Vienna at Nightfall

by Richard Wake

  "But why didn't you just kill him? Or why didn't you let me kill him? You must have known what I was thinking. Groucho must have told you."

  "Who's Groucho?"

  I held two fingers over my upper lip. "My Czech contact."

  "I haven't had the pleasure. And, yeah, he told his bosses about your plan. But it wouldn't work. I mean, first off, we couldn't count on you following through -- and I was running out of time. We couldn't afford it if you chickened out. But more than that, killing Vogl wouldn't solve the problem -- it would just put it off. If he's dead, his replacement just picks up his old cases. But if he's disgraced, and found guilty of fabricating evidence against me to preserve his dirty secrets, the case is closed. Nobody's going near me now."

  It was the middle of the night. For the first half-hour or so, there was pretty much no traffic on the road. But as we got closer to the border, we began to see more of a military presence -- not soldiers so much as trucks and other materiel, parked along the shoulders here and there on both sides of the road.

  "What are they going to say back in Traunheim when they find my cell empty in a couple of hours?"

  "It's been taken care of. Germans are great record-keepers but, well, let's just say that people get lost in Dachau all the time. Don't worry about that. Do you have any other questions?"

  There was just one. It was the question that had started this whole thing. It was the line that intersected with all of the other lines.

  "Otto?"

  Ritter nodded. For a second, he looked as if he was going to cry. "I got him killed, and I have to live with that. It wasn't intentional, and there wasn't anything I could have done about it, but I got him killed. I got him killed by running into him in the bar at the Wasserhof that night.

  "It was a total accident. We hadn't seen each other in probably close to 10 years, but there he was. Suddenly, we were retelling our old stories -- we had a couple of others, besides Munich -- and getting drunk and just laughing our asses off. But I was traveling early the next morning, and I couldn't make it too late a night, so we said our goodbyes and promised to not wait 10 years before doing it again, and that was it. When I found out he killed himself, I couldn't believe it. But I had no idea that Vogl had begun to suspect me at that point, no idea I was being followed. That didn't come until months later."

  "So he wasn't a spy?"

  "Otto? No way. At least not with me. It was just a terrible misfortune. I found out much later that they questioned him the same night we met. I'm convinced they threw him off that bridge. And it's my fault."

  If Ritter was looking for me to let him off the hook somehow, to offer some kind of absolution, he was disappointed. I just sat there and stared out the window. Soon we were stopped, stacked behind a column of trucks carrying troops. I pointed. "What's going on?"

  "Oh, shit. You don't know, do you? About the plebiscite?"

  I told him what I had heard.

  "Well, your source was good. Schuschnigg announced it Wednesday night in a speech in Innsbruck. You were probably in the alley when he did it. The vote is supposed to be Sunday, but Hitler won't let it happen. We're invading. That's why Hess was in such a hurry -- big planning meeting tonight in Berchtesgaden. It's Thursday night now going into Friday morning, and we're coming over the border on Saturday morning."

  Ritter looked at his watch. "Maybe 30 hours from now, give or take. We've already closed the border. No trains are getting through."

  The military column finally began to move, and Ritter made a left turn onto a smaller road. We were in the middle of dark farmland within a minute, with few visible landmarks, but Ritter seemed confident as he maneuvered right after one farmhouse, then left after the next, and then right again soon after that, past more farms set in small valleys among the mountains.

  After another right turn into the woods, there was nothing for a while, just us on a single-track road, and then we passed another farm. "OK, we're in Austria now, through a little back door. Almost there."

  Farms quickly gave way to small houses, and then Ritter pulled over. "The Salzburg station is two blocks down the road and to the left. There's a night train to Vienna in 20 minutes. Here's some money. Make sure you're on it. But just so long as you understand..."

  "Oh, I understand. I can't stay in Austria. That's pretty goddamn obvious at this point."

  I opened the door, got out of the car and started walking. I didn't say thank you. I didn't say fuck you. I didn't look back.

  52

  The train ride didn't take four hours. I tried to sleep a little and think I succeeded. I figured it was going to be my only chance to get a rest. Still, back in my apartment by 6 a.m., with a pile of newspapers -- one more hysterical than the next, even the serious ones -- I half fell asleep again. Then the banging on the door began. It was Henry.

  I looked at the wall clock: 7:30. "A little early for a visit, isn't it?"

  "Man, you look like shit."

  "Right back at you, buddy."

  "No, I mean, seriously. Are you OK?"

  I hadn't seen myself in a mirror, so I decided to take Henry's word for it. Then I couldn't help myself and walked into the bathroom to see. He was right. But the thing about it was, I wasn't kidding about Henry. He looked as if he hadn't slept, and had been wearing the same clothes for days.

  He joined me for a peek at the mirror, then winced. "Look, it's a risk, but we both need to get cleaned up. You first, then me. Fifteen minutes."

  "Risk? What's the risk?"

  "I'll tell you when we're done."

  The bath felt like a forbidden luxury, even if only for five minutes. The shave almost made me feel human again. Then I was out of the bathroom, and Henry took my place, having scavenged my wardrobe for some clean clothes. Fifteen minutes turned into 25, but then we were out, walking down Mariahilfstrasse, away from the ring. About three blocks down, we came upon a tired looking cafe, the Linden.

  Henry stopped. "You ever eaten here?"

  "Are you kidding me? It stinks. You can smell it out here on the street."

  "Perfect. Let's go."

  We ordered what turned out to be a more than serviceable breakfast -- and the thing was, you got used to the smell once you got into the place. After the waiter brought the food, I finally said, "So what's going on?"

  Henry pointed to a newspaper that a customer had left on an adjoining table. "You mean other than the obvious?"

  "Yeah. What's the issue? What's the risk? Is it Fuchs?"

  Henry's face indicated that he was shocked that I knew about Captain Fuchs, or that I had guessed.

  "I saw Max giving him an envelope. I figure that had something to do with it."

  "That isn't the half of it. You probably figured that he goes to the back room at the club sometimes. Nothing unusual there -- that's always been a part of the accommodation with the police, back to my father's day. Well, sometimes there is a young man in one of the rooms to meet him. Our friendly captain is, how do you say, of equal opportunity?"

  "Oh, man." I could see where this was going.

  "It's not my place to judge," Henry said, "and I don't. We don't advertise it, but it's a service we can provide. And as long as he needed me and I needed him, there really wasn't an issue."

  "Except now Uncle Adolf is coming..."

  "Exactly. So this is my problem now. Most of the cops are Nazis anyway, and you just know our boy wants to move up in the ranks once the Germans get here. So who can cause him trouble with his new bosses? Well, there's the guy who ran a small organized crime ring, the guy who paid off the local captain to protect just the kind of thing that the Nazis hate. And then there's the guy who can tell the Nazis that this ambitious little fascist is into the fellas. The problem is that both of those guys are me."

  "Oh shit."

  "Oh shit, indeed. But there's more. I haven't been in the bar in three days, and I haven't been home -- a couple of my father's old boys have been giving me some cover. But my friend Captain Fuchs has been i
n there twice in the last two days, asking if they've seen either me or you. So what's with that? Why you? He only met you the one time, right?"

  I could only guess that the Gestapo had put out a few feelers with their soon-to-be coworkers. It's the only thing that made sense -- because Henry was right, I had seen Fuchs only the one time.

  Whatever. It was time to tell Henry everything, and so I did. It took a while, from the very beginning to the scene in the alley and the mock trial and my being spirited across the border about eight hours earlier. Henry was either stunned or had suffered a stroke because his mouth was half-open for about the last two minutes of my story.

  He snapped out of it when I stopped talking. "God...God, that means you can't stay, either."

  He had known he couldn't stay, and I had known I couldn't stay, but the combination -- and the very act of him saying it out loud -- added a crushing finality to it. We both just looked at each other and shook our heads.

  Henry began to wipe a tear, and I started talking to distract him. "Liesl?

  He smiled. "We're leaving together. We're getting married, wherever. What about Johanna?"

  I shrugged. "I don't know. We haven't talked about it."

  "Does she know about all the cloak-and-dagger stuff?"

  I shook my head. Henry was quiet again. "Leon knows -- he's the only one. He figured it out from the start. Have you talked to him?"

  "Not for a week, at least."

  "But he knows he can't stay, right?"

  "I don't know. But we both know the only way we'll get him to leave is by dragging him."

  "Then we'll fucking drag him," I said.

  Henry said he had access to a car and a plan for leaving that he had been working on and that it would accommodate all of us, plus Johanna if she wanted to go. I told him what I knew about the timing of the invasion, that the Germans would be in the country by this time tomorrow.

  Henry stopped, seeming to calculate something in his head. "OK, then it's got to be tonight. That's fine. I can get it together. But there are a couple of details I need to nail down, and I need to get Liesl ready and get her down to one small suitcase. That's all Johanna can take, if she's coming. You and I are going with the clothes on our backs."

  "My clothes, you mean."

  Henry opened the jacket, looking at the tailor's label on the inside pocket. "Same shit I wear. I thought you were better than that."

  Henry reminded me that I couldn't go home, or to the office -- Fuchs was probably checking both, growing increasingly frantic. He said we should meet at Cafe Louvre at 7. He asked me what I was going to do in the meantime, and I said I had to talk to Johanna, but first I had to find Leon.

  "His apartment?"

  "Nah."

  "The Louvre?"

  I pointed again to the newspaper on the adjoining table. "Yeah, I think that makes the most sense. If he isn't there, he'll be there soon."

  53

  Cafe Louvre was just this side of pandemonium when I walked in. There were no regular customers that I could see, only reporters -- almost every one that Leon had ever introduced me to, plus some others. Their wives were there, too, at least some of them, working as secretaries. One ran past me toward the door, clutching a sheet of paper, likely headed for the telegraph office across the street. Another rushed past me the other way, returning with a sheet of paper of her own.

  A waiter scooted past with a tray crammed with empty schnapps glasses. They weren't staffed for a big crowd, so I broke every rule of Viennese waiter-customer decorum and just caught his eye and pointed to an empty table on the periphery. He nodded. I ordered coffee with a shout, and he nodded again. It came in a few minutes -- on a small metal tray, with two glasses of water, decorum partially rescued -- but only after he had delivered a bigger tray of full schnapps glasses to the journalists. It wasn't yet 11 a.m. Leon wasn't there.

  They were in the midst of the biggest story of their lives -- at least the biggest for most of them. You could sense both the excitement and the nerves. To blow this one somehow would be to blow their jobs, and they knew it.

  Suddenly, I had a table-mate. Leon.

  He leaned in. "See them over there? Scared shitless, every one."

  "But wouldn't they be excited -- I mean, a scoop on this one..."

  "Scoop? They're not interested in scoops -- they're just worried about being left behind. Look at them standing there -- they're standing so close to each other, they're nearly hugging. It's kind of unspoken, but as long as they all write the same thing, everything will be fine with their bosses. So they're not out doing any reporting -- they're just watching each other like hawks."

  Just then, the man from the Philadelphia Inquirer walked into the cafe. A dozen reporters immediately surrounded him, grilling him, debriefing him. Philadelphia had been over by the Karntnerstrasse, and he had seen some Nazis openly demonstrating. He also had a copy of the latest government handbill, urging a yes vote on the plebiscite. He said they were just throwing them out of the backs of trucks all over.

  I pointed at the handbill. "Your printer friend?"

  "Yeah. That would have been the story of my career if I had been able to nail it down."

  Just then, the Chicago Daily News brushed by, nodding at Leon. One of the reporters called out -- "Stephansdom, one hour then back here, no more" -- and it was understood that he was going on a reporting excursion for some color from the streets, at which point he was expected back to share his work.

  Leon scoffed. "Most of those old fucks are too scared to go out and doing any reporting themselves." Then Watson from the Manchester Guardian walked in and calmly hung up his coat and hat. "But even more than the streets, they're scared of him most of all. He's been at this a long time and has diplomatic sources that even the guys at my paper don't have. And everybody knows it. If anybody is going to get a break on this one, it's him."

  "But didn't you tell me he was generous with his information."

  "Yes. Ridiculously generous. Some of those lazy blockheads, I can't believe how patient he is with them. But would you share this story if you had it alone? If you were the only one who knew when the invasion was starting, would you share it with anyone?"

  At which point, the obvious suddenly dawned on me. While the reporters crowded around the Guardian for a few crumbs, I told Leon everything that had happened in the last couple of days, beginning with Zurich and ending with my clandestine drive to the border, and what Ritter said to me about the invasion plans.

  Suddenly, Leon was in full-on reporter mode, the questions coming quickly, one after the other -- describe the military vehicles, approximate how far from the border you were, what time was it, what time again did he say the invasion was, when was the planning meeting at Berchtesgaden.

  "Why aren't you writing any of this down?"

  Leon nodded toward the pack of reporters. "Don't want them to think this is anything but a couple of friends having a cup of coffee."

  "So we're not friends anymore? I'm hurt."

  "We're best friends, but now we're even more than that. I'm a reporter, and you're a 'diplomatic source' giving me the biggest story of my life."

  Leon said they were running extras all day, special editions, every three hours. He looked at his watch. "I've got an hour to get this in the next one. I've got to get to a phone, and away from here."

  I grabbed his arm and stopped him as he began to stand. I told him that Henry and Liesl and I were leaving and that he had to leave, too. I explained everything about us, and he nodded. I made my case about him, but he was defiant.

  "Are you kidding me? I'm not leaving."

  "Leon, be reasonable."

  "No, you be reasonable. This is the biggest story I'm ever going to cover."

  "It isn't worth dying over."

  "I'm not going to die."

  "They'll arrest you in an hour. Come on, think about it. Jews will be the first ones they come after when they get here, and Jewish newspaper reporters will be the first of
the first. You think you'll be covering this big story, but they won't let you. The papers will never be allowed to print the truth. It isn't worth the risk."

  I pointed over to the pack. "They'll probably throw all of them out in the first couple of days -- but at least they'll get to leave."

  "You worry too much."

  "You're staying because of some fantasy. They'll never let you print the truth."

  "But they're not here yet, and thanks to you, I have my biggest scoop ever. So let go of my arm."

  Which I did, after getting him to promise to come back at 7. Leon walked out of the cafe slowly, so as not to attract any attention. But once he was out the door, I watched him out the window as he began running.

  54

  I rang the bell at Johanna's house, and Gibbs answered as he had a dozen times before when I visited, all formal dress and stern demeanor. After about the third time, I tried to get a laugh out of him with some kind of smart-ass remark, but it never worked. I never got a reply, never even a smile, just an escort to a chair in a little sitting room off of the entrance hall and a promise to fetch Johanna.

  This time, I asked, "How's tricks, Gibbsy?"

  This time, he answered, "Tricky, sir."

  He walked me past the usual waiting place and into the family's main living room, a coldly formal space that happened to be warmed by the biggest fireplace I had ever seen, the opening six feet high and just as wide, the logs stacked to my waist. It was big enough to roast a Goering.

  Johanna and her mother sat in matching wing chairs, 10 feet apart, staring at the fire, not talking. The old man wasn't with them. The radio glowed in the corner and played some nondescript music. It was about a quarter till 6 when the next scheduled news bulletins were customarily read.