The Wind Chill Factor Read Online Free PDF Page A

if my grandfather had just gone up the stairs to retire for the evening. Logs had been laid in the cold grate opposite his desk with its brass student lamps. Books lining the walls had been dusted. The World War II position map was still punctuated with colored pins. I stepped closer to it and realized that my grandfather had been refighting the German breakthrough in the Ardennes during the winter of 1944–45, called the Battle of the Bulge ever after, when he had died.
    Another series of pins, all white, marked the corridor which was to have been used for Hitler’s escape at war’s end. A realist at all times, my grandfather had always labeled those who thought the escape route might actually have been used as “romantic idlers.” Hitler was dead, and in my grandfather’s view Hitler’s fate had been earned by his own gross excesses and perversity, was richly deserved for having squandered his chances.
    But there was still a good deal of wallspace given over to framed and frequently autographed photographs of my grandfather in the company of world leaders. There was even one of him puffing a token cigar with Winston Churchill when Churchill was alone in the wilderness of the 1930s. My grandfather was, of course, at political swords’ points with Churchill but admired him enormously. Most of the black-and-white photographs were, however, efforts to capture forever moments with the Nazi leaders: sitting in slatted lawn chairs in slanting late afternoon sunlight with Hitler in some flower garden, chatting with Hitler and Eva Braun at a table laden with the remains of a casual luncheon while a pair of German shepherds drowsed at their feet, peering intently at a bottle of wine being exhibited by von Ribbentrop, who bears an expression of such vacuous arrogance as to be laughable, standing by an immense Mercedes-Benz touring car with a vague smile on his face as if trying to ascertain the reason for Goering’s obvious mirth.
    There were also a great many family pictures, one of which showed me holding a baseball bat, wearing a Chicago Cubs cap, smiling at my grandfather, who wears a characteristic suit and tie. There were pictures of my father, young and quietly concerned, and my mother laughing, holding my little sister Lee, who died. …
    The house was moaning in the wind and there was no point in standing in the library getting sentimental. I was very tired. I took a bottle of Napoleon brandy from a cart against the wall by the large, functional globe, and went back outside, turning off the lights and closing the front door.
    I let the Lincoln roll back into the whiteness, eating it up, down around behind the house, following the railing barely visible over the snow drifts. Inside the car it was still ice cold. But I was all right. I parked beneath the blackened branches of an oak tree which in summer shaded the cottage.
    I got the bags out of the trunk, hauled my gear into the cottage. The screened porch was deep with snow and in the light I could see that the cottage was not kept up as carefully as the main house. It had a mildly stale quality and as I stood in the faintly musty room I realized what was missing, what I’d noticed in the library, in the foyer: cigar smoke. The house still retained the aroma.
    The furnishings were wicker, flowered cushions of green and summer yellow against white painted wicker. It was very cold in the cottage and I stacked wood in the fireplace in the living room, checked the flue for snow and birds’ nests, and lit it, listened to the dry birch and oak crackle in the flame. Then I went to the bedroom, saw that the bed was made, and laid another smaller fire in the bedroom fireplace, lit it.
    While the house was warming up I went around opening all the windows a crack to get rid of the stale smell. Then I went to the kitchen, found that it was stocked with certain necessities, and made coffee in a glass percolator on a gas burner. I lit my pipe of Balkan Sobranie and the two