The Wind Chill Factor (17 page)

“Yes, the Plaza,” I said. “That clipping—I’d like to see it.”

“Of course, you will—we’ll be in touch, won’t we?”

I nodded and he was gone. The thunder was louder now and the clouds were purple. I was very tired. I got my own cab. The day was almost gone and I felt as if I’d spent it with Sidney Greenstreet.

I bought the Buenos Aires
Herald
and the airmail New York
Times
as I walked through the Plaza lobby and ducked into the ritzy, famous American Bar for something tall and cold.

On an inside page of the
Herald
I was mildly astounded to find a brief story about “the siege of a small Minnesota town,” which they had picked up off the wire. It was brief, but the facts were there: two murders, the courthouse and library blown up, one of the attackers killed. My name wasn’t mentioned, nor was anyone else’s but Mayor Richard Aho, who had apparently made a statement. The idea of a siege was news anywhere, no doubt.

Curious, I went carefully through the
Times
and there it was, right before the cultural coverage,
DEATH, DESTRUCTION VISIT MINNESOTA VILLAGE
: that was the head. The story said the attack was motiveless, occurred during the winter’s worst storm when the town had been totally isolated. Cyril’s name was used and the connection to our grandfather duly but objectively made. Aho and Peterson were named. Peterson was in Washington, D.C., and was unavailable for comment. Aho had obviously been instructed by Peterson to keep his mouth shut and I could imagine the reporters flocking to the scene, frustrated, angry.

I finished my drink and went upstairs to my room. I opened the windows, took off my clothes, and stretched out in a lukewarm tub. I tried to fit all that Roca and St. John had told me into some framework with what I knew about Cyril and what had happened in Cooper’s Falls. Roca merely played his cards properly, survived several regimes, and lived to preach discretion to inquisitive young North Americans. Yet he had led me to St. John. …

And St. John had been quite willing to go on with the story. But why not? It had all happened so long ago. They spoke of the Nazi phenomenon as if it had been cast in bronze and placed under glass. Yet, it was all I had to tie Cyril, Buenos Aires, and Cooper’s Falls together.

The telephone woke me and I struggled dripping from the tub. It was eight thirty. St. John was speaking to me and I recognized a Beethoven quartet in the background. He said Kottmann would see me at breakfast. A car would be sent to the Plaza, if that was acceptable to me, six o’clock in the morning.

“Of course it is,” I said, staring down at Buenos Aires in the late, slanting sunshine seeping past the dark clouds on the horizon. “Of course.”

When he rang off, the telephone produced a click followed by another almost simultaneous click, an electronic echo. St. John was gone.

The Mercedes limousine was forest green, longer than a small parade, and dappled with raindrops. When I came through the doors the rain-washed cool of morning touched my face. The jacaranda and paradise seemed to be the invention of a gifted watercolorist.

Rolling through the wet, fresh six o’clock streets of Buenos Aires, I wondered if the New York
Times
had a man in the snow talking to Peterson and I wondered, then, if Peterson was back from Washington and what the cryptographers had learned from the contents of the box. It seemed peculiarly far away: I felt my life split in two, divided by the flight to Buenos Aires.

We wound north from the city toward El Tigre. The sun was beginning to shine tentatively through the bunkers of rain clouds rolling from the South Atlantic to my right. On my left the greenery was thick and deep. Somewhere out across the Rio de la Plata was Montevideo. The sun came and went, rain splattered the window.

At seven thirty we reached the estate. We had swung back from the road and up a steep incline, leveled out in a tunnel of greenery, and suddenly there was a huge iron gate towering above us, guardhouses on either side. At the approach of the Mercedes the gates began the rather tedious job of sliding open and a man in one of the buildings nodded to my driver as we eased through.

Bright flowers exploded in color on either side of us as we proceeded on up the narrow drive of finely crushed gray stone. It silently pulled away again as I was led up the walk between the flowers and across the portico, into the echoing hallway. There were several gigantic paintings of horses and castles on the Rhine in rich dark frames and the floor was stone. The furniture was European, silk, antique.

“Follow me, please.” The butler was far older than he at first appeared. He walked very straight but his voice was dry and cracked. “Herr Kottmann will see you in back, if you will be so kind.”

I followed him through French doors and out across a veranda, along another gray path between more flowerbeds. Five or six people in robes were sitting around a large white wrought-iron table near a swimming pool. A maid in a black dress which looked twenty years out of date was serving them breakfast. The mist was clearing. They did not look up at me as I was led past: an older woman, a man and woman who seemed to be in their late twenties, some children. Their voices were low. Spoons clicked on china.

The butler led me to a spot beneath a shade tree. He produced a towel from his pocket and wiped the rain from another wrought-iron table and chairs. “Herr Kottmann will join you here, if you would be so good as to wait.” He held the chair for me and when I was seated I heard his heels come faintly together. “Coffee will be served.” He went away listing slightly to starboard but erect, holding on to his illusion of youth. I wondered how long he’d served Herr Kottmann.

Across a tremendous expanse of emerald grass, wet and thick, a man was riding a pale horse in the shifting sunshine. He was far away and rode well, wore a helmet, and leaned down from the saddle to stroke a ball. In one fluid movement he would cantilever himself away from the horse and swing the mallet in a graceful arc through the heavy moist morning. Later the sound of the smack would come floating toward me as I watched him move off in the path of the ball, tracing it across the turf. As he came closer I saw the hooves spray divots, heard the snorting of the pony as it wheeled and accelerated.

He finally reined in about twenty yards away and sat patting its pale neck, talking to it. Then he dismounted, shucked on the helmet, tucked it under his arm, and a groom appeared to lead the horse away. He strode toward me purposefully.

“Mr. Cooper,” he said, extending a hand. “I am Alfried Kottmann.” He smiled through a thin mouth, white teeth glinting. He smoothed his black hair straight back. His skin was tight and tanned and fit. He turned and gave me an aquiline profile with ridges at the corners of his mouth. “Here comes the coffee.” The woman in the out-of-date black dress, her hair in a suitable Teutonic coil, carried a silver coffee service. “I’ll pour, Hilda,” Kottmann said. “Thank you.”

He carefully poured cream into my coffee and spooned sugar. It was bitter and thick, bracing.

“Your journey was satisfactory?”

“Yes, it was very beautiful.”

“I am prone to these early meetings because I seem to be an early riser. I work the ponies most mornings, enjoy my beautiful environment, my flowers, have my coffee, shower, and find that I am really quite primed for the day.” He leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, held his cup and saucer on his thigh. He wore whipcord jodhpurs and high brown riding boots, a red polo shirt with a towel draped around his neck. His boots were creased with age and toned with years of polish; they were flecked with moist black earth and wet grass. The only things missing were the dueling scars and monocle.

“I was terribly sorry to learn of your brother’s untimely passing, Mr. Cooper. He was here such a short time ago and now, so abruptly, I learn he is dead.”

“Someone murdered him.”

I could hear the wind in the trees. It carried the voices of the people by the pool: a child leaped into the water, there was a splash, children shouted happily. I had not thought of the fact of Cyril’s death for several days and now, for some reason, it came to me with a jolt. He was gone.

“Your brother called on me here, Mr. Cooper,. … My life has changed so little, I still ride the ponies each morning and have my coffee … and your brother is dead.” He shook his head gravely. “In the midst of life, eh, Mr. Cooper? We never know.” He looked at the back of his hand. “I stay fit, stay out of doors as much as possible. Yet, there are liver spots on my hand. I am sixty-eight and there’s no pretending with Father Time, is there?”

“You look younger,” I said.

“It is my young wife.” He smiled briefly, gesturing at the group over his shoulder. I had thought it was his wife, his children, his grandchildren, but I’d been wrong.

“In any case, Mr. Cooper, I understand that you are curious as to what your brother was doing here in Buenos Aires. Mr. St. John arranged for him to meet me. I saw no reason to see him at first but then my curiosity prevailed. I am not a particularly public man. I live quietly, see my old friends. But I decided I might as well meet your brother. Perhaps it was because Mr. St. John had told me who Cyril Cooper actually was, the grandson of Austin Cooper. Now, I certainly knew about Austin Cooper’s friendship with Herr Hitler and all the rest of those fellows. Your grandfather was not looked upon as an American traitor in Germany, by Germans—on the contrary, he was felt to be simply a friend of Germany, a man of vision who saw a strong, rebuilt Germany as the key to the strength of Europe. Many sophisticated Germans saw your grandfather as one of the bulwarks in our hope of staving off the Russians, you see … quite apart from the Second World War.”

“What did my brother want from you?” I asked.

“So I saw him,” Kottmann went quietly on. “It was not so simple discovering why he wanted to see me. I had the feeling he was not being perfectly frank with me. He said he was a journalist, that he was interested in the German community in Buenos Aires, how we all got here, how we managed to live down the Nazi stigma. …” He sipped the coffee, tweezed a piece of turf from his boot. He caught my eye and seemed to be looking through me.

“It was my duty to inform him that I felt there was no Nazi stigma to live down, that Germany and Argentina had enjoyed close relations for a great many years, and that if there was a stigma to live down it was a stigma borne by South Americans generally for the hideous manner in which Germans of all sorts were persecuted during the late thirties and early forties. You see, that was the truth of those years, Mr. Cooper, an unpleasant fact ignored in your country. All Germans were looked upon as agents of Herr Hitler, regardless of their own beliefs—being a German was enough. You see, Hitler claimed that even if your blood was only one-quarter German, you were all German, all Nazi, surely poised to take up arms for the Nazi cause … anywhere in the world. He said there were three hundred thousand Germans in Argentina in 1942, each of whom sympathized with Nazi aims, and the world actually believed him. He said that there was the framework of an entire Nazi state within the borders of South America and the rumors spread and were frequently reported in the press. Even
La Prensa
here in Buenos Aires swallowed some of it—secret airfields in the Andes, immensely powerful jungle radio stations. Nazis high in the various governments. In Montevideo, if you were a German, you were lucky not to be jailed on mere principle.

“In reality,” he said, plucking the end from a croissant and moistening it with coffee, “what you actually had was a band of swaggering would-be SS and Gestapo boobs hanging around cafes loudly letting it be known they were German agents and discussing absurdities along the general lines of taking over the Panama Canal from secret bases in Colombia and going to war with the United States.” He smiled a trifle sadly and ate the morsel. “Can you imagine that? Those blithering nincompoops were the Nazi threat in South America.” He shook his head.

“Why did you come here, then? If it was such an inhospitable place?” I was beginning to feel secure. I knew he was lying, or at least embroidering the truth to his own benefit.

“Ah, well, Mr. Cooper, I’m exaggerating the peril and, in any case, by Christmas of 1943 the situation had calmed down a good deal. Argentina was still neutral, but within three weeks the United States demanded that she give up her neutrality and come in on the Allied side … and there was relatively little opposition. Argentina did as she was told and the people realized that the Nazi threat, if there had ever been one, was over.

“When I decided I had to leave Germany, I believed the war was lost. And I knew enough history to realize there was a more than passing chance that I might be considered a war criminal during that curiously vicious period which follows the arrival of peace. And I did not relish the fate of war criminals. I once had a rather oblique conversation with Krupp about it but Krupp’s attitude was one of total arrogance. Whoever wins, he said, they’ll need me—and not in jail. Well, history gave its own answer to Krupp.” The wind stirred the treetops, sun flashed through the leaves. “And he turned out to be more or less right.” He sipped at the coffee, tasting it before swallowing. The children laughed.

“So I cast about for ways to escape with as much money as possible. That was the hardest part, I assure you. But I scraped a bit together and instituted a few discreet inquiries. I began to think quite seriously about Colonel Perón, whom I had met a few years before when he had been military attaché to Rome.”

He slid a pair of tinted aviators glasses from his pocket, put them on, and turned to stare in the direction of the pool. A child began to cry. The older woman had begun to comfort him.

“My wife’s mother,” Kottmann said. “She’s younger than I am, oddly, but she is my mother-in-law. Life,” he said to no one in particular, “is marvelously peculiar.” He enjoyed another bite of croissant.

“Perón. … Yes, I did tell your brother something I thought might interest him. And you, too, perhaps, if all this antique matter doesn’t bore you. I once met both your grandfather and father … and curiously enough Perón was there, as well.” He paused to watch the expression on my face. “That surprises you, Mr. Cooper?”