The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  In about the 20th minute, this big, lumbering forward began to lumber forward for Rapid. At six foot two, he was half a head taller than his next tallest teammate, easy to follow as he made his way from the center line, weathering one tackle and niftily shifting and avoiding another—niftily for his size, anyway—and launching a right-footed blast from the edge of the box and into the top-left corner. It was Franz Binder, the leading scorer in the league, and it was 1–0, Rapid.

  As they chanted his nickname, "Bim-bo, Bim-bo . . ." Henry leaned in and said, "I think he has 11 goals in nine games. You'd need a poleax to stop him."

  We grabbed a beer and switched sides at halftime, sitting under cover in Henry's prime seats. He seemed nostalgic the whole day, and then he told me why: He had just sold the bar.

  He saw the shock on my face and held up a hand. "It's done. I got the money on Friday. I agreed to keep running things for a while, but it's over. The last of the Fessler empire is gone."

  He stopped, laughed at himself. "Empire. I mean, that's the way we always thought of it—the old man, all of us. He had the numbers business here, and a little protection, and the little dive bar, and things were fine. But when he decided to take the business inside the Ringstrasse, it was a huge decision. I was only three or four when they did it, but my mom used to talk about the stress of it all. Some people in Hütteldorf thought he was putting on airs, 'too good for us now.' But my dad saw it as a business opportunity after this whole family that had a piece of everything inside the Ring died in a big fire in ’03. He also saw it as the natural progression for his ambitions and his family. But he never forgot this place. He always hired from the neighborhood."

  My turn to laugh. "Except the girls."

  It was a more significant operation inside the Ring—the bar with the back rooms, the gambling well beyond a simple numbers game, the protection more widespread, extending up Mariahilferstrasse, a couple of miles past my house.

  "So it's all gone?"

  Henry nodded. "You know we sold off everything except Fessler's, and my dad took that money with him to Zürich, besides what he’d already squirreled away over the years—and it was a big fucking squirrel. He's fine. He couldn't spend it all if he wanted to. And he gave me Fessler's, to do with what I wanted. Well, I have."

  I was still surprised. Henry was good at the bar business, and I thought he liked it. I knew he didn't want the rest of what his father did or the reputation it left him with, and his father knew that, too. Henry thought the gambling hurt weak people; it always bothered him, especially when he had to help with collections. He once told me he never beat anybody unconscious and considered that to be some kind of moral victory. But he hated it, and he hated the protection worse. He never admitted it, but he was relieved when his father and his Nazi fears left town in 1936.

  But why sell the bar? And why now? Some of this had to be because of Liesl. We had all grown to like her a lot, partly because of who she was and what she believed—she referred to Hitler as "Herr Book Burner"—but mostly because of the bond she had built with Henry. They were so obviously in love that there was no chance Henry was packing up and leaving Austria if she wasn't going with him.

  Just as he was about to answer, the clapping began. For the last 15 minutes of every game, Rapid fans joined in a rhythmic, almost hypnotic, clapping ritual. It began years ago, in a game where the team came from behind after the clapping started, and it became a tradition—and people looked at you suspiciously if you didn't at least half-heartedly participate.

  So we clapped, and Henry talked. "Look, the old man was right, Hitler's coming. That shit in the paper today, I don't care what Schuschnigg says—Hitler's coming. I sold for a decent price; my father would say it was a shitty price, but it was okay, more than okay, and it was in cash, and the cash is already in a bank in Bratislava. My whole account here, I emptied almost all of that, too. I'm set up for my next move. I wouldn't mind if it was here, but I'm just not sure it can be in Vienna anymore."

  We watched the rest of the game, pretty much in silence, except for the clapping. Rapid won, 2–0.

  34

  For some reason, Groucho wanted to meet at Café Demel. I hated Demel. It was actually a little bit of a strain between Johanna and me, because she loved Demel. But it was just so fussy. All of the confections seemed as if they were there to be admired, like in a jeweler's display case, rather than eaten. Sitting there, slopping a cup of coffee and reading the paper amid the fur and the felt, I imagined myself being viewed as an animal that had wandered in off of the street.

  Groucho came in, dressed as if he were coming from a meeting with the president of the bank. I looked him up and down with mock admiration. "Does this mean you have a real job beyond making my life fucking miserable?"

  "Of course I have a real job. How could I not? Prague is paying me exactly what they're paying you."

  "So you're a true believer? I took you for a mercenary."

  "Fuck you. I'm risking a lot more than you ever will."

  I fingered the material on the lapel of his suit. "I can see that."

  We ordered breakfast and mostly talked about what was in the papers. It had taken a couple of days, but the government finally was admitting that Schuschnigg had taken it up the ass at Berchtesgaden. Well, they weren't exactly admitting it, but the facts were plain enough. Schuschnigg had agreed to put three Nazis in his cabinet. He also agreed to grant amnesty to all of the Nazis who had been jailed over the years—including the guys who killed Dollfuss. It was hard to decide which was worse. But Groucho had a definite opinion.

  "Look at the cabinet. Look at that worm Seyss-Inquart. See the job he got? Minister of the Interior. He's in charge of the police. Half of them are Nazis anyway and now their new boss is one."

  I started to interrupt, and he stopped me.

  "No, listen. Know your history. When they first put Hitler in the government and made him chancellor—when Hindenburg was still alive, and they thought they could control him—he only asked for a couple of spots in the cabinet. One of them was Minister of the Interior, and another was Minister of the Interior of Prussia. He let the others in the coalition have the prestige jobs—finance, foreign affairs, all of them. Hitler didn't care. He was in control of the two biggest police forces in the country, and that was enough."

  It was more than enough. We were so screwed, and everyone with eyes could see it. The only question was the timing. Groucho didn't have a good guess.

  I asked him, "Weeks or months?"

  "So you're discounting that it might be days?"

  "Seriously?"

  "Seriously, I have no idea. My guess would be months, but not a year. And they're just going to fucking waltz in unless Schuschnigg suddenly grows a pair. But I kind of think, deep in his heart, that he believes Austrians really are Germans, and he just couldn't ask them to shoot at their Germanic brothers."

  We ate in silence for a few minutes. Then it dawned on me. "Why did you want to meet me? Did you find out something about my uncle?"

  "No, and I asked my contact, and he said the same thing. He'd never heard of Otto until we started scouting you. I don't know what to tell you. But that's not why I wanted to talk to you. You're going to Cologne on the 24th. We want you to change your train to the 23rd."

  "That's the Wednesday train. No, I hate that trip. It stops in Frankfurt for, like, three hours. And then I'll have an extra day in Cologne with nothing to do. No. Why?"

  "It stops in Frankfurt for two hours and 45 minutes. It's enough time for you to walk three blocks from the station and have lunch at Dimble's, on Mörfelderstrasse. When you're done eating, use the bathroom. Check under the lid of the toilet tank. There might be an envelope taped there. If there is, bring it home with you after the trip."

  "If?"

  "Yeah, if. We're not sure. But if it's there, bring it home. If it isn't there, enjoy the lunch."

  35

  The opening of Johanna's exhibition was set for Friday night. She
was so busy in the days leading up to it, and so nervous, that we barely saw each other. I packed her a lunch and brought it to her desk on Thursday, trying to do the supportive-boyfriend thing, but I never saw her and never heard from her after. A problem with the program had her pretty much living at the printer's until it was straightened out.

  Ernst. Nussbaum. Beckmann. Jew. Jew. Jew. The story promoting the event in the Wednesday Die Neue Freie Presse had been both cursory and buried in the paper. It contained none of the expected comments from either anyone at the museum or any of the artists. It was as if they couldn't ignore it, because it was the Rudolf Museum, after all, but they would be damned if they were going to promote it. Seeing as how most of the editors of the paper were Jewish, this seemed odd. Then again, survival mode is a peculiar state of being.

  Henry had already noticed that ever since word of Schuschnigg's trip to Berchtesgaden, traffic in Fessler's had been down. He said that other restaurant guys had told him they had noticed the same thing. It was as if a switch had been flipped somehow, as if hope had suddenly morphed into grim reality. People were saving money all of a sudden, getting ready, preparing for a storm.

  I was walking to the office, thinking about all of this, when there was a tap on the window of the café I was passing. It was Johanna's father, Karl, motioning me inside. Perfect.

  The Baron von Westermann's morning café was Schwarzenberg, on Kärntner Ring. Its location and its history told you a lot about the man. It was never a place for intellectuals or authors, but for commerce. Financiers had always been the customers, not Freud. It was also one step removed from the real action, from the heaviest of the heavy hitters, who frequented the Imperial Café across the street. You could see the comings and goings, but you weren't really in the middle of the action.

  Which, as it turned out, described the baron perfectly.

  His stammtisch was by one of the front windows, giving him a perfect view of the Imperial. The sign at the front talked about a band on Friday nights, but I was pretty sure the baron had never been there at night, or even after noon. The remnants of what was undoubtedly his regular frühstück—coffee, roll and butter, soft-boiled egg—were being taken away by the waiter when I arrived, after I almost stepped on a little peanut of a dog who was sipping from a small silver bowl at the feet of a desiccated countess, lightly jeweled at 10 a.m., reading a newspaper.

  "You almost stepped on Rudy," the baron said, by way of greeting. "That might have gotten a yap out of him. I'm not sure I've heard him make a sound this month."

  The place was not silent if you counted the occasional tinkling of silver on china or the rustle of a turning newspaper page to be noise. There were eight tables occupied, six by single newspaper readers, one—in the far corner, away from the rest—by an ancient man taking a quiet nap, and one by Karl and me.

  "You see those two?" he asked. He pointed out the window at the door of the Imperial, where two men stood, buttoning their overcoats and waiting for a taxi, or a car, or something. "The older one is Himmler. The younger one is Heydrich. Do you know the names?"

  Himmler, I knew. Heydrich, I did not. Karl proceeded to fill me in, adding details about Himmler I did not know—including that he had been a pig farmer when he fell in love with the Führer—and filling in a portrait of Heydrich as a genuinely frightening combination of both Aryan and Nazi perfection.

  I read the newspapers pretty carefully—I read three every day, and I took a big stack on every train trip—and I traveled enough to hear plenty, but the good baron was offering a lot of details that I had neither read nor heard before. Still, that wasn't why he rapped on the window, to impress me with his inside knowledge of Austrian politics.

  He pointed to the newspaper story. "This Jewish exhibit. It will ruin her career."

  The thought had crossed my mind. "She is very proud of it. And as you know better than I, she is very strong-willed."

  "She is acting like a petulant child. She refuses to see the consequences. Maybe she would listen to you."

  "I think you overestimate my influence. Besides," I said, pointing to the same newspaper story, "it's too late. It's happening whether you like it or not."

  The baron sipped his coffee. The expression on his face suggested it was cold. "She won't see the complications."

  I looked, questioningly. He put down the cup and leaned closer.

  "You've read the papers. You see what's happening. The way I figure it, Schuschnigg has one chance left. He has one card left to play—the restoration card."

  Also known as the Return of the Vons. Like everything in Vienna, it was complicated. Everybody was using everyone else. Most of the Jews disliked Dollfuss and Schuschnigg but supported them out of fear of what might take their place. People like the baron, who wanted a return of the Habsburg Monarchy, were in kind of the same boat. They didn't like Schuschnigg, either, but they supported him because it was the only way to keep Austria together—and Austria had to be kept together if there was ever to be a restoration. If Hitler swallowed the country whole, he would belch pleasingly, and the monarchists would be done. There would be nothing to restore.

  I always understood that. But this was a new twist for me.

  The baron said, "Hitler is now knocking on the door. The people are split—you see the Nazis in the streets, getting bolder every day. I mean, is there a phone box inside the Ring that they haven't blown up yet? Schuschnigg's best chance here is to call for a Habsburg restoration—it can even be a constitutional monarchy if it has to be. But that's his chance, and we're actively making sure that he realizes it."

  "Are you involved?"

  "Behind the scenes, yes. He listens, and he's listening more in the last few days. It's very delicate, and I don't need this museum complication, not right now."

  He stopped, locking on my eyes. "Fucking Jews," he said. "Fucking Jews."

  That conversation was all I could think about as I walked up the museum steps on Friday night. The main gallery was set up for a reception, with waiters toting champagne, and canapés lined up and at the ready, and the works of Ernst, Nussbaum, and Beckmann arrayed around the great hall. My eyes caught Johanna immediately. She was stunning in a formal silver gown, her hair up, her smile perfect and perpetual. She was very easy to spot, for all of the aforementioned reasons but mostly because the place was almost empty.

  "It's going to be a disaster," she said, leaning in as I kissed her.

  "Come on, it's still early," I said, because it was the only thing I could think of saying.

  But she was right. Leon and Henry and Liesl were there. A handful of the museum's patrons were there, but only a handful. Four hundred invitations had been sent. There was enough champagne and finger food for 250. But there weren't 30 people in the great hall. Disaster did not begin to cover it.

  Time dragged—seven became eight, and eight became eight thirty, and 30 people became 15. Then 17, when the Baron and Baroness von Westermann arrived. Given our conversation at the café, I was shocked to see the old man (less so, his wife).

  Johanna greeted them with a hug, and then walked them around the exhibition, and introduced them to a few of the patrons whom they didn't know, mostly because all of the patrons they did know were at home in their mansions, having tossed out the invitations the day they arrived. The smile on her face seemed just a tiny bit less forced. And while mother and daughter continued on, the baron suddenly showed up at my side with two glasses of champagne.

  He handed me one. "The paintings, I actually kind of like them. She has no sense, but she does have a good eye."

  I didn't know what my face was showing, but he caught something. He said, "You're surprised I'm here?"

  "Well, after everything you said . . ."

  "If you didn't think I would come, then you don't know my family very well."

  36

  Ever since I met him, my mind had wandered back to that day with Edgar Grundman in the quarry in Mauthausen. It didn't take a Freud or an Adler to gue
ss that I was looking for a father figure in my life after Otto died. It got to the point where I wanted to talk to Grundman again but not only that—I wanted to see him, be with him, for reassurance or comfort or something. When I called, we talked about a time, and he seemed to think that Sunday would work best. He said, "Come to my house, and we'll listen to Hitler's speech. Sunday at noon—Nazi church."

  The house was on the road toward the quarry—neat, tidy, with a couple of spare bedrooms. The radio sat prominently in one corner of the living room, warmed and glowing, playing German martial music. With sandwiches and beers, we got through the pleasantries in good order—the quarry was sold, and Grundman had occupied himself for the last couple of weeks with a home project: repointing the stonework of the house. He seemed content.

  The music stopped at noon, and a voice thundered through the box. I didn't recognize it and shrugged. "Göring," Grundman said. Göring began reading off a list of the names of deputies of the Reichstag who had died in the previous year. Then he said, "The word is now given to the Führer."

  After the applause died, and a long, uncomfortable pause, Hitler began. He said that this wasn't just a speech to commemorate five years in office, as most had anticipated, but an opportunity to correct some ongoing misperceptions about the military and about "certain aspects of our foreign relations."

  Those words were barely out of his mouth when Grundman said, "We're screwed. As if we didn't already know."

  We talked and listened. When he said Field Marshal Blomberg had stepped aside because of ill health, Grundman whispered, "Bullshit."

  But Hitler was just getting started. He railed against a whole series of slights and misreporting he saw in the foreign press, this report, that report, a long litany ending with a report "that 14 generals have fled to Prague with Ludendorff's corpse; and that I have completely lost my voice, and the resourceful Dr. Goebbels is presently on the lookout for a man capable of imitating my voice to allow me to speak from gramophone records from now on. I take it that tomorrow this journalistic zealot of truth will either contest that I am really here today or claim that I had only made gestures, while behind me the Reich Minister of Propaganda ran the gramophone."