The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  "They're city people now," she said. "Their parents, and a lot of their friends, always thought that they lived in the country and only visited the city. But my father and mother were always the opposite. Vienna is their first home—that's how they feel."

  "But—"

  "But there's a problem. Who the hell would have the money to buy this place? And who would want it even if they had the money?"

  It was the Austrian dilemma of the 1930s. Who had the money to buy anything? There wasn't a whole lot of new industry in the country, so there wasn't that high-flier class of new-money shitheads to take over from the nobility. Besides, the small group of those people who were buying, well, they were purchasing petite palaces in the city like the von Westermanns. They had no use for this place, which represented a time long gone.

  "So, if your father has an offer, what's to think about? Is it that low?"

  "It's pretty low," she said. "But that's only part of it. The offer is from a man who is being very honest. His plan is to divide the estate and sell the pieces. The house will surely be knocked down. Because of the stream, there is a potential industrial use. Who knows? And," she said, pointing out beyond the woods, "the Museul estate is about a mile that way, and the Lindemann estate is really just past the last trees that way, and they would be furious. They would consider it a betrayal."

  "But what's the alternative?"

  "To sell the city house and come out here and die," Johanna said. "That's what his people are supposed to do. But he's just not willing to do it.

  "But, you know, even then, it's just buying time. Father has been plain. He says, 'The money will keep us going for the rest of my life but not yours.' I'll have to sell the house when mother dies. It's why he’s always encouraged me to get a proper university degree so that I could work."

  I always thought she loved her work. Now she was spitting the word.

  "Goddamn museum, that's going to be my life."

  The notion that I was maybe going to be her life apparently had not dawned on her. When I realized that, my mood suddenly matched hers.

  "Is it that bad a life?" I said. I really was hurt, but she didn't get the hint.

  "I am a modern woman," she said. "But why can't I be a modern woman with a title?"

  As it turned out, we never ate the lunch that the staff had hustled to prepare. It goes without saying that we didn't christen any of the bedrooms.

  46

  The trip to Switzerland with Hannah went off as planned. There were no problems at the border, her money had been transferred to the Zürich bank account, and the visa to England was, in the words of the man at the consulate, "in process, likely within a week." As we walked down the Bahnhofstrasse toward the station, past all of the grand merchants, we were silent. By the time we reached the big train shed, we were both weeping—not for each other, but for Otto. And as I boarded the train an hour before departure, had my ticket back to Vienna punched, tipped the attendant who had set me up in the compartment and brought me a drink, I allowed myself a small moment of satisfaction. Otto's last wish was for me to take care of Hannah, and now she was set.

  One sip. Two. Then I got up, carrying my coat and the smaller of my two suitcases, and walked back two cars, away from the attendant's station and away from the conductor who had punched my ticket. Neither of them saw me as I got off the train. With any luck, the attendant would see the suitcase I left behind and assume I'd had a run of good fortune with a single woman whose compartment was in another car on the train. Between that and the punched ticket, there would be ample evidence, if needed, that I had made the trip back to Vienna, just as the itinerary had said.

  I walked a block from the station to pick up the car I had hired for what I described to the owner as an overnight visit to St. Gallen, paying for two days in advance plus a third day as a deposit. The identification I used for the transaction was all fake, obtained quickly and at great expense after visiting the man in the office down the hall from mine, the office that assisted Jews seeking a way out of Vienna. The conversation didn't total more than about a hundred words. I explained what I needed. He told me the cost. I paid. He stood me up against a neutral backdrop and took my picture. "Come back tomorrow night at about six." That was it.

  Now I was driving to Cologne. It was an eight-hour trip, give or take, over uniformly good roads. I crossed the border into Germany soon after Basel, with nothing more than a stamp in the passport book and a wave on the Swiss side and only a quick chat and another stamp on the German side. Then it was really a nice ride—through Freiburg and Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Mainz, and Koblenz. I stopped for the night in Bonn, about 20 miles south of Cologne. This was where my meeting with Herr Bader would take place, nearer to his home than the steel mill. He said it would be an excuse for him to skip a day at the office and spend most of it with his wife, still convalescing from her heart attack. It would give me a free evening, as Bader was in no mood for nocturnal entertainment. And it would give me a chance to remain out of Vogl's range of vision, given that I checked into the hotel with my new passport. My real name would not show up on the nightly Gestapo report of new hotel guests.

  Bader and I met at lunch, did our business in about 15 minutes as we drank our coffee and picked at our strudel, and spent the rest of the time reminiscing about Otto. Bader clearly missed him. They had worked together for 35 years. His steel mill was our first German client, and the two businesses and the two men had matured together. Bader wasn't a Nazi, but he was careful. We just didn't talk about it, probably because he didn't know me very well. I wonder what he had confided in Otto.

  I had about three hours to kill after lunch before I would drive into Cologne. I had rolled the plan over in my head a hundred times during the drive from Zürich, to the point where I was seeking any kind of distraction. As I wandered upon the Beethoven Museum, located in the house where he had grown up, it seemed as good a distraction as any.

  The woman sitting behind the desk at the front door seemed thrilled to have a visitor. I was pretty sure I was the only person in the place as I wandered from room to room over a couple of floors and a couple of houses that had been joined. It was mostly kitsch and crap but, whatever, it passed the time. And as I was leaning down to look at some sheet music in a glass display case—for what purpose, I didn't know, seeing as how I couldn’t read music—I suddenly felt the presence of another visitor in the small room. It was Major Peiper, in civilian clothes.

  I looked at him, shocked but maybe not so shocked. "If you're looking to get laid in here, I think you're going to be disappointed."

  "I'm just looking for inspiration."

  "From Beethoven? Really?"

  "A complete hound. A fucking legend, apparently. Although they don't play that up in any of the exhibits. It's more of a local knowledge kind of thing."

  Peiper pointed, and we walked to another room, farther away from the front desk. This was the ear trumpet room, with a couple of examples of the devices Beethoven used to try to improve his hearing. Whispering seemed somehow appropriate.

  "I'd ask how you found me, but it doesn't really matter."

  "We just followed the old man. You told us you were going to be meeting him, and it seemed easier to do it that way."

  "So what's the big secret?"

  Peiper told me. He said that there was a pretty solid rumor that Schuschnigg was going to call for a plebiscite in the next couple of days, an up or down vote by the Austrian people on the question of continued Austrian independence from Germany. At which point, the night in the bar in Schottenfeld suddenly began to make sense. I told Peiper about the hush-hush government printing job that Leon had sniffed out.

  Peiper's face fell. "Ballot papers. Shit. I was hoping maybe it was just a rumor. That printing business adds a layer of credibility to it. Shit."

  "Why shit? Schuschnigg will win. He might win really big."

  Peiper looked at me like I was a stupid school kid. "Don't you get it? Hitler will go crazy when he
hears—and for that very reason. His whole narrative is that the Austrians want to be part of the Reich. Well, not the whole narrative—he can still hang on to the bullshit about Nazis being persecuted. But the big justification is that we're all one big Germanic happy family. He can't have a vote that says otherwise."

  "So you think—"

  "I don't think—I know. Or at least I know in my gut. The German army is coming in, ready or not—and we're not ready. We don't have a plan except for some fucking training exercise called 'Case Otto.' I swear to God, we’ll get stopped in our tracks by a loud fart. But the Czechs, your people, are both gutless and delusional, which is a fatal combination. And Mussolini, he could turn us around with a glare—but I think Hitler has that taken care of. So we're going to waltz in. Just watch. That vote is never going to happen."

  "So what do you want me to do?"

  "Tell your people—but it's not going to matter. They're already curled up in the fetal position, Beneš first among them. He's hopeless. They're all hopeless—they still think the French are somehow going to save them. Smart people with no street smarts, all of them. So go home and tell them. And maybe say a prayer that this is all just a fucking fever dream of mine."

  47

  Wednesday night. This was my only chance. I was counting on Vogl being a man of fastidious habits. I was praying that his workday had not intervened. Because this really was it: I wouldn't be back for six months, and by then, whatever nerve I had mustered would have dissipated.

  My hired car was parked across the street and down a couple of hundred feet from Bischoffshausen, the café where Vogl told me he played chess and drank on Wednesday nights, his only drinking of the week. He’d told me about it the night I first met him, in the Dom Hotel lobby: into Bischoffshausen at 7:30, home by 10, right around the corner from the hotel. I was in the car and waiting at seven, scanning the street, praying that Vogl would park in the small street behind the hotel and walk from there down the alley next to Bischoffshausen. I had looked at it before and it must have been where he was talking about when he said, "It's a 30-second walk from the back of the hotel." It was an essential part of the plan, that alley. And right at 7:30, it was from that alley that Vogl emerged, turning right and opening the café door.

  So, it was happening. Part of me couldn't believe it, but the rest of me couldn't consider backing out. It was a good plan. I kept repeating that to myself like a mantra. It wasn't just blind vengeance, even though it was. It wasn't crazy just because it seemed impossible to kill a Gestapo captain in the middle of Germany. Because it wasn't impossible. It was a good plan.

  I patted the knife in my pocket. It was a beauty, a flick knife from Solingen in Germany. The handle that concealed the blade until it was summoned with the push of a button was sheathed in brown leather, worn down over the years in places but even more handsome as a result. It was Otto's knife. I never saw him carry it—I think he used it as a letter opener—but it always sat on the desk in his apartment. And if it was the movie cliché of all time to kill Otto's killer with that knife—and it was—well, fuck it.

  If the plan wasn't foolproof, it was entirely sane. I would be waiting at the far end of the alley at 10, near to where it joined the little street behind the hotel, which wasn't much more than an alley itself. Vogl and I would meet, me smoking a cigarette before going into my usual hotel. Vogl would not be alarmed by my presence, and maybe a little tipsy. He would reach out to shake my hand. I would reply with the flick knife, straight into his throat. That was the area I would attack, bare skin not covered by his coat, first his neck and then his head. He would be stunned. It would not take a minute. The only risk was somebody ducking into the alley to take a piss.

  I thought about planting an envelope with some money on the body, to suggest it might have been a private Gestapo shakedown that had gone wrong. I thought about unbuttoning his pants and yanking them down to his ankles, as if it had been some kind of illicit encounter. But in the end, I decided against any embroidery. Don't waste time. Just kill him and walk back up the alley, nice and comfortable, across the street, down to the car and away. The Dutch border was only about 50 miles to the west, just past Aachen. With any luck at all, I would be out of Germany before they found the body. The odds of somebody stumbling on it weren't that great. His wife probably wouldn't call work looking for him for at least an hour. The Gestapo night crew would take at least a few more minutes after that before rousing themselves to go out and check. It would be some time after that before any kind of organized search for the killer would begin. And there would be every reason to believe it had been a local grievance, because Vogl dealt with local people. That's where they would start investigating, not at the Dutch border. This was going to work.

  I sipped schnapps from a flask as I sat in the car. The street was dark and there was nobody out. Between 7:30 and 9:30, only two cars drove past. I closed my eyes at one point and woke with a start, but a look at my watch told me I hadn’t been asleep a minute. In that short time, though, I felt this flicker of photographs streaming through my subconscious, of Otto and Hannah and Henry and Leon and even Johanna—I was surprised at that—and of me in two particular places: hiding in that barn during the war, and peeking through the window of that classroom door.

  At about 9:45, I got out of the car, crossed the street and walked toward Bischoffshausen. As I reached the alley, I ducked, walked halfway down, and took a piss against the wall. If anyone had happened upon the scene, they would think nothing of it.

  Buttoning up, I headed toward the end of the alley, where it met the little street behind the hotel. There Vogl's car was, the big black Daimler. I stood at the end of the alley and began to smoke. It was a habit I had given up 15 years earlier, and it actually dawned on me that Vogl might have noticed I had never smoked in his presence before, not even after dinner that first night I met him. But I could live with that contradiction—it wouldn't register with him right away, and he wasn't going to have much time to think about inconsistencies or anything else.

  Standing there, smoking, checking my watch every 30 seconds, the adrenaline rose and the hand that held the cigarette shook. I really was doing this. I thought of Otto for a second, and how he would crucify me if he knew what I had planned. Otto did not do vengeance. And Otto did not take personal risks. But if I could tell him, I would say that, yes, I was doing this because of him—but I was also doing it for myself.

  After waiting a few minutes, I decided that standing on the street behind the hotel and not in the alley itself made the most sense. Just a step or two around the corner, leaning casually against the brick wall, finishing a last smoke before heading back into the hotel—again, if anyone came upon me, they wouldn't think twice.

  I leaned then, left shoulder against the brick wall, facing the alley about two feet ahead, smoking. The night was quiet. Then I heard someone, first footsteps in the alley, then a soft whistling. I couldn't make out the tune. I looked at my watch quickly. It was 9:55. This had to be Vogl.

  I tried to look casual. I decided I would walk into the intersection between the alley and the street and then turn on my heel, as if pacing as I finished my cigarette. The whistling had stopped but the footsteps grew louder. I fingered the flick knife in my pocket. I did not look down the alley—easy now, relaxed, casual, not to appear as if I were expecting to see anyone, no less Vogl. I threw the cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out, prepared to turn and head back for the hotel's rear door, fully expecting to be stopped by a shout of, "Alex, is that you?"

  What stopped me instead was a blow from behind, and then a handkerchief held over my nose and mouth, and then sleep.

  48

  The cell was lit by an overhead fixture. The walls were plaster painted white, amplifying the light. The bunk was just a mattress on the floor, the straw spilling out of the sides. I fully expected to see bugs crawling on the bed, and on me, but when I finally opened my eyes, I couldn't see anything, not with any degree of focus. I was i
n a kind of fog, much worse than the worst hangover.

  Where was I? I could tell I wasn't in the cellar at EL-DE Haus—this cell was different, everything about it, size, shape, and including that there was no writing on the wall—but, beyond that, I had no idea. The last thing I remembered was being in the alley, hearing the whistling, waiting for Vogl. I coudln't remember seeing him. Whatever was done to me, he didn't do it—at least not physically. But he probably ordered it.

  But then, why wasn't I in EL-DE Haus? If Vogl had somehow sniffed out my plan—and I really didn’t think that was possible—why wasn't I in Gestapo headquarters in Cologne? Maybe someone had seen me sitting in the car and became suspicious, but they would have called the police, and I would have been cuffed and arrested, not knocked down and then, I thought, drugged. When I was hit, it was on the shoulder, not the head—at least my shoulder was what still hurt. And I remembered a kind of chemical smell on the handkerchief that was clamped onto my face. The fogginess was likely a hangover from whatever had been on that handkerchief.

  I didn't know where I was. I didn't know how long I had been in the cell—day or days, night or nights, no clue. I had a vague sense that I’d woken up at one point, lying down in the back of a car, but it might have been a dream. I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure of anything—except, that is, that I was fucked.

  Leon had warned me. Grundman had warned me. Groucho had warned me. But here I was, too smart for my own good, loading on the self-pity. Then the key turned in the lock of the cell door. A guard I did not recognize came in carrying a tin tray with a cup of black coffee and two slices of brown bread.