The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  “What are you saying, Arthur?”

  “I haven’t seen God suddenly at the end of my life, I have no evidence of the existence of Satan, or evil or good. I sometimes doubt even right and wrong. God is so often a justification for the worst of what we want to do. God is always on our side—and what matters in the end?” He sipped the scalding tea; sunshine played on the craggy side of his massive head, with its well-combed white hair. He smelled of Yardley. “Personal worth, your integrity, character—no matter what your cause. Decency, a vision of the greater good whatever the greater good may be, the eradication of pain. …”

  “I know,” I said, but I wasn’t sure.

  “All of the reason why Nazism as we once knew it came to such failure,” he said. “The lack of decency and integrity and reason and the scales tipping out of control toward pain. Fighting a war is one thing, losing a war is yet another, but the Nazis under Hitler redefined bad judgment.” He sighed and gave me a tired smile. “It is best they lost,” he said softly.

  “Yes, its best,” I said. My mind fluttered like wings, brushed at Lee, and I saw the curtains on the third floor parting, parting. … I was tired of Nazis. They could have the world as far as I was concerned.

  “But I was thinking about your father, John. I was remembering what a man your father was. A great man, John, a man of very considerable honor. I lay there in my bed and I was bothered by the immense amount of information you had discovered about him, about all of them. You knew almost all of it—”

  “What do you mean, Arthur? Almost all of it? You mean you know … more?”

  “Of course. I know more than anyone else.” He kept chewing on muffin while I stared at him. I was having a fear reaction, like a shellshock victim.

  “So I decided,” he said quietly, “that perhaps, before it’s too late and I’m gone, you’d better hear all of it, the entire story. You have so much to live with now, such a great burden and so much of what you know is off-center, so wrong. If you’re going to bear the burden, I asked myself, why not the truth?”

  He looked at me benevolently, with the calm of a man no longer a participant. He was going to die soon. He knew it. And I didn’t want to hear the truth: I’d been told so many lies and so many versions of the truth that I didn’t want to hear Arthur Brenner’s. He went right on talking and I didn’t know how to stop him.

  “Your father was a Nazi, as you know, but that’s only a very small fragment of the picture, John, a startling corner but far from the center, far from the truth. Yes, he was a Nazi—but he was also an American patriot, a very real American hero—the kind who must wait, perhaps for generations, for their proper role to be defined by history.”

  “What are you trying to tell me? He was a Nazi. And a patriot. …”

  He clasped his hands across his broad chest and settled into the chintz chair. “Many of us in this country saw the strengths and even the virtues of Nazism in the thirties and were dismayed by the manner of its misuse by Hitler’s people. And, of course, by Hitler himself. Your grandfather was one, of course, and since he was in an independent position, he could state his feelings openly. Others were not able to do so openly. But, believe me, the strong feelings were there in the thirties and in some rather surprising places.

  “Well, then, when the war began to go badly for the Germans, when we had begun to apply some very significant pressure, there were several plans put forth in Washington and London about how best to use the situation—”

  “Use the situation?” I asked. “We were winning the war, for God’s sake—”

  “Winning the war,” he repeated. “Wars are almost never won on battlefields, John. Many other places … seldom battlefields. Planning rooms, war rooms, council chambers of one kind and another—in any case, there were good men within the Nazi system, men who could bring order and reason to the postwar chaos, men who could be absolutely trustworthy in the inevitable struggle against the encroachments of Communism.”

  “You’re joking,” I said. “We hadn’t even defeated the Germans!”

  “I am not joking,” Brenner said.

  “No,” I said slowly. “No, I can see you’re not.”

  “It was decided in Washington that your father would develop liaison with these cells inside Germany, these cells of able and gifted men we found sympathetic. Your father was a Nazi, yes, but he had always been operating, or run, by Washington and London—that is, by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, by highly placed officials operating at the most secret authorizations, by men who knew that Hitler was mad, a barbarian perverting a usable system.

  “For these men, John, the war was fought to rid the world of Hitler and his people, just as it was for all, ah, right-thinking people the world over.” He smiled comfortingly and poured more tea for both of us. “But not to destroy the movement, you see. The nucleus was to remain strong, active, but rid of its debauchers. After all, Russia had to be contained. But first Russia, the greater enemy, had to be used to defeat the lesser. Don’t look so amazed, John. Think about it.” He poured cream into his tea and stirred sugar in tight little circles. “Think—we already knew that even Hitler’s atrocities against European Jewry were dwarfed by what Stalin had been doing to Jews for years. We knew that bad as Hitler was, the world could recover from him. But Stalin was a scourge, a plague, unparalleled in recorded time. You see,” he said, carefully sipping so as not to scald his mouth, “it was a bit of a quandary—Hitler had to be stopped first because he controlled for the moment the movement we knew was rightfully our own. Once Hitler was removed there would be plenty of time to deal with Comrade Stalin.”

  “Arthur,” I said, “level with me. Where do you fit in?”

  “I am a Nazi, too. And I am no traitor. Surely, you can’t imagine that I would betray my country?” He smiled tightly, eyes narrowed.

  “No, of course not,” I said. “I’m not questioning your loyalty … I don’t know what I’m questioning. …” I didn’t understand what was happening. “What do you mean, you’re a Nazi?” Outside the window, a globule of water gathered at the tip of an icicle and hung, stretching, growing heavier, defying gravity. “You were a government official—you were always in Washington.”

  “Precisely,” he said. “You see the connection, John? The two halves of my life have not been in conflict. Washington and the Nazi movement; one, the same, John—that’s what I am explaining to you now.” He saw my face. “I can’t, I don’t expect you to accept all this yet. But you will, John, you will. …

  “I have been in constant touch with Europe all through the years—or, I should say, they’ve been in touch with me. Sometimes through Washington, the Pentagon, sometimes through your grandfather, but always in close touch. It was I, John, who arranged for the giant submarines to unload our people on the East Coast. I funneled our agents into key positions in our own government, in Canada, all through Central and South America—all our people. We chose which ones would escape from Germany, which ones would take over the postwar government there and in the other free countries of Europe, which ones would stand in the dock at Nuremberg. Obviously, we didn’t want to keep the most famous ones, the symbols, and we didn’t want the monsters, the real war criminals—those we would either send to Nuremberg or feed to Simon Weisenthal or later to Colonel Steynes. We wanted to make sure the able men got out, got to safety. The only one we really failed with, the only one we really wanted and didn’t get was Albert Speer. We couldn’t get to him in time, and once the Russians had him in Spandau we couldn’t get him out.

  “In any case,” he went on with a motion of the huge, pale paw, “we have made great use of the scientists, the administrators, the intelligence operatives. Gehlen is only the most famous and Allen Dulles wanted him badly, particularly in the years immediately after hostilities ceased, when we knew so little about the Communist apparatus and he knew so much. There have been many others—we could not have contained the Communists without our German friends.”


  He went away to replenish the tea and I sat staring out the window. I wasn’t sure it was all registering. Layer after layer was being built up and the complexity was by now a self-fulfilling prophecy. I couldn’t begin to imagine where it went now, or even where it had been. It had been so simple: at least it had seemed so simple. But that was a lie. It had never been simple. Never. Arthur came back. There was a can of Twining’s breakfast tea on the tray and he sat down, measured tea into the strainer, carefully poured the boiling water from the kettle into the lovely ceramic pot. He began measuring his words like the tea.

  “What will be difficult for you to understand, of course, John,” he said like a gentle schoolmaster, “is that what I am discussing with you is not a mad plot to rule the world—”

  “But a perfectly serious, rational, right-minded plan to rule the world,” I said.

  I felt lightheaded, like giggling. Or crying. I tightened my grip. I was fighting the icicle.

  “Not a mad plot, John, but United States policy, a continuing policy, but beneath the surface. Elected officials have seldom been involved or even informed of the movement. We don’t need figureheads, you see—all we need are the intelligence people, the operations people, the diplomats, the professors, and a handful of Congressmen at key points, on the proper committees and so on. You see, we don’t operate on four- or eight-year plans according to whoever may be occupying the White House—we are methodically ordering the world our way, on our own timetable, stopping Communism and bringing it all under a single unifying umbrella of power. Sinister?” He smiled his characteristic avuncular smile and nodded. “To some people, surely, terribly sinister, or it would be if anyone knew, anyone in the public at large. But the point is, we see no other way, no other line of defense against the Russians and the Chinese. It’s their way or ours, John—the survival of the mass, the group, as robot life, or the triumph of the will, of the individual, and it is a long struggle. …”

  “What if you’re wrong?” I asked numbly.

  “We’ll never know—we’ll all be gone, we’re gambling with other lives a long time from now. For now, we’re staying busy, keeping ourselves occupied. When their time comes, they can stay busy too, as best they can.”

  Finally I said: “Why were they trying to kill me? Why did they kill Cyril? And Paula?”

  “The problem was with those documents, the things in that box in the library—the whole thing there for anyone who could understand it.” His eyebrows arched up and he held his hands out, palms up. “Well, a problem. And why run the risk of making it all public, bring all the old Nazi rigamarole back to life? Too much would have been stirred up, wouldn’t it? Would anyone have believed it? Who knows? Almost certainly not. But it would have gotten people talking again … and then someone else would have begun digging and the trail would have led back to Germany and Herr Brendel and Siegfried and just maybe someone would have remembered Edward Cooper, son of Austin, and so on back to poor little Lee. There was that chance and there was no point in risking it. Then, when we realized that Olaf Peterson had taken the documents to the government, some very high-level strings had to be pulled, and we pulled them, but our Mr. Peterson is a resourceful man. He went to New York and of course we were watching him all the time. Finally we decided to send a CIA man to deal with the man at Columbia, who badly needed some money for alimony payments and his son’s education at Exeter and he fancied a new car, I believe. So now he’s doing a certain amount of contract work for our cryptographic center. He has enough money to meet his obligations and have a luxury or two, and his lips are sealed on the subject of those documents. We can always fall back simply on the interests of national security—national security covers a multitude of, oh, well, not-quite sins, you know—and that puts an end to it, particularly if there’s a bit of money involved. So, you see, we’ve completely neutralized Olaf’s friend.” He looked at me, his fingers laced across the old cardigan.

  “But the killing,” I said.

  “The attempts on your life—they should never have been allowed to happen.” He looked sad, chagrined, kept on. “They were CIA men, Keepnews and Reichardt, and they were authorized by Herr Brendel. Who was panicking—”

  “CIA men!” I exploded, scalp prickling. “Brendel had that kind of power, for God’s sake?”

  “Of course, John. CIA men. And yes, unfortunately Herr Brendel had the power to send them on their way. Since they were CIA men, all records of their existence could be concealed, repressed. There were no answers forthcoming from Washington because the government had been set the task of investigating itself. Very useful—the result, no records of such people exist.” He balanced the teacup on his knee as if to demonstrate his control. “When you killed the gaunt man, Reichardt, that upset them. Keepnews was recalled at once, to Buenos Aires, which was his regular base.”

  The sky outside had lost the sun, and gray clouds flattened out against the landscape. The trees were stark, as if they had been burned, and snow dripped like a hundred metronomes from the eaves.

  “Did Milo Keepnews kill Cyril?”

  “No.” Arthur breathed heavily, rubbing his nose with the flat of his hand. His hair was combed back so neatly, silvery and straight with pink scalp beneath. “He didn’t kill Cyril and he didn’t kill Paula. Once the man at the top of our little pyramid realized what Brendel had taken upon himself and that he had turned assassins loose on you—why, then the attacks stopped and Keepnews was recalled. By then it was too late for Reichardt.”

  “Peterson killed him in London,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Keepnews.”

  “You were present, I take it?”

  “Yes. In a filthy public toilet.”

  “Well, well. Keepnews.” A grudging respect flickered at the corners of his mouth. “I must say I’m not surprised. Mr. Peterson is a very hard case. I admire him. He’s in Washington now, as you may know, being told more or less what I’m telling you.”

  It was increasingly difficult for me to talk coherently. The numbness was shared equally by my body and my brain. The front of my mind was perfectly aware that I had been battered mentally and physically and that the stress on my mind had been much the worse. Stress: it was like an inquisitor’s pincers pressing on my temples, crushing everything behind my eyes into a single mangled sludge of fear, incomprehension, disgust. I sat in the chair for what seemed a long time and when I looked at the clock on the mantlepiece it was the afternoon and a spring rain had begun falling sluggishly outside. The snow seeped away, revealing the wet, dead, brown leaves like huge flattened beetles. The ticking clock reminded me of Roeschler’s parlor and my thoughts swiveled to Lee.

  I remembered as I sat by the darkening window the day we had met in the snowy park, how we had strolled and talked of old movies, of passengers on a ship sailing away into eternity. I rambled endlessly through my times with her, the touch of her mouth in the sleigh and her visit in the night, her cold thighs spreading beneath my hands and the unfeelingness. Would I ever see Lee again?

  “You’ve had a hard time, John,” Brenner said. He poked at the dying fire and bent stiffly, placed a couple of more logs on it, shook up the remains until flame licked up at the loose bark.

  “I was thinking about Lee,” I said. I saw the square of window, the light clicking on as we drove away. I knew what I wanted to believe.

  “She’ll be all right,” he said. “I promise you. She’ll be taken care of. She’s a Cooper.”

  “They started trying to kill me again in Glasgow. …”

  He nodded. “Yes, yes, another silly, ill-advised move and once again attributable to Brendel’s panic. He knew by then that you had been to Buenos Aires, he knew you’d seen the photograph and talked to Kottmann and St. John. Kottmann, a meticulous and prudent man, was terrified—but he did not wish to overstep the boundaries of his actual authority, which surely did not extend to include the killing of Edward Cooper’s only living son. St. John, a singul
arly amoral man, found it all rather amusing—after all, he takes no sides, makes no commitments, though he knows perfectly well that behind the Nazi movements stands the government of the United States and he has no wish to trifle with Washington.

  “Brendel decided once more to avoid the proper channels,” Brenner said, with a flaking of distaste. “He turned his dogs loose again when he realized that you were in Glasgow, tracking back on Cyril’s path, which would eventually lead to Munich. He didn’t think about it, he didn’t consult anyone—he merely wanted you dead before you found your little sister alive and relatively well.” He sighed again, a wheeze: the strength of the long talk couldn’t be doing his heart any good but he seemed steady, calm, the final authority.

  “The job he tried to have done on you was, I am told, hideously bungled—fortunately for you, thank God. And again Brendel had failed to consult the top man—he knew that such a matter, involving tying off the son of Edward Cooper, would have to have final approval and he knew it would not be forthcoming. So he didn’t go to the top. In fact, he knew he couldn’t go to the top, that it was not possible at just that time—so Herr Brendel just went ahead and did it.”

  “But why,” I asked, “why couldn’t he have asked the man at the top? Why was it impossible?”

  Arthur looked at me for a long time, weighing it all up.

  Finally he said: “I had suffered a heart attack, John. I was unconscious.”

  My dinner was untouched, but the wineglass had twice been emptied. It was a dark night and candles flickered in silver on the large dining table with its old lace cloth. I sat in my chair and listened to the rain and watched it blow across the stone patio and the white wrought-iron furniture and watched the fire. I was desperately tired, without will or determination or hope. Without a future, held tight by the past.