The Wind Chill Factor (37 page)

I watched him soap under his arms.

“Peterson, is all this steam going to make your hair come loose? No, seriously, will it melt the glue or something?”

“No, Cooper, it won’t melt the glue, for Chrissakes—have you gone mad?’

“I just wondered, that’s all.”

He soaped sulkily for a moment.

“Anyway, once she started screwing Siegfried everyone thought the marriage was over. But Brendel seemed relieved, not in the least bothered by it. The three of them began appearing in public together—and all the observers began to assume the, heh heh, worst—that is, that Siegfried was servicing both of them.” He cocked an eye to see my reaction.

“Well? Is he?”

“Nobody knows for sure. How could they? But that’s all gossip anyway, isn’t it? Who cares who’s screwing whom, right, Cooper? Scarlet women, raving perverts, the whole works—who the hell cares? We’re not Masters and Johnson, are we? We’re Peterson and Cooper, one of the great comic teams, and we don’t give a shit about rumors. We’re on the trail of the Master Race.

“And that’s where my friends, over enough schnapps to pickle a regiment of Hessians, began to lay it on me. Roeschler was right—Siegfried is the leader of a strong new Nazi group, latter-day Nazis with no ties to the past. Nobody really knows how serious they are, but they have pots of money and are developing an enthusiastic youthful following.

“The theory seems to be that Brendel very calculatedly unloaded a troublesome wife on Siegfried and used her to build a bridge between the old guard and the new. She became a symbolic uniting of the old and new. It’s not quite as nutsy as it sounds. These guys are not elves from the Black Forest, they’re police officers and they’re not nuts. Towel, Cooper, and stand clear, I’m coming out.” The splashing was absurd.

Leaving footprints, he wandered into the bedroom.

“Any theories about who she is?” I asked.

“No. They don’t know who the hell she is, wouldn’t offer an opinion one way or the other. Nobody ever really asked them—until your brother came along. And he planted the idea in their minds but then he never followed up.”

He wrapped the towel around himself and dropped onto the bed. He lit another cigar and told me to sit down, for God’s sake.

“I called Cooper’s Falls again,” he said, “talked to Bradlee. He says Brenner is stronger every day, out of the coma, not talking much but he thinks he’s going to pull through all right. Said the Feds are still all over the place. Can’t find a damn thing, of course.” He pushed back against the pillow. “If they knew what Steynes told us … can you imagine it? They’d go mad. If they knew what my man at Columbia knows, all the stuff that was in those boxes, their brains would turn to Alpo, Cooper. Alpo.” He sighed the sigh of the just. “Did you ever think about what we’re going to do with all this stuff? Will anybody believe us?”

“Will we live to tell anybody? That’s the question.”

“I also called Buenos Aires, talked with your little man there—he had a head cold, made my eyes water. He doesn’t know where the hell Kottmann and St. John, the pilot or the plane went to. Sounds like he’s beginning not to give a goddamn but that was probably just the cold.

“And finally I called Ivor Steynes. I wanted to find out who the killer sent to get Brendel is—I know, I know, faint hope. No answer, nobody home. Frankly, I don’t think we can save Brendel anyway short of kidnapping him. Somebody’s wandering around with Brendel’s name on a bullet.”

He got up from the bed and began to poke through our baggage, finally emerged with a bottle of brandy.

“So, my young friend, you’ve got more to worry about than my hair coming unglued.” He poured brandy into a tumbler and handed it to me, poured another for himself. “If Deadeye Dick shoots old Brendel before tomorrow night, you and I are going to miss a hell of a party.”

Peterson hired a Mercedes sedan and we drove through the snowy streets, leaving the center of Munich farther behind with the slow minutes. The snow had continued, was banked high at roadside, and the night was still as if calmed by a great gloved hand. We wore rented dinner clothes and Peterson was carrying a gun. The only time he spoke was to bitch about having to wear a rented garment. The armholes were tight.

Snow swept across the hood, the wind hammered at the car, there was no world beyond the edge of the roadway. It reminded me far too much of that first night in the snow, the night I met Milo Keepnews and the gaunt man. Peterson reached into an inside pocket. I expected to see the gun. He withdrew a round lollipop on a white stick and began to suck it, his cheeks bulging. He knew I was staring at him.

“When I was a kid,” he said, eyes intent on the road, talking past the ball of candy, “I used to say that prayer about what I wanted to have happen if I died before I woke up. I was just a little kid, of course, and I prayed the Lord my soul to take. Well, I got older, went into several nights knowing I might not come out again in the morning, and I began to have doubts about the Lord taking my soul. He might not care—or he might be busy with some other guy’s soul, I mean you couldn’t count on it. And one time, faced with such a night, I got to thinking about very simple pleasures which meant a lot to me. You know how you can’t explain certain things that sort of lodge in your memory? Well, I remembered my father taking me to a Chicago Cubs baseball game at Wrigley Field. I must have been eight or nine. I worshipped Big Bill Nicholson and Phil Cavaretta and we went to the game and—this’ll kill you, Cooper: I can’t even remember who won the game. I remember two things about that game. Nicholson hit a homer and my father bought me one of these suckers, the round ball with the white pasteboard stick coming out of it. It was grape and I could remember the taste with fantastic clarity. And I loved that taste. Yet I hadn’t had one since I was a little kid. And the thought struck me that if I died during the night, why then, I’d never get to taste one of those suckers again. I’ve kept a bunch of them with me ever since, when I go out to do something dangerous—and at just the right times I haul them out and taste that grape again. It’s very comforting, very comforting.”

I wanted it all to be over. I prayed the Lord my soul to take. I didn’t have a sucker.

The house was a square, flat-walled thing, well back from the road, with a front lawn of gravel and a statue standing in the middle of it creating a huge turnaround. A hunter’s moon slipped out from behind the screen of cloud cover for a moment, cast an icy-blue silver light, and then was gone, leaving us in the maelstrom of snow.

We were helped from our car by a pair of uniformed attendants who gave Peterson a ticket and drove the Mercedes away to the rows of other Mercedes which stood like tanks waiting in the order of battle. Peterson hustled me along. “Come on, it’s a party. Have a good time.” He was distracting me from the groping terror in my chest. We were in the doorway, more servants were helping us out of our coats, there was the rumble of a large party, people everywhere, a sea of German being spoken. I understand nothing, floated almost deliriously like a man strapped to a table and rolling groggily toward the operating room. I heard Peterson chuckle and I turned, knowing I was pale. “What are they gonna do, Cooper? Kill us?” His grin snapped at me beneath his mustache. “Hell, everybody dies.” I nodded. “Introduce me to your sister, Cooper. Then we’ll surround the bastards.”

The faces were all worn by strangers who seemed to see through us. Men wore either black tie or military uniforms, women were mostly in long dresses with bare shoulders. Diamonds caught light from the chandeliers.

We stood unnoticed by an urn full of ferns and several palms. A string quartet was at work at the far end of the room: you could see the bows flashing over the tide of heads and hear the music behind the blur of conversation, laughter, cries of Germanic greeting. Peterson whisked two glasses of champagne from a passing silver tray. He fingered a palm frond. “I want my sucker.”

I was grinning numbly as I turned, saw a startlingly pale woman with cropped black hair, short like a raven’s feathers on the nape of her neck. Her dress was black, her eyes were heavily outlined, her skin almost deathly in contrast. Her eyes were pale gray behind round steel-rimmed spectacles. There was a puckered wound at the corner of her right eye, small but strangely obvious, a false note, strangely theatrical. She was wildly out of place and coming toward us, looking past us, and I tugged at Petersons sleeve.

“I beg your pardon—”

It wasn’t Peterson. A tall man in an American general’s uniform peered down at me over Ben Franklin half-glasses.

“Ah. …” I said. “Well, you’re not my friend, are you?”

“I’m mighty sorry to hear that, son,” he drawled. A large gray-haired woman with arms like draperies of spaghetti gritted her teeth at me. “Are you all right, boy?”

“He looks drunk,” spaghetti arms said and began reeling him in.

“Get some air, boy,” the general said, drifting away from me.

I turned away, caught a tailing of fem in the eye, and heard my name. “Mr. Cooper, good evening. You needn’t cry out, you know.”

It was the black-haired woman with the glasses that not only failed to disguise the mouse by her eye but drew attention to it.

“Well, I didn’t mean to shout, but the general, you see—” She was looking slightly past me at the room over my shoulder. She raised her hand as if to slap me. I flinched and she brushed the fern from my face.

“Mr. Cooper, you don’t look well at all.”

The glasses magnified her gray eyes. I hadn’t recognized her. It was Lise Brendel.

“Surprise,” she said calmly.

I lifted my champagne and dribbled it over my hand.

“Are you enjoying yourself?”

“I just got here—”

“I know. I heard.” Her mouth was red, like a forties pinup queen. I shuffled my feet nervously; any rapport that I had expected was utterly nonexistent.

“What happened to your eye?”

“Why are you so frightened, Mr. Cooper?” A smile wormed its way onto her face, a trace of gloating. “Still thinking about your Nazis? Well, the place is crawling with them. And has Gunter found you yet?”

“You said you weren’t going to tell him.” I didn’t know this woman and it occurred to me that she might be on something.

“I changed my mind and I told him. I told Siegfried, too. I thought his reaction was quite amusing until he hit me in the eye.” She sighed self-consciously. “Do close your mouth. And while you’re doing that I shall attend to my guests.”

I watched her walk away. Her feet were bare beneath the dress, and several heads, male and female, turned to watch her go. Mouths began moving, faces contorted: she attracted their hatred.

Peterson appeared from behind the cluster of palms.

“What in hell was that?”

I wondered how to break it to him.

He began to shake his head.

“Oh, no,” he said. “You’re not going to tell me—”

“But she’s not the same as she was,” I said. “I didn’t even recognize her. She told Brendel. She said she wouldn’t but she did.” Peterson’s eyes traveled slowly to the foyer, to the door where several servants, large servants, stood at ease.

“Cooper, do you see those men by the door? If they were any bigger their knuckles would drag on the floor. If men that size don’t want you to leave, then you don’t leave unless you’re prepared to shoot them full of holes. You are not prepared to do that. I am. So don’t try to leave without me.”

He looked back at me. “And if you see me beating your goddamn sister into chopped liver, I’m telling you that you interfere at your own risk. I’m getting very survival-oriented all of a sudden. Brendel should not have been told ahead of time. That changes everything. Our only advantage is gone.” He thrust a hand past me and I flinched again, Walter Mitty to the end. “Doctor Roeschler,” he said, shaking hands with Roeschler, who managed to look like Carl Sandburg even in evening dress. “It’s nice to see a familiar face.” Peterson was glazed with the phoniest smile I had ever seen. He was fully capable of shooting some people, pulling the trigger instead of shaking hands, and Roeschler seemed so gentle, a man whose compromises had been made so long ago.

“Well, you’ve certainly gotten inside the battlements,” Roeschler said. I kept looking back into the crowd for a trace of Lise. I couldn’t quite believe the way she had behaved; it made no sense to me. How could she have betrayed me?

“You’ve seen Lise,” he said, his voice rumbling, Adam’s apple bobbing behind the black tie. “I can tell.”

“I didn’t recognize her. Very confusing, Doctor Roeschler.”

“Absolutely nuts,” Peterson said. “God, it’s hot in here.”

“Mr. Peterson has a point,” Doctor Roeschler said so softly that I had to incline toward him. “It’s her style and in certain cases style is another name for madness. There is more than one Lise. …” He paused and touched my arm pointedly. “She is schizoid—I couldn’t tell you that until you’d seen it for yourself. Not a psychosis, but pronounced nevertheless. She just comes and goes, one mask after another. She will never be sure who she is, Mr. Cooper,” Roeschler said sadly. It was impossible to tell how figuratively he was speaking.

“We will, though,” Peterson said. He was tense.

“One wonders,” Roeschler said. He moved away, leaned for a moment against a chair, took a glass of champagne, drained it off, and walked slowly away into the crowd.

“He’s an old man,” Peterson said. “I wonder what’s left for him?”

“What’s left for her?” I couldn’t get hold of the evening.

“I don’t know, but she’s trouble, John. You can’t trust her. Do you hear me, John—don’t make a bad mistake.”

The music swept across the crowd. Peterson went to find the buffet. The vast, immense men stood by the front doors chatting, looking surly. The knot in my stomach tightened.

It was all so uncertain. We were there, but why? What was supposed to happen? Lise had turned out so badly: that was no ally, no friend in the enemy camp. I couldn’t shake my terrible fear. Fear. Cowardice. What difference did it make?

It was all so serious, but I found myself awaiting the arrival of Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny and it didn’t make sense. The room, the people, the fear were all tightening on me, squeezing me, and I kept wanting to giggle and go to the toilet from fright. I turned toward a French window which stood slightly ajar, wiped my face with a handkerchief, felt the draft cold on my sweat.