36 Yalta Boulevard

by Olen Steinhauer

  Brano shook his head.

  “Don’t bother. It’s cold, too. My God, is it cold.”

  “Then I won’t bother.”

  “This was the only place I could think of. But I’ve been here a week, and now it’s coming back to me. Why I didn’t want to stay in the first place. I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I think I should just go back to Bóbrka. You ever think that?”

  “Tell me. Tell me what you’ve heard since you’ve returned.”

  “About you?” Jan grunted. “Ludwig was all over the place last week. You’ve really pissed him off. He says you killed a man and ran away.”

  “Does he think you know where I am?”

  He shook his head. “Not at all. He keeps asking about …”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t suppose it matters now, does it?”

  “What doesn’t matter?”

  Soroka settled his forearms across his knees. “What you always asked me—what did I sell the Americans?”

  Brano sat down finally. “What did you sell them?”

  “A story. Well, not the story, really, but my silence.”

  “Explain.”

  He took a breath. “You know where I was before I went to Vienna?”

  “At a conference.”

  “That’s right. On ‘the future of power in the socialist neighborhood.’ Sounds good, doesn’t it? It wasn’t much of a conference, though, just a lot of empty speeches, but Gyula was quite nice for a spa town. Remember I told you about my visit to see Mihai?”

  “Of course. When you were sixteen.”

  “Turned out that another of the Pioneers in that group, Gregor Samec, grew up to be a scientist. Working in nuclear energy. He was one of the speakers at the conference. So I got in touch with him, and we went out to a bar. You’ve been there, to Gyula?”

  “It’s very nice.”

  “It’s excellent. You take the baths, then go get drunk. Gregor, though, wasn’t enjoying it. He was nervous. It took a couple bottles, but I finally got it out of him: He thought he was being followed.”

  Soroka blanked for a moment, as if he’d pass out, until Brano said, “Why did Gregor think he was being followed?”

  He blinked. “Because he’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to see. He was helping set up a test reactor in Vámosoroszi, near the Hungarian border. On the previous Saturday, he’d returned to pick up some papers he’d forgotten and found two men taking photos of the reactor and the field around it.”

  “What men?”

  “Wait.” He held up a finger. “Well, he told them they were breaking the law. One of the men answered by showing him the cover of his identity card. It was from the Ministry for State Security. He told Gregor that if he mentioned this to anyone, he was a dead man.”

  “Is this true?”

  “He said it was. But I tried to calm him. After all, he hadn’t seen the men since then, and I suggested he was just becoming paranoid, which was understandable.”

  “And that’s what you told the Americans?”

  “I told the Americans that the next day I read in The Spark that Gregor Samec was found outside one of those wine bars. He’d been shot in the head.” He snorted. “And so I was scared, too. Some Yugoslav gas researchers helped me leave with them, and from Zagreb it wasn’t too difficult to get to Vienna. The Americans. They paid me not to tell anyone else the story.”

  “Why?”

  “How should I know?” he asked. “And why should I care? I was broke, and they were willing to pay me. But I’m not as slow as I look. You see, Gregor, that night in Gyula, when he told me his story, he said that there were two men. A state security agent and someone else.”

  “Yes?”

  “That someone else, he told me, was an old man who didn’t say a thing. He had a white mustache and beard. And as I was sitting in the American embassy, across from a white-bearded old man telling me not to breathe the story to anyone, I realized that this was the bearded man from Gregor’s story. He’s the one who paid for my silence, then Later brokered the other deal—the Americans would get me inside only if I got you out. That was the deal.”

  Brano pressed his palms together in front of his nose. “Andrew.”

  “Yeah. That’s how he introduced himself to me,” said Soroka. “You know him?”

  “Why did he want me out?”

  “I don’t know.” Soroka shook his head. “But he knew a lot about you. Names of your family, what to do to provoke you.”

  Brano let this sink in. He’d always suspected the Committee was behind smuggling him here, but now it was clear. Not only the Committee but Andrew, the old man who left their literature in his mailbox.

  “What about the other man? At the reactor. What did he look like?”

  “Gregor didn’t say; I didn’t ask.”

  “Have you seen Filip Lutz?”

  “He’s disappeared. Ersek said he heard about what you did to this Lochert character and is scared you’ll be after him next.”

  “Why does he think that?”

  “Because you’re a spy, Brano.”

  “I was a spy.”

  Jan looked at him. “How should I know the difference?”

  “Do you know anything about the fourteenth of May?”

  “What day of the week is that?”

  “Sunday. Do you know something?”

  “Should I?”

  Brano tried to cross his left leg over his right, but it was difficult, so he left both feet on the floor. He covered his face and rubbed his palms into his eyes.

  “Have you talked to your Dijana Franković yet?”

  Brano uncovered his eyes. “Why?”

  “She’s worried to hell about you. She goes to the Carp every night and asks if anyone knows where you are. She’s making a real nuisance of herself.” He smiled. “My professional opinion is she’s in love with you.”

  Brano nodded.

  “Are you in love with her?”

  Brano looked up, but Jan wasn’t smiling. “I’m afraid so.”

  Then Jan nodded as well, seriously. He allowed a small grin to creep across his face. “I know I look like hell. But you—Brano, you look even worse. This is what love does to a man. No?”

  25 APRIL 1967, TUESDAY

  •

  He waited until ten, when the tourist crowds began to swell. He had told Jan to stay quiet about his presence in Vienna but had no faith in the man’s silence. So he mingled with the foreigners and their cameras, crossing to the edge of the old town, where the streets were emptier, then bought cigarettes in a tobacco shop and gazed out the window a few minutes, unwrapping the pack, before leaving again.

  He walked the rest of the way, up Nußdorfer to the overhead rail bridge, and bought hot tea in a paper cup from a kiosk. From where he stood beneath the bridge, he had a clear view of the front of her building.

  He left his spot twice during the next three hours, once for another tea, once to urinate in an alley. Then, around two, he saw her cross the parking lot in front of her building, wearing jeans and a short brown leather jacket. Passing cars briefly obscured her, but when the traffic cleared he saw the sunburned man as well, just behind her, both waiting for the light to change. They crossed to the tram stop in the center of the street. Brano walked to the opposite side, hat low, and continued to a doorway just past the stop.

  When the number 38 pulled close, Dijana stepped forward, as did the sunburned man. Brano crossed the street behind the tram, hobbled up, then climbed into the third car as they boarded the second. Others piled on behind him, but he clutched a pole to hold his position by the window.

  Dijana and her shadow got off at Haltestelle, where she entered a clothing store, and her shadows, on either side of the street, looked at window mannequins. The sunburned man smoked three cigarettes during the half hour she shopped, glancing up and down the street while Brano walked to the corner, rounded it,
and turned back, avoiding his gaze. When Dijana finally left the store, she hadn’t bought a thing.

  This was a young man’s job, creeping around a metropolis, tracking people while remaining invisible. Decades ago, Brano had found the minutiae interesting, sometimes exciting, but he no longer remembered why. All the older Brano found himself desiring, as he followed Dijana and her shadow farther down the street, was a life that looked a lot like retirement. Maybe Gerhard’s small house on the Fertő Lake, and a woman not so different from Dijana Franković. A child as well? No. Brano Sev did not have the imagination to encompass all of that.

  It was a little before four when, after more of Dijana’s seemingly random stops, the three of them made it to Sterngasse. She did not hesitate as she entered the Carp. The sunburned man settled at the point where the Sterngasse stairs descended to Marc-Aurel; Brano, again, waited at the Friedmannplatz end of the street, leaning against the corner of a building. When he looked, he could just make out Dijana’s form through the window as she fended off an old man with a white beard who had approached her. Andrew Stamer first put his arm around her shoulder, but she shrugged it off and threw some earnest words at him. The old man raised his hands, eager not to offend, and talked with her awhile. She calmed and nodded; then the old man wrote something on a napkin and passed it over. He tapped her on the shoulder again before taking his shot glass with him to a back table.

  She had a second beer, and as she talked with Monika, the bartender shook her head sympathetically. Perhaps he was the subject of their talk. Whatever the subject was, it seemed to agitate Dijana. She kept using her palms to pull the sides of her short hair over her ears, to where it wouldn’t reach.

  Darkness had fallen by the time she left, and she trotted obliviously down the stairs past the sunburned man. From Marc-Aurel they walked east, toward the Danube Canal. They reached the Marienbrucke, and Brano, feeling weak from the exertion, realized this could go on forever.

  He counted three other people on the bridge, men with ties and briefcases. But witnesses no longer mattered. Ludwig no doubt already knew he was back in town. Brano quickened his pace.

  They were halfway across the bridge. The sunburned man was five paces ahead of him; Dijana was ten more. The street was empty of traffic. Brano jogged those first five paces, his left leg cumbersome, pulled out the pistol with his right hand, and swung its butt into the shadow’s neck.

  He let out a shout but did not fall. Brano swung again as the man thrust back an elbow, catching his ribs. But the pain stayed solidly in Brano’s fist, and he hit the neck again, then leapt on the man’s back, an arm over his trachea. The sunburned man fought back, and they wrestled to the railing.

  “Brani!”

  He ignored her and twisted a pistol from the shadow’s hand, tossing it into the canal. Grunting, Brano struck his neck again and felt the body relax. The man was weak but not unconscious. Brano hefted the man’s top half over the railing, ignoring the moans—“Nein, nein”—and grabbed his kicking feet. He lifted, and the man tumbled over the edge.

  “Brani!”

  He waited for the break in the water, the shadow’s head surfacing, arms splashing. German curses burst from the man’s lips.

  “Brano Oleksy Sev!” said Dijana.

  When she hugged him, her leather jacket squeaking, he smelled the cigarettes in her hair.

  She pulled her head off his shoulder to look at the railing. “He is—”

  “He’s all right. I didn’t want to kill him.”

  Three men in ties fidgeted nearby, as if something were required of them but they didn’t know what it was.

  “I’m a policeman,” Brano told them.

  The men looked at each other.

  Very seriously, he said, “Now, please excuse us.” He took Dijana’s hand and began walking away.

  “What you are doing?” Dijana whispered, barely suppressing a giggle.

  “Just keep walking.”

  Once they’d reached the other side of the bridge, Brano glanced back. The men were gone.

  “Brani, what is happen?”

  “Follow me.”

  Still holding her hand, he led her to the end of Gredlerstraße, then left on Taborstraße, to the Church of the Brothers of Mercy. He pushed through the wooden doors into a plain entryway with notices for upcoming sermons.

  “Dragi is Catholic now?”

  They continued into the church, but an iron gate closed off access to the pews, so they moved back into a dark corner, beneath enormous portraits of saints.

  “Dragi,” she said. “What is wrong with you? You look bad. Your hair …“ She removed his hat and touched his shaved scalp with cool fingers, her nose wrinkling.

  “It’s a kind of disguise,” he said.

  She put her hands on his beard, a thumb touching the sloped left corner of his mouth. “What is—”

  “I’m all right, don’t worry about me.”

  She hugged him again. “I was very worry.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I had to leave.”

  “Who is this men?”

  “What men?”

  “They come,” she said, looking at his forehead. “They ask where are you. This man, Luvi—”

  “Ludwig?”

  “Da, Ludwig. He say you kill a man. Brani, tell me. This is true?”

  “Yes.” When he said this he was looking at the marble checkerboard floor. “He was trying to kill me.”

  “Kill you? But why, Brani?”

  “I can’t explain.”

  “Dragi, you make no sense.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just had to talk to you again.”

  “And I to you, but what you must say?”

  He had nothing to say. He’d followed her all day and had attacked a man to get to her. All that he’d known was that it was necessary. He rubbed his eyes.

  He had become that thing that for men in his business was the beginning of the end. Dijana had turned him into a sentimental old man.

  He stroked her hair as far behind her ears as it would go and whispered, “I just want to say I miss you.”

  Then he pinned her to the cold church wall and covered her mouth with his. After a minute, he pulled back, watching how she licked her lips. “I like the way what you miss me. But I must to tell you something.”

  He waited.

  “I was on the Carp today. Of course, like every day, I looking for you. But this man, he come and talk.”

  “His name is Andrew. I saw him.”

  “You saw him?”

  “I was following you.”

  She arched an eyebrow and cocked her head. “Da?”

  “Da.”

  She kissed him again. “Well, this man, I knowed him, too. From before. He was friend for Bertrand.”

  “Not one of his Russian contacts?”

  She shook her head. “No. He friend for Lutz and for that Josef Lochert. And now he looking for you. He say he your father.”

  Brano looked into her eyes, waiting for something to clear up the grammatical mistake that had obviously ruined the sense of what she wanted to say. “Can you repeat that?”

  “This man, he your father. Well, he want to meet with you. He say if I see you, I will to tell you.” She leaned closer. “Brani?”

  He had stepped back a few paces, his back now against the iron gate protecting the pews. Andrew, they had called him. The Americanization of Andrezej. How could he not have seen this? How could he not have recognized him? She put her hands on his shoulders. He leaned his head close to her ear and whispered, “My father?”

  “Pa da. You not know?”

  He shook his head against her shoulder as she rubbed the back of his head.

  “Shh,” she said. “I am sorry.”

  Brano could not remember the last time he had wept. Perhaps when Regina Haliniak left him for Zoran the lieutenant—but no, not even then. It was possible that the last time he’d wept was during the war, after his friend Marek Piotrowski was kil
led. But that time, at least, there had been a reason for weeping. Now, in a Viennese Catholic church, he was crying uncontrollably on this girl’s shoulder, and he didn’t know why. She cooed and kissed his bald head, and her voice finally brought him out of it.

  “You will to meet him?”

  He wiped his nose with a palm, then raised his head. “I should. What else did he say?”

  She thumbed some wetness from his cheek. “He say he is reason what you are here. In Vienna. And he give me this.” She reached into a pocket and handed him a napkin from the Carp, with Inter-Continental 516 written on it in pencil. “He say you call him, and he will come right away.” She touched his face again. “You will call? He seem very worry.”

  “Yes. I will call.” He sniffed again and looked around. The church’s arid smell was getting to him. “We should go now. They’ll be looking for me.”

  “You come home, I will take care for you.”

  He kissed her, and she held on to his neck as he explained. “If I stay with you, they’ll find me. They’re already watching you—the man I attacked was with you all day.”

  “Pa da. I knowed that. He’s very bad, no?”

  “It’s my fault. They’re looking for me.”

  “Then we go,” she said, smiling. “We make a trip to Salzkammergut and swim in the lake.”

  “We will, but I need a few more days to figure things out. Right now, I’m confused.”

  “Zbrka?”

  “Da,” he said. “Zbrka.”

  “What you must figure out?”

  He sighed, staring at her ear as he brushed down her hair. “I never left my job.”

  “You never—” She shook her head. “You say that again.”

  He continued staring at her ear to avoid her eyes. “I’m still working for the Ministry for State Security. That’s why I’m in Vienna. And now I have to decide what to do.”

  When he finally looked at her eyes, they were wet. She did not know whether to be angry or not.

  “You’re going to the jazz club now?”

  “Da,” she muttered. “I must to work.”

  “Then work,” he said. “I’ll find you in a few days, and hopefully we can go to the lake. Really.” He raised her chin with a forefinger. “It’s the only thing I want now.”