36 Yalta Boulevard tyb-3

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Sure,” said Cerny. “A minute.” He patted Brano’s shoulder, then, hesitantly, gave him a hug, smothering him in the familiar scent of stale cigarettes.

  Brano walked across the marble floor without looking back, then turned a corner to a line of pay phones by the bathrooms-where, many months ago, he had knocked out a man. He slipped a coin into the closest phone and took a stiff card out of his pocket. On one side was that Raiffeisenbank account number; on the other, a telephone number.

  “Please state your extension.”

  “Two-zero-eight is the old extension,” said Brano. “But he should be in Accounting now. Ludwig.”

  After some clicks, he heard two rings, then a man’s voice. “ Ja? ”

  “It’s me.”

  “It’s…” A sigh. “You fucking bastard.”

  “Thank you for the hospitality, but I’m leaving now.”

  “Do you know what you’ve done to my career, Brano?”

  “Go to Schonbrunn, to the Roman Ruins. You’ll find the body of Filip Lutz.”

  “So he wasn’t paranoid, was he? You did kill him.”

  “Not me. It was Colonel Laszlo Cerny.”

  “Of your ministry?”

  “He’s leaving as well, but I thought this might help get you out of Accounting.”

  “What are you up to?”

  “Just trying to return your hospitality.”

  Ludwig grunted. “You really are a queer one, Brano.”

  When he returned, Cerny was at the head of the line, flirting with the girl behind the counter. Brano tapped his shoulder and watched the fog of surprise seep into his face. “Brano?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t do it.”

  Cerny rapped the counter with his knuckles, regaining his composure. “Well, I can’t say I’m disappointed. It would be a terrible thing to lose you.”

  They were squeezed into their cramped seats, thirty thousand feet above the Austrian border with Hungary, sipping from cans of Zipfer beer. Cerny stared out the window at clouds. “It’s funny.”

  Brano saw nothing of interest out the window. “What is?”

  “Up here everything looks the same.”

  “You’re sounding as sentimental as my father.”

  “It’s true, though. And when we land we’ll forget what it was like up here. We’ll get back to work. We’ll interrogate the Lieutenant General and search the poor bastard’s belongings until we’ve come up with the evidence.”

  “We don’t need the evidence.”

  “You want to just shoot him? Brano, there are some legal issues involved, you know.”

  “We both know the Lieutenant General isn’t the man we’re after.” Cerny looked at him.

  “I’m sorry, Laszlo. It’s you.”

  The colonel brought his eyebrows together. He smiled. “You need sleep, Brano.”

  “You shouldn’t have trusted my father. He’s too sentimental. He wanted me to stay in Vienna so badly that he blew the entire operation.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  Brano had known it ever since his father’s hotel room, but only later, in bed, was he able to work backward through each moment to convince himself of what he could hardly accept. “My father knew I was coming to visit him. He prepared for it by inviting Dijana. How did he know?”

  Cerny didn’t answer.

  “Only two people knew I was going to visit him. Romek and you. You called my father and told him to expect me.”

  Cerny clapped a hand on the armrest. “This is incredible, Brano! Of course your father knew-don’t you see? We both know how loyal Romek is to the Lieutenant General. He lied to me and called him anyway. The Lieutenant General contacted your father.” He shrugged, as if this were simple mathematics. “ That is how your father knew you were coming. And that’s why we’re going to have to be careful when we land.”

  Brano sighed. “Romek is a nuisance, but more than anything, he’s honest. We all listened to the recording together-he believed that the Lieutenant General was guilty. If Romek had contacted him, he would have warned us before we left.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do. But more importantly, my father let me think that the Lieutenant General was the man. He was prepared to do it.”

  “Like you said, he’s sentimental. He’d admit anything to keep you.”

  “And it doesn’t matter how much history we have-I would never give you the opportunity to defect. Both of us could give away too much.”

  The colonel’s face loosened, and he turned to look through the window at the bed of clouds beneath them. “Your father’s a good man, but he’s a fool.”

  “I know,” said Brano.

  Cerny pursed his lips.

  “Maybe you can clear up some things for me, Laszlo.”

  The colonel shrugged.

  “Why did you want Lutz dead? He wasn’t selling anything that I know of.”

  He puffed up his cheeks and exhaled. “No, Filip Lutz was always loyal. But it had to be done. Because of Bertrand Richter.”

  He watched as the colonel’s features relaxed; he was settling into a serene shock. “The Russians knew Lutz’s name,” said Brano. “So he had to be sacrificed in order to keep you above suspicion. But Lochert could have done it.”

  Cerny surprised Brano by smiling. “If Lochert killed him, the Americans would think the operation was eating itself up. They’d take back our funding. The only way was to find someone else to do it. It was your father’s idea to bring you over. He’d tried to make you stay in August, and he wanted to try it again. I told him it was too much of a stretch, but he can be very persuasive. He was afraid that if the operation failed, you’d be executed along with me. It made a kind of sense at the time-we get you into the West, and you take care of our problem. He already knew about Jan Soroka approaching the Americans for help. Sometimes circumstances come together in surprising ways.”

  Brano touched the back of the seat in front of him, counting the levels of conspiracy. He dropped his hand. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why you? ”

  The colonel considered that. “Remember when Irina killed herself? Of course you remember. You were a great help to me then, and I’ve never forgotten it. But that was when it started.”

  “When what started?”

  “The doubt.” Cerny straightened in his chair and glanced over the seat at the heads of the other passengers. “I can’t say I didn’t see it before, but in truth I didn’t care. I saw the corruption. I was aware of how we throw around our power, stick our own people in prison, send them to camps, shoot them. Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “Remember back in the war, when we talked about the coming age of socialism?”

  Brano nodded.

  “Well, forget about it, One-Shot. Because it’s never going to happen. The only thing going on east of the Curtain is a series of power struggles. The workers of the world don’t even exist. We’ve become a three-class society-those who are in prison-”

  “Yes, yes,” said Brano. “I know the joke.”

  Cerny shifted his knees against the next seat. “I knew this before I ran into your father a couple years ago. He had already placed his first fifty or so in villages here and there, but he needed help from the inside. I made myself available.”

  “And a year later,” said Brano, “you were walking around with my father at that reactor in Vamosoroszi, doing reconnaissance. But you didn’t expect someone would actually come to work on a Saturday.”

  “You never expect that kind of work ethic in our country.” He shrugged. “Jan’s friend had a lot of questions.”

  “So you killed him.”

  Any hint of a smile disappeared. “This operation is much larger than the lives of a few men-larger, even, than mine.”

  “And the Americans paid Jan to keep it a secret.”

  “The Americans know very little because they don’t want to know. De
spite what you think, they don’t enjoy lying to their senators. Jan’s payment was from your father, from the Committee. The embassy was just a meeting place.”

  Brano looked past him through the window. Above the clouds, the sky was bright blue. “You were the one who gave away our Viennese network. You were GAVRILO.”

  Cerny rubbed his temples. “They weren’t supposed to use my information. That was the deal. Not directly, at least. But some idiot in Langley began trading it with your friend Ludwig. I have no idea why. And Ludwig, with about as much subtlety as an elephant, ripped apart the network. See, the danger of conspiracies is that the more people involved, the more chance there is for idiocy. Then Richter started talking to the Russians, and it felt like the whole thing was unraveling. So you were sent in to fix the situation.”

  “You would be saved from suspicion, get rid of your leak, and keep the American money coming.”

  “Something like that.”

  Brano looked into his face. He had thought it would look different now, Machiavellian, but it looked as paternal as it always had. “And do you believe like my father, that it doesn’t matter that this whole thing will be crushed by Russian troops within days?”

  “You don’t understand,” said Cerny. “You’ve been inside too long. We’re not trying to collect power. We’re trying to weaken an evil power, the one we’ve both served all our lives.” He shifted in the seat and grinned almost bashfully. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, all this talk is disrupting my bladder.”

  Brano did not hate the colonel. Hatred and love were not things that mattered in the end. He simply wanted to understand, and he could not. He could follow the stories, the arguments, even the justifications. Yes, everyone knew the system was corrupt. But even if the system is corrupt, the fact is that it is your system; it is your world.

  He got out of his seat to let Cerny pass. He watched the old man move slowly down the corridor and pause at the bathroom door, look back, and smile again before going inside.

  Brano had wanted it this way, for him and the colonel to speak as equals, for him to learn all he could in a secure environment. He wanted to know as much as he could before handing the colonel over to the men who would be waiting for them at the airport. And the colonel, like Ewa Nubsch, felt the need to tell Brano everything. The colonel needed to make his first confession to a friend.

  He didn’t know how long he had slept; he only knew that he was waking. A voice, at first unintelligible, spoke to him through a speaker:… making our descent. Please fasten your seat belts. He opened his eyes and saw, first of all, that the seat beside him was empty.

  He was on his feet. In the next seat back, a small boy stared at him, and at the front of the plane, an impatient-looking man stood beside the toilet door with his arms crossed over his chest.

  That was when he knew.

  He crossed the distance quickly but felt pain in his weak left leg, as if it were trying to hold him back. He reached for the locked door as the man said, “Hey-I was here first.” He pounded on it and listened, but heard only the roar of the engines.

  He told the man to get back.

  “Look, I was-”

  Brano grabbed the man’s shirt and pushed him into a pair of empty seats, then banged again. He braced himself against the wall and shoved his right foot into the door.

  It popped open a couple of inches, then slammed shut again.

  Brano pushed and found resistance. As he pressed, something slid back and the door opened farther, enough for him to stick his head in.

  Cerny was on the toilet, his jacket and shirt off. His knees were tight between the door and the wall, and in his forearm was a syringe.

  Brano squeezed through and got the door shut again. Cerny’s blue head was tilted back against the wall, mouth open beneath that disheveled mustache. When Brano removed the syringe, the plane trembled, the flaps tilting for descent, and he had to hold the sink to steady himself.

  A woman’s voice outside the door was telling him something.

  Brano removed the plunger and brought it to his nose. There was no smell. And when he touched the inside with a finger, it came up dry.

  Then he leaned against the door and stared at the colonel. There are many ways to kill yourself. Sometimes all it takes is a little air.

  POSTLUDE

  14 MAY 1967, SUNDAY

  Brano Oleksy Sev paused at the top of the metro steps, a hand gripping the rail. Skodas and Trabants and Ladas shook over the cobblestones around the statue at the center of Victory Square: a handsome couple sharing the burden of a flag held aloft. It was very warm, and as he made his way along the crosswalk to Victory Park, at the beginning of Yalta Boulevard, he unbuttoned his jacket. Behind him, the Central Committee building, wide and gray, looked over everything.

  He walked through the gate to where more trees were covered in fresh yellow blooms and couples settled in the grass, eating bagged lunches. At the end of the trail lay a memorial to the war dead of all centuries, a bronze soldier sitting on a boulder, his rifle lying across his knees. In front of it, the wide back of the Comrade Lieutenant General faced him. Beneath his arm was a manila folder.

  “Good afternoon,” he said as Brano approached. His red alcoholic’s cheeks were puffy. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m still easily tired, but otherwise I’m all right.”

  “Excellent,” the Lieutenant General said. “So you’re happy.”

  “I think that would be asking a lot.”

  The big man frowned. “Do you want to know?”

  “Yes,” said Brano. “I do.”

  There had been four men at the airport when he landed, and they didn’t wait for him to come out. They found him squatting beside Colonel Cerny’s body in the back of the plane, mute, gripping the old man’s hand.

  Then, inevitably, they placed him in the back of a white Mercedes. Like Ludwig’s men, they were adept at silence. They brought him into town, him staring through the window like a tourist at the dirty Habsburg buildings that were so much smaller than the ones in Vienna. They brought him to Yalta Boulevard, number 36.

  He found himself dreaming of Austrian interrogation techniques when they tied him to a hard chair in the middle of a concrete cell, then turned off the light.

  It didn’t seem to matter how much he told them. He answered each question earnestly, hiding nothing, not even the existence of Dijana Frankovic, but still they treated him like a liar. And he found that, after a few days, he also began to wonder if he was lying. What was he leaving out? Who was he protecting? He wasn’t protecting himself; he admitted his mistakes and lack of foresight. When they asked who was to blame for the death of Colonel Cerny, he told them he was to blame.

  By the end of the week, he was unable to speak because his teeth, which had once been so perfect, were bleeding too much.

  Then he woke in a hospital bed, the Lieutenant General gazing down on him. Our celebrated Comrade Sev, he said, but without a smile.

  Now, though, the Lieutenant General was all smiles.

  “You’ll be happy to know the streets are peaceful, Brano. Generally so. We’ve had three incidents-two here in the Capital, and one at the reactor in Vamosoroszi. Some joker tried to get inside, and we had to shoot him. The other two we picked up on the edge of town this morning. They had a truck full of old rifles. They were going to the Second District to distribute them to the others.”

  “And the others?” asked Brano.

  The Lieutenant General shook his head. “No one showed up. It seems the scheme required a cue. The two arms dealers told us that. There would be a notice in The Spark announcing, of all things, a flower show. How do you like that? Flowers! Cerny’s wonderful imagination yet again.” The Lieutenant General wiped his lips. “But since he wasn’t around to place the notice, well, no one came to get their guns. Pretty anticlimactic, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, comrade.”

  “One of them told us their plan was to remove Adam Wolek from priso
n and place him at the head of our great country.”

  “Father Wolek?”

  The Lieutenant General nodded. “Would’ve been a surprise when they learned he was dead. About a month ago he dropped while working on the Canal. Heart gave out.”

  “I see.”

  “Of course, we have quite a job ahead of us. There are enemies of the state to rout out. But we’ll get it taken care of.”

  “I’m sure we will.”

  “Come on, Brano. Let’s take a walk.”

  They continued past the statue, off the path into clusters of birch trees, from which Brano could hear, but not see, birds.

  “Your father, you may be interested to know, is back in America. With his family. Would you like to see the photographs?”

  “No.”

  The Lieutenant General laughed. “You know who’s most angry about this? Not you, not me, but your friend Ludwig. He complained directly to the embassy. He’s demanding your extradition! But that was clever, what you did. Turning in Cerny before you left, so he’d be arrested if he returned.” He shook his head. “That poor Ludwig has been in the dark about everything all along.”

  “And you?”

  “Me?”

  “How long have you known about this?”

  The Lieutenant General cocked his head, shifted the folder, and reached into his pocket for some cigarettes. As he explained his side of the story, his initial suspicion of Brano, Cerny’s elaborate excuses for him and for his demolished Viennese network, and that final, exquisite plan to get Brano into Vienna-“That man always had a byzantine sensibility for schemes, didn’t he?”-it occurred to Brano that, although he had uncovered his own father’s scheme, he was still under suspicion. The Lieutenant General paused now and then, working his way around occasional details, as if he were talking to a member of the opposition.

  “Tell me,” said the Lieutenant General, “why didn’t you rest longer on the Ferto Lake?”

  “I didn’t want to be captured by the Austrians again.”

  “So you didn’t know.”

  “What?”

  “That the good Dr. Simonyi was one of our men. He would have taken care of you.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”