36 Yalta Boulevard tyb-3

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Okay, Sev.” Lochert stuck out his hand.

  Brano gripped it but didn’t let go. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “You were the one who hit me in the Volksgarten, and then-”

  But Brano didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he punched Lochert in the eye, then let go of his hand.

  Lochert stumbled back against the wall, holding his face. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Brano. I deserved that. But you were endangering our mission with that woman. I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.”

  “No, Josef.” Brano took another step toward him. “You deserve a lot more than that. You tried to set me up for Bertrand Richter’s murder. And when that didn’t get me arrested by the Austrians, you took advantage of my condition and packed me off for home. I imagine you also called the Austrians who almost got me in the airport. Then you sent in a report that ended my career. You wanted Vienna to yourself.”

  Lochert rubbed his eye; the other one squinted at him. “I don’t know what to say, Brano.”

  “Well, you got what you wanted, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose I did.”

  Silence followed, and Brano didn’t feel the need to fill it.

  Lochert finally lowered his hand from his wet, bloodshot eye. “Are you being followed?”

  “Of course; he’s outside. I think I might want to do that again.”

  “Enough, okay?” Lochert raised his hands. “Let’s consider ourselves at peace for the moment. Can we do that?”

  Brano shrugged.

  “Your instructions are simple,” said Lochert. “Yalta wants you to take care of Filip Lutz. I see you’ve already made contact with him.”

  “Take care?”

  “Kill him, Comrade Sev.”

  At first Brano couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Was this the answer he’d been waiting so long for? This? He shook his head. “I’m not the man for this. There are others.”

  “Not this time.”

  “Why me?”

  “Orders.” Lochert took his hat from the sink.

  “Wait a minute.”

  “I’m not waiting for anything, Sev. I’m going.” He stepped toward the door, but Brano gripped his arm. Lochert looked at Brano’s hand.

  “You’re not walking away,” said Brano. “I’ve been stuck in this country a month and a half now, and I don’t have any idea what’s going on. I’m not an amateur. I should have been told from the beginning.”

  “So you could spill it to the Austrians?”

  “You’re the usual hired gun, Lochert. And even if you’re the temporary rezident, there are plenty more of your kind around.”

  “Think about it, Brano.” This close, below Lochert’s dripping eye, he noticed scars from old acne.

  “Because Yalta can deny it if I’m caught.”

  “You haven’t lost it all yet.”

  “I don’t even work for the Ministry anymore. I’m just a murderer who fled the country.”

  “Very good. Can I go now?”

  “Wait.” Brano frowned. “A frame-up in a village, all the operatives I had to turn in here, letting Soroka out of the country-all this was to get rid of one troublesome journalist? I don’t believe it.”

  “Do you want me to tell Cerny you’re refusing?”

  “No.” He squeezed Lochert’s arm tighter. “What I want is for you to tell me why we want Lutz dead.”

  Lochert sighed and, when Brano let go of his arm, settled on the toilet. “I was only supposed to tell you if I felt it was necessary.”

  “It is necessary, Josef.”

  “Well, then.” Lochert’s hands hung loosely between his knees. “You were at Lutz’s speech to that Christian organization, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re Lutz’s connection to the CIA.”

  “I suspected as much.”

  “But what you don’t know is why the CIA is giving him money. It’s not for those silly articles he writes.”

  “Then what’s it for?”

  Lochert paused. “You remember after the war, Truman’s plans to roll back the Iron Curtain?”

  “Of course. I’ve seen Sasha Lytvyn around.”

  “Well, they’re doing it again, with Filip Lutz at the head. It’s better organized than the one Frank Wisner led. It’s completely airtight, too. We don’t have anyone working on the inside. We’ve tried, of course, but come up with nothing. All we know is that something is being planned-probably an armed insurrection.”

  “Something to shake up the Politburo,” said Brano. “That’s what he told me.”

  “Lutz talks a lot, but only when he’s being vague.”

  “Then we should interrogate him.”

  “No.” Lochert shook his head. “That’s out of the question. He’s being watched too well, and we don’t want the Austrians to learn of this. At this point, they don’t know a thing-the Americans haven’t involved them. We want to keep it that way.”

  Brano nodded, the zbrka of the last weeks dissipating. Explanations, however distasteful, and even from someone as distasteful as Lochert, were what he needed. “Is Jan Soroka connected to this?”

  “Not that we know.”

  Brano pressed a finger to his lips. “But it’s not Lutz heading this. There’s an old man named Andrew Stamer. He knew Frank Wisner. They were friends.”

  “Yes, we know about Andrew-he was just a go-between. He passed Wisner’s knowledge on to Lutz. At most, he’s an occasional advisor, a nobody.”

  Brano stepped back and leaned against the wall. He didn’t like that all-knowing look in Lochert’s good eye. “Tell me, then, why would the Americans be involved in a scheme they know will fail?”

  “We’re here to be sure they fail, but don’t think it’s predetermined.”

  “It’ll be the same as Budapest in ’fifty-six,” said Brano. “They can start a revolution, but Russian tanks will end it. The Americans won’t send their army to back it up, and even if they wanted to they’d have to go through Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia first. No. It’s impossible.”

  “Maybe they know something we don’t,” said Lochert. “Or maybe they just want to disrupt things. We can’t take chances. The CIA have placed themselves far enough away to deny they had any part in it. To Yalta, that suggests something quite serious.”

  Brano nodded.

  “And you had better watch your back with that woman.”

  “What?”

  “Your Fraulein Frankovic. She’s working with the Russians.”

  Brano smiled. “That’s the story you gave Cerny, but don’t think I’ll believe it.”

  Lochert reached into his jacket pocket and took out an envelope. He held it out.

  Inside, Brano found four black-and-white photographs. In the first, two men in suits entered Dijana’s apartment block. The next three were taken with a telephoto from another building through her window. Dijana with a tray of drinks, smiling at the men, then talking very seriously.

  “You know the tall one, don’t you?”

  Brano had trouble bringing Lochert into focus. “Major Alexis Gogol, head of KGB counterintelligence in Austria.”

  “I don’t have to tell you why we don’t want the Russians getting wind of this. The Ministry has enough problems maintaining any sense of autonomy. This would ruin us.”

  Brano went through the photos again.

  “Keep them if you want,” said Lochert. “I just want to be sure you understand your orders. Do you, comrade?”

  Brano said that he did.

  Lochert stepped over to the door and touched the handle. He looked back. “I don’t imagine killing Lutz will be easy, but trust me-it’s a vital operation.”

  Brano nodded.

  Then Lochert walked out the door.

  That evening in her apartment, Dijana cooked a layered Balkan pastry with a mixture of ground beef and pork and cream. Gibanica, a dish he’d had in Belgrade years befor
e, and though it was a favorite of his, he couldn’t taste a thing. They ate at the cramped kitchen table and drank red wine from coffee mugs-she didn’t own any wineglasses.

  He had watched her carefully since returning from his meeting. He was trying to read signs of betrayal in the way she kissed him when he arrived and helped with his coat. What before had seemed the lucky virtues in a woman who loved him had become the techniques of seduction. There were schools in the Soviet Union that taught pretty Russian girls how to become, in the vernacular, “swallows.” They learned how to extract information from traveling Western businessmen and diplomats, or simply to bed them for the hidden cameras. Before eating, as he washed his hands in her bathroom, he even cupped his hands around his eyes and leaned close to the mirror, as if there really would be two-way glass and a remote 35 mm.

  “You like?”

  Brano nodded, stuffing more gibanica into his mouth. “You’re a good cook, Dijana.”

  “I must to be. You don’t cook?”

  Brano shook his head.

  “What I thought. You are not comfortable at the kitchen.”

  “How long have you lived in this apartment?”

  She rolled her eyes, thinking. “One year? Da, one year.”

  “Is it expensive to rent?”

  “Da. But I not rent. It’s mine.”

  “You own it?”

  She nodded.

  “I didn’t think you earned that much.”

  She waved her fork at him. “Pa da. Is true, but-you want I should tell you?”

  “Of course.”

  She frowned at her plate. “Was Bertrand. He buy it for me. I say no, really. I like Bertrand, but know I won’t be with him so long. I tell him this, too, but he was-I don’t know. He say it’s okay, he just want to buy it for me.” She smiled. “He was good man, no?”

  After dinner, they settled on the couch and listened to one of Dijana’s records, an American folk singer named Joan Baez. “I not understand so much,” she told him as she settled into his arm. “But I think maybe I can to learn English with this music, no?”

  “I knew a man who was learning French from Juliette Greco records.”

  “Really?”

  They fell quiet as the young American sang in her soft voice, but Brano was not interested in the music. He wanted to ask her directly about Lochert’s accusations. She had met with Russian agents in this very apartment, in this room-through the window he could see the building across the street where the camera must have been placed. But if he brought it up, she’d demand to know how he knew. So he said, “You liked Bertrand, didn’t you?”

  “Of course,” she said into his chest. “I don’t go to the bed with a man what I don’t like.”

  “Of course.”

  “But you know something?”

  “What?”

  “Bertrand, he scared of you.”

  “Me? He mentioned me?”

  “Once, da. He was drunk, and he say, That Brano Sev-he is a dangerous one.”

  Brano’s arm around Dijana became cool. “Why did he say that?”

  “He say you are a spy.” She shifted a little. “That is true?” “I was a spy, yes.”

  “You kill people?”

  He looked down at the crown of her head, encircled by his tingling arm. “No,” he lied. “I wasn’t that kind of spy.”

  “I thought not.” Then she sat up and looked at him. “But you can? You know how.”

  He nodded.

  She looked at the record player. It had reached the end, and they could hear the quiet shht shht of the needle’s revolution. She smiled. “So you can to protect me?”

  “Of course.”

  She turned the record over, filling the room with music again, then sat down and stared at him a moment before speaking. “Why you are cold tonight?”

  “Am I cold?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You not kissing me.”

  “Sorry.” He leaned over and kissed her, but she didn’t return the kiss.

  “Why you are not a spy no more?”

  “Because I didn’t want to be.”

  She nodded. “How long will you staying in Vienna?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Long time?”

  “Maybe forever, Dijana.”

  That answer seemed to satisfy her, and she settled again beneath his arm. Brano watched her face as she gradually fell asleep.

  13 APRIL 1967, THURSDAY

  The Cafe-Restaurant Landtmann sat across from the Burgtheater, part of the ring of enormous Habsburg buildings around the Innere Stadt. In its dark wooden walls, mirrors and intarsias of bouquets-blond walnut inlaid in the dark walls-looked down on a cramped scene of marble-topped tables stuffed with politicians involved in serious discussions over late breakfast. A woman offered to take his coat; when he declined, she frowned and told him it was the tradition, that all coats were taken, so he handed it to her. She gave him a slip of paper with a number on it. Again, Brano felt underdressed.

  He found Lutz in the back, beneath a tall, narrow mirror in which he could see himself approach, a short man in this crowd. Lutz’s tiny table was overflowing with empty cups and saucers, dirty spoons, and a full ashtray. He was reading from a stack of typed pages that he put away when he noticed Brano. He smiled and stuck out his hand but didn’t have room enough to get up.

  “Delightful to see you, Brano. Delightful. What’ll you have, a coffee? Something stronger?”

  “Just coffee.”

  Lutz took care of the ordering and stretched beneath the table.

  “You’ve been working hard,” said Brano.

  “As always, my man. As always.”

  “Writing?”

  “Reading. Government reports, that sort of thing. It’s dull enough to make you want to shoot yourself.”

  “Why are you reading government reports?”

  “Sometimes it’s the only way to learn things.”

  “Is this that Politburo-shaking project?”

  Lutz considered him. “You, my friend, are going to have to wait, just like the rest of the world.”

  Brano prodded carefully. He’d been given a clear, unambiguous order, but nothing quite added up. His imagination could not manage a buffoon like Lutz at the helm of an international conspiracy. The answer would only be found in whatever Lutz was now working on behind a pile of extinguished cigarette butts. But this was the one subject Lutz refused to expand on. Brano’s casual questions met with the defiant answer that his work was not yet ready for public consumption and, once, the reminder that Lutz, because of his writings, was a dangerous man. “Come on, Brano. You’re my friend. Why would I want to put you in danger?”

  Brano found he had no good answer for that.

  “So?”

  Brano furrowed his brow as the coffee arrived in a cup so delicate he feared he might break it.

  “So are you here to tell me your tale of intrigue? For Escape from the Crocodile?”

  “That’s just what I was here to do.”

  Lutz took notes in a worn spiral notebook as Brano spun his story. Like always, he stuck close to the truth. He talked about a childhood in Bobrka and his move, after the war, to the Capital. They’d both been there at the same time, so they shared stories of deprivation and the Russian soldiers’ atrocities. Brano said that this had always been difficult for him, that he could see the moral problems inherent in his career. A large part of his job had been to cover up Russian crimes, while arresting those who had, it seemed, done nothing.

  “I thought you were just an informer.”

  Brano had considered sticking to the bland version he’d told Monika-a trench coat in a hotel-but Lutz, given Lochert’s assessment, would be able to see through the lie. “That’s the story for the Carp.”

  Lutz took a breath. “Then why did you stay with it?”

  “Because it was all I had. I couldn’t be a farmer anymore-my family no longer owned land. What else was I to do? And you remember, it was no small
thing in those days to be in a position to get a little extra bread and salt.”

  “You kept your family in salt.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  Filip Lutz looked at the notes he’d written, then back at Brano. “What, exactly, did you do?”

  “I tracked down dissidents.”

  That earned a raised eyebrow, then a nod when he explained that he even measured the loyalties of people within his own Ministry for State Security. He kept a desk in the homicide department of the People’s Militia, measuring the loyalties of the militiamen as well.

  “Did you arrest many of them?”

  “Not many. A few.”

  “Did you only work inside the country?”

  “No.”

  “Exotic places?”

  “Some.”

  “Where?”

  Brano cleared his throat and apologized. “I’m not really comfortable with too many details. Not yet.”

  Lutz said he understood. “When did you become disillusioned?”

  Brano paused, then lied smoothly. “I’d always been disillusioned, in my own way. But it was always an abstract disillusionment.” He said he was a believer in Marx, in the promise of communism, and he knew sacrifices had to be made. But how many sacrifices have to be made before you stop and say, This is enough?

  “How many does it take?”

  “It takes hundreds. Thousands. Either that or simply one sacrifice that affects you personally.” Brano told him that while he was at home he had been framed for a murder.

  “Framed?” Lutz pulled back a little, elbows rising from the table. “For murder?”

  “My superiors, they framed me for murder in order to get rid of me. I’d already been kicked out of the service, but that wasn’t enough. They wanted my career to end in a prison cell.”

  Lutz stared at him. Then he wrote a few more lines and asked about Brano’s family-his mother, his sister, his father. Brano told the truth. They lived in their village far from the Capital. His father had fled west after the war.

  “Was that it, maybe?”

  “Was that what?”

  “Was that,” said Lutz, warming again, “perhaps the seed of your discontent? That your own father refused to live under communist rule?”

  “My father had no conviction. He was just a coward. And in the West he probably died a coward.” “He’s dead?”