The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  Being in my late thirties and perpetually single made me a valued commodity on most invitation lists. There was always a spinster, or a homely cousin, or a girl on the rebound who needed sitting next to. Truth be told, Henry and Leon were the same age and of the same marital status, but I was the safer invite: because Henry was continually in and out of love—plus the fact that his father was a small-time mobster; because Leon was renowned as a hound who couldn't be counted on to make conversation with Cousin Hilda for very long, plus the whole Jewish thing. Hitler and the Nazis might have raised it to a governmental art form, but the Viennese didn't need lessons from anyone in the craft and practice of anti-Semitism. Certain people would never—never!—consider inviting Leon to a family wedding, no matter how much he had charmed them at a café.

  As I walked from my flat to the opera, I wondered if Johanna was one of those people. She certainly fit the bill. I didn't know her last name, but given how she was put together, plus the family box at the opera, I guessed there was probably a "von" in there somewhere. They wouldn't say it out loud—the whole "von" thing wasn't really done anymore, not since they whacked the nobility after the war—but you just knew that the whole lot of them were still clicking their heels and calling each other Count von Whatnot when among friends. You know, like when they were at the opera.

  Our original first date never happened because of Otto's death. This was a rescheduling after another meetup at Café Louvre. I made sure to be early, partly because Johanna was so intriguing, and partly because she was legitimately frightening. It's a good thing, too. Right at seven, the big car pulled up to the curb. The chauffeur hopped out and hurried around to open the door and out came Johanna first, her hair done up, her fur down to just above her splendid calves; her mother next, an older version of Johanna but with a tiara; and then the old man. As I walked over to greet them, I noticed: Christ, he was wearing a cape—black on the outside, red underneath.

  Johanna put out her gloved hand and said, "Mr. Kovacs, so nice to see you again. May I present my parents, Karl and Cecelia Westermann. This is Alex Kovacs."

  Greetings all around, and then we were part of the flow of people headed inside. We got to the door, and there were no tickets; a nod from the old man to the ancient usher seemed all that was required. And then we were inside, where even the lobby areas looked expensive—no scuff marks on the marble floors, red damask everywhere. Johanna took my arm and led us up the staircase and then to the left.

  "I'm glad you were on time. Mother and Father don't wait for anybody."

  "Somehow, I'm not surprised."

  "Meaning?"

  "Nothing. But I do have to apologize that my cape is at the dry cleaner's."

  "It's a pity your trousers haven't been there recently."

  "I think they look fine."

  "I imagine you would."

  Arriving at the box, an attendant opened the door and greeted Johanna and her parents by name. Sitting down, the magnificence of the sight really did hit me: the ornate stage, the circular seating area, lots of deep reds and gold leaf and a massive chandelier. The Westermanns' box wasn't in the best position, but it was close—on the second level, near the side of the stage. This stuff didn't impress me, but I was impressed. Johanna could tell.

  "Close your mouth," she said. "Act like you've been here before."

  Soon, the lights went down, and the performance began. It was Carmen, which the program informed me would last approximately three hours, including the intermission. The woman who played Carmen had a beautiful, powerful voice in my first-time-at-the-opera opinion, but her body was her most impressive feature in the same way a battleship is impressive. This was one big woman. I felt a small concern for the opera company, and how the extra yards of fabric in all of her costumes must eat into the nightly take.

  I was starting to doze when Johanna woke me by gently resting her hand on mine. This was okay with me. I was enjoying her company. The more she belittled me, the more she intrigued me.

  As we walked to the bar for a drink during intermission, I asked her, "So it's really von Westermann, right?"

  She smiled. "But not anymore."

  "I bet your father still uses it."

  "Only when he's been drinking. So, only every day. Starting at lunch."

  "Beats working. So what is he, a count?"

  "No, only a baron," she said, smiling again. "But enough with the inquisition. Champagne for me, please."

  I returned with two champagne glasses to find the old man holding two of his own, and Johanna and her mother making their way to the powder room. Which left us stuck in a situation that is never not awkward. Good thing I made small talk for a living.

  "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 Habsburgs' property was confiscated by the state; that’s how this became the Vienna State Opera instead of the Vienna Court Opera. The minor nobility, without a court to whom it could pay obedience in exchange for its lifestyle, was left to wither. Most of them were financially sinking, throwing a country home over the side this year, a couple of gardeners the next. 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 café 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 onstage scenery 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. Okay, 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 went 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 fed 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 didn't actually 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 have understood 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 a feeder street and entered the ma
in 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 forward, with a hand clamping his hat to his head.

  That Sunday was even funnier, or maybe I was still in a good mood from my 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 passersby 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 one, 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 leaped from the back of the truck into his path, and then relented with a Nazi salute—at which point, the hat flew off of his head into the wind and swept down Goldschmiedgasse. As he chased after 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 that 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 always 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 had been re-delivered last week—same bar, same messenger, same everything. There was never any doubt that I was going to meet the man. Part of me wanted to do something meaningful—not to say 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 then 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 Neustädter 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 three-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 into 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 at the border ever looked in one of your briefcases?"

  "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 nonexistent 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. Once, I even put it to the test. It was only a couple of months earlier, for Leon's father, right before he left Vienna. They wouldn’t let you leave Austria with much currency—almost none, truthfully. So after he sold the family home, Leon’s father took the proceeds and bought diamonds, and then he gave me the diamonds, and I traveled with them on one of my trips to Saarbrücken. After meeting with my client, I went over the border to Metz, changed the diamonds for francs with a prearranged broker, and then deposited the francs into a prearranged bank account. The whole time, the diamonds were either in a money belt or in a half-assed false bottom in my briefcase. 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 would have just said they were mine and played dumb. I might have had to bribe somebody to get out of trouble, but there wasn't really 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 fourteenth."

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

  "What do you think, that we're amate
urs? 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 Vienna office of Kovacs Mining Company 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 their 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 their space, with a receptionist and a small seating area in front and a private office through a 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 Falkestrasse.

  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.