Vienna at Nightfall

by Richard Wake

  "Baron, the view from your box is magnificent. How long have you been a subscriber?"

  The old man smiled at the honorific and stood just a little straighter. "Call me Karl," he said. "I don't even know how long we've had it -- it's been in the family since before I was born. Families kept them forever, until recently. It is one of the pities of our age."

  After the war, the nobility was put out of business. The Hapsburgs' property was confiscated by the state -- it's how this became the Vienna State Opera instead of the Vienna Court Opera. The minor nobility, without a court to whom it would pay obedience in exchange for its lifestyle, was left to wither. Most of them were financially sinking, throwing one country home over the side this year, a couple of gardeners the next year. Some of them were said to have taken the drastic step of actually going to work for a living, although most of that work was said to involve long lunches and enthusiastic glad-handing on behalf of one bank or another. But I was in no position to judge, seeing as how that's pretty much how I made my living.

  Which is what the baron asked me about. I emphasized the part about being the scion of a Slovakian mining family and glossed over the part about personally knowing the proprietor of at least one shady cafe in 20 different cities between here and the Rhine. We were interrupted at one point by a Herr Doktor Klein, who offered some platitudes admiring the scenery on the stage and then made his excuses.

  Johanna's father caught my eye, and then shot a glance at the retreating Herr Doktor, and then quickly brushed the side of his nose with his index finger, just a quick flick, the universal, unspoken shorthand for Jew. OK, then.

  Just as I began to pontificate on the many industrial uses of magnesite, Johanna and her mother returned, and the lights flickered, and we were back to the box.

  "That seemed to go well," she said.

  "What did you expect?"

  "He can be pretty intimidating."

  "I'm more afraid of you."

  After the allotted time, the performance finally ended, and everyone cheered as if it had been a great success. As the attendant helped Karl on with his cape, though, he said out of the side of his mouth, "I think that cow has put on 50 pounds since we saw her in 'Don Giovanni.'"

  As we got outside, I asked Johanna if she'd like to get something to eat, and she did. I asked her parents if they would like to join us, and they did not. Within seconds, the car appeared, and the Westermanns were gone.

  "Is there anyplace you'd like to go in particular?" I asked.

  "You must have something to eat in your flat -- let's go there."

  I had half of a stale loaf of bread, a few slices of liverwurst and four bottles of beer. Which we did consume, eventually.

  8

  Six or seven streets feed into Stephansplatz. I counted them once in my head, then remembered another one, then resolved to make the circuit around the cathedral and count them accurately, then realized I really didn't care. So, six or seven, not precisely like spokes in a wheel but close enough -- with the enormous Stephansdom at the center.

  If I had paid more attention during physics class, I might understand the reasons for the phenomenon of the wind tunnel. But all I knew for sure was that, when you were walking there on what you considered to be a sort of breezy day, once you exited one of the feeder streets and entered into the main square, sort of breezy became one of those newsreels from Kansas. It was a powerful, comical phenomenon, comical because it left pretty much every man who entered the vortex stooped over forward with a hand holding down his hat on his head.

  Sunday was even funnier, or maybe I was still in such a good mood from the night with Johanna. Because there was an open truck parked on Goldschmiedgasse, with a half-dozen 20-year-olds wearing swastika armbands (completely illegal) and waving a Nazi flag (also completely illegal) and hectoring passers-by to give the Nazi salute (also completely illegal). I know, a laugh riot. But I stood and watched for a minute -- this wasn't a common sight in Vienna, but it wasn't an uncommon sight, either. I watched from about 150 feet or so and saw an old, head-shaking woman ignore the young brownshirts, and I smiled. But the thing that made me laugh out loud was when a scrawny 40-year-old man tried to ignore them, got stopped by one of the kids who jumped out of the back of the truck to block his path, and then relented with a Nazi salute -- at which point, the hat flew off of his head in the wind and down Goldschmiedgasse. As he chased it, my guffaws were taken away in the same wind, camouflaged by nature, unheard by any of the brownshirts.

  You took your laughs where you could get them in February of 1937 in the country that shared a border with Germany and was featured on the first page of "Mein Kampf." First page, second paragraph, to be precise:

  "German-Austria must return to the great German mother country, and not because of any economic considerations. No, and again no: even if such a union were unimportant from an economic point of view; yes, even if it were harmful, it must nevertheless take place. One blood demands one Reich."

  I had lived in Vienna for all of my adult life. It was an odd thing -- I considered myself a Slovak, and my loyalty was to Czechoslovakia first, but I had never actually lived in Czechoslovakia. It was just part of Austria-Hungary when I lived there as a kid. At the same time, I talked about Austria and got involved in loud arguments about Austria -- always in private places -- and I used the word "we" to describe Austrians. I did it reflexively, primarily when I was arguing against Anschluss, extra-especially when I was drinking and arguing. The Czech loyalty was an intellectual thing and a fiber-of-my-being thing -- but I never got the ancient anti-Austrian bias that generally came with it. I loved Austria. It could be confusing, except it wasn't, seeing as how my two loves shared the same predicament -- that is, a border with the corporal.

  All of this had been running through my head in the hours since the invitation to meet the spy was re-delivered the previous week -- same bar, same messenger, same everything. There was never any doubt that I was going to meet him. Part of me wanted to do something meaningful -- not that arranging a threesome every six months for the bald, walks-with-a-cane president of the biggest steel manufacturer in Stuttgart wasn't meaningful. He was our biggest client, after all, and the size of his magnesite order seemed to correlate pretty closely with the attractiveness of the women I managed to wrangle for the occasion. But there was meaningful, and there was truly meaningful, something I had been thinking about a lot since Otto's death, and doing something for the people of my homeland trumped my work as a procurer, however skillful. Exactly what that truly meaningful task might be was what had me baffled as I pulled open the big, heavy door of the cathedral.

  On a Sunday afternoon, well after the last Mass, there seemed to be two kinds of people inside: well-dressed families, undoubtedly from the country, doing a bit of religious sightseeing; and old ladies. So there were two of the latter, heads covered, swaddled in scarves, kneeling at the Wiener Neustadter side altar and staring up at the carved figures or the Virgin Mary after lighting candles. And there was this tableau of the former: a mother shushing her giggling daughters while the father grabbed a 3-year-old boy by the collar before he could sprint up the center aisle, after which husband and wife made eye contact that said clearly, but without words, "Let's get the hell out of here." Holy, holy, holy.

  Meanwhile, I was standing in the back and looking up the right aisle and counting the pillars and seeing no one. But the pillars -- they were enormous -- did block the view of some areas, which I imagined was the whole point of the exercise. Even though my right hand, which held my hat, was shaking noticeably, and even though my bladder was suddenly speaking to me, I began walking up the right aisle, as instructed. I went slowly, making a show of stopping and admiring the stained glass and the statues, really selling it to who knows who. And when I got to the third pillar, there was indeed a man in the pew, kneeling and praying. And in the row in front of him, there was indeed a copy of the newspaper. And, well, what the hell. I kneeled down, careful to look forward at all
times. There wasn't anybody within a hundred feet of us.

  Quickly, the man spoke in a loud whisper.

  "Were you followed?"

  "How the hell should I know?"

  "Christ. Do you think you were followed?"

  "Look. I'm not a --"

  "I know what you are. And I know what you're not. Just listen. Your government needs your help --"

  "But --"

  "Just shut up and listen before you turn me down."

  So, I listened. The request was simple enough. What it amounted to was, he wanted me to be a courier. He said that my job got me into Germany on a regular basis, and that it got me there without suspicion, and that -- because magnesite had both industrial uses and military uses -- it got me in contact with influential business people who, in turn, were in contact with prominent military people. And some of those people had information that could be helpful to the Czech government, and that he wanted me to be available to carry that information back to Vienna.

  I finally spoke. "But isn't that dangerous?"

  "Don't you carry lots of documents on your trips -- contracts, order forms, schematics?"

  "Yeah. Sometimes two briefcases full, depending on the trip."

  "And has anyone ever looked in one of your briefcases at the border?"

  "One time, the Nazis opened one."

  "And?"

  "They looked, saw a bunch of papers and folders, and closed it."

  "You see what I'm saying. The danger is minimal to non-existent for somebody like you. Your company provides an essential material for German industry. They can't build a steel mill without your shit, and they don't have any of their own, which means you are essential to the German military buildup. Nobody is going to bother you."

  Truth be told, I had often thought the same thing. One time, I even put it to the test. It was only a couple of months before, for Leon's father, right before he left Vienna. They won't let you leave Austria with much currency -- almost none, truthfully. So after he sold the family home, he took the proceeds and bought diamonds, and then he gave me the diamonds, and I traveled with them on one of my trips to Saarbrucken. After meeting with my client, I went over the border to Metz the next day, changed the diamonds for francs with a prearranged broker, and then deposited the francs into a prearranged bank account. The diamonds were either in a money belt or in a half-assed false bottom in my briefcase the whole time. No one at any border crossing looked at me for more than a second before stamping my passport and waving me along.

  Still, though, this was different. If I had been caught with the diamonds, I just would have said they were mine and played dumb. I might have had to bribe somebody to get out of trouble, but there really wasn't any risk. There was no way to play dumb, though, about a couple of pages of German military information hidden in the middle of the August magnesite delivery schedules. There was no way to bribe your way out of something like that.

  "I don't know..." I said, finally.

  "Christ. Do you know how important this is?"

  "I think I do, which is why I'm not sure. Can you give me some time to think about it?"

  "Look -- we need to know before you leave for Cologne on the 14th."

  "How the hell do you know when I leave for Cologne?"

  "What do you think, that we're amateurs? This is serious. We are serious people. Think hard, Herr Kovacs. Two weeks. We'll contact you. Now you stay here for five minutes. Say a prayer."

  I heard him get up as I continued to stare straight ahead, fixing on the massive altar in the distance.

  9

  The office of Kovacs Mining Company in Vienna was one room on the second floor of a building filled with one-room offices -- an accountant to the left, an architect to the right, an unnamed tenant at the end of the hall whose clientele tended toward the quiet and the desperate. I was pretty sure it was a place where Jews worked out the financial arrangements before they left town. That is, how they hid their assets.

  Ours was a nice-sized room, just the one room. Other offices had divided spaces, with a receptionist and a small seating area in front and a private office through the door. But seeing as how Otto and I went to the clients instead of the clients coming to us, we went with a more open concept: one room, two desks, one shared by Otto and me, one for Hannah. That way, she could look out the window onto Falketrasse.

  I didn't go to the office, other than to file my expenses, make travel arrangements, pick up money for an upcoming trip, or deal with my father. Once a month, it was a phone call. The rest of the time, it was correspondence by mail. Hannah took care of all of the paperwork details in between.

  This day was for expenses. Or, as Otto used to say, "You always eat three meals a day on the road, even if you don't."

  That's when he wasn't saying, "Add 20 percent to every expense -- it's the only compensation you get for being away from home."

  And when he wasn't saying, "If you're not smart enough to steal a good living from your father, you're no good to him as a salesman, anyway."

  It had been a couple of months, and my emotions still seesawed when I thought about Otto. Hannah seemed to be doing fine, except she often found the subject of Otto awkward. Sometimes she talked about him endlessly. Other times, she avoided mentioning him altogether, even when telling a story where his name should have come up naturally.

  I walked into the office with the standard office greeting, begun by Otto, continued by me.

  "Hey baby, how's business?"

  Hannah lit up. "I was wondering if you remembered."

  "How could I forget?" It was Otto's birthday. We always went to lunch together, and had a few drinks, and told all of the old stories -- which generally meant making fun of my father and brother.

  "We going to Cafe Central?"

  "Reservation is made," she said. "But first we have to get a couple of things done."

  She looked down at the expenses, focusing in for a second, shaking her head. "You know, the day is coming when your brother is going to refuse to pay one of these. You should have heard him last month --"

  "Which is what you have told me every month for the last 11 years. And he has paid every time, and he will continue to pay, and the reason is simple: if he fired me, he would either have to start making the sales calls himself, or he would have to hire someone else to do it. And if you have learned anything about our family in the last 20 years, it is this: that the only people we trust less than each other are everyone else. To this day, I can't believe they let you handle their money."

  She snorted. "Enough. Let's get through this."

  She opened a file full of letters from various clients who I hadn't seen in a while. We set the dates for my next visit, and Hannah would write them to confirm. Next was a file with letters from clients asking questions about their orders, or with specific delivery issues, or whatnot. I dictated replies as Hannah took shorthand.

  "OK -- Linz next week," she said. "You have been putting this off, but we need to make the arrangements today."

  The trip to Linz was going to be maybe the worst of the year. It was going to be one night in a hotel, two stops, both unpleasant. At the first stop, we were going to get fired by Ulrich Bain & Co. There was no way around it at this point -- we had messed up an order, and they were unhappy with the price accommodation we made as a result, but it wasn't just that. The guy I dealt with, Herr Ulrich Bain himself, was just about the most odious of the Nazis I was forced to deal with, and I just couldn't kiss his ass anymore, and he resented it. Then, after he fired us, I had to go visit a quarry on the edge of town that was for sale -- not because we were going to buy it but because the owner was somehow an old acquaintance of my father's, and we were just showing the old guy some respect.

  Hannah looked down at the paperwork. "Why is this guy firing us again? We could give him more of a discount. Isn't it worth a try?"

  "You want the real reason or the one we're telling my loving father?"

  "The real reason."


  I told her about the Nazi flag in his office, and the picture of Hitler on the sideboard next to the tray of schnapps, and the map on the wall with the red push-pin stuck in at Braunau am Inn. The anger in her eyes was apparent by the time I was finished.

  "So what do we tell your father?"

  "Blame the bad shipment from the mine that started it all. Make it his fault."

  She reached into her desk drawer for the train timetable. It wasn't necessary. Before she got it open, I just started dictating -- 3 o'clock train to Linz on Thursday, 6 o'clock return on Friday night. One night in the Hotel Wolfinger. No need for a lunch reservation on Friday -- the Nazi is firing us, so the Nazi is picking up the tab.

  That was enough. We went to lunch, got drunk, told all of the old stories and cried a little.

  10

  "A schnitzel for two marks. Two! And it's good!" Leon dug in.

  "A two-mark schnitzel and a room full of reporter assholes -- who could beat it?"

  Leon looked at me with faux disapproval. "Now, now. You like reporter assholes. You like all kinds of assholes. You like me, after all. And do you own a mirror, by the way?"

  It was like this most nights at Cafe Louvre. The big fat American from United Press had his own table in the far corner, his stammtisch. Michael Stern. In the unofficial foreign correspondents' clubhouse, Stern was their unofficial ringleader. He had a typewriter at the table and used the cafe as his office many days. The others either worked from home or in their cubbyholes across the street in the telegraph office, from where their copy was sent. Well, not all of it. The really urgent breaking news could be dictated over the phone to London and passed on from there. Routine breaking news, with a short shelf life, went by cable. The stories without any urgency were typed up and dropped in the mail because it was so much cheaper. Or, as one of the correspondents told me, "As long as this whining, broke former Hapsburg count doesn't die between now and publication, what's the difference? His whines will be just as whiny two weeks from now."