The Wind Chill Factor (23 page)

As I reached the top of the stairway, the door at the rear of the dim hallway swung open with a bang and the short figure of Alistair Campbell appeared half in shadow, arm raised in welcome. I waved and stepped toward him.

Slowly he seemed to collapse, clinging to the wall as if it were the facing of a cliff. I stopped and he lunged forward. As he came into the light I saw that his hand was red, leaving a trail along the wall like a bleeding, wounded slug inching its way toward a safe hole.

My breathing had stopped. My knees and thighs clenched weakly. His breath rasped in the quiet. The front of his mac was soaked with blood. His eyes stared through me, the glitter and gleam long gone.

“Stains,” he gasped with tremendous effort. “Find stains. …”

A figure blurred out of the shadowy stairwell at the back of the hall, an arm was raised, and there was a sound like the sucking of air, twice, and Alistair Campbell leaped jerkily forward, his wet red hand just reaching my raincoat, clutching the belt, clamping it in his hand. The back of his mac was blown open in two places and the sucking sound came again and the plastered wall beside me exploded, showered me in chips, filling my eyes with gritty dust—

I lost my footing going backward down the steps and, before his grip loosened, Alistair Campbell’s body slid partly down on top of me. The smell of blood covered me like a sheet in a morgue. The sucking sound came again, a rush of hot air past my hand as I fell, plummeting back down the stairs into the dark.

I could hear the man in the upstairs hall fumbling to get past the body, which lay crossways in the narrow stairway. A door opened a few feet away from me as I struggled to my feet, an unshaven man in a dirty undershirt stuck his head out and told me to fuck off, and I ran the length of the hallway, ducked through a doorway into the entryway, turned right away from the street, and headed into the courtyard.

I could hear him pounding down the stairs, charging along the hall. He was coming after me; he’d shot Campbell full of holes and taken a couple of hurried shots at me. Adrenaline surged, my heart skipped, my side ached.

The courtyard’s looming shapes became a junked automobile, a rusting truck with a flatbed carrier, stacks of tires, trashcans, and I dived among them, felt a bit of wire slice my cheek. Snow sprinkled my face; it was turning back to rain and the wind was blowing. I tried not to make any noise. This was the third time they’d tried to kill me.

Feeling my way along the length of the truck, I heard him reach the entryway. He was undecided. Kneeling, I saw his legs and feet dimly from between the undercarriage. He turned away finally and walked toward the street. I crouched there, waiting. He did not reappear. At last, I made my way back past the tires and trashcans looking for an exit. I opened a metal door and stepped into a dark corridor, ill-lit, with water standing in puddles on a dirt and gravel floor. A broken wooden door swung open at the other end: rain and snow glistened in the lamplight. There was the smell of engine oil and gasoline.

I pushed past the broken door and was back in the real world: a wet street, loud boys at the corner swearing nastily. I walked the other way: my face burned and ached, I kept imagining I heard the sucking sound of the silencer and the meaningless cry of
stains, stains
as he fell smearing the wall, my coat, with his blood. I wiped cold rain across my cheekbone and felt the ridge of the wire cut. My hairline was sticky and I pulled my tweed cap down, brushed plaster dust away.

Twice I asked directions. It took me a long time to reach the railway station on foot. I missed a couple of cabs, zig-zagged in an inefficient attempt to avoid any would-be pursuers. Obviously they hadn’t followed me. They were making a bad job of it again.

I took my bag from the locker. It was 11:14. I went to the men’s room, feeling weak-kneed and faint. My eyes burned intolerably from the plaster dust and my head had begun to ache. In the mirror over the washstand my face looked back at me like something from a set of atrocity photographs: haggard, worn, pale yellow. My cap was stuck to my head and when I peeled it away I saw that one of the puffs of air I’d felt go past my head must actually have just caressed it. Christ. They were getting closer … and it was always my head. The soggy beginnings of a scab came away, stuck to the cap’s silk lining, and the blood began to seep down out of my hair. I dabbed at it with watersoaked paper, prayed that no one would come in and find me.

Nausea flooded me suddenly, and I vomited into a toilet, sank to my knees, and fainted across the seat.

I was still alone when I blinked my eyes open, and after sitting there with my head hung down between my knees for a few more minutes I felt well enough to finish cleaning up my face. It was a ridiculous job, patting and drying, and I finally stuck a piece of toilet tissue in the gouge and held it in place by pulling my cap down over it. My head throbbed like a Buddy Rich riff, drowning out other sounds. All I wanted was to get on the train, collapse in my compartment. Eventually, I would have to think over what had happened and mourn Alistair Campbell along with the others. But I was too tired just then, too hurt.

There weren’t many people on the platform. It was cold and the chill felt good, cleansed my pain. I leaned against a pillar. A few feet away a family waited, middle-aged and tweedy, with a little blond girl holding her mother’s hand. She was smiling with the expectancy and excitement of the very young who are up long after their normal bedtime. She let go of her mother’s hand and began to pace ever-widening circles around her parents, until she came close enough for me to see her cornflower-blue eyes. She smiled up at me and I smiled back. She was well dressed: her coat had a velvet collar.

Tentatively she came closer, staring up at me in a child’s unrelenting manner, her smile fading. Again I caught her eye through the pain and weariness engulfing me and tried to smile. She reminded me of pictures of my little sister Lee taken many years ago.

Finally, somewhat discomfited by her staring, I leaned forward to say hello. That was when she began a high-pitched screaming, a wail, as if I’d attacked her. I felt myself toppling forward, no strength in my legs, and I gripped the pillar. I was befuddled: why was she screaming? Her mouth, a cavern into which I seemed about to fall, reminded me of the wound in Alistair Campbell’s forehead.

Her parents turned to stare, her father rushed forward saying, “Here, here,” and reaching for his daughter. The woman came closer, her face scowling and full of reproaches, and then she stopped short, covered her mouth with a gloved hand, and I heard her say: “Oh, God, Henry, look at his face, he’s all bloody. …”

I wiped my hand across my face and it was sticky and my stomach turned; there was blood smeared on my fingers. I tried to hold fast to the pillar but everything was slanting and voices came to me as if from a distant echo chamber. The little girl had stopped screaming and I could see that the rain falling on the railroad tracks had turned to snow drifting down.

A voice near my ear said tiredly: “Jesus, Cooper, look at yourself, another fine mess. …”

The voice was familiar, but when I turned, my sight was going quickly and I could see only a shape, a pinpoint of light, a face in the pinpoint but it was too late and I saw only the snow blowing in great soft gusts, heard only the dim sounds of trains very far away, and I was falling and I simply didn’t give a damn. …

T
HE VOICE I HEARD WHEN
I came to was the same I’d heard as I passed out, but it took a moment for my eyes to focus.

“Cooper,” it said. I felt a gentle tug on my shoulder. “Cooper, can you hear me?”

It was Olaf Peterson.

I had been more or less unconscious since I had fainted into Peterson’s arms at the railway station. He’d got me to a police medical aid station for repairs and then to a private clinic for some sleep. When I saw him it was three o’clock in the afternoon and he needed a shave. I asked him why the hell he was in Glasgow. He smirked with characteristic self-satisfaction and told me there would be plenty of time to discuss that later.

We were ticketed on the sleeper train to London, one day behind my schedule. We would talk then. In the meantime a short man with fuzzy gray hair and gold-rimmed spectacles appeared, a doctor giving my poor aching head a once-over.

I winced at the probing of his fingers.

“Lucky,” he said tersely beside my ear. “Scratch. No dressing required. Let the air get at it. No comparison to what I usually get.” He looked over at Peterson. “You should see the lads I patch up after a football punch-up.” He looked back at me as if I were a severe disappointment.

In the early evening we went to police headquarters, where I explained my connection with Alistair Campbell. A newspaper lay on the desk with a picture of Campbell taken years before, a story of the shooting, a picture of the man who’d stepped into the hallway and told me to fuck off.

I went through the story several times. The detective’s name was MacGregor and he looked like a carnival pitchman and spoke like a funeral director. Finally, having got the facts straight, he shook his head, frowned. He could make nothing out of the Gunter Brendel part of it; he clearly didn’t want to open it up in all its complexities, at least not until he’d made the most of sheer facts.

He thanked me for my trouble and I was taken into an anteroom where I waited. Eventually Peterson came out and told me we were free to catch our train. One cop to another, Peterson could apparently work wonders.

He looked at me as if deciding to keep me or throw me back. “Jesus, what disgusting sandwiches,” was all he said.

The night train traversing the four hundred-odd miles to London was extraordinarily luxurious and once we settled back in the compartment I began to feel something like my normal self. Granted, my head had taken far more punishment than was good for it, but the pills helped. So did Peterson: he was as ironic as ever but it felt good not to be alone. It was almost as if his broad, thickset body was a shield for me, as if he could protect me.

Peterson produced a bottle of scotch, summoned ice and squat tumblers, and lit a cigar. Through the smoke he regarded me with a faint, tolerant smile.

“All right,” I said, “what are you doing here?”

“The room clerk at the hotel told me you’d bought a ticket on the midnight sleeper to London. I went to the station and found you covered in blood, scaring small children, learned to my chagrin that you continue to be involved in murder wherever you go, and of course found you in desperate need of someone—anyone—to keep you from disgracing yourself.” His voice trailed off; he shook his dark head. Some sort of plaid hat with a gaudy feather in the band lay beside him, beneath it a pearl-gray cashmere topcoat.

“But why did you come to Glasgow at all?”

“Because something very strange is going on, because I’m curious, because I feel this peculiar need to keep you alive. Because I should never have let you go to Buenos Aires. Because I wanted to have a vacation from my wife.

“Look, Cooper, remember the boxes—the empty boxes? I took the contents to Washington, to the government cryptographic center. But before I delivered them for decoding I stopped at a branch library and spent several dollars Xeroxing them, every page. Once I had my own copy I could feed them into the bureaucracy and not worry.

“What happened in Washington was that I got the classic runaround. I was debriefed by the FBI and by the CIA, because of your grandfather’s career. I met with men who were described as being from the Pentagon—nothing more, and the cryptographers came up with nothing. They said they’d need more time, that it was a ‘toughie.’ That’s what they called it, Cooper, a ‘toughie.’ Christ, it was insane.” Peterson took a deep drink of scotch and put his feet up on the seat, stretching out with a pillow behind his head. The train rocked gently on the rails.

“For three days they went over what had happened in Cooper’s Falls, hid me from reporters—Cooper’s Falls has been a very big story, front page stuff, the network news, the works. Anyway, when they got done with me I checked in with the cryptographers and they were still mumbling and farting around and shaking their heads.

“I decided they weren’t going to get anywhere so I flew up to New York to see a friend of mine from the old days, a guy named Ernest Harnetz at Columbia. He’s a physics professor but he’s also what we used to call a puzzle man when I was on special duty, a guy who could break a code like a pane of glass. I laid the stuff on him and we had a couple of drinks and he looked through it and began to doodle on some Columbia University stationery.

“About three hours is what it took him to crack it from corner to corner. ‘They’re bullshitting you in Washington,’ is what he told me. ‘They don’t want you to know what’s involved, so they’re bullshitting you.’ So he started telling me what was in those boxes.”

I drank some scotch. “And—”

“It sounds, funny, Cooper—”

“I’m sure.”

“Plans, Nazi plans to occupy, take over, countries and major cities and huge corporations all over the world—once the war was won.” He stopped and chewed the cigar.

“Or if the war was lost, either way, win or lose. They had plans, page after page of specific plans. For RCA and General Motors and utility companies, power and gas and all that, government agencies, cities—Chicago, New York, Miami, Detroit, Los Angeles. … They had divided the United States into six sections, all absolutely clear-cut and precise.”

“Win or lose,” I said. “What do you mean win or lose?”

“If the war in Europe was lost, that was only a temporary setback—a delay of a generation or two, and they allowed for that, apparently, because there was a second plan full of steps for taking over all the nations and cities and agencies and corporations slowly and from within. They already had their people placed inside these organizations. A vast, really enormous network of men who would make Quisling in Norway seem very small potatoes, indeed. Harnetz said you could read between the lines and see that Quisling was a sort of trial run, an experiment on a relatively—ah—inconsequential level.