The Wind Chill Factor (26 page)

An early Steynes, suffering the not surprising fate of a man who felt he might himself make a good King, died in June of 1242, being first dragged from Westminster to the tower and thence to the Gibbet, when he had there breathed out his wretched soul, he was suspended on a hook, and when stiff in death was lowered, disembowelled, his bowels burnt on the spot, and his wretched body divided into quarters which were sent to the four principal cities in the Kingdom, by what pitiable spectacle to strike terror in all beholders.

Peterson was reading it over my shoulder. When he finished, he looked at me. “Do you suppose it worked?”

Dawson appeared in the doorway. Peterson jumped when he spoke: “Colonel Steynes.”

And through the wide opening came a man in a wheelchair, motor whirring, wide, thin mouth smiling and pale eyebrows arched high over blue-gray eyes. A Sherlock Holmes nose protruded like a hook from the narrow face: gray-blond hair fell lankly across the high forehead. The voice, freed of the bad telephone connection, still had a flinty, metallic quality, cold like the drafts on the stone floor. A heavy steamer blanket lay across his legs.

“Good evening, gentlemen, good evening and welcome to a rather inclement Cat Island. You,” he said, rolling handily toward me, “are surely Mr. Cooper. A distinct family resemblance, through the eyes, and let me tell you how very sorry I am about your brother. … And you,” he said, looking at Peterson, “you are an associate of Mr. Cooper’s?”

Peterson introduced himself and Colonel Steynes motioned us to deep leather chairs before the fire. He summoned Dawson to bring a tray of glasses and brandy, whiskey, and soda and suggested that he check the larder for some dinner for us. We settled in. I lit my pipe with a wooden match, and built a weak whiskey and soda.

While we waited for Dawson to return, Steynes showed himself a bright, sharp-tongued commentator on the present English political problems and leadership. He found them decent enough but “pathetically weak.” But he smiled when he spoke and showed full use of his arms and hands. There was an elegant gray-blond mustache laid along his upper lip, deep ridges in his cheeks, and his face was weatherbeaten from the Atlantic gales.

Dawson appeared with a tray of cold roast beef sandwiches, a wheel of Stilton, mustard, fruit tarts, a pot of steaming coffee. Colonel Steynes urged us to fill our plates. Dawson was dispatched to ready our rooms and Steynes fitted a Dunhill cigarette into a black holder, and began to tell us what we’d come to hear.

“Cyril Cooper came to me directly from his meeting with Alistair Campbell in Glasgow. I have known Mr. Campbell since I was associated with him in Cairo before the general outbreak of the Nazi war. Your brother showed me a newspaper cutting—a photograph of a man named Gunter Brendel and his lovely wife, Lise, Frau Brendel. As it happens, I have an extensive file on Herr Brendel and Campbell was well aware of that, but we will come to that later.

“Cyril explained to me who he was, grandson of Austin Cooper, a fact which I found rather more interesting and satisfying than he could possibly have imagined. Your brother knew only that I could give him information regarding Herr Brendel. And he explained to me that he was, in fact, not interested in Herr Brendel himself but in the young woman, Lise Brendel.” Steynes fixed me with a pale eye through a veil of cigarette smoke. “He suggested a unique hypothesis. He believed that Lise Brendel was his sister, long presumed dead. I naturally asked him what prompted this belief and he very sheepishly informed me that she looked like what he thought his sister would look like today, very much like his mother looked to him when he was a child. But he was very, very insistent.

“In point of fact, however, I would almost certainly not have gone into it with him but for the one tremendously salient fact—that this young man was Austin Cooper’s grandson … and, gentlemen, that Herr Brendel was and is a Nazi.” He spoke with that same metallic calm, but the last word echoed in my mind. Steynes leaned forward, sipped his whiskey. Peterson stared at me, eyes alive, then went on chewing on the rare beef.

“That connection—Austin Cooper and Herr Brendel, two Nazis—that connection bore down on one like a runaway lorry on an empty street.” He smiled at the turn of phrase. “That ‘coincidence,’ if indeed it was a coincidence. That, my friends, is something I have learned to distrust, the coincidence phenomenon. I have found too often the existence of a meaningful pattern beneath the untroubled surface of what the laity may conveniently call coincidence. As I listened to your brother, considered who his grandfather was, and who Herr Brendel is, related these facts to my own sphere of interest—which we will discuss somewhat later, I began to discern that pattern, like a school of sharks, beneath the unflurried surface of the vast sea of sheer coincidence.” He sighed. “Mr. Peterson, would you jostle those logs? I know perfectly well that I have no feeling in my legs, but I swear that I can feel the drafts on my feet—like the old salt who can feel the changes in the weather in his pegleg.”

The sparks roared up the flue, sucked by the wind. Peterson stroked the drooping dark mustache, stood watching the fire. Steynes fixed another cigarette in the holder and went on, snapping a wooden match on his thumbnail with a long finger.

“Now, it seems to me that my distrust of coincidence is justified. You tell me your brother is dead. Is he dead because Austin Cooper and Gunter Brendel, two Nazis, are calling to one another across the years? It seems possible, doesn’t it?” He stopped and stared at me with those naked eyes. “Tell me about your brother, Mr. Cooper. Tell me why you have followed his trail to Cat Island.”

I tried to lay it out carefully for Colonel Steynes. It took considerable time. I concluded: “And three nights ago in Glasgow Alistair Campbell was shot and killed by a man who also tried to kill me. I escaped and realized when I saw your letter on my brother’s desk in London that Campbell spoke your name to me in that dim hallway as he died and I misunderstood him. We’re here, Colonel Steynes, because Campbell wanted us to come and because my brother was here … and his path is the path we’re following.”

Steynes had blanched behind his weatherbeaten exterior and a quick tightness yanked at the corners of his mouth. He took a stiff measure of whiskey, said quietly: “So Campbell is dead. … Rum fellow, rum … and the most recent victim in a very long war. They have killed him because of you and your brother, of course. He will be avenged, I assure you.”

Peterson caught my eye, mouthed the word “avenged” with raised eyebrows. Peterson was not impressed. I was beginning to break into a cold sweat.

Colonel Steynes’ pale eyes flickered at us from behind the sandy blond lashes, banked and freezing fires in the maimed body. His eyes frightened me because Peterson could just be right: Steynes might be mad. The metallic voice was going on.

“Now you tell me—if I may sum up this altogether extraordinary tale—that your brother is mysteriously murdered, that some awesome species of document has been sought by strange and homicidal men who choose to handle all matters with a maximum of violence, that these curious documents are in fact old Nazi plans for world domination—historical trivia, at this point, heh?—that a town has been sacked in a manner worthy of my ancestor Bevil Steynes, Bevil the Red, as he was known by his chums, that a harmless old professor is murdered in Buenos Aires after meeting with your brother. …” He paused for breath. Outside, the wind smote the house and it creaked and whirred like a machine.

“You tell me that Martin St. John and Alfried Kottmann, both of whom are known to me—a point which we’ll come to in good time, that both St. John and Kottmann met with your brother, met with you, and subsequently vanished from the face of the earth. You tell me that my old friend Campbell is shot to death in a Glasgow slum in an attempt to keep him from directing you gentlemen to me. …” He sighed again, leaned back in the wheelchair, cosseted by chrome and steel and leather, the King of Cat Island.

“I suggest that my first distrust of coincidence was correct, that we are dealing with a very specific pattern.

“Let me further suggest that the only coincidence in this entire business was your late brother running across that photograph in the Glasgow
Herald.

“From then on, I suggest that Cyril Cooper was a doomed man, doomed because he was driven by something in his own character to find his sister. Once he set out to find her, he no longer had a chance to escape with his life.

“And why? Why must that be so?

“Because your brother had come too close to them, to Brendel, to Kottmann, to St. John, to all the rest of them. …”

“Who are these men?”

A faint smile came and went. He poured himself another whiskey and soda, wet his thin, dry lips. “That
is
what you are wondering, inevitably, and let me say that if I thought I could save you … I would simply refuse to tell you. But even now, only the grace of God has kept you alive.

“In light of that and the nature of the situation you find yourselves in, I will tell you even more than I told your brother. I owe it to his memory as well as to you. I will tell you who I am and what I am, how I came to be the man I am at this moment—

“But it is much too late in the day to begin all that now—we will start in the morning.” He smiled at us, turned the wheelchair around, and began to move off, beckoning us to follow him. “I trust that I have piqued your interest.” In the entrance hall he rolled to the bottom of the wide staircase. A chair attached to a track on the wall waited at the foot of the stairs. Laboriously he levered himself out of the wheelchair into the lift. Peterson and I stood watching. The exertion tightened his face into a grimace of effort, pain, determination.

“Now,” he said, once he was situated, “Dawson will see you to your rooms for the night. And, gentlemen, you can sleep soundly. As long as you are here with me on Cat Island you are entirely safe. And now,” he concluded as the chair slipped from view into the darkness at the top of the stairs, “good-night.”

Seabirds, gulls, wheeled against the gray wet sky hovering low over the Atlantic. Occasional bursts of rain spattered the windows in the room crowning the lighthouse which was built on a tiny outcropping of rock reached by a stone causeway that was crumbling slowly away over the centuries. At eye level, through the fog and mist, the shape of the high walls of the castle keep loomed over the plateau. The smell of wet ferns and moss and saltiness seeped in at every crack, the wet pungent odor of the sea. Peterson stood glumly, subdued, staring at the evidence of a distant horizon slicing like a jagged knife wound, separating the grayness of the sky and the slate flat sea which grew choppy and angry as it approached the island.

Dawson poured us steaming midmorning coffee from an old thermos. Peterson sipped loudly, burrowed deep into his black leather trench coat, pulled a white muffler tight at his tonsillitis, sniffed. I was trying to keep my pipe lit, gave it up, burned my mouth on the wickedly strong black coffee. Colonel Steynes, in a plaid Burberry cape, was settled in the swiveling wooden chair beside the mechanism controlling the lights.

Waiting for Colonel Steynes to begin, I tried to pick out landmarks visible on the nasty sledge of granite, like the exposed head of a hammer crashing up through the surface of the Atlantic, that was Cat Island. The Stone Age hut huddled remarkably intact on the sheltered landward side, shielded from the weather, surrounded by wet green turf like sponge, encroaching bracken, the odd thicket of bramble and remembered hedge which dotted that side of the island. Moss clung to the walls. Down the Beach Road a quarry lay like an explosion from an ancient war, eaten out of the granite. And above it the vine-covered tennis courts and the rusted fuselage of the German airplane. Driving from the main house to the lighthouse road, Dawson had swung the old Rolls on a miniature detour, stopped above the cliffs, pointed with a smile of real enjoyment at the ME 109 driven like a stake into the cliff—the plane which had pursued the Colonel through the fog and rain back to Cat Island more than thirty years before. It too had begun to green with sea moss.

Over a hearty breakfast, accompanied by Peterson’s sneezing, the Colonel had reminisced about his career. He was half-German, had served as a courier and special operative based in Cairo before the war, had gone on to Whitehall, had engaged in the Battle of Britain, flying Spitfires and a limping old Hawker Hurricane. It was in the Hurricane that he’d run afoul of several Messerschmitts on his last flight.

The crash of the Hurricane had crushed much of his spinal column, broken his legs, burned his body badly, left his carcass leaking blood like a sieve. He had remained comatose for several weeks while the effort was made to save his rapidly waning life. In time, of course, he’d come around. A year after the crash he’d come back to Cat Island, paralyzed from the waist down, weak as a child and almost hairless, like an aged, decrepit baby. Dawson accompanied him, had stayed on, had brought him back to health.

At breakfast, Colonel Steynes had discussed the murder of his German half-sisters by the Nazis in 1945 as the Russians pushed toward Berlin. Their deaths were singularly senseless and the news came to him shortly after hostilities ceased. Subsequently, his health having sufficiently improved, he was invited to join a team of British officials sent to Germany to engage in the investigations of a few, very specific war crimes. Among them were the murders of his half-sisters: the killers, though identified by witnesses who survived, were never found. Eventually he returned to Cat Island, alone. His entire family, German and English branches, had been wiped out by the war. By the Germans. By the Nazis. “An extraordinary coincidence,” he had said, tucking into his toast and eggs, “but I have never found the pattern in it—except in the chance result.”

Now, in the lighthouse, with the electric-heater bars growing red, he began to elaborate on his story.

“So I watched the world in convulsion after the war. I saw Germany sick and reeling, cowering in defeat, hostile and pathetic and resentful, even more crippled than I was. I was, I believed, more or less helpless, a physical derelict—but the longer I remained in Germany the more I began to see that there was a moral difference between my weakness and theirs. And I began to harbor a more than normal distaste for the Germans. I saw my reaction for what it was—the seed of an irrational illness, an obsessive hatred for an entire race of people, the Germans.