgow exporting company. The agreement was reached during the Glasgow Trade Fair now in progress. See story.
Until I was proven incorrect, I would believe the woman was Lee. Everything about her was absolutely right. I yawned: the hours had passed and the sky was lightening. Maria was sleeping soundly and I stretched out on the bed beside her, closed my eyes. I wasn’t doubting at all as I went to sleep.
It had to be Lee. It explained so much.
In the morning Maria took her car and went to put her life back together.
Roca was in his office and asked me to come by.
It was a functional room at the Moreno Street address. The walls were pale green, the furniture modern and institutional. In his elegantly tailored dark blue suit he seemed o
ut of place in the drab surroundings. There was an official photograph of the President on one wall. He shook my hand, smiled, and sat primly in a large leather desk chair with a high back that was obviously his own idea. The top of the large desk was bare except for a black telephone and Professor Dolldorf’s diary.
“We have several matters to discuss, Mr. Cooper. I suggest we get to them.”
“Fine. But I have something new for you.”
His eyes narrowed and he ran a fingertip along the thin gray mustache. He seemed tense, careful, wary—to use St. John’s word. He had begun to fear me, I thought. He wasn’t quite sure what I’d brought to Argentina with me but he damned well didn’t like it. I told him about the threat Maria had received, the fact that it had been made in German. He listened, then put a legal pad on the desk and made a few notes with an old Shaeffer white dot fountain pen. When I brought up the fire his eyes darted up and he knitted his brow. His head looked like a peanut resting on hunched shoulders.
“Miss Dolldorf’s home was actually destroyed by fire?”
“Yes.”
“And you smelled gasoline?”
“Yes. There was no doubt of it. Gasoline.”
He leaned back from his desk and stared at me.
“Interesting,” he whispered, “but very difficult to quite believe. In fact, I’m inclined to agree with your assessment of the situation—it was set to frighten Miss Dolldorf and, very probably, you, too. But, still, it is a terribly overt step.”
“Apparently they are very confident people,” I said. “They kill my brother, an innocent girl he knew, burn down half a town, try to kill me, murder a professor in Buenos Aires, and burn down his daughter’s apartment and threaten her about me. … Yes, they do seem confident to me.”
“Ah, well, you make many connections, Mr. Cooper.”
“Do you mean you don’t believe it’s all linked to my brother, my family? Look at this.” I slid the photograph toward him.
“The woman—she is a duplicate of my mother at that age. But the picture was printed in a Glasgow newspaper last fall and my brother brought it to Buenos Aires with him. And showed it to Mr. Kottmann and St. John. Kottmann knew the man, according to St. John, but lied to me, told me he’d never seen either of the people before. Why did my brother carry it with him?” I drew a deep breath. “Because the woman, I am convinced, is my sister Lee.” Roca started again, squinting at me across the desk.
“Your sister?”
“She supposedly died in the Blitz. In London, with our mother, thirty years ago.” I took my pipe from my pocket while he stared from me to the picture and back to me. I packed the large bowl. “Well, I don’t think she died after all.” I lit the tobacco, waved the match out, dropped it in an ashtray. “I think she lived through it. I think she is Gunter Brendel’s wife. And Gunter Brendel is the man Kottmann told St. John he knew in Germany. The man Kottmann told my brother he’d never heard of, and has now emphatically told me he’d never heard of!”
“Well, well … I don’t know what to say. …”
I drew on my pipe, savoring Roca’s uncharacteristic confusion.
“And that’s the one connection we have between my brother and Buenos Aires. He came here with that picture. He damn well knew it was Lee and somehow the picture led him to St. John and Kottmann. The question is how.”
Roca said nothing.
Finally I said: “It seems to me you ought to get some straight answers out of Kottmann and St. John. Between them, they’ve told me a good many lies since I’ve been here. Not big lies, just some little ones … but outright lies.”
“Have they?”
“I’ve said they have. Maybe they’ll tell you the truth.”
“That is going to be difficult, Mr. Cooper.”
“Why?”
He reached into a desk drawer and withdrew a file folder, placed it carefully, squarely, in front of him. Ceremoniously he opened it and flattened back the cover. He took two sheets of white paper with typewritten notations on them and placed them side by side meticulously.
“Your inquiries here in Buenos Aires have set me thinking—the English would say you’ve set a cat among the pigeons.” He smiled faintly. “And I have been reading through a bit of our material on Mr. St. John and Herr Kottmann. I have also had them watched, very discreetly and at a distance, the last twenty-four hours. No particular reason—simply because you put me in a mind to do so. Fortunately, I am in a position to make no explanations to anyone.” A ghost of another smile, gone before it arrived.
“I read Professor Dolldorf’s diary yesterday.” He touched it with a fingertip. “Paying particular attention to the section you mentioned in your note. Oddly enough, nowhere else in the diary is there any of that sort of thing—it is truly pedestrian for so intelligent a man. Depressing. Obsessed with his various aches and pains. And then, after your brother descends on him, he makes the one interesting entry, the one enigmatic reflection … and we are left to decipher it.” He took a cigarette from a case in his pocket and lit it. Everything the man did was a ritual.
“So there I was. Kottmann and St. John under surveillance. The diary before me with its references to P—Perón?—and Siegfried and Barbarossa, waiting to be decoded. Was it hysterical babbling? I don’t know, Mr. Cooper, I don’t know and I tell you that in all candor … but I doubt that it was.
“Finally I decided I wanted to find out exactly what Kottmann and St. John were doing, where they were. I was thinking about Dolldorf’s funeral. In my mind, I saw them there in the cemetery paying their final respects. And I was becoming very interested.” He shrugged. “Being interested is my profession.”
“Go on,” I said impatiently. “Why is it going to be so difficult to interview them?”
“Because they are gone.”
‘They’re gone?”
“Indeed,” Roca said. “Gone.” He paused and I sat nonplussed. Gone. “You recall that in the note which you left with the diary you asked me if there were any records of Alfried Kottmann traveling out of the country. I checked on that, Mr. Cooper.”
“And?”
“Alfried Kottmann returned to Buenos Aires one month to the day before your brother checked into the Claridge here in Buenos Aires. Kottmann was coming back from Egypt. Cairo.” He made a check mark next to some typing on one of the white sheets. “Your brother came here from Cairo, Mr. Cooper.” He sighed, a tiny, buttoned-up little sigh. “It seems to me we’re building a peculiar little edifice, doesn’t it? Odd little coincidences.
“So I thought I would enjoy a conversation with Herr Kottmann. But he was gone.”
“Where have they gone?” I asked. It was airless in the little office, antiseptic, organized, but my mind was in chaos. Every time I turned around there was something new and disagreeable.
“They left in the very early hours of this morning from a small private airstrip north of the city. The airplane was Herr Kottmann’s Lear jet, the pilot was Helmut Kruger, a professional pilot for hire who often flew Kottmann on little jaunts around the country. Their destination was filed as Patagonia … do you know Patagonia, Mr. Cooper?”
“For God’s sake, of course not.”
“It is the end of the world. Desolate, bleak, at the end of South America. Ah … no one goes to Patagonia for a good time.” He sighed and daintily killed his cigarette. “Yet it is the sixth visit Herr Kottmann has made to Patagonia in six months.”
“Surely you can interview him when he gets there,” I said. “Or when he returns.”
“Well, not necessarily.” He pursed his lips and drummed his fingertips on the file. “Let me explain. He, St. John, and the pilot set off for Patagonia. They … never arrived. The Lear has landed nowhere, nowhere between here and their destination, and nowhere in Patagonia. They cannot be raised by radio. They have not been seen by any other airplanes along their flight path.” He pursed his lips again, as if to blow me a kiss. “They have disappeared. I’ve already ordered an air and ground search
. I’m not quite sure why, but I have the distinct feeling that we’re not going to find them.” He smiled gravely.
Glasgow
THE LAST LEG OF THE flight to Glasgow ended in the dark and the rain. I had tried charting the events since my departure from Boston in a notebook but it quickly became too involved. I couldn’t organize it. I was no Roca.
When I left him at the Moreno Street office he had been perplexed but far from confused. He faced his new difficulties with dispatch and discretion. By evening he would surely have each in its own manila folder.
He told me he would keep Maria Dolldorf under protective surveillance until what he termed “this period of instability” was over. He was also ordering some very thorough research into Professor Dolldorf’s financial condition and any continuing involvement he might have had with Kottmann or any other leftovers from the Perón years.
The diary Maria had found among her father’s papers particularly fascinated Roca. He informed me that inquiries would be made into Barbarossa and Siegfried; into circles of Peronistas who from time to time worked up a sweat about bringing the deposed President home.
So I gave up on my chart.
All I really cared about was my little sister Lee. I had to find her. Innocent and childlike, I was convinced that when I found her it would all begin to come clear. I would understand … once I found Lee.
I felt a hand on my arm.
It was my seatmate, a small, solid man with a red face, dressed in a Harris tweed suit. He had a Clara Bow bee-stung mouth that looked as if someone had yanked it shut with purse strings.
“I say, that’s Glasgow down there,” he said primly. “We’re here at last.” He pointed out the rain-flecked window as the 707 banked slightly: Glasgow squatted below, asleep and grimy. The purse strings crinkled open in a tight little smile. “I didn’t want you to miss that first look.” He looked away shyly.
The Wind Chill Factor Page 16