The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  That was it. Hess offered no explanation for his decision. Vogl had seemed resigned to the verdict all along and stood calmly as the leg irons were attached. Ritter gave no reaction, gathering his papers and then standing at attention as Hess descended from his perch.

  Perhaps no one else noticed, but it certainly caught my attention that Hess had said nothing about me. But then, as his aide helped him on with his overcoat, he caught my eye.

  "Oh, yes. Herr Kovacs will be transported to Dachau in the morning."

  Then he was gone, followed by Ritter, and then by Vogl, clanking along, one guard at each elbow, one behind. As he trudged by, he stopped for a second at my side and leaned in and smiled.

  And then Vogl whispered to me, "The walls are strong enough. The real problems are inside, not outside."

  51

  Dachau wasn't a secret place—they’d done newspaper stories on it when it opened, and we saw at least one newsreel on it. I couldn't remember the term they used—something like "re-education facility," I wasn’t sure—but the pictures showed people who were doing a lot of physical labor, then listening to lectures and eating happy meals together. They wanted to make it out like it was a rustic summer camp just outside of Munich—the kind of rustic summer camp where you sent enemies of the state, mind you—with no downsides except for maybe a sore back from all of that good, honest heavy lifting, or water that was too cold in the showers. I didn't believe it, not really, but as I lay there on the straw mattress, back in the same cell, I began conning myself into believing parts of it. You know, hey, it looked like there was meat in the stew they served on that newsreel.

  I didn't think I fell asleep, but maybe I had because I was so startled when I heard the key turn in the lock and the door of the cell open. It wasn't the customary guard. It was Ritter, alone.

  He tossed me an overcoat and a hat. "Put them on, quick." When I did, I saw that I was suddenly an officer in the German army. I couldn't tell the rank.

  "Quick, quick, just walk right behind me and don't say anything." And so we walked, out of the cell, down a hallway, across the courtyard, through an archway, into another courtyard, and then into a waiting car. We did not see a guard.

  "I'll get in the back. You drive. At the guard shack, just point to me in the back. He won't say anything. Then make a right turn, drive a block, and pull over."

  It went exactly as he said it would, at which point he got into the driver's seat and handed me a civilian overcoat to change into.

  I got into the passenger seat and tossed the hat into the back seat. "Seeing as how I'm a civilian again, I have a question to ask you. With all due respect, sir, what the fuck is going on?"

  Ritter smiled. "Can you just shut up and listen for a little while longer? We have a little less than an hour to drive."

  "Drive where?"

  "Just listen, okay?"

  With that, Ritter began to tell the story. I had just spent the night in Traunheim, in a prison where, during the Great War, they had rounded up civilians who had a background in France or England. We were driving to the Austrian border, near Salzburg. I was going home, my role now finished.

  And that role? "Vogl was right—I am a spy for the Czech government, and he was on to me. We needed to use you to get him. It was the only way we could think to do it. But look, I wouldn't have agreed if I hadn't been confident we could protect you."

  "Confident? In that lunatic playing with the pfenning? Are you kidding me?"

  Ritter ignored me and continued. The operation had been a couple of weeks in the planning. The blank bank book had to be obtained from Zürich. "That might have been the hardest part—you wouldn't believe how much money we had to pay one of their clerks to get it."

  Ritter said the fingerprints were easy enough; they can be lifted with tape and transferred from a drinking glass, say, to another surface. The selection of Dimble's in Frankfurt for my lunch was easier: Vogl took his mistress there for a second breakfast every time he visited. That was really the key—that Vogl did have a flaw they could exploit. Without it, Ritter said, he wasn't sure they could have pulled it off. "Even with the bank book, convincing people that a completely straight arrow like Vogl was a spy would have been doable, but a stretch. But add in the mistress, and the arrow is suddenly a little bit bent. Just enough."

  "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 not to 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. "Okay, 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 twenty 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 might have 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—each more hysterical than the last, 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 okay?"

  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 like he’d 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 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 café, 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 in."

  We ordered what turned out to be a more than serviceable breakfast—and the thing was, you got used to the smell. 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 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’s 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 in 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 was the only thing that made sense—because Henry was right, I had only seen Fuchs 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. "Okay, 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 Café Louvre at seven. 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

  Café Louvre was just this side of pandemonium. 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 for 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 g
lasses of water, decorum partially restored, 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 café. A dozen reporters immediately surrounded him, grilling him, debriefing him. Philadelphia had been over by the Kärntnerstrasse, 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.

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

  "Yeah. That would have been the story of my career if I’d 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 do 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."