by Richard Wake
He saw the question before it was asked.
"It's all they'll let me do now. I never had a private practice, you see -- I was always in academic medicine, and then I worked in the government. But when it came time for me to be a full professor, well, they call you into the office, offer you coffee and cake, and tell you that the professorship just isn't possible. You know, 'because of the current situation,' and they suggest that it's time to leave the university, except it isn't a suggestion. This is all I can do, the only job I can get, repairing street fighters on a night when no other doctor wants to work. I'm ashamed to admit that I was hoping you were more seriously hurt so I could have a chance to operate on you. So this is me, stitches on the Sabbath -- my mother would cry. She had been so proud. She cut out the first newspaper story that mentioned me and framed it."
Leon was seething, and Jokl patted him on the arm. "Stop," he said. "I have other options. I could go to Paris tomorrow and live with my cousin if only I didn't hate him so much. But he did make the offer, and I am thinking about it. But what about you, my friend? You will continue beating up Nazis in the street until you run into one with a knife?"
"I am a journalist," Leon said. "Die Neue Freie Presse."
"So you will try to tell the truth until they take the printing presses? It is hopeless, I fear, but it is our only hope. Truth."
Jokl hugged Leon, and then he was off to his next patient. Leon put his shirt back on and, miracle of miracles, there was no blood on it, and there was only one small drop on the sleeve of his jacket. He looked in the mirror, combed his hair with his fingers, and smiled. Leon looked as if he had been in a fight, but he didn't look as if he had lost.
He turned from the mirror and said, "I don't feel like dancing anymore. But maybe one more at the Louvre?"
3
Cafe Louvre was a newspaper hangout at the corner of Wipplingerstrasse and Renngasse, really a foreign correspondents' hangout. Leon first started going there to make contacts, and later started bringing Henry and I because he thought we would enjoy it because newspapermen are a little smarter than average, and a little more cynical than average, and a little more disreputable than average. In other words, our kind of people.
The American correspondents were at their regular table in the far corner. A group of visiting American students had kind of joined them, getting sloppy, yelling about Hitler. Even if they weren't speaking English, that's how you knew they were Americans, the yelling. On the subject of Hitler, the rest of us mostly tended to mutter and whisper.
It was nicely crowded, comfortably warm. The adrenaline from the fight was gone, leaving a quiet glow. We hadn't seen the sun in a week, which isn't all that unusual for Vienna in November but depressing nonetheless. You fought the black feeling in places like this, with a glass in your hand, in a crowd where you didn't tend to look at anybody in particular but still felt as if you were seeing everything.
Which, I imagine, is how I noticed this guy walking toward my table from about 50 feet away. I was sitting alone at this point. Henry had just left for the bathroom, and Leon had invited himself to sit with three blondes a few tables over. He said it was one of the rules of a game of his own invention -- Shiksa Roulette -- that there be an odd number of shiksas for the single Jew to have a chance. He was fingering his stitched-up eyebrow, and they all seemed suitably impressed with his tale.
The guy reached the table and introduced himself. His name was Robert Something-or-other, and he was the Vienna correspondent for Prager Tablatt.
"Do you know the paper?"
"Of course," I said. He already seemed to know that I was from Czechoslovakia, or he wouldn't have come over, but I told him anyway, offering him a seat, beginning the social dance.
We began chatting. I asked him about the latest with Schuschnigg, which is really a question about the latest with Germany, which is where every conversation seemed to end up, and he told me a bunch of stuff that I had already read in the papers. He asked me about my work, and I filled him in on the fascinating life of a sales representative for a magnesite mine. As I was droning on about blast furnace linings and maximum temperatures, I caught him staring at a nearby brunette's nearby ass, and he caught me catching him, and he shrugged and said, "Maybe in a little while."
After a quick laugh and an uncomfortable pause, he leaned in and said, "Look, I have something to tell you."
"I kind of sensed that."
"A representative of the government in Prague would like to speak with you."
"About what? My company has an office in Brno. I really just take care of the accounts in Austria and Germany. I can give you the number --."
"It's not about the mine. It's more delicate than that."
There was nothing delicate about what I did. It was just sales. Which I tried to explain to a newspaper reporter who clearly wasn't listening, who was digging into the meat of his hand with his thumbnail with enough force that he was near to drawing blood.
"Look," he said. "The guy they want you to meet," and here he leaned in uncomfortably close and whispered, "is from the intelligence services."
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm telling you what I know. They want to talk to you about something. They want you to meet a guy on Sunday at 1:30 in Stephansdom."
"What?"
"You go in the main door, head up the right aisle," he said, and now he was reciting quickly from memory, the words tumbling out, faster and faster as if he was afraid he would forget if he slowed down.
"Just in front of the third pillar, a man will be kneeling and praying. There will be a copy of Die Neue Freie Presse in the pew in front of him. If the paper is there, you sit in that row and don't turn around and look at him. If the paper isn't there, you keep walking."
"You've got to be fucking kidding me."
He assured me that he wasn't fucking kidding me. He said that if there were a problem, the guy would be there at the same time the following Sunday. If I didn't show up then, they wouldn't bother me again. And then the guy walked away, not looking this time as he passed the nearby brunette with the nearby ass, grabbing his coat and hat from a rack and heading for the door, not saying goodbye to anybody.
The whole thing didn't take five minutes. Henry was back from his piss as it was ending. "Who was that guy?" he said.
"Newspaper guy from Prague. Wanted to know if we had a common friend. We didn't."
We ordered another drink and talked about nothing. Actually, Henry talked, and I nodded over my sudden preoccupation. Why the hell would the Czech intelligence service want to speak to me? I could tell them where to get drunk in Graz, or where to get laid in Dusseldorf, but those weren't exactly state secrets. And as for magnesite, yes, it had military uses, but I knew as much about the stuff as anybody who could read an encyclopedia. This just didn't make any sense.
Meanwhile, Henry was talking about Leon and the three blondes. "Has he given the signal yet?"
"I haven't seen it, but I haven't been paying attention."
The signal was just a tug on his right earlobe. When he did it, Leon needed help. That is, he was doing well but needed companions for his girl's friends before they would let her leave. It was a pretty standard strategy. It sometimes even worked.
"There it is," Henry said, as Leon tugged his earlobe.
"Do we have to?"
"What's wrong with you?"
"I don't know. I just don't feel like it."
"You have to come. Just me doesn't work."
So we went over. Mine was cute, as it turned out, and all three of them looked like they came from money. We ordered another drink, and it was all charmingly inane. It became pretty evident that this wasn't happening for Leon after all when the girls went to the bathroom and then sat in different seats when they returned, but then an odd thing happened. Mine, Johanna, sat in the same seat, leaned in and asked me if I would be her date on Saturday night at the Opera in her family's box.
"Saturday like tomorrow?"
>
"You're probably not busy," she said.
"What's on the program?"
"Why do you ask?"
"It's an appropriate question, I think."
"It's an appropriate question for someone who cares. You don't impress me as someone who cares. When was the last time you attended?"
I laughed. I think the last time I was there was on a school field trip where they took us backstage and showed us the big wardrobe of costumes, and I got a big laugh from my mates by grabbing one of those Brunhilda blonde wigs and putting it on while the professor had his back turned.
"'Attended' is such an imprecise word. I can tell you that I walk by the Opera every day and admire it. It's a very handsome building."
She smiled for a millisecond. "That's what I thought. Be outside the main entrance at 7. I'll meet you there."
It suddenly occurred to me that I had never actually said I would go, but now it was certain that I was going. I was playing the conversation over in my head during the walk home and still hadn't come to a conclusion when I saw Hannah, our secretary, sitting on the steps of my building, bundled up, a handkerchief balled in her left hand. She was crying.
"Hannah..."
"Oh, Alex...It's Otto. He's dead."
4
We hugged each other for I don't know how long, out there on the steps in the cold. We cried together. I believed I was closer to Otto than anyone on the planet, to the man who made me what I was as an adult, for better or worse. Hannah believed she was closer to Otto than anyone, her lover for years though unacknowledged publicly.
She didn't know much. A telegram had arrived at the office from the Cologne police, a detective, Adalbert Muller. It said that Otto's body had been found two days earlier "within the jurisdiction," and that he would appreciate being contacted "at your earliest convenience" to arrange for identification of the body and its release from the city morgue. When we got inside my apartment, I tried the contact phone number, but there was no answer, hardly a surprise at 11:30 pm.
And then we sat, with a bottle from the cupboard, two glasses and our shared grief, still raw and unformed. We had no idea what had happened and could only guess. A heart attack was most likely. Otto had suffered what he passed off as "a flutter" a few years earlier. The doctor had no real explanation and prescribed some rest. Otto stayed off his feet for precisely 24 hours and never mentioned the whole thing again.
"I'll call in the morning and then get on a train," I said.
"I should come with you."
"I don't know."
"You shouldn't have to do this alone."
"You're not going to help me with the identification -- there's no way I'm going to allow you to do that. And the rest is just a long train ride."
"He loved that train ride," she said, and then went silent. I loved that train ride, too, when it was on one of the days of the week when the Orient Express connected Vienna and Cologne. It was one of the things Otto taught me, to love luxury. Or, rather, as he said, "To love the finer things but also to appreciate them. To live humbly but to splurge extravagantly. That is a perfect life -- especially when the splurge is on your expense account."
Otto had taken me in when I was in high school. I was 16 and came to visit for the summer with my favorite uncle and thought I knew everything. I found out I knew only one thing: that I had no desire to go back to Brno and sit in an office with my father, learning the mine's account books. To this day, I can't believe he let me stay. Just before graduation, the army called. That's where I met Leon and Henry. Our outfit was transported back to Vienna after the armistice, and I was determined to stay with Otto and learn his end of the business: the sales and the clients. He agreed immediately when I asked, and so did my father, who likely knew that my brother Ernst was a much better fit for the other side of his partner's desk. Ernst's nose had always been a better fit up Papa's ass than mine ever was.
And that's how it began. For the first six months after the war, in between a bit of schooling -- finishing at Akademisches Gymnasium at one point, a semester of university later -- I traveled with Otto everywhere, learning the paperwork requirements and the caring and feeding of the clients, from the office meeting to the evening debauchery to contacts between visits, just to make sure everything was OK. I learned about a French cognac named Hennessy and a Leipzig madam named Clarissa and the fine art of padding an expense account. Or, as Otto used to say when he was filling out his monthly form, "When you hit your knees before bed, always remember to thank the Almighty for the man who invented the taxi cab."
Soon, Otto was giving me a few of my own clients, mostly the smaller ones where the head of the firm was younger. Within a couple of years, we were splitting things pretty evenly. A couple of years after that, Otto was in his mid-fifties and starting to give me more and more work. I would take it all if he'd let me -- and not for the money because while I did enjoy the commissions, I craved the freedom of being out on the road even more.
Somewhere along the way -- I think it was about 1925 -- Otto hired Hannah to handle the office. I don't know when they started sleeping together, but I became aware of it about five years ago. It coincided with Otto giving me another bunch of his clients, and I understood. He kept a handful of the mine's oldest and most significant clients, but that was it. He was 63 when he died.
"I have to call my father," I said.
"It can wait till morning."
"I think you should stay -- there's plenty for you to do here. There's a funeral to plan. There are clients to inform. Maybe you can get a little lost in the details. Maybe it will help."
Otto hated my father, who was his brother. It was the first thing we shared. He understood it entirely in 1917 when I explained why I couldn't go home. Otto was the older brother by a year, but he never got along with his father, either -- mocking his conservatism at every turn. The way Otto told it, his father made a face and shook his head this one time when Otto ordered a steak in a restaurant, and Otto yelled loud enough for the whole place to hear, "Austerity should be a temporary condition, not a way of life."
So, when grandfather Jakob died, he left the mine to my father, 100 percent, against all tradition. Otto was furious, but my father refused to give him even a small percentage. Otto worked for a salary and his commissions and nothing more -- except, that is, for the expense account. And just as his father had cut him out of the will, I had no doubt that my father had cut me out. So I did as Otto did. I lived the same life. I held the same grudges. I embraced the pursuit of life's finer experiences while simultaneously keeping an intentional distance from almost all of life's people, never coming close to marriage, not really interested in taking the leap between acquaintance and friend anymore.
That was me. That was Otto. Only the relationship with Hannah broke the pattern, but only partly. They didn't hide their love, but they didn't announce it, either. Marriage was never considered, at least not by Otto.
"Do you know, Otto never spent the night in my flat?" Hannah said.
"What? That seems ... impossible."
"He never stayed. He never slept. He got dressed and left -- 1 am, 3 am, it didn't matter."
"So he was protecting your reputation?"
"He was protecting himself. Whatever he was doing, everything in his life, he always had one eye on the exit."
I found a small photo album in a desk drawer -- the three of us on a day out in Grinzing. For some reason, the owner of the Pine Bough had a camera and sent Otto the photographs. There we were, clowning with the band, posing with the pyramid-shaped glasses filled with the spring wine that went down like lemonade but kicked the next morning like a mule. In the shot I liked the most, Otto and Hannah were dancing, her eyes closed and her head resting on his shoulder. It was the last picture in the book, and as Hannah stared at it and cried, I read the little note that Otto had penned on the flyleaf: "Grinzing 1934. A grand life." On his formal correspondence, he signed with a great flourish, "Otto A. Kovacs." But on personal notes
like this, it was always a capital O with three parallel lines beneath it. When I saw that, I started crying.
"I see that signature, and I think of this note he once left on my desk. I was still just a kid, just back from a trip, and -- remember Richard Gruber? From Saarbrucken? The old prick gave me a bad time about something, but he was still a pretty big client back then, and I was worried, and I told you about it, and you must have told Otto. And he left me this note that said, 'Fuck Old Gruber. And make sure to put an extra bottle of wine on the expenses for your aggravation.'"
We talked and laughed and cried until 4. I left Hannah asleep on the couch, warmed by a comforter. I went to bed and was awakened by a knock on my door at 10. Hannah was gone. At the door was a messenger delivering train tickets to Cologne that she must have ordered.
5
The police headquarters in Cologne where I was to meet Detective Muller and view Uncle Otto's body was at Schildergasse 122. It was a scary looking building with a tower on one end that looked more like a gun turret, with narrow vertical slits that were just wide enough for a sniper and his weapon, that offered subtle vantage points in every direction. In all, it was a perfect architectural manifestation of the Nazi relationship with the German people, a relationship built not on trust but on the simple calculus that you never who was watching. If the tower hadn't already been there, the Nazis probably would have built it.
Muller's office was on the fourth floor. My heart was already pounding as if I were having a panic attack, and the four flights of stairs just amplified what was going on in my chest. Muller greeted me when I walked in, offered me a chair and a cigarette along with condolences that were somewhere north of rote but decidedly south of compassionate. I didn't smoke, but I took it.
