“What can I do?”
“You can go home, Brano. I’ve got papers for you, and there’s an eleven o’clock flight tonight. I’ll drive you—I’ve got a diplomatic car.”
“And you?”
He sighed. “I’m going to kill Filip Lutz.”
“But I told you—”
The colonel raised a hand. “It doesn’t matter if he’s important or not. If we don’t get rid of Lutz, suspicion in Yalta is going to fall on you—don’t forget that. You don’t have evidence, only speculation. Lutz’s death will buy us time to collect evidence on the mole in the Ministry.”
Brano looked at his hands on his knees, then said, “No.”
“What?”
“I killed Lochert. I dropped out of contact for a long time. I even gave information to the Austrians. When I spoke with the Lieutenant General, it was clear. If I go back now, it’ll be to a firing squad,” he said, realizing he was echoing his father’s words.
Cerny considered this, his face impassive. “Perhaps you’re right. Okay. Stay in Vienna until it’s done, and I’ll tell them you took care of Lutz. That should help your case.”
“I don’t want you to lie for me.”
“I don’t mind lying for you, One-Shot.”
“They’ll interrogate you.”
Cerny gave him a pained expression. “If you insist, I’ll let you do it. Tomorrow morning. Can you get to the Schönbrunn Palace at nine-thirty? Lutz is meeting someone there at ten.”
“Who’s he meeting?”
Cerny smiled. “He thinks he’s meeting Andrew, your father. But we’ll be there instead. At the Roman Ruins. You know where that is?”
“Of course.”
“Are you staying at the hotel tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Fine,” said Cerny. He looked up to where the Crusader and his assistant were riding horses along the shore. “You know, I always hated this movie.”
Brano returned to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, nodded at the bellboy, and took his key from the woman at the front desk. In his room, he pulled the curtains shut and lay down for an afternoon nap. There was nothing to do but wait for the execution of Filip Lutz, then the flight back home. For the first time in months, he felt he knew what tomorrow had in store.
Yalta Boulevard, like any office in the world, was riddled with alliances and feuds. One vice of the dictatorship of the proletariat was that absolute power led inevitably to favoritism, cadres, and corruption. Those in the Ministry devoted to the original ideals had to be vigilant in order to keep the Ministry pure. This in turn led to schisms and power struggles. The ideals of the Ministry, like socialism itself, were under constant threat. For twenty years, Brano had remained in Cerny’s camp, and together they had fought skirmishes to hold on to their positions. The only difference between their office and most others in the world was that when they lost a skirmish, they could end up dead.
Which was why, drifting into an uncomfortable sleep, he began to picture a life in the Salzkammergut, a house on a lake, the simple existence of chopping firewood and visiting the local market, of mixing with the kinds of farmers who had once populated his childhood. Dijana was there, with her tarot cards and acoustic guitar and her inventive syntax. It was a world where the cost of any skirmish was only hurt feelings.
That’s when he considered it first in its entirety. An escape. Finding her was simple. A car could be acquired. And under the names Herr and Frau Bieniek they would check into a quaint pension surrounded by mountains.
A first step, until he’d wandered the local graveyards to find a stillborn child born the same year as him, 1917, whose identity he could borrow.
He sank into his dream uncritically, slipping through years, houses in southern France or the Italian coast, and wondered why he’d never thought through all of this before.
The Jazzklub Abel was on the other side of the Danube Canal, over the Marienbrucke, past the Church of the Brothers of Mercy, at Große Moihrengasse 26. The evening shadows hid the grime as he walked down from Johannes-von-Gott Platz, and through the front door he entered a courtyard fallen into disrepair. There was no sign of Ludwig’s men; perhaps he’d given up. In the back, beside a gnarled fence, was a flat, abandoned apartment building with a small, hand-painted sign—JAZZKLUB ABEL—attached to its windowless door. It was almost seven o’clock, but he heard nothing from inside. The door was locked. He rapped with the knuckles of his right hand.
After a minute, he knocked again and heard heavy footsteps on the other side. Then the door opened, and he was faced with a large man in his sixties, bald, wearing tortoise-shell glasses like the British spy in the film Brano had seen a long time ago.
Ja?”
Brano tried to smile. “Is Dijana here? I’m a friend.”
“Dee?” Abel Cohen frowned as he made the connection. “So you’re the one.”
Brano shrugged.
“Well, come in.”
He opened the door for Brano, then trotted down concrete stairs without looking back. Brano followed him into a long basement with a low, arched ceiling blackened by decades of cigarettes. An empty wooden stage sat at the far end, and crowded throughout were round tables and chairs.
“No business?” asked Brano.
“We’re just opening,” Abel said tonelessly, then walked behind a wooden bar through a door. “Dee!” he called as he disappeared.
“Da?”
Whispers.
Then she was in the doorway, wiping her fingers quickly with a white towel. “Oh, Brani.”
She flung herself at him, kissing his face as she held on to his neck. Each time he opened his mouth to speak, she covered it with hers, humming mmm. Finally, she pulled back.
“Where you have been?” she said with feigned anger.
“I’ve been working.”
“My spy” she said. “And you feel … how you feel?”
“Excuse me.”
They both looked up at Abel, who stood in the kitchen doorway.
“I need to open up. And a cigarette.”
“You need a cigarette?” Brano reached into his pocket.
“No,” said Abel. “I’ll have a cigarette outside.”
“Danke, Abelski,” said Dijana. “We’ll talk quickly.”
Abel, more sheepishly than his size would suggest, jogged up the stairs. They felt a cool wind as he opened the door and stepped outside.
“He is good, no?”
“He seems so.”
“Tell me, dragi. You stop to working and I take care of you. You are sick. We go to Salzkammergut?”
Her expression was hopeful in a way that only women can make convincing. Childish and naive. Brano had spent a lifetime taking apart the imperfections in earnest expressions, but with Dijana it was impossible. Her earnest expressions were exactly what they seemed. He imagined that face in that house on that lake. Earnest, trusting.
During his walk from the hotel to here, he’d gone through that dream again, but critically, picking it apart, analyzing it. There was only one flaw he could find, but it brought down everything: What would the lies, and a mind like his, corrupted from a young age, do over the years to a woman who could not be taken apart, who did not calculate and scheme? On the Marienbrucke the answer came to him: They would ruin her.
He said, “There’s something I have to tell you first.”
“Da,” she said. “I know. You is a spy for your country. You tell me that.”
“There’s more,” he said. “You have to know this.”
“Okay.” She nodded, her face very serious. “I am on the ready.”
What he wanted to do now, more than anything, was to come up with some innocuous fiction—that he had no money, or that he was married. Or even the simple truth that he was leaving. But despite the sometimes comical effect of her grammatical blunders, Dijana Franković was the most serious of women. She had spent the last years rebuilding her life from nothing and would not accept half measures. Her decisions—whethe
r her decision to be with him or her decision to take on a low-paying waitress job because she’d uncovered the fraud of her previous career—were absolute. She had more integrity than anyone else in this cold city, and she deserved the truth. So he said, “Bertrand. I was involved in his death.”
She let go of him. “You kill Bertrand?”
“No,” he said, “but I arranged it. I believed at the time that he was selling information. He worked for us—for me—and I thought he was selling our secrets to the West. It was a mistake. I was wrong. But I had reason to believe it. There was a reason, it seemed, at the time.”
He was babbling, so he stopped. Her expression was more like surprise than anger, and perhaps that’s why he clarified it for her.
“I ordered his execution.”
Footsteps clattered behind him. Two young men—Wolfgang and another long-haired friend—followed by Abel. They all nodded hello as they passed.
“I must to working,” said Dijana. She brought a hand to her mouth, the nail of her thumb caught between her teeth.
“I had to tell you.”
“Da,” she said, staring at some point in the air between them. “Thank you for your honestly. But I must to working.”
She turned away; and he, feeling as if he were at that party again, stoned, wanting nothing more than to keep this remarkable illusion, reached out and grabbed her wrist.
With more speed than he would have expected, she spun around and struck his face with her open hand.
“Get away from me, Brano Sev.”
28 APRIL 1967, FRIDAY
•
Brano raised the mélange to his lips, sniffing the frothed milk sprinkled with cinnamon, but found no scent. It was fatigue, he knew, the result of a night in an uncomfortable bed, reviewing each moment leading up to that still-sore bump on his head. He drank the coffee quickly, feeling it scald his throat, then motioned to the waiter for another. He lit a cigarette.
It was shocking, the amount of abuse his poor body had survived.
He’d been in Austria over two months now, but it felt like two years. Last night he’d replayed all those people in an endless loop. Lutz and Nanz, Ludwig and Franz. Monika at her eternal bar, and even the pitiful Sasha Lytvyn. His father was no longer just a chipped front tooth, and Dijana—she was so much more than the memory of a single night that had kept him warm at the Pidkora People’s Factory those final months of last year.
The waiter placed a fresh mélange on the table and took the empty cup. He smiled at Brano, then walked away.
Should he have told her? There were moments last night, tangled in his wet sheets, when he had been sure that with those few words he had killed any possibility of his own happiness. Now, bringing the cup to his lips, that conviction returned.
No lakeside house, no acoustic guitar. No charming sentence structures and no more desire.
He’d once believed that those who fled socialism were opportunists, and perhaps that was true of him as well. Dijana was an opportunity to have something that his own country had been unable to give him.
And what was left to him now? An assassination, and then the possibility of a firing squad.
A clock on the wall told him it was nine.
He paid and started down the busy street, following the stone wall of the Schönbrunn grounds. He touched the spot on the back of his head, then lit another cigarette.
Cerny had once said that young men were ideal for assassination. They didn’t overthink. For them, the only worry is their own safety. Will they be able to get in, do the job, and make it out again? Unlike old men, they don’t concern themselves with the whys and the repercussions, as Brano found himself doing as he approached the front gate.
The colonel’s reasoning was valid enough. Lutz’s death would hold the Ministry wolves at bay until they could uncover the mole. The Lieutenant General, in particular, was waiting for the opportunity to finish what he’d started in August. This time, as he’d said, a factory job would be just a dream.
Brano paused in front of the unbearably regal palace, then followed a crowd of tourists around the left side, to enter the gardens.
Filip Lutz was connected to a conspiracy to undermine socialism. He had no doubt about this. But Lutz was, like Brano, a pawn. His death would not frighten the surviving conspirators—Andrezej Sev and the unknown Ministry figure—into inaction. Lutz’s only value was the information he carried in his head. Which meant that the only reasonable course of action was to make him talk. And then, if necessary, kill him.
He walked down the long stretch of garden leading behind the palace to the Neptune Fountain as he considered his phrasing, how he would explain this simple fact to Cerny. They could return to the Capital with enough information to salvage their position.
At the end of the Great Parterre he turned left, trees rising on both sides. The tourists thinned here, and up ahead he could see the imitation antiquity of the Roman Ruins.
By the time he reached the half-buried columns and worn arches and started walking around the pool filled with shattered fragments of lost splendor, he believed he had assembled the correct argument. That conviction only accentuated his surprise when he reached the hidden side of the pool and found Cerny with one knee in the dirt, a pistol equipped with a silencer in his hand, looking down on Filip Lutz. Lutz lay facedown at the edge of the water with a hole in the back of his skull.
Cerny looked up, his face inert. He wiped his mustache. When he spoke his voice was almost a whisper. “Brano,” he said, then looked back at Lutz’s body. “You’re here.”
“You’ve already done it.”
“The first one didn’t,” Cerny said. “The first one didn’t kill him. It was in the stomach. So I had to do it again.” The hand on his thigh shook. “It’s horrible, isn’t it?”
“He came early.”
Cerny rose to his feet and wiped dirt from his knees. “Yes.” He blinked a few times. He rubbed his eyes.
Something smelled strange here. Sweet. “He would have been more use to us alive.”
Cerny gazed at the body. “I don’t know.” He looked past Brano, and Brano followed his gaze through the underbrush, but they were alone. Cerny’s face was very red as he stepped back and leaned against a tree. “I haven’t been in the field for over a decade, do you realize that? I send you guys out here all the time, but I forget it’s the hardest job in the world.”
Brano nodded.
“I did it for you, One-Shot. For both of us.” He took a long, loud breath through his nose and tapped his head against the bark. “I forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
Brano looked at his red face, which was covered in sweat.
“Comrade Colonel?”
The colonel bit his lower lip and reached into a pocket. “I forgot.” His hand came out holding a long syringe. “Jesus, Brano. I don’t think I can do it.” He slid, panting, down the tree as Brano ran over to him and took the syringe. In the same pocket he found a glass bottle of insulin and began. The colonel fell to the side, trying to pull out his shirt. Brano filled the syringe with insulin, then held it up to the light, squeezing, until all the air was out.
“Christ,” muttered Cerny.
Brano tugged the colonel’s shirt out of his pants and gripped the ample fat around his waist, which was cold and wet. Then he plunged the needle in, trying to ignore the dead body lying just behind him.
He waited for the colonel to recover, then helped him back through the gardens, out the front of the palace, to the car park where Cerny’s diplomatic Mercedes waited. Some tourists watched, and a Frenchman offered assistance, which Brano declined. The colonel took the wheel but didn’t start the ignition. His breaths were heavy.
“It’s all right,” said Brano. “You’re not expected to do fieldwork. It has to be difficult.”
“I’ll be okay.” Cerny patted Brano’s knee with a weak hand. He took a deep breath. “But I’ve learned a few things. Since we last talked.”
“What?”
“My contacts,” he said, then cleared his throat. “My contacts have made some progress back in the Capital. During the months you’ve been in Vienna, one officer is on record as having made more than twenty calls to speak with our dear departed friend Josef Lochert.”
“Who?”
“Take a guess.”
The answer slipped from his mouth without reflection. “The Comrade Lieutenant General. Who also ordered Lutz’s execution.”
Cerny nodded. “You know what’s going to happen when we get to the embassy, don’t you?”
“I have some idea.”
“I’m not sure you do,” he said. “I know you killed Lochert in self-defense, but as far as Major Romek’s concerned, you’re a murderer. And probably a double agent.” He frowned, as if realizing something else. “He’s going to want to interrogate you, and it won’t be easy. There’s nothing I can do about that. I don’t know who I can trust.”
Brano nodded.
“I’ll tell the Ministry you took care of Lutz, but they won’t believe that until the Austrians print his death in the newspaper. They know how loyal I am to you.”
Brano didn’t answer, and the colonel started the car. He drove slowly.
“What about your father?”
“What about him?”
“He wants you to defect, doesn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Father and son, but so different.” He smiled. “Irina used to say that children always act the same as their parents. Either they do it for the same beliefs, or they reverse those beliefs but commit themselves in exactly the same way.”
Brano nodded as Cerny leaned into a turn.
“Listen, One-Shot. I’m worried about you.”
They were driving east toward the Ringstraße. A light ahead of them turned red, and Cerny slowed. Brano said, “I don’t have any choice. I have to go to the embassy and tell them everything I know.”
“I can tell them everything,” the colonel said as he rolled to a stop. He turned to Brano. “There’s no need for you to return if you don’t want to. You’ve done your service to the state. You’ve earned this right more than anyone. I can delay a search for a day or so, but you have to make the decision now. Before this light turns green.”
36 Yalta Boulevard Page 29