I go into all this because it’s important. I won’t call it a moral in this scattershot narrative, but it’s something like that. The price of revenge is that everyone around you pays. Gisele Sully, Brano and his family, even Ludwig—and a decent Austrian family I’d never even met before.
“Schneller!” I shouted as she swung around the wreck I’d made minutes ago.
Unlike her daughter, Frau Shappelhorn didn’t scream, which impressed me. A heavy woman who’d spent the last six years without a husband, she was someone who took the punches as they came. She gunned the engine and shifted gears, and we sped down the ramp, past the short-term parking lot. Beside her I sat fidgeting, sweating, trying to get air, and inexplicably checking my watch—it was 3:07. My poor veins were ready to burst. Everything had happened so quickly, faster than my brain could work.
“Where?” she said.
I wasn’t sure. Did I want her to run down the bus with this little car? No. “South train station,” I said, remembering the sign at the bus stop. “Drive normally.”
She let off the gas and switched gears again as a taxi pulled in front of us.
“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
“You can put away the gun,” she said. Though she was calm, there was fear in her voice. I felt ashamed.
“But you are taking me, right?”
“If the police don’t stop us first.”
At the time, I couldn’t see just how cool Frau Shappelhorn was. Now I can. I slipped the pistol into my coat pocket and rubbed my face, trying to keep my eyes open. I couldn’t take much more of this. I said, “There’s going to be a ticket gate when we leave the airport.”
“Yes,” she said.
“You have a ticket?”
“Of course.” She pointed at the dashboard, where a single orange stub lay.
“Go through like normal.”
“Okay.”
I’ll never understand why she didn’t try something. We rolled up to the ticket booth, the man inside said, “GruB Gott,” and she said it back, handing over her ticket, and then the mechanical arm rose, and she drove through. When we reached the A4 heading into town, she admitted something: “I thought they’d stop us back there. They should’ve radioed ahead to stop us.”
“Oh,” I said, because that hadn’t occurred to me.
I learned the answer later, also from Der Standard. The ticket booths were connected to the terminals by an underground communications system. That day, the system was being tested because of problems, and it failed when they tried to make contact. Because of the embarrassment over my escape, from the following day all the booths were equipped with wireless radios.
It takes twenty minutes to drive from the Vienna airport to the Sudbahnhof, and in that time Frau Shappelhorn began to ask questions. “What’s going on?” was her first.
I thought about telling her. I wanted to say, I’m tracking the man who killed my wife, who’s taking over my country. Even then, overcome with so much physical pain and confusion, I knew it would sound paranoid. It would frighten her more. So I said, “I need to catch someone.”
“You need a gun for that?”
“I think so.”
“So you need to kill this person.”
“No,” I lied. “I just need to catch him.”
The bus was nowhere in sight, and I wondered if we’d passed it. That would be a good thing. I could reach the bus stop at the Sudbahnhof and wait for him to exit, or go into the bus myself. If we weren’t stopped beforehand.
Had I done the right thing? I didn’t know. I knew how Brano felt—he must have hated me.
Anyway, it was done. I’d begun the chase because I felt I had no other option. I didn’t want Jerzy Michalec enjoying the comforts of an Austrian jail cell and eventual extradition back home, or to France. Because revenge has nothing to do with due process—revenge wants to be sharp, and final.
Frau Shappelhorn drove steadily along the A4. She said, “You don’t want to tell me more?”
“There’s no point.”
“Sure there is. Maybe I can help.”
“No,” I said. “The last person who helped me ended up dead.”
It was the wrong thing to say, but I wasn’t thinking straight. The car swerved briefly, and I reached over to steady the wheel; someone blew his horn and passed us. “So you’re in trouble,” she said.
I even grinned. “Can’t you tell?”
That didn’t make her feel any better.
I said, “Just drop me off near the Sudbahnhof. A block away. Police will probably be waiting for me, and I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
That seemed to help a little, but I regretting having said it. I wasn’t really sure what I’d do when I reached the train station, and it would have been smarter to keep the car. But I wasn’t smart. I’ve never been smart.
I tried to imagine that I was Jerzy Michalec, a criminal who knew he’d been doubly conned. First, by the Austrians—surely he watched Brano and Ludwig follow his double’s car. Second, by the person who had warned him. In the bus, he had no way of contacting the embassy, which would start looking for him at the airport. Brano and his Austrian friends would soon do the same, also posting men outside our embassy.
Michalec could get out at the Sudbahnhof or go on to the final stop at the Westbahnhof and then try to contact the embassy. But if he believed the Austrian government was out to get him, that it was also watching his embassy, then he wouldn’t feel safe here.
There was only one thing a man like Jerzy Michalec would do. He would flee Vienna on the first train leaving.
“Have you accepted Jesus?” said Frau Shappelhorn.
I blinked, unsure if I’d heard her right. “What?”
“Jesus Christ. Have you accepted him as your personal savior?”
“Please,” I said. “I don’t want to hear about that.”
She nodded at the road. “Sure. But you’d be surprised. No matter how terrible your situation seems, Jesus Christ can help. He helps millions every day.”
I looked out at the road, then at her. She was as serious about this as I was about Michalec. She took the exit for the Sudbahnhof.
She said, “You have to pray. That’s the first step. You have to ask Him to come to you, but you have to be ready to accept His Glory.”
“Take this left,” I said, but she was already taking it, and up ahead I saw a police car with blinking lights but no sirens. The station was a block ahead. “Let me out here.”
She pulled to the curb along Wiener Gurtel, and I opened the door. Then, as an afterthought, I reached over to cover her hand on the gearshift. “I’m sorry about this. But thank you. I’ll consider giving Jesus Christ a try.”
I think that’s what she wanted to hear. It meant that her day hadn’t been an entire waste.
THIRTY-SIX
•
From the opposite side of Wiener Gurtel, peering through the busy traffic, I spotted the airport bus in front of the ugly Sudbahnhof. It was parked along the road, empty, and outside its door stood four policemen talking with the bewildered driver. I didn’t see Michalec among the small crowd of passengers who’d been taken off. He’d gotten away before the police arrived.
When the light changed, I crossed behind three teenagers cursing in German. They looked very strange—they wore leather jackets, and their long hair was shaved into Mohawks, like American Indians, but dyed bright green and purple. It was unnerving.
The car ride had given me back my breath, but not my strength. I worked hard to keep up with the teenagers, terrified that a policeman would recognize my face. No one stopped me. I crossed the sidewalk to the entrance, the pistol in my coat pocket feeling very bulky and conspicuous, and waved off a hustler trying to sell me a watch.
The station was airy and cavernous and full of travelers, just as when I’d arrived hours before. An escalator to my left led down, but I continued to the rear wall, where a vast board of departures and arrivals was being updated to
the clicking noise of revolving numbers and city names.
I was looking for the next train leaving. There it was, at the top of the departures pane. In two minutes—at three thirty—the train on track 7 would depart for Trieste, Italy.
I hurried through travelers to the escalator. It was difficult getting past them, muttering Entschuldigung endlessly, but soon I reached the underground passageway. At the sign for track 7, I used the stairs, gasping, to reach the platform. A bell sounded, warning passengers that the doors to the dirty red train were about to close. I reached an open door on the last car and pulled myself inside. Shaking, I steadied myself against a window that looked out at the station.
As the train started to move, a crowd of policemen poured onto the first platform and spread out, looking for me, and for Jerzy Michalec. They were followed by two men without uniforms. One was tall— Ludwig—and he shouted at the policemen. The other, a short old man with three moles on his cheek, stood back a bit, his hands clasped behind his back. He was staring at my train with a severe expression. I didn’t know if he could see me through the dirty glass, but then our eyes met. Brano Sev glared at me with what looked like hatred, but he didn’t tug his friend’s sleeve to point me out.
That, of course, was another of Brano’s mistakes. I wondered, as we moved out of the station, if living so well, with a house and a family that loved him, had made him soft.
I suppose it had.
I didn’t go after Michalec immediately. In the space of a couple of hours I’d betrayed Brano Sev, taken his car and ruined it, shot four times at a man, and hijacked a woman’s day, chasing the man across town. I’d spent the last half hour acting like a young man, but I wasn’t one. I stumbled into an empty compartment and collapsed, catching my breath and fumbling with my medicine bottle.
When the conductor came along and asked for my ticket, I used most of the schillings Dijana had given me to buy second-class passage to Tarvis, on the border. The conductor told me I could buy the rest of my passage from the Italian conductor, who would take his place there.
I thanked him.
Before leaving, he paused and squinted. “Herr, are you all right? Do you need something?”
I thanked him again but shook my head, blowing air through pursed lips. The train rumbled on.
I peered out the window at the passing countryside south of Vienna. It really did look the same as home, particularly as the sky turned gray and cloudy. I rubbed my eyes; my head buzzed. I again heard that hum in my ears left over from my wife’s death. I tried to think back over the steps that had brought me here, to another country, but couldn’t. There seemed to be links missing. I wondered where Ferenc was now, and if he was with that Russian. Then I heard her voice, Lena’s, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying. She sounded angry.
When the train stopped, I woke up without realizing I’d fallen asleep. We were at a station with bright lamps shining in on my face. I panicked. The sky was dark. I didn’t know where I was. I got up and tugged down the window and pulled out the pistol. It caught on the fabric of my coat, but I got it free, holding it below the window as I craned my neck to see down the length of the train. A sign told me we were at a town called Bruck.
The lights at Austrian stations are brighter than at home, and I could see the people who climbed slowly down from the train. Old women mostly, and a few young people with backpacks. Michalec wasn’t among them. I kept watching until the train closed up and we were under way again, moving into the darkness. It was 5:18 P.M.
I pushed the window shut and stepped out into the narrow corridor. The conductor squeezed past me, giving a genial nod as he went on to check tickets. I went the opposite way, to the bathroom. I tried not to look in the mirror but couldn’t help it. In the flickering train light, I was completely white except for the dark rings around my eyes. I looked like death.
I straightened my collar and adjusted my jacket under my coat,then got a sudden, sharp pain in my left arm. I squeezed it, grunting. Not yet. Later, okay, but not yet. I breathed deeply until the pain subsided, then checked the pistol again. My hand on the metal grip was sweaty, so I dried everything off and looked through my pockets for something with friction. Rubber bands would have helped, but I didn’t have any. The best I could do was take some toilet paper and press it between my hand and the grip, squeezing everything together in the pocket of my coat as I slowly proceeded up the train.
The cabins, as I moved forward, became fuller and louder. Austrian families fed plastic-wrapped sandwiches to children, and Italians, sipping smuggled wine, argued in voices that sounded like angry songs. Sometimes they paused to look up at the strange old man staring in through their doors, and once a fat Italian mother with a missing tooth smiled and offered me wine. I smiled back but went on.
I tried not to hurry. I tried to be methodical, but my sick body kept wanting to run. I stopped many times when I found elderly men facing their windows and waited for them to turn back. A couple of times I knocked on their doors and then waved embarrassedly when I saw their faces, as if I’d made a mistake, before continuing on.
The train was ten cars long, and at my steady, meticulous rate it took nearly an hour to reach the restaurant car, where I found a route schedule. Two more cars, and I was at the engine. I hadn’t seen him.
I’d neglected to bring cigarettes, so I asked an Austrian businessman for one and smoked by the window, squinting at the schedule. We had another hour before Klagenfurt, then Villach, and then Tarvis on the border. I peered out at the black mountains, just visible in the lights of a passing town, and wondered if I’d been wrong. Perhaps Jerzy Michalec was still in Vienna.
No. I wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t be.
The bathrooms. There had been seven occupied bathrooms in the train, but I’d only had the patience to wait for four of them. That was the only answer.
I slowly worked my way back down the length of the train. The toilet paper wrapped around my pistol grip was so full of sweat that it had disintegrated into slippery mud, so I waited for a bathroom, replaced the paper, and continued.
I was slower this time, again giving bashful looks of confusion after staring at passengers too long, and people became suspicious. A young Italian man asked me in German what my problem was. I told him I had no problem. I was apparently scaring his mother, so I apologized and went on. When an old Austrian man complained, the conductor also asked me questions and then asked me to please return to my seat. He was kind, though. “You’re sick, Herr. I can see that. But you cannot scare my passengers. They’re my responsibility.”
I tried to assure him of my good intentions, but people whose job it is to deal with strangers know better. They can tell, perhaps from the face, when someone has taken that final unimaginable step over the border that separates the rest of the world from murderers. Certainly I knew what it looked like—I’d seen it enough—but I couldn’t see it in myself.
Because he insisted, I let him walk me, much too fast, back to my seat. I kept leaning back to look into cabins, but he had little patience. “Mein Herr. Please.”
During my excursion, an American couple, backpackers, had set up house in my compartment. They looked disappointed when the conductor guided me to my seat. They pulled in the bags of potato chips and canned beer they’d spread over the seats to discourage just this situation. They warmed to me, though. Just before Klagenfurt, the girl offered a beer, and I finally took my hand off that damned pistol to accept it. “Thank you,” I said in my best accent.
Halfway through the can, I opened the door and leaned out to look. The conductor was at the end of the corridor, an open book in front of him. He stared at me glumly, and I drew back in.
“Where you headed?” asked the American girl.
I blinked at her. My English wasn’t very good.
“Where are you go-wing?” she repeated, slow and loud.
“Oh.” I nodded and sipped the beer. “Trist.”
“Trist?” said the boy.
The boy nodded.
“We’re go-wing to Ven-iss,” she told me.
“Venicia,” I said in my language and suddenly recalled my youth.
I’d worked for a while on a fishing boat up in the Barents Sea, and among the crew were men from many countries. One of them, a Croat from Split, was obsessed with Venice and the bridge that connected the courthouse to the prison, where prisoners got their last sight of freedom before descending into the their dank cells.
“Ponte dei Sospiri,” I said, remembering its Italian name.
The girl smiled, showing all her big teeth, and nodded. She had no idea what I was talking about.
As we pulled into Klagenfurt, I set aside the empty beer can and checked the corridor. The conductor had stepped out to perform his station duties. I climbed down to the platform, again gripping the pistol in my pocket, and under the arc lights watched people leaving. The air was mountainous, cold and clean; it woke me. Again, no Michalec. Perhaps he’d actually found a way out of the Sudbahnhof undetected and made his way to the embassy, but I still doubted it. Other people would have tried that, but Michalec wasn’t the type of man to panic and run through the streets of a city where anyone could be looking for him. He would have assumed that the Austrian police who came over to his bus just after he’d disembarked were waiting to arrest him. He was on the train. I was sure of it.
I climbed onto the steps and leaned out as we started moving again. Once we’d picked up speed, I came inside. The conductor was standing outside my cabin, asking the Americans where I was. When he saw me, his sour expression returned. “Please, Herr. Do not make trouble.”
“Of course not,” I said.Soon after, we stopped in Villach, but I was more confident now. I excused myself as I pushed between the Americans’knees and looked out the window. They gave me generous smiles and offered potato chips, which I declined. We were high up now, moving along dark mountainsides and whistling through tunnels. When we emerged, the moonlit clouds seemed close enough to touch. Sometimes snow blew against the window. The Americans cooed at all of it, and I wished I knew enough English to ask if this was their first trip to Europe. They were so full of joyful excitement.
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