The Wind Chill Factor (35 page)

“And this is the man Gunter chose to be Lise’s new friend.” He shook his head. “It was a purely political move on Gunter’s part—perhaps a
rapprochement,
reconciling his own political interests with Siegfried’s. After all, Gunter represents the
real
Nazis in Germany these days—perhaps he feels the competition between the old and the new has gone on long enough. Perhaps, to take another more pragmatic view, he is trying to lull Siegfried’s people into relaxing their vigilance. Perhaps Gunter is preparing another night of the long knives for his young friends. He is certainly capable of it. But I only see the outlines of it, I don’t know the details.”

We walked a bit farther. Peterson was puffing in the cold. My mind raced, imprecise, driven by fear and curiosity. Roeschler was so calm.

“Did Lise tell you to tell us this?”

“No, Mr. Cooper, certainly not.”

“Does she even know about her husband’s political activities? Or Siegfried Hauptmann’s? I can’t remember who knows what around here,” he muttered.

Roeschler stopped in the middle of the street and took hold of both our arms, his grasp firm.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how much she knows. I think, quite frankly, that she is almost totally egocentric. I don’t know if she is aware of anything beyond the limits of her own being. I don’t even know if she is altogether sane.” He gave me a wintry smile and was quiet during the walk back to his home.

We sat in one of the Schwabing coffeehouses an hour later, staring at one another over bitter espressos. Snow had begun to sift down through the soft glow of the paraffin lamps and there was an ache behind my eyes. Peterson stared dolefully into the night and absent-mindedly applied the Benzedrine inhaler to his nose. I shook my head.

“Two groups of Nazis—there’s no end to it, it’s like a children’s game, fighting over whose bat and ball it is. I’m punchy, I can’t even remember what he said.”

“It’s not
what
he told us,” Peterson said. “It’s that he told us at all that’s so amazing. And he knew I would be with you. And he expected us to swallow all that stuff. Poor Anna, dear little Heinrich, sad and bewildered Lise, rich and dashing Siegfried, and good old Gunter, the only sane one in the bunch. He’s right about that, it’s a madhouse, Cooper, a madhouse, and that’s what makes it so hard to figure out. It’s a goddamn playpen. Steynes is a nut, Dawson is a robot, Lise is a manic-depressive having an identity crisis. Shadow Nazis are running around all over the field and then we run into a comic-opera killer like Milo Keepnews and I wind up killing him in a toilet. Everyone seems to die but you, no matter how hard they try they can’t seem to nail you, an absurd situation if they know what they’re doing.”

“It’s real enough for me,” I grunted. “I keep thinking they’ll get me eventually. I’m so tired of it—I just don’t want them to get me until I see her tomorrow. That’s all I’m waiting for at this point, beyond that I’m beginning not to care. …”

Peterson was grinning more widely with each minute. “I’ve been trying to figure them out, see their plan, get a bead on what was going on. Well, goddamn it, they don’t know what’s going on. They don’t care who dies but they’re very sloppy about their methods. It explains a lot. They’re bunglers and they’re amateurs. Christ!” Glee curled around his cigar like a Christmas wreath. “Roeschler!”

“Roeschler what? Don’t you believe him?”

“It doesn’t make any difference. He’s playing a game of his own. Steynes is playing his game. Brendel his. They are all playing their own games and we’ve been trying to fit in, play all the games at once because we thought there was just one game. But that’s wrong—lots and lots of games. When I faced up to it with Keepnews we began to play ours. When you called Lise we were still playing ours—now we can’t start backsliding.”

“But what is our game?” I asked.

“Your game is to find out if she’s your sister—let me worry about the rest of it.”

By morning Munich had turned white. The snow was dry and fine. When I went outside the wind sprayed it on my face like old memories of anticipation and beautiful women. Skaters with their scarves unfurling behind them slid noiselessly through the snow, carving their paths on the ice of the small lake. The English Garden was eerie, quiet, sound hugged to the earth by the layers of snow. I was early, stood watching the figures gliding with their hands clasped behind their backs, tried to take Peterson’s advice and play my role as the innocent American searching for a possible connection. Pretending Cyril and Paula and Dolldorf and Campbell and Keepnews were not dead at all but going about their business as usual. It was like being a man with normal sight trying to give the impression of blindness and it was confusing.

The serenity of the park swept across the lake, lapped at my failing nerves, soothed me. If only I could have strolled without reflection into the swirling whiteness, across a tiny arched bridge and into sheer nothingness—then, at that moment, I’d have sighed and gone without a good-bye. Looking back at it, I suspect that I was very far gone in those moments: I was alone, it was quiet and cold, there was no one trying to kill me, the world was as white as an abstract painting, an enormous canvas into which I could step and slowly watch myself dissolve as if I were in two places at once. I felt the way I remembered John Garfield had been in a movie I saw as a kid at the little theater in Cooper’s Falls. He was sitting at the bar on a steamship sailing on an endless sea and Faye Emerson told him he was okay but he was a washed-up newspaperman who drank too much. He was bitter and he was tired out and he didn’t know it but he was already dead, everybody on the ship was dead. John and Faye and Paul Henreid and Eleanor Parker and Edmund Gwenn—they were all dead and they didn’t know it and I was thinking about that movie, remembering that it had been called
Between Two Worlds
and Cyril and I had been taken to see it by our grandfather and one of his guards. Eleanor Parker knew she was dead, she and dapper Paul figured it out, and they asked the steward, Edmund Gwenn, where they were sailing and he said, why, you’re sailing for heaven … and for hell, too, because it was all the same place in the end. It was almost thirty years later and I was sure I hadn’t thought about that long voyage out, with our popcorn and our Dr Pepper, in all that time, but I was thinking about it when I saw Lee standing on the little humped bridge, the outline of her blurred through the snow, and she was watching me. …

Then she came down the bridge and around the gentle curve of the lake toward me, purposeful but not hurrying, she was just walking toward me through the snow and I couldn’t move. There was snow in her hair and her hands were jammed down into the pockets of her leather coat. She was wearing dark brown corduroy pants and her long legs ate up the distance between us until she was standing in front of me, smiling at me levelly, gray eyes straight and for a moment it was there, she looked exactly like my father’s portrait of my mother; she was looking at me and past me at the same time, as if you could never have quite all of her attention.

Her voice was businesslike, faintly clipped and British. “I’ve been watching you, wondering what to do—I’ve been nervous about seeing you.” She turned to me, slid her arm through mine, and shoved her hand back into her pocket, locking me against her and heading off around the lake path. “I’m Lise Brendel … or at least I am until you can prove I’m someone else.” She stuck the tip of her tongue between her lips, caught a snowflake. She wasn’t smiling when I looked.

“I can’t prove anything,” I said. “I have no evidence. Nothing. Intuition, hope, curiosity … but I am a little short of proof.”

“So was your brother.”

“You look like our mother.” A man in a red jacket sat down abruptly on the ice, looking about to see if anyone had been witness to his fall.

“Yes, he told me that, and a good deal more. He told me about your little sister and the Blitz and that the body of the little girl was never found.” She kicked at a tiny snowbank, pulling on my arm. The tension was easing away.

“I do quite want to know who I am. I try to treat this with a certain amount of bravado, I tried it with your brother and he wore me down … and I suppose you’re the same way, aren’t you?” She pushed on, said: “What were you thinking about when I first saw you? Me? Were you thinking about me?”

“No, I was thinking about a movie I saw with my brother Cyril when we were children … a fantasy. A bunch of people on a ship, they didn’t know they were dead but finally Judgment Day comes and they have to answer to Sydney Greenstreet.”

Arm in arm we walked through the snow.

“Paul Henreid comes back to life in the end. So does Eleanor Parker.”

“Not an easy trick,” she said, somber, eyes ahead.

“Love conquers all.”

“I rather doubt that.”

“Well, you should see more movies.”

We walked a path leading out of the park, across the street, with snow to our ankles. Down a few narrow, snowy steps from the sidewalk there was a small coffee shop. A rotund woman with gray braids and a red nose welcomed us effusively; the place smelled of baking sweetcakes and fruit warming and strong coffee. Lise was obviously at home there.

I helped her out of the tight-fitting leather coat: it creaked in my hand. She moved to a table by a window which faced into a tiny patch of garden which ended some ten feet away with a brick wall rising six feet to the sidewalk. The garden was slowly filling with snow; huge flakes fluttered past our window. A fire leaped in the grate. From upstairs came the sound of a piano, elaborating on “Laura.” I was Paul Henried and she was Hedy Lamarr and outside there was a continent in flames, the Nazis reached for the world.

“You like the music?” she asked.

I nodded.

“It’s the proprietress’ son. He’s blind and plays in a jazz club I sometimes go to.”

“With Siegfried?”

Irritation flared like a signal in the night.

“Yes, with Siegfried.”

She took a Camel out of a crushed pack and lit it with a paper match. Her tiny bag matched her coat. She leaned her elbows on the table, narrowing her square shoulders; the tight, ribbed sweater made her seem terribly thin, tiny-breasted and boyish. She wore no jewelry, all very plain, and her gray cat’s eyes were large and luminous. Her cheekbones were high and prominent, the mouth wide, the cold light reflected from the snow took the color from her cheeks and hollowed them out, gave her a gaunt cast. “Is there really much point in going on about my social life? I am very fond of my husband and Siegfried is a close friend. Doctor Roeschler is a kind of father. I lead a very quiet, very circumscribed life. I teach my ballet class, I consult with the children’s mothers, I read books, try to keep my English up, try to understand why there isn’t more to life. I wonder what other people’s lives are like, what gives them meaning, what draws them on from day to day. …” She regarded me coolly. “I am not a very interesting person, I’m afraid, Mr. Cooper. I’m not even sexually responsive … I’m alive. I think I could be interesting perhaps—if only I knew the trick. I’m sure there’s some sort of trick to it. Perhaps, if I’m someone else—” There was no hint of a smile, just the tight-lipped, cool voice. “Then maybe I would find myself interesting. I don’t know. So, if I am your sister, that’s all I amount to. A neurotic, not very happy, exceedingly bourgeois woman on the wrong side of thirty.”

The strudel smelled of hot raisins and apple and cinnamon, caramel melted across expanses of nut buns.

Lise poured coffee, added cream and sugar in large quantities without consulting me, severed a large chunk of bun, spread it with butter, and ate it, leaving a dusting of crumbs on her protruding lower lip. “Good,” she said, licking the tip of a finger. “Go ahead, it’s bad for you,” and she smiled. “Most German women get fat asses and arms in time from just this sort of eating.” She took another bite. “Want to avoid that if possible. Not easy.” She sipped coffee, leaving a faint mustache of foamy cream. The blind boy switched to “You and the Night and the Music” and a gust of wind blew snow in a flurry against the window.

“Tell me about my brother,” I said, “how he behaved. …”

She looked at me blankly.

“Well, you know him. He came to me with the story straight out, saw that it disturbed me, saw that I was unsure of my own lineage and he kept pushing at me about it. He was making inquiries around Munich, stirring certain people up, newspapermen and city records officials. I was sorry that Gunter was upset because that meant he’d see to it that your brother left town. And I liked your brother—he had freckles. Your brother and I shared a sense of what was funny—he once said that what was funniest was what just missed being tragic.” She chewed on the bun, stared out the window for a moment as if remembering something. “I liked that. He said that wherever I actually came from my soul dwelled in the Black Forest. I thought he was rather poetic.”

Wind whistled in the little garden. The piano had slid into “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and I was trying to envision this version of Cyril.

“Did my brother ever mention your husband’s political involvement?”

She smiled, almost chuckled. “The Nazi thing, you mean? Roeschler again, wasn’t it? Well, that’s something which struck us, Cyril and me, I mean, as rather funny—you know, just short of tragic. I’m aware of some of the friends my husband has, some of the games he plays with his friends … but it’s impossible to take seriously, isn’t it?”

“But did my brother express an interest?”

“All right, yes, he mentioned it. Look, he was curious about me. Me. Not my husband. Not Nazis. There was no political overtones.”

“Did he meet with your husband?”

“At his office.”

“And?”

“My husband was irritable, annoyed. He wanted your brother out of our lives.”

“Did he threaten my brother?”

“My husband doesn’t threaten people, Mr. Cooper.”

“Look,” I said, working up to my maximum wounded-sincerity level. “Look, I’m not myself—stop eating for a minute, for God’s sake, and please listen to me. I’m not here as a troublemaker, please believe that—I’m overwrought, I admit it. But I have a hell of a reason.” Her interest was with me now, a handful of bun had come to a halt halfway between plate and mouth.