The Wind Chill Factor (18 page)

“You mean that my grandfather and father actually
knew
Colonel Perón and you?” I felt myself grow pale and I drank a sip of coffee to draw attention away. I tried to smile. “It’s a small world.”

“Knew … no, that is too strong a word. They may have
known
Perón, I cannot say, but they did not
know
me. We merely met at a party and Frau Goering introduced me to all three of them at one time—”

“My father was killed in the Battle of Britain,” I said. “Flying for England. We are not all Nazis in our family.”

He smiled, nodded his head. I saw myself looking pinched and tiny in his opaque glasses.

“I know all about your father, Mr. Cooper. An exceedingly brave man, I am sure. In any case, I was interested in meeting your famous grandfather, who seemed, I must say, rather austere. Goering kept slapping him on the back and laughing but he did not seem to find Goering terribly amusing.” A smile on the thin mouth. “Your grandfather struck me as far more of a Junker than was normally found at such gatherings.

“But I was intrigued by Perón. He seemed a clever, alert fellow. He must have been about forty then and somehow he impressed me as being … crafty, you see? So, in 1943, with craftiness in mind, I thought of Perón. I felt he was sympathetic and accessible and clever. Shortly thereafter Martin St. John, who really defies classification, entered my life, arrangement for passage and payment were made, and so”—he sighed—“I am here today.”

“You were not a Nazi, I take it?”

“Oh, my, no,” he said, a glimmer of surprise gone at once, barely recognized. “I rather sympathized with their war aims, of course, and at the beginning they seemed very competent men. After all, the going was easy and I was making a great success—or, more accurately, my father’s firm, and my firm by birthright, was doing very well out of it. But the war didn’t continue at the level of an operational training maneuver, you see. And with stiffer resistance it seemed a less good idea and our leaders no longer had immunity in my eyes.” Irony clung to each word. “They were all rather unsavory, quite suddenly, and I saw that they were losing the war—well, I have no patience with that sort of thing. Then I began to get fairly accurate reports on the extermination camps—so impractical, so perverse, so childishly malicious. It was time to leave.”

A small boy came running across the grass. He was wet, holding a towel. “Excuse me,” he said with six-year-old gravity. “Papa, when may I ride? You did promise, Papa. Mama said I should ask.”

He clapped his son’s arm affectionately.

“Very soon, Hans, very soon. You have one more quick dip and then—”

Kottmann stood up, lean and hard.

“My family requires my attention.” He ushered me ahead of him onto the path. His boots crunched. “Is there anything else? Let me see. … Your brother had some very nonsensical notions about the Nazis, I’m afraid. He attributed some very grandiose schemes to them, saw one lurking behind every jacaranda tree. He was pleasant about it, talked about the young Siegfried only sleeping and waiting to come alive again. Terribly Wagnerian. He said he felt Argentina would be the home of the Fourth Reich.” He spread his hands in the air before him and shrugged. “I didn’t know what to say.”

We walked across the veranda and into the hall. There was music coming from concealed speakers. It was the second time I’d heard a Beethoven quartet in two days. I recognized it: the same Beethoven quartet.

“Is there any chance Perón may come back?” I asked.

Alfried Kottmann looked at me patiently.

“Juan Perón is seventy-seven years old, Mr. Cooper. He lives in Spain with a young wife, his third, and his half a billion dollars, whatever it is. Why in the world would he come back to Buenos Aires?”

We stood in front of the immense house. The forest green Mercedes was waiting. The sky had darkened again and smelled like rain.

“I am sorry I haven’t been more help,” he said. “But that’s all there was to my meeting with your brother.”

The door was open; the chauffeur was waiting.

“One last thing,” I said. “Did my brother show you a clipping? A newspaper clipping?” Kottmann’s face changed; it was as if he’d slipped a mask over his friendliness.

“Yes,” he said.

“And did you recognize the people?”

“No, I did not.” He bowed slightly. “Now I must go. Good-bye, Mr. Cooper.” His heels clicked across the stone as I slid into the back seat. It rained hard all the way back to Buenos Aires.

The air was heavy and hot and wet when I got out of the Mercedes. I went into the bar, drank a quick gin and tonic, congratulated myself on the way I’d been handling my liquor, and went back outside. There was a thick haze, but the Plaza San Martin was crowded, people moving slowly. Even the pigeons were droopy and tired. They staggered. I joined them, sat on a bench, looked back across the Calle Florida to the beginnings of the shops. In the afternoon, motor traffic was prohibited and people swarmed in the thoroughfare.

I tried to collect my thoughts. I loosened my tie.

Unless there was a run on Beethoven quartets, St. John had not only lied to me about having seen Kottmann after meeting with me, but had in fact been with him when he called me. I remembered the second echoing click when he hung up the phone. Kottmann? If so, why? Whatever was the reason for lying? Disassociation from one another perhaps.

And why had my question about the newspaper clipping so obviously irritated Kottmann?

I still didn’t know what prompted Cyril’s visit to Buenos Aires.

It was thundering again. A little girl aimed a thoughtful toe at a pigeon and missed. The paving was wet and the rain gentle. The clouds made it dark. The lobby was bright coming in from the purple afternoon.

I sat at my window thinking, watching the rain and hearing the breeze blowing it. Cyril had wanted to know about the Nazis, the Germans in Argentina, about Kottmann in particular. What else was there? If it hadn’t been the Nazis, what had he been after? I drew a blank trying to cope with alternatives. But everyone was chuckling indulgently over the Nazi thing. St. John had called it “ancient history.” So had Brenner. It was romantic nonsense, product of an overworked imagination, an obsession with one’s grandfather: the Nazis were a part of history, something quaint, as unlikely in the far greater dangers of the atomic and computer age as something from another century.

Cyril’s newspaper clipping bothered me. I wanted to see it. St. John would have to show it to me.

The telephone rang. It was Ramón Roca again. I thanked him for arranging my meeting with St. John and told him I had been to see Kottmann.

“It was helpful then, seeing Kottmann?”

“I wish I knew,” I said. “But I don’t.”

“Well, we have come up with one more lead.” His voice was restrained, very quiet, sibilant. “Your brother made another call in Buenos Aires. He saw Dr. Hans Dolldorf, a professor of economics living in retirement here in the city.” He gave me the address. “Perhaps you will want to contact him. I leave it to you.” I wrote down the telephone number and thanked him. He said it was nothing.

The apartment building was very high, very new, and very expensive. I checked the tenant listing. Dolldorf was on the nineteenth floor, but no one answered my buzz. I asked the doorman if he had seen Professor Dolldorf go out. He fixed me with a supercilious smirk and said that yes, in a way, he had. He spoke with a Middle European accent which seemed to contain a well-practiced insult.

“In a way,” I repeated. “What does that mean?”

“What I said.” He busied himself with a pigeonholed cabinet full of keys.

“Look, you silly shit,” I said conversationally as two elderly women approached, “explain yourself. Or I’ll have your balls for breakfast, make no mistake.” I stepped up close to him as he reached for the door. The ladies passed. I pushed him back into the corner of the entryway. “Talk to me. Now.”

He looked at me as if I were insane. I stared at him.

“He came out dead. On a stretcher with a blanket over him.”

“When?”

“Day before yesterday.”

“Open the goddamned door,” I said. He held it open.

Her eyes were huge and dark beneath thick dark eyebrows, long brown hair curling on her shoulders, and she was biting her lip and had lipstick smudged on a white tooth. She was wearing a black sleeveless dress and behind her the drapes were drawn across the window. She listened as I fumbled through an explanation. I was flustered by the eyes. There was a tracing of wetness on one cheek.

“A couple of weeks ago my brother, Cyril Cooper, an American,” I ended, “visited your father. I wondered why, that’s all. And just now I heard of your father’s death. I’m sorry. My brother is dead now, too. …” She turned around and walked away from me. She was tall and strong and her name was Maria Dolldorf. She stood by the window in the shadows. The room was lined with books and there were papers and magazines everywhere.

“I have just come from my father’s funeral,” she said formally. “I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

“I’m sorry. I had no way of knowing.”

“It’s all right. I am stupidly emotional. We are given to excessive grief here.” She tried to smile and shivered. “You have come a very long way to ask your questions. I must ask you why is it so important, Mr. Cooper?”

“I can’t see you,” I said. “It’s so dark.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s a sedative. The light hurts my eyes. Please sit down.” We sat side by side in two chromium and cane chairs, very expensive. “Why?” she asked again.

“My brother was murdered and I think what happened to him was involved with what he did here in Buenos Aires. We don’t know who killed him.” I felt faintly foolish; it had become such a long story. She sat with her hands in her lap; tanned fingers in the dim light, plain nails. “So I’m trying to find out what he was doing here before he came home to be killed. Do you see?”

“Your brother was here, yes. He talked to my father. My father told me about it. My father was terribly upset. Terribly.”

“Why?”

“His health had been failing, his eyesight going. He was nervous, almost afraid … of everything. I came in the evenings after my work and we would have dinner together or go out to Palermo and sit in the evening sunshine. And we would talk or I would read to him. The night after your brother was here he was very nervous, hadn’t slept, his hands were shaking. He’d been drinking brandy all day and he babbled on about the American who’d come to see him. …” She was twining her fingers, turning several rings.

“I asked him why he was so troubled and he said this man had asked questions about the past … about Perón and the Nazis and Alfried Kottmann.” She closed her eyes, forced the last bit.

“Why should that have upset him?”

“My father had been an adviser to Perón in the old days, one of the few intellectuals whom Perón trusted. My father was an economist and a German and Perón listened to what he had to say. He made a hash of his economic policies but my father at least could tell him what was going wrong and why. They were very close. Some”—she paused and turned to face me, her eyes searching my face—“some people used to say that my father slept with Eva Perón because Perón … failed her. I don’t know if my father did that or not, it doesn’t matter. But my father knew all those men intimately and having it all dragged up now out of the dark, by this unknown American made him afraid. When Perón fell it was not easy for my father. There were those who kept him from the university position he deserved on merit. Alfried Kottmann helped him. But my father grew weaker, sadder as the years went by. He was a sad man. …”

There were tears streaming down her cheeks. She excused herself and I heard water running, a door closed, the toilet flushed. I was standing at the window with the drapery held back when she returned. The sun had reappeared.

“If you want to talk more let’s leave this place. It smells of him. I cannot think of anything but him.” She looked at the cluttered desk. “I’m not ready to clean all this up. Let’s go to the park.”

She drove an expensive sky blue Mercedes 280SE convertible. Apparently, whatever indignities Herr Professor Dolldorf had experienced, poverty had not been among them. She turned the radio on and moved with a certain panache through the late-afternoon traffic.

Palermo Park stretched wetly green away toward the gray and glass towers of Buenos Aires rising up through the haze over the trees. She knew her way; she had taken her father there. We sat at a table with gin and tonics and watched the golfers strike the golf balls, watched them arc white coming toward us, then plummet to the greens. It was reminiscent of a country club, but we were sitting in the midst of a huge city. Yet it was cloistered, quiet. Finally she spoke.

“My father was killed.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said your brother was killed by someone.” She was watching the golfers, speaking tonelessly. “So was my father. Three days ago—or was it four?—someone came to his flat, took him in his robe down the hallway to the service stairway in back, cracked his skull, and threw him down a flight of concrete stairs. A janitor found him half choked on his own vomit, his hands tied behind him with the belt of his robe. He never came back to consciousness. He died in the hospital.” She lit a cigarette from a black and gold packet. “Someone did that to an old man who was nearly blind and very weak. And terribly sad.”

There was a decorous cheer from the green. Someone had holed a long one. Maria curled her lips around a lime and sucked it.

“Detective Inspector Roca, please.”

The telephone clicked several times, resulting in a pause and then the soft sibilant voice.

“John Cooper,” I said.

“Ah, Mr. Cooper. …”

“I saw Hans Dolldorf’s daughter, Roca, I couldn’t see the professor because somebody dragged him out of his apartment the other day, beat him just about to death, and threw him down a stairway. He died without regaining consciousness. They buried him today.”

There was a lengthy silence, then: “I see.”

“Now you’re going to tell me you didn’t know a damn thing about it. You sent me to talk to a corpse, by coincidence. Is that right?” I was beginning to feel the way I did the night I shot the gaunt man: there was no reservoir of patience. The fuse kept getting shorter.