Vienna at Nightfall

by Richard Wake

  And then I looked down at my shoes on the floor. And then I thought again about that quote on the wall of the cell, the one that Vogl said was his favorite:

  "Perhaps the hour will arrive. Perhaps they'll let me go. Perhaps we will be able to say farewell to the Gestapo in my homeland, in my homeland, to a reunion we will strive."

  This was not my homeland. Maybe Czechoslovakia was, maybe Austria, but not here. But I couldn't shake the thought that if somebody didn't do something, there would be cells just like those on the Ringstrasse in Vienna within a year, and on Na Prikope in Prague within a year after that, and everybody knew it -- Chamberlain in England, Daladier in France, Mussolini in Italy, and Schuschnigg and Benes, too. They all knew it in their hearts. But somebody needed to remind them that they had hearts.

  What would any of them have thought, or done, if they had just witnessed the scene out my window? What precautions would any of them have taken against Nazi aggression if they had toured the EL-DE Haus, smelled the shit, heard the screams?

  I was sitting on the end of the bed at that point, physically shaking as it all played out in my head. I don't think I had ever been more afraid, not even in that barn in 1917 -- because that was a terror imposed upon me by great forces and this was a terror imposed upon me by my own decision.

  I could walk away. I wanted desperately to walk away. But I kept coming back to the man who had just been piled into that Gestapo taxi. Was he now in one of the cells, pants gone, dignity gone, sitting either with a few others or maybe by himself, alone with his bucket and his terror?

  I put the shoes back on and ordered room service and began with the pile of paperwork.

  29

  Routine was always the answer -- order forms, delivery schedules, complaints and suggestions from clients, notes for Hannah about this and that, everything unfinished in a stack to the left of the typewriter, everything finished in a stack to the right, one stack shrinking, one stack growing, a mindless sense of accomplishment with each piece of paper being pushed. I would go minutes at a time without revisiting the picture in my head of the Gestapo officer staring up at me from across the street.

  I took my time and finished at about 7, which left me about six hours before the train. Eating and drinking were the only options as a way of filling the time, and not in that order. Typically, I would be a little bit careful because being too drunk and missing the train would cost me a day. But careful wasn't going to be an option on this night, not after the afternoon I'd had. Besides, this was going to be one of those times where my adrenaline was such, and my nerves, that I probably wasn't going to be able to get drunk no matter how hard I tried.

  After dinner, I tested the theory at a little bar down the street from the hotel, Herschel's. It was one of my go-to spots to kill a couple of hours before the Orient Express pulled in, a hole in the wall that seemed to be a favorite with off-duty police. It was there, sitting at the far end of the bar, almost entirely in the dark -- Herschel was a little slow on replacing burned out light bulbs -- when none other than Detective Muller grabbed the stool next to mine. Muller was the cop who investigated Otto's death.

  He was pretty much incoherently drunk, based upon his difficulty in placing his shot-and-a-beer order with Herschel, who made him say it three times. I'm pretty sure Herschel understood it after the second time and insisted on the third performance merely for its comedic value. It's a long day tending bar in a place like that, and you take your laughs where you can get them.

  Muller didn't look at me and likely would not have remembered me, given his condition. But after hitting the men's room -- where the smell triggered a memory of the basement of EL-DE Haus, which really shook me and left me wondering if I would be reminded every time I went to the shitter -- I sat back down and decided to start a conversation.

  "Detective Muller?"

  Muller turned and looked at me. There was no initial reaction, and then a glint of recognition, and then some verbal shambling as he searched for the connection, a staggering down several dead ends that I allowed to go on for far too long, again because of the entertainment value.

  Finally, I told him. "I'm Alex Kovacs. You investigated the death of my uncle, Otto. Drowned in the Rhine."

  He started to tell me that no, that wasn't it but just as quickly agreed that it was. "The Austrian Czech!" he said, exclaiming as if it was a triumph. "A suicide! A jumper!"

  He stopped, looked at my face and realized through his alcoholic fog what he sounded like. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for your loss."

  I could go a day or two at that point without even thinking about Otto at all, which was how I coped. It also was as shitty as it sounds. Although in Cologne, I thought about him a lot. They were mostly good thoughts, funny thoughts. I thought about him up in the hotel room when I was finishing up the reports, laughing at how he made fun of the neat pile I always handed to Hannah in five minutes while he spent the better part of his first day back from every trip trying to decipher little scraps of paper he had stuffed in his pockets and quickly-scrawled notes in the margins of documents, dictating his translation of the hieroglyphics to Hannah for processing.

  I didn't have a lot to say to Muller, but I gave it a shot, telling him about my sales trip and my reservation that night on the Orient Express. Muller said he once drew the assignment of delivering a Hungarian diplomat on some kind of trade mission to the great train. "Unpronounceable asshole," he said. He stumbled over the "unpronounceable," but the "asshole" rang out loud and clear. Then he laughed. "But the overtime was good. But why is that train always so late?"

  I tried to explain that it wasn't late, that it left London Victoria at 3 p.m., and made its way to Brussels by about 10 p.m., and that Cologne got 1-something in the morning because of geography, but he wasn't buying it, mumbling about how "a German train would never run late like that. It's the damn English."

  This was going nowhere. If I left at that point, I could have one more at the hotel bar and then grab a shower before heading to the station. So I stood and began to reach for my coat. Muller grabbed my arm and stopped me. "Sit," he said, and he suddenly seemed a little more sober.

  "I have something to tell you. Just listen. I never lied to you -- understand? I never lied. But the story of recovering your uncle's body is a little more complicated than I said.

  "Shhh," he said. I wasn't about to speak. He was shushing himself, it seemed like. And he leaned in a little closer and whispered.

  "He definitely went into the water off of the bridge. He went in at about the time I said he did, and his body floated down the river to where they all float. That's all true. The coroner did look at him, and there were no fatal injuries like a shooting or stabbing."

  "So he drowned?"

  "That's what I asked the coroner. He said, 'Fuck if I know. His lungs were full of water, but they all get full of water after they've been in the river for a few hours.' Then he said, 'There's no reason to think it's anything but suicide.'"

  Muller stopped, lost in the middle of his own story. I had actually become OK with the notion of Otto's suicide. Given the thing with the doctors, and the date on the letter he left for me, it made sense. If he really thought he was dying, I can see him making that decision. Cologne didn't make much sense to me as the site, but he might have been drunk and talked himself into it. And the truth was, he really did not want to be a burden on anyone. He had so few people close to him, and sometimes I got the sense it was because he didn't want to feel obligated to anyone about anything. So I could see it. I could see him jumping off of that bridge rather than having Hannah and me tending to him in a hospital bed for his final months.

  I tried to snap Muller out of his fog. "So --"

  "So, this. Just listen." Muller was now speaking so low that my ear was just inches from his lips. "The coroner said your uncle had bruises in several places on his body. They weren't fresh, but they weren't healed, either. Doc thought they were a couple of days old, probably, maybe a day -- torso, uppe
r arms, legs, and ass. No place that showed when he was dressed. Doc thought he was beaten with some kind of paddle. But there were no defensive wounds, nothing on his hands, say. No broken fingers."

  I felt this fury rising in me. Beaten? "You fucking lied to me."

  "I didn't lie to you. The bruises were not from that night. There were no fatal wounds. His lungs were full of water. He drowned. Period."

  "But what about the bruises? Why didn't you investigate?"

  "Investigate what? We don't know where he got them. We don't know when he got them. They weren't fatal, not nearly. They didn't happen that night -- we're sure of that. For all we know, it was a jealous husband who taught him a lesson. Is that a possibility?"

  It was, admittedly, a possibility. It also wasn't the only possibility, as we both knew. Suddenly, one of the screams from the basement of EL-DE Haus filled my head. But why would the Gestapo give a shit about Otto? I was about to speak again when Muller put a finger over his lips and shushed me. It was like he was drunker again and suddenly overcome by a drowning wave of paranoia. But there was one more burst of clarity:

  "The bruises are not in the coroner's report. He will deny their existence. I will deny their existence. The body's been in the ground for nine months. I am sorry for your loss, I really am, but this is over. You need to remember where you are, which is in Germany, and you need to remember what year it is, which is 1937. Nothing you can do will bring him back. So you need to get on that fancy fucking train tonight and stop thinking about this. It was suicide. Case closed."

  "So why did you tell me? Why did you bring up the bruises?"

  Muller did not answer. He just got up and left.

  30

  The porter told me that every compartment on the train was taken. When I took the Orient Express in February, it was all business people and rich fossils with nothing better to do, and there was plenty of elbow room. In August, they were joined by vacationers of all flavors -- heading out, returning home, new money, old money, the lot. Which meant that the bar car was crowded, even approaching 2 a.m. I sat at a table with a Turkish couple returning from their honeymoon in France, and a Bulgarian count, or prince, or something, who was 80 if he was a day and pretty much asleep in his seat. The honeymooners and I shared some rudimentary French for a few minutes but we gradually slid into a comfortable alcoholic silence, the two of them also fading, the count faded, me wired and staring out at the darkness.

  Beaten? Otto was all I could think about now. Only when I uncrossed and then recrossed my legs did I feel the microfilm in my shoe and remember, that, oh yeah, if the Gestapo were going to torture one of the Kovacs boys, it would be me, not my uncle.

  There is no way in hell that the Otto I knew would find himself sideways with the Gestapo in Cologne. He had clients, and the clients did business with the military, and in that sense, the authorities were probably aware of him in the same way that they were aware of me. But there is no way Otto would do anything that put himself at risk. I've often thought that he would crucify me if he knew about my courier work for the Czechs -- and the truth is, if he were alive, I probably never would have agreed to do it. That I spent my adult life craving his approval, even his silent approval, went without saying.

  I had to admit that the jealous husband theory was more than plausible. Otto was an impossible hound. He had a personal code with women that consisted of two immutable rules: don't get too deeply involved and don't get caught. That was pretty much it. I'm convinced that the reason he never married Hannah was that he knew he could never change and that she knew it, too. I'm also convinced that he would always keep a handful of clients because, well, he would always crave the adventure of leaving the city limits -- the chase even more than the sex. Given all of that, a raging husband with the paddle he had used on his children, turning it instead on Otto as his wife pleaded with him to stop, really was a pretty easy scene to picture.

  But still, for all of this to happen within about a two week period -- the seemingly ominous news from the doctor, the beating, and the plunge from the bridge into the Rhine -- was maybe one big event too many in a short period of time. My gut told me that two of the three had to be related. I had become convinced that the medical news led to Otto's death. But what if it was the beating? If that were the case, the suicide was now likely a murder, unless the beating had somehow scared him into killing himself. But if that were the case, well, there was no jealous husband in Cologne who could possibly force Otto to kill himself. If the husband really was a lunatic, Otto would just give me that client -- old Josef Kreisler -- and stop traveling to Cologne.

  So it was either the suicide I had already bought into, or something much more sinister than a jealous husband. And the more I thought about it, the more I owed it to Otto to try to find out. And if it led to the Gestapo somehow? As I sucked down probably my tenth drink of the day, there was an odd clarity: if I was willing to risk Dachau for some bullshit military secrets that really weren't all that secret, why wouldn't I be willing to risk it to find out the actual cause of death of one of the three people in the world who I really loved? Because this was the list: Henry, Leon, Otto, fin. Not Johanna, not really, not yet. But if not for one of the three, who?

  The police were going to be of no help -- that was obvious. Their investigation was s sham. The paper trail was doctored and incomplete. But the fear that shone through Muller's drunken mask told me what he suspected. How he had gone mute when I asked him that last question in Herschel's: "So why did you tell me? Why did you bring up the bruises?" Silence was the lush at his most eloquent.

  It is all I could think about as I ordered a final cognac from the bartender and walked it back to my compartment, the microfilm subtly nagging every time my right foot landed.

  FEBRUARY 1938

  31

  My welcome home lunch with Johanna turned into a forgettable schnitzel followed by a long, lovely afternoon spent entirely within the confines of the bed that she had begun to refer to as "our rickety oasis." That it hadn't broken yet was a testament to good old-fashioned Austrian craftsmanship or luck.

  After I walked her home, I stopped in at Cafe Louvre to see if Leon was there, and maybe to catch up on the news. As I approached, I saw Old McGee -- I think he was from the Chicago Tribune -- running across the street from the telegraph office into the cafe. Now, Old McGee was probably 60 and must have weighed 250 pounds. As a matter of course, he did not run. He did not do anything quickly, for that matter, except shove Schinkenbrot sandwiches -- ham, rye, butter, gherkins, the whole mess -- down his gullet for his Gabelfruhstuck. All of which meant that there was news, it seemed.

  Inside, in the corner of the room where the foreign correspondents always congregated around the United Press man's Stammtisch, there was a pandemonium in full roar. There were probably a dozen of them -- London, Prague, Budapest, Paris, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, Washington; I'd been introduced to most of them at one time or another by Leon -- and there was this insistent shouting among them, nobody seeming to listen but everybody hearing everything.

  When there was big news, they all worked together on the stories. Leon explained how it was different for the locals, who all sold their newspapers on the streets and lived and died by their exclusives. The foreign correspondents really did not compete in the same way for breaking news. Yes, if one of them had a big exclusive interview with a government official, everybody bought the guy a drink the next day to congratulate him (and then shit on him and the story as soon as he left the cafe). But for day-to-day breaking news, they worked as one, pooling their information. It just made sense to them, especially given that most of them, while based in Vienna, were responsible for news throughout the region. If there was a political assassination in Bucharest, they had to write. If a bank failed in Budapest, they had to write. And if they happened to have taken their wife to the mountains for the weekend when said assassination or bank failure occurred, there would be someone to cover for them. Their b
osses would be aghast at the coziness of the arrangement, but their bosses were thousands of miles away.

  I was seated at a small table on the edge of the swirl -- most customers wanted to be nowhere near the noise, so there were plenty of choices. I asked the waiter what the news was. He screwed up his face and said, "Schuschnigg is in Berchtesgaden to meet with Herr Hitler. Menu?"

  I ordered a drink and eavesdropped, which wasn't hard. The news of the trip was a complete shock, and the secrecy itself had become the story for many of the correspondents. They loved secrecy. It excited them in ways that women no longer did.

  From what they knew, Schuschnigg had taken the overnight train. Only a couple of embassies had been told -- England, France, maybe a couple more.

  The Baltimore Sun read loudly from one morning paper, I couldn't see which. "'There will be a Cabinet Council meeting today to deal with important matters.' Important matters, my ass. They knew he wasn't going to be here. Why the smoke screen?"

  It was the question they were all asking, in a dozen different ways. Nobody knew anything until about 4 p.m., when the final edition of several afternoon papers hit the streets with the news of the meeting, nothing more. The government press office confirmed the bare bones soon after. Then the Austrian reporters were called in for a meeting with the commissioner for propaganda, Colonel Walter Adam -- whose full name had been changed by the Philadelphia Record for the purposes of that evening's discussions to "that fucking snake Walter Adam." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch went with "that lying sack of shit." I had never heard that one before, but I quite liked it.