The Wind Chill Factor (13 page)

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s peculiar but for some people they never end, every so often they find some poor bastard holed away in a Berlin attic or a Jap somewhere on some Pacific rock who still think there’s a war on. People are funny, as the man on the radio used to say.”

He stood at the window drinking his coffee.

“But the people who want you dead don’t know that you don’t know … anything, really. After all, you’re Cyril’s brother and he knows about the boxes, he knows enough to bring him back from Buenos Aires. Put yourself in their shoes. Since Cyril knows about the boxes—whatever there is about those boxes, and we still don’t know—he
may
have told you and as long as that possibility exists they figure that you’ll have to die, too. Cyril may have told you in his wire for all they know. He
may
have telephoned you from Buenos Aires, he
may
somehow have gotten the word about the boxes to you.

“Those boxes, which had been sitting around that library for years, are terribly important to someone, Cooper. Whether or not Paula knew anything about them, she had them—and they killed her to get them. So we’re left with those boxes. What’s in them? And what’s in the one they left behind? And who was the man who tried to kill you? And who else is in danger? Anyone you’ve talked to? Doctor Bradlee? Brenner? Me, for Christ’s sake? I’ve got the goddamn box—I may be next on their goddamn list. And, believe me, Cooper, this piece of frozen hamburger out there in the snow didn’t do all this by himself—not by a long shot.”

Perspiration was standing out on Peterson’s forehead and he wiped his face with a handkerchief. It was the first time I’d noticed any evidence of nerves. By talking through it to convince me of the danger, I believe he had opened up some new vistas for himself. I think he was just getting an inkling of the enormity of what was happening, an inkling which had not reached me in my tiredness and sorrow and revulsion at what had happened.

We didn’t say much more until the ambulance came and then I heard Peterson giving orders to the men who were going out to get the body. “Be careful not to break him,” Peterson warned. “He should be pretty damn brittle by now.”

It took us an hour to get my Lincoln and his Cadillac free of the driveway and then I followed him into town. It was twenty-five degrees below zero and the wind was blowing snow everywhere. You couldn’t see anything but snow when you looked away from the tail-lights ahead of you. It was one thirty in the afternoon of January 23.

T
HE ATTACK ON ARTHUR BRENNER
was already over by the time Peterson and I were driving into Cooper’s Falls. It had begun about noon and continued until one o’clock without interruption and then stopped.

With the storm making travel next to impossible, we might have gone even longer than we did without knowing what had happened. But Peterson had begun to get nervous about Brenner in midafternoon. When he tried to call him there was no answer at his home, no answer at his office in the hotel, and he had not been seen by anyone at the hotel all morning. Peterson looked at me.

Together we drove toward Brenner’s house, which sat on the outskirts of town overlooking the river, masked from the road by a hill covered with firs and evergreens and pines. The path had been plowed, was one-car wide, but the tremendous gales had partially refilled the way with powdery snow. We said nothing as we drove. My stomach burned with a bilious nausea; my knees shook. The Cadillac with its four snow tires got stuck at one narrow turn, the front end buried in a wall of snow which extended well above the top of the car. I’d heard of such walls caving in and burying cars, leaving the passengers, with no way of pushing the doors open, to die of carbon monoxide poisoning or freeze if the motor was turned off. Peterson rocked the car back and forth and finally it freed itself as a portion of the wall cascaded down across the hood with enough impact to be felt inside, enough impact to send a shudder through almost three tons of Cadillac.

Coming around the final corner, we saw the house dimly through the curtain of snow, a shapeless mass blending into the grayness of the storm which hung over the river below. As we moved closer, with an agonizing slowness, we saw that the house was dark.

“My God!” There was a quality of awe in Peterson’s voice.

An explosion had ripped a hole in the front of Arthur Brenner’s white Colonial house. Where there should have been a door there was a jagged cavity, blackened. Windows on the front of the house were blown in.

Peterson stopped the car and we ran as best we could across the snow, sinking to our knees through the crust that bit at us like ragged edges of broken glass.

“Brenner,” I heard him calling. “Brenner!” There was desperation in that cry, sorrow and fear and despair.

The front door had been snapped off its hinges and lay smoking in the front hall. A mirror was shattered, a vase of flowers in pieces on the snow-covered hallway floor.

Directly in line with the door and the hole in the front of the house, Arthur Brenner lay face down on the carpeted stairway as if he were trying somehow to crawl up the stairs. He was wearing a heavy wool bathrobe and seemed to be in one piece. He lay very still.

Miraculously, Arthur Brenner was not only alive, but almost untouched. His cheek had been bruised and he had been knocked unconscious by the impact of the blast. But Arthur, huge and elongated on the steps, fluttered open his heavy-lidded eyes, stared up at us, and moved his mouth slowly without making sounds.

“They booby-trapped the door,” Peterson said. “Get him some brandy.”

The brandy seemed to revive Brenner and he nodded, swallowing. “I heard the door chimes, I opened the door, and there was an explosion and the next thing I knew you were here.”

“I can’t tell you how lucky you are,” Peterson said.

“I know, I know. They wanted me dead.”

Apparently there were no ill effects. In a few minutes Arthur was on his feet, shaking his great head, leading us into his study. While Brenner went to his basement workroom to check his porcelain figures, Peterson quickly built a fire in the grate and had it roaring when the old man came back. He was smiling and had a Band-Aid on his cheek. Not a single piece had been broken.

After giving Arthur a detailed report on what had been happening in the hours since he had bade me goodnight with the suggestion that I say my prayers, Peterson leaned back in the chintz-covered armchair and finally lit a cigar.

“It all adds up to one rather startling fact. Almost impossible to believe.
We are under siege.
This is a war and we are cut off by the elements, under attack from unknown forces. We have killed one of their number. They have killed two of us and tried to kill two more. They have attacked us in our homes with rifle and explosives.” He looked at us and I had the feeling of unreality you get when watching a certain kind of movie, when the danger is part of the movie and not of your own life. Of course I was wrong: this was no movie.

“Why?” Brenner asked softly.

“They want that box,” Peterson said.

“More,” I said. I was terribly tired. “They want to kill anyone who may have seen the contents. Anyone who
may
have seen the contents.”

“They are frightened,” Peterson said.

“So am I,” Brenner said.

In the late afternoon we all climbed back into the Cadillac, negotiated the narrow canyon of driveway, and laboriously made our way back to town. We were at war.

The mayor of Cooper’s Falls was waiting for us when we finally got to Petersons office in the courthouse. He was wearing a purple Minnesota Vikings snowmobile suit and holding a visored purple helmet in his left hand. He belonged to the purple snowmobile standing at the courthouse steps. His face was pale, he was forty-four years old, he owned an insurance agency, and his name was Richard Aho. He was a Finn.

“Peterson,” he said calmly as we stood in the outer office with Alice watching us. There was the overpowering reek of strong coffee. The radiators sizzled. It was five o’clock. “Peterson, what is going on here, in this town? I come into the office to try out my new snowmobile, a Christmas present from Phyllis, and I start hearing all sorts of shit.”

“What shit, Richard?” Peterson slid out of his coat and hung it on a hook. “Sandwiches, Alice, get ’em over at the hotel, an assortment. And, Alice—you’re a dear.” He walked through to his own office. “What shit have you been hearing, Richard?” We all went into the office. It was stifling.

“Dead people? That shit.” Aho looked persistently at Peterson. “One of the Coopers, of all people, and the librarian, Paula … Smithies. Are they dead? Murdered?” He unzipped the purple quilted suit: “Christ, it’s hot in here.”

“Yes, they’ve been murdered. And this fellow here”—he pointed at me—“is another Cooper, John Cooper, and they’ve tried twice to kill him and last night he killed one of them out at the Cooper place. This afternoon they rigged a bomb to Arthur Brenner’s house and blew the front off.”

Aho took the news with a quiet, staring amazement. Though I had never heard of him, Cooper’s Falls was his town, too. From time to time he looked at me. Finally he said: “Mr. Cooper, trouble seems to follow you.”

Peterson grinned. Aho’s coal-colored eyes bored into me.

I yawned.

“Seems to,” I said.

We all ate the sandwiches and learned that our telephone connections to the outside were gone. The storm had taken lines down all along the St. Croix as well as in many rural areas across the state. We could contact the Twin Cities by short wave but so far our little war was ours alone: no word had been sent. Peterson argued that it would do no good since we were unreachable. The highways were all blocked, all airplanes were grounded. Snowmobiles could get through, at least in theory, but the cold was too intense and the visibility in the storm was nil. Unlikely as it seemed, we were cut off from the outside world. Aho nodded his agreement.

There was no word at all from Buenos Aires in response to Peterson’s inquiries.

The box sat in the middle of the desk. Peterson nudged it. “The problem is this thing. We’ve still got it. And they still want it. It’s no good to us because we don’t know what it means.”

“Are they prepared to kill us all?” Aho pursed his lips.

Peterson shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“They think they’ve killed Arthur,” I said. “They must have figured that he might have seen the contents of the box and understood what it meant.”

Brenner blew his nose and coughed. His cold was worse than ever. He looked his age just then, slumped in a chair in the corner, his muffler wrapped around his throat. Peterson pulled a flask of brandy from his desk and handed it to him.

“They don’t know where the box is,” Peterson said. Alice brought more sandwiches and coffee. “Why don’t you go on home, Alice? It’s late.”

“I’m afraid to go out,” she said. “It’s cold, murderers are lurking in the streets, and I’m not going out. I’m staying right here until the storm is over.” She was determined.

“Take a room at the hotel,” he said. “On the town treasury.”

“Well, thank heavens. I will, but I’ll wait here awhile yet. You may need me.” She went back to the outer office. We could hear her talking to other women who worked in the building, gathered now around her desk.

“Cozy,” Brenner said.

“They don’t know where the box is,” Peterson said. “I think we had better leave the damn box here, lock it up, get to the hotel, and as John Wayne used to say, make our stand there.”

No one had a better idea. So we piled back into our gear, closed up the courthouse, and fought our way through the storm to the hotel across the street.

I bedded down in a double room with Arthur. We all drank brandy and stayed together until midnight. The talk was desultory. We were all tired. At midnight, when I could no longer keep my eyes propped open, Peterson insisted that we all get to bed.

Arthur was snoring almost immediately and the close air smelled of the lemon toddy he’d drunk in bed. I was so tired that it was impossible to think. It was a good thing.

T
HE NIGHT CAME UNDONE WITH
a racketing explosion which brought me awake, sweating in the overheated hotel room. Brenner lay breathing deeply in his bed. I shivered with a chill. My stomach turned. For an instant I wondered why I had wakened; then I heard the continuation of the explosion, which was no quirk of my imagination. It was real and I unwound myself from the bedclothes, went to the window. The streetlights shed a yellow light through the falling snow, and past the snow the courthouse was burning. I heard the whine of snowmobiles, saw only the jagged flames at the windows of the courthouse. There was another detonation, the window before me rattled, new flames were jerked up out of the dim shape of the courthouse.

Brenner stirred. I went into the hallway and began rapping on Peterson’s door. He called to me to come in. He was sitting in an armchair by the window staring out across the street. Past him, I saw the flames in the night. Aho stood in the doorway to the white-tiled bathroom, where a light reflected brightly.

Peterson did not turn to me.

“Well, Cooper, what do you think of that? They just blew up my goddamn courthouse.” He chuckled bleakly. “Tenacious bastards. I’ll give them that. They come out of the night with the weather ready to kill them, forty below zero, they come out of the night on their snowmobiles and they go after that box. And they blow up my courthouse.”

Aho sneezed and swore.

I didn’t know what to say.

A match flared, I smelled Peterson’s cigar.

I looked at my watch; it was three fifteen. My body ached; my head hurt. I shook with a sudden chill. The hotel was beginning to produce sounds as townspeople trapped for the night by the storm came alive, began emptying into hallways.

“Come in here, out of the hall, for Christ’s sake,” Peterson said. Brenner was up, sniffling behind me, wrapped in his heavy overcoat. He followed me into the room without speaking.

Silently, the four of us stood watching the fire grow through the storm. Flames ate their way through the structure. A wall, damaged by the blasts within, made a crunching, sliding noise and slipped away. A furnace was revealed, yellow and orange, flickering away into the night.