The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  “Fate again! It gets better and better.” He beamed at us, teeth shining behind the bandit’s mustache. “Does Dumfries even know when Cyril Cooper is likely to drop by the Glasgow office? Chance … if Cyril had come a week later, a month later, Dumfries might have forgotten his momentary coup and the newspaper would never have reached Cyril Cooper’s breakfast table. But, by God, Cyril hit Glasgow the day the photograph appeared … and when he looked at it he didn’t see a public relations triumph for Jack Dumfries. Do you know what he saw? Jesus Christ, can you imagine it? He saw his mother!”

  Roeschler regarded him with something approaching awe. Lee stared openmouthed. He winked at me.

  “So Cyril Cooper went to Germany. What was in his mind? I don’t know. He was presumably innocent of the political convolutions of Gunter Brendel. He just had that photograph and the nugget of an idea. And what harm would it do to simply inquire?

  “He contacted you, Lee. He made a nuisance of himself and he knocked the stilts out from under your life. He asked you if you knew for certain who you were … and you decided that just maybe you didn’t. He spoke with you, Doctor, and he got himself run out of town. But he was onto something. God only knows exactly how he put it together, but he listened and he did make sense out of it … he may even have somehow gotten wind of the involvement of your father. Remember that telegram, John, something about the family tree needing some work. After shaking hell out of everybody here, this son of Edward Cooper wound up in Buenos Aires talking to Kottmann and St. John—I’m telling you, he had figured it out!”

  “Why didn’t they kill him then?” Lee looked like death, eyes red, face splotched from crying, but it was her life and nothing could have been more important.

  Roeschler answered: “Because he was Edward Cooper’s son. Kill him and you would have to answer to someone.”

  “So he lit a fire under them in Buenos Aires, sent the telegram to John in Cambridge and John sets out for home. By car. Cyril flies home and goes to the family home in Cooper’s Falls to wait for John’s arrival.” Peterson held up a hand and began to tick the items off, one by one.

  “So here comes John across country from the East. Cyril is home waiting on the last night. Two men attack John on the road and leave him for dead … and someone kills Cyril, poisons him. John survives the attack and arrives home the next day or late the next night. Nobody home, so he sleeps in the guesthouse. The next day he finds Cyril Cooper dead—dead about twenty-four hours, murdered right about the time John was arriving home. The murderer was, in fact, probably in the house when John arrived and thought it was empty.

  “Somebody, Doctor Roeschler, wasn’t worrying about having to answer to anyone. And they’ve been trying to kill John Cooper ever since … with an incredible incompetence.

  “And these were Brendel’s men. There’s no point in going into all that now, but a bunch of them have died recently—”

  Roeschler’s eyebrows raised.

  “I killed one in London, a man named Keepnews who was one of the two men who waylaid John on the highway. And John himself killed the other one in Cooper’s Falls.” He heaved an immense sigh and went back to lean on the mantle. “All because Lise Brendel was really Lee Cooper—John’s sister, Cyril’s sister. …”

  “That’s not quite right,” Roeschler said. “It never made any difference whose sister she was. It was whose daughter she was—that was the problem.”

  My sister had dried her tears with the denim shirttail. I saw her tiny naked waist, saw the tremor in her hands. In the silence, she looked up.

  “What will happen to me?”

  No one knew what to say.

  An hour later my sister and I were alone in the room, sitting on the floor staring at the fire. Roeschler had wrapped tape around her rib cage in case there was a hairline fracture. While he wrapped her at the kitchen table, he told us what was going to happen right away, why he had been looking at the clock. Lee sat on the table, naked to the waist, her tiny nipples erect on the small mounds of her breasts as he wound the white tape tight. Her shoulders were held back, her eyes closed, her face set and wounded and very tired.

  He told us that he had arranged for our passage to the United States on a commercial flight, connecting from the air terminal in Munich to London, Shannon, and New York. We would be met by “friends” in New York and they would take us the rest of the way. He told us that we really had no choice, that our search for my little sister was finished, that it was time to go home.

  “Are you telling us that this is it? It’s all over?” Peterson asked.

  “Exactly, Mr. Peterson.” Roeschler looked up from his tape. “And you will do precisely what you are told. Without my help, you are dead men and there will be no incompetence, not anymore.” The smile was gone, the Doctor Roeschler we had known was gone: he was ordering us and Peterson knew it.

  Lee shifted before the fire, moaned. The house was quiet. Roeschler and Peterson had retired upstairs to grab a couple hours of sleep. Our plane would leave at seven, with dawn.

  “What to do?” I said. The fire had burned low and the sound of the rain and wind came down the chimney.

  “You will be home this evening,” she said quietly.

  “I meant what about you. All of it, from the time I saw the newspaper photograph in Buenos Aires, all of it has been to find you. I forgot everything else, I forgot about finding whoever killed my brother, I thought only of finding you … seeing you for myself, seeing if you were my sister.”

  “You succeeded. I asked you before if it was worth it, I asked you if it made any difference. …” She took a deep, painful breath.

  “Is this it, then? I found you. People have died. …”

  “My husband and my lover are dead because of you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Of course you are. But you can go back to your old life, you see. I don’t have one, there is nothing waiting for me—unless it’s Alfried Kottmann and his toy soldiers.”

  “There’s Roeschler, isn’t there?”

  “He will try to keep me from taking too many pills. He will protect me from anyone who wants to hurt me. There are my ballet classes. I can fill my days with the little girls. I will go back to the house in the country where my husband was … executed. The servants will have cleaned up my party, there will be fresh flowers in the vases and in the spring we’ll open the windows and clean the house.”

  “Why don’t you come with us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a Cooper. Come back with me. To Cooper’s Falls.”

  “What in the world for?”

  “We would be together. We could get to know each other.”

  “John, listen to me. I don’t want to know you any better. Do you hear me? You may think I’m a Cooper, you may want to have me around to get to know me—you may want many things. You wanted to find me, you had to find me at any cost. You got what you wanted. Because of you my life is now barren, I have no one. Not you, not Gunter, not Siegfried, no one. You have demolished my life—no, listen to me. You’ll only hear this once. When you leave here, I will be alone. Try to understand—that’s the way I want it. I don’t want you here, anywhere near me. I don’t hate you; I simply want to forget about you. I won’t ever be able to forget what you and your friend have done to me and to my life but I am a German and I am strong because I have no choice. I have done nothing to regret. You have, if you are at all sane. You live with what you have done to me.

  “I won’t help you, I won’t forgive you, I will only try to keep living and rebuild my life. Do you understand me?” I couldn’t answer.

  “There is no comfort for you in me. None. You’ve lost a brother. I have lost so much more. …”

  “He was your brother, too,” I choked. “Perhaps you actually are insane,” she said calmly. “You call him my brother. He was your brother. He was nothing to me. You are nothing to me. Only something evil that happened. I can survive, I can will my survival, I ca
n recover. I have already begun to recover. Don’t cry. Don’t be so foolish. You’re embarrassing me. Please, help me get up.”

  I stood up and took her arm, helped her to her feet. Her face was utterly without expression. She was returning my look, she was standing beside me, but I was alone, as I’d been when we’d lain in bed together. I felt the tears on my face.

  “Now, good-bye, John.”

  Impulsively, she pulled my head down and I felt her lips on mine, unhurried, passionless, but thoughtful, as if she were making a single concession. I held her shoulders gently so as not to hurt her, kissed her soft dry cheek and her eyes and her hair. Finally she pulled away, slowly, and freed herself completely. There was no smile.

  “You should get some sleep,” she said, moving away. “I won’t be awake when you leave.”

  She stopped in the doorway to the hall.

  “Will you be all right?”

  “I should think so. Yes.” She sounded so English, so distant.

  I nodded. “Good.”

  “Good-bye, John.”

  I watched her leave, heard her on the stairs.

  “Good-bye, Lee.”

  There was no one left to hear me. My sister Lee was gone.

  The morning was dark and the rain beat steadily. The snow was almost gone. Water rushed in the gutter. A car waited under the overhang. The headlights shone through the rain; the stone alleyway glistened. I was holding my bag and Peterson was talking to Roeschler. “If he asks for the pills,” Roeschler was saying, “don’t worry about it—just give him one of the yellows. It’ll relax him, let him sleep. About half an hour before you reach New York give him one of the red and green ones, it will pep him up and induce a slight euphoria.” They were talking about me. I felt Roeschler’s hand on my coat sleeve. “You need rest and time to get all of this into perspective. You’ll see—you’ll be amazed at how well you’ll feel after a week’s rest. Now”—he slapped my back gently—“the sooner you’re away the better.” He shook hands with Peterson.

  I was thinking about her, somewhere in the house, in her bed, lying awake and shivering in the cold. I thought of what she had said and of what I had done to her and I swallowed against the knot in my throat. “Help her,” I said to him.

  The driver opened the door of the Mercedes and I moved into the shelter of his black umbrella. Peterson had climbed into the car already. “I will.”

  Roeschler was standing on the steps while we moved slowly up the narrow alley. The wipers beat across the windshield. At the top of the alley I looked back. On the third floor of his narrow, spindly house a light clicked on behind the glass, the white curtains parted, the car turned into the street, and that was all.

  The air terminal was shiny and metallic and bright, like schoolrooms on rainy days of childhood. I was vague and disoriented, I knew, and without Peterson I would probably have bungled it all and missed the plane. But he was quietly in charge, saying as little as possible, attending to the luggage and boarding checks and passports. I let myself go, let him take care of me, and my mind wandered helplessly in the memories crowding the present out of my consciousness. I settled back in a window seat, watched the tears of rain bead up and spin along the glass as the plane gathered speed on the runway, and I ate my breakfast like a good boy as we climbed up out of the clouds and rain into a molten sky with the rays of sun like sticks of glowing gold. Germany was behind us.

  Home

  SOMEWHERE OVER THE ATLANTIC, hours later, I came to and felt a bit more like a human being. The ocean looked like metal in the sunlight and the sky was pale blue, cloudless. Peterson was reading Playboy. He saw that I was awake.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “My teeth are wearing socks.”

  “Do you feel like a drink?”

  “You forget I’m an alcoholic,” I said.

  “You can have tomato juice and fixings, no booze.”

  We took the little stairway up to the lounge. We settled back in black leather chairs and listened to the piped-in music. It was a pianist playing “Where or When.” I sipped my tomato juice and fixings and tried not to remember where I’d last heard the song.

  “Well, your health,” he said, sipping.

  “Your wealth,” I replied and he grinned, shook his head.

  We sat in silence for a while longer.

  “Well, John,” he said at last, “we didn’t accomplish much, did we?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose we didn’t.”

  “I wonder if Milo Keepnews killed your brother?”

  “Maybe we’ll never know. But he sure as hell tried to kill me.”

  Peterson nodded.

  “What do you think Cyril was going to tell me?”

  “I think he’d figured out most of it. He probably felt like we do.”

  “And how do we feel?” I asked.

  “Like who the hell can we tell? He could tell you and that was going to be a relief to him. But who the hell is there for us? Can you imagine trying to explain all this? It isn’t that people would laugh at us—no, they just wouldn’t be able to make any sense of it. The conspiracy theory of history, rampant paranoia. How would we blow the whistle? Produce the bodies? Blow Steynes’ cover? Try to get Roca to talk in Buenos Aires? Or Maria Dolldorf?”

  I thought of her, remembered the golfers in Palermo Park and the fire in the night.

  “Nobody would talk. It’s too big, it’s too audacious, and it’s too well camouflaged.” He sighed philosophically. “They know we’re handcuffed … they know we can’t really expose it. But still—”

  “What?”

  “But still, why take the chance? Why let us go?”

  “You forget,” I said. “I’m one of the family. Who would want to take the responsibility of killing Edward Cooper’s son?”

  “But who would they have to answer to? Who the hell is at the top?”

  “Another thing we’ll never know,” I said.

  “But why were they willing to risk killing you for a while and not now? There’s always some kind of logic in a paradox. Why then and not now? Someone is protecting you, Cooper, that thought just won’t go away.”

  “Well, what difference does it make?” I said.

  “None, if it’s all over. No difference at all.”

  “What do you mean, if it’s all over? What could be left?”

  “Nothing, I didn’t mean anything.”

  I looked out of the window for a long time.

  “It’s not worth it,” he finally said.

  “What?” I came back slowly.

  “Crazypants. I didn’t say she’s not worth it—she’s probably okay if you like crazy women. I said it’s not worth it. You’re sitting there thinking about her, wondering if you’ll ever find her again, racking your brain to figure out where it all went wrong. Well, let me tell you, it could never have gone right. It was a mess from the beginning, I knew it was the first time I heard about her.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. My face was hot and I was beginning to sweat.

  “Bullshit I don’t understand,” he said softly. “I understand. The problem was, once you saw her, you never treated her like a sister. You came on telling her she was your sister but you were obsessed with her as a woman. You fell in love with her. You came back from your walk in London, the day you tailed her, and you were in love with her already. You were in love with just looking at her. But, goddamn it, what could I do? She was the key to it—by then there was a lot more to it than just finding out if she really was your sister.

  “And look at it from her point of view. She didn’t know if you were brother and sister, but she was a woman, an unhappy woman, and she must have sensed your feeling about her. Now what was she to make of that? Say she finds herself attracted to you—but she’s got her own identity crisis, her own set of problems. Like I told you, Cooper, she’s just a woman. … And little men keep dropping in on her, telling her they’re her brothers. But you’re not acting like a brother. She
doesn’t know what to do because she doesn’t know what’s going on—no more than you did. Then, wham, last night any doubt is erased. She finds out she is your sister and she realizes that you’re in love with her regardless of who she is.” He shook his head, drained the glass, and the ice cube slid down and hit his nose. “No picnic. I don’t know what went on between you two last night. I don’t want to know. But I’d advise you to look at it from her point of view. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Johnnie, and think about the lady you left behind.”

  “I’m thinking about her,” I said.

  “Ah, what the hell,” he said.

  “What difference does it make?”

  Peterson looked at me balefully.

  “There is an old belief,” he said, and I could tell he was quoting, “that on some distant shore, far from despair and grief, old friends will meet once more.” He cleared his throat. “I read that once. Somewhere.”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s all right with me.”

  New York sparkled in the night.

  The 747 settled down through the night, floating through wisps of cloud like ack-ack from Long Island battlements. It was warm when we came down the corridor into the Kennedy receiving section for international flights. People swarmed around us. Rain streaked the vast windows. Two men in brown suits and narrow ties and tan, wet raincoats picked us up on our way out of the customs area. They looked like very strong accountants, faceless, like the men who had come to the schloss, killed Siegfried, and brought us back to Munich.

  “Mr. Peterson? Mr. Cooper? Will you please step this way? We’ll only be a moment.” One of them went ahead of us, one brought up the rear, and we marched quickly into a small office fronting a concourse. A pale-tan curtain was drawn across the window. The walls were pale-green, needed paint, and a modern steel and Formica woodgrain desk faced the door. An empty room, a dead room. “Please sit down. We’ll be very brief. You both must be tired.”