The Wind Chill Factor (41 page)

“It’s a matter of leverage more than anything else. It was more important to us to get out than it was to the goon squad to keep us there. Now the goons, they were supposed to keep us there, but if we told them they might die trying to keep us there, their choice became one of choosing to let us go and living for sure or keeping us there and maybe dying.” He snuffled and clapped his hands for circulation. “Now you give a man that kind of choice between living and dying and most of the time he’ll choose to live. The leverage, of course, is the guns. You’ve always got to be able to back up your threats. If we’d said, let us out of here or we’ll beat on you with our tiny fists, forget it. They’d have fed us to the dog for breakfast.”

He pointed the Mercedes on through the town, which was nothing but a blur behind the snow.

“Roeschler’s map says we angle off this main road and head back up into the mountains. We stop short of Austria but we get pretty well hidden in the Alps. We’re about halfway there. The place we’re going, this schloss, belongs to Brendel and it’s deserted now. Roeschler says there’s a tiny village where the road becomes impassable and a man named Lindt will take us the rest of the way.”

Light comes quickly to the Alps, even the gray blur of that morning with the fir trees like black cones and the snow banked higher than the top of the Mercedes. It comes up out of Russia and the East and unaware the world takes shape, even the blunted gray-white crags and the endless towers of snow and tree and rock fading, disappearing in the snowstorms high in the mountain passes.

There were road signs posted frequently, jutting out of the snow, barely visible.

Frostschaden

Schlechte Wegstrecke

Verengte Fahrbahm

We were somewhere between Bad Tolz and Garmisch, where they do all the skiing. By the looks of it outside I couldn’t believe anyone would be out skiing. It would have been so simple to simply glide off into the snow and be gone forever.

A small castle, stubby and squat, rose up quickly like an apparition and Peterson said, sighing with evident relief, “That’s it. We’re here.” He pitched a sucker out the window and slid the car to a quivering halt before the largest of several smallish structures clustered around the foot of the castle.

He hurried off to knock on the door with all the gingerbread around its frame. It opened immediately and he ducked inside.

I woke Lise, who came to like a child, rubbing her eyes with her fists and moaning in a tiny voice. For an instant there was a glint of terror in her eyes, then she recognized me.

“John,” she said slowly, as if learning again how to control her tongue, “I have to use the toilet, please.”

I helped her up to the doorway and pushed inside.

Peterson was talking with a gray-haired, gray-bearded man of fifty or so who wore a red-and-black checked shirt. Wind whistled in a large, blackened fireplace where coals smoked. Lise went away.

“Herr Lindt is ready to take us to the schloss. He says the snowmobiles have been rented but that we will be much warmer and more comfortable in the sleigh. I said okay. We couldn’t keep crazypants on a snowmobile anyway.”

Lise came back and Peterson went to the bathroom. Lise took my hand and held it to her face, smiling.

Lindt threw a log on the kitchen fire. She drank coffee from a huge chipped mug. Lindt went outside to ready the sleigh. Peterson came back and I went to the bathroom. I wondered if she even remembered that her husband was dead. The monster of the night had turned into Goldilocks and the problem was I wanted to hold her and kiss her.

Someone pounded on the door.

“Get your ass out here,” Peterson said. “It’s time. Donner and Blitzen and Cupid are chomping at the bit.”

Peterson rode in front with Lindt. Lise and I burrowed in back beneath blankets which covered our faces. We could hear the horses snorting and the runners hissing and the wind moving on the crust. Her hair was in my face and she turned her face up, her cheeks fresh and dark glasses over the mouse by her eye. She grinned. Her mouth was wide and impudent. I kissed her. Her mouth didn’t move, she didn’t lass me back, and I knew I was making an awful mistake.

I don’t know how many times I pressed my mouth to hers, how many times I wanted her to respond. But she didn’t and I kept touching her face with my lips, the scab on her lip, the marks where she’d been struck, the snow on her forehead.

The sleigh finally stopped and I heard Lindt and Peterson get down, puffing, staggering in the snow. Peterson opened the tiny door for us to climb down and he went off with Lindt. The schloss had a balcony and looked like something from a guidebook. I stood up and saw an incredible panorama stretching below, beyond the line of fir trees. Far below, with the sun glinting on gray ice and snow, lay a lake. Great tufts of snow and fog hung above it but there it was, miles away and a long way below, huddled among the mountains like a picture from a jigsaw puzzle box, and it occurred to me that Gunter Brendel would never see it again.

I pulled Lise up and she saw what I saw. She shrugged and lowered her eyes.

“But am I your sister, John?”

A fire blazed in the grate. The stone fireplace took up half of an entire wall and heated the large room. The electric lights didn’t work. Lindt was carrying logs in from a shed outside and Peterson had opened several cans of stew and canned brown bread. He was doing the cooking on the stove, which drew propane from tanks. The house was warm enough to shuck our coats. Lise was curled on a couch before the large fire, her sheepskin coat thrown across her lap and legs, a brandy snifter in her right hand. Lindt began carrying logs up to the bedroom, which opened onto the balcony circling the main room on three sides. It was very hard to believe it was anything but a vacation.

Peterson heard me come in and spoke without turning to look at me.

“Delicacy is not my strong suit, Cooper. You know that by now, right? Right?”

“Sure. You’re insensitive. It’s too bad but you have other good qualities.”

“So let me get it right out there. The lady you’ve been necking with has two big strikes on her for sure, before you even start looking at her hard. One, she may be your sister. Two, she is a nut case. Am I right?”

“The question is, is it any of your business?”

He plunged a long wooden spoon into the pot on the stove.

“Nobody likes a smartass, Cooper.” He dropped the spoon on the stove and ground pepper from a mill into the pot. “So I’m suggesting, man to man, that you think twice before messing around with the widder lady. That’s all.” He turned and looked at me. “I’m talking to you as a friend. I guess I’ve come to think of you as a friend of mine. I just think you should leave her alone. Treat her like the sister you thought she was. That’s all. Otherwise, she’s all trouble, and a mile wide.”

“Look, I’m having a hard time handling this—it wasn’t what I meant to do.”

“She can make it worse for you, believe me.”

“What if I said I just can’t help it?”

“I’d understand that and I’d be sorry. Because right now, regardless of what she means to you, she’s dead last on my list of priorities.” He sighed and rubbed his stubble of beard. “And you’re a nice guy, an innocent. I want to see you come out the other end of this nightmare. I don’t care if she makes it through the afternoon.”

Lise came to the kitchen table and the three of us sat like deaf and dumb mountain dwellers, scraping the bottoms of our bowls.

Lise fell asleep on the couch in the afternoon. I sat in a deep chair watching her for a while, wondering where her mind was, remembering that I’d seen her husband die quite violently only a bit over twelve hours before. The fire was warm and the party seemed a long time ago, acted out by another cast altogether.

Peterson went upstairs after our lunch and was gone an hour. When he came back down his face was freshly shaven and his mustache was trimmed. He wore a heavy turtleneck sweater and Levis, all from the bags which Lindt had dutifully loaded onto the sleigh from the trunk of the Mercedes. He looked reasonably fresh and he was carrying two rifles from a case on the balcony. Both were mounted with telescopic sights and rested over one forearm. In his hand was a large box of ammunition. He sat down at a long trestle table behind the long couch where Lise slept and laid the rifles lengthwise. He began to play with them but I didn’t want to know why.

It was dark when I woke up. Lise lay on her side asleep, her mouth slightly open, an arm jutting outward from the couch toward the fire. The rifles lay on the table.

He looked up when I went back to the kitchen.

“Stew,” he said. “Brendel must have loved stew. There’s enough in the cupboard to feed the entire Fourth Reich.” He tossed the corkscrew to me. “Open another bottle.”

“What about Lise?”

“Let her sleep.”

We ate quietly, exhaustion everywhere. Peterson had developed a low cough and had a row of pills arranged on the tabletop.

“Can I take these with wine, do you think?” He picked them up, rolled them in his palm like dice. “Roeschler gave them to me for my throat and cold and incipient pneumonia.”

Later, we took a bowl of stew to Lise and the three of us sat in the firelight talking. He was quite civil to her and she seemed reasonable if impersonal. We were all tired and said nothing of the events of the previous evening. Less than twenty-four hours before, Peterson and I were setting off for the party.

Peterson and I smoked cigars and drank Brendel’s port and stared sleepily into the fire. Finally Lise took a candle and said goodnight, climbed the stairs, and disappeared into one of the bedrooms. I watched her go.

“How long do you think we’ll have to wait?” I asked.

Peterson shrugged. “I don’t know. Tomorrow, the next day. There may not even be a way to reach us. It would be easier to say if I knew who to trust.”

“What do you mean? We’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys.”

“But who’s who? All we know is what people tell us. St. John told you things, Kottmann told you things, Alistair Campbell and Ivor Steynes and Roeschler and Lise—they’ve all told us things. But who the hell knows what’s true? We keep hearing about things, a plan, coming to a head. Money in Madrid. Magical submarines, plans to take over the world, a group of conspirators called the Spider.

“What I want to know is just this: If this is so goddamned big and powerful and menacing, why hasn’t someone else, the CIA or the Russians or somebody, discovered it and stopped it? Why Cyril? Why us? We’re accidents, Cooper, not spies. We weren’t looking for any of this, we stumbled into it. I’m beginning to wish we could just stumble on out. But they won’t let us. It’s all very strange. An accident.”

“Maybe that’s the explanation. Accident. It’s hard to prepare for accidents.”

“Sure, sure. We may have penetrated by accident. But why the hell didn’t they just kill you? Or us?” A log fell, sprinkling sparks on the hearth.

“Somebody up there likes us.”

Wind ate away at chinks in the chimney.

“I think you’ve got it,” Peterson said. “Somebody somewhere is watching over us.”

It was pitch-dark when I opened my eyes. Someone was speaking to me but I couldn’t make sense of it. The square window took shape, the fire took glowing form, the smell of the smoldering embers made sense, jogged my memory. I looked up at the figure leaning over me, the hair draping down. It was Lise. She was speaking German, her voice edging toward hysteria.

She was wearing the sheepskin coat. It hung open, the lining brushing my face.

“What’s the matter?’

She shivered. Her legs were bare. She pulled the coat tight.

“I woke up, all alone. I didn’t know where I was. I called for Gunter, then I realized I was alone, and I began to cry. I didn’t know where anybody was and I thought I heard someone outside.” She sniffled. “I was thinking about Gunter. Is he all right? Someone told me he was dead, maybe in my dream. I’m so confused, I’m so tired. I woke up thinking he was dead and then I couldn’t remember how I got here. Someone had hit me, Gunter I think, and then someone told me he was dead—” She peered at me.

I lit a match on the bedside table and fired the stubby candle I’d brought with me from the kitchen. She was covered with goosepimples, her arms, her legs.

“Where is he? Please … John.”

“He’s dead, Lise. He was killed at your party.”

“Your brother is dead, too. Isn’t he?”

“Yes, he’s dead, too.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

She sniffled again and touched her lip.

“Who cares, anyway? Do you know?”

“When I found my brother dead, I cared then. And then, each time someone else died, maybe I didn’t care quite so much. Now I don’t know … I cared about finding you.”

She looked at me. Her eyes were wide, remote, vacant.

“I had to find you,” I said. “If you were my sister it was worth anything and I just wouldn’t stop looking until I found you.” I reached out and took her hand. Christ, who was she?

“Why?” she asked tonelessly, her hand limp and cold. “I don’t know who I am, I don’t know why I’m here, my husband is dead.” She slumped inside the heavy coat. “You kissed me in the sleigh. … And was it all worth it?’

“I don’t know.”

“Are you glad you found me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you do it? What was the point?”

“My brother was dead. And he had your photograph.”

“So was it worth it?”

“Are you my sister?”

There were tears on her cheeks, like icicles. “Maybe I never knew—”

“If you are, it was worth it.”

“Why would you kiss your sister that way?” She was watching the candle’s twitching flame.

“I couldn’t help it, that’s all.”

“Do you want to make love to me, then?”

“Yes … I don’t know, Lise.”

She pulled back the comforter and got into bed, lay straight beside me. She was ice-cold, quaking, rigid. There was no desire in me. I looked at her face, white, stark, staring at the ceiling. Her eyes were open, fixed like something in marble. She lay like a corpse, unnerving, inanimate. I leaned across her, felt her bare leg next to me, felt her breath on my neck. I blew out the candle. What a waste it all was. I kissed her cold, dead lips. I put my hand on her thighs, felt the smoothness and the wiry hair between her legs. A tremor shook her body.