by Richard Wake
The Alex Kovacs Thriller Series, Books 1-3
Richard Wake
Manor and State, LLC
Contents
Vienna at Nightfall
Dedication
Untitled
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Untitled
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Untitled
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Untitled
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Untitled
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
The Spies of Zurich
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part II
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Part III
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Part IV
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
The Lyon Resistance
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part II
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Part III
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Part IV
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Afterword
REVIEW
About the Author
Vienna at Nightfall
Copyright © 2018 by Manor and State, LLC.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To Mary,
My true love, my best friend, you are the person who gave me my life.
NOVEMBER 1936
1
The American Bar on Kärntner Durchgang was where we often began the night. It was all sharp angles and geometric patterns and dark wood and a green-and-white marble checkerboard on the floor. Masculine. It was a tiny place, a bar and three tables and not much else, including women. But it was where we drank Manhattans and got fortified for our pursuit of the aforementioned women, albeit somewhere else.
"The starting blocks," was what Leon called the place.
We hadn't gotten together, the three of us, in nearly two months, mostly because I had been traveling so much but partly because Henry had been occupied with a certain Gretchen, a porcelain doll, and a clingy one—until, that is, she got a better idea of how Henry's family made its money. It wasn't the first time this had happened, and he shrugged it off in what had become for him the time-honored fashion: a bottle, a 48-hour monastic sulk, and then, all better. Anyway, there we all were, two Manhattans deep.
"So where was this trip?" Leon always asked, mostly because he said he found my life in Vienna so dull by comparison.
"Dresden, Koblenz, and Stuttgart," I said, trying to suppress a smile. Trying and not succeeding.
"Koblenz? Isn't that . . .?"
"Yeah, the Gnome." I couldn't help but grin.
I was a magnesite salesman, which was about as exciting as it sounds. My family owned a mine in Czechoslovakia. My father ran the business, and my shit of a younger brother sat at his elbow. I lived in Vienna and serviced 24 of our clients in Germany and Austria, visiting twice a year, about 120 da
ys on the road altogether. My Uncle Otto, who taught me the business, kept a half-dozen clients in his semi-retirement.
Most of our clients were steel mills, because of their blast furnaces—they used magnesite in the lining—and in those days, in Germany, the furnaces were working overtime. The Little Corporal had been very good for business. Most of the trips followed a familiar rhythm. I got to the place early in the afternoon, and most of the owners liked me to tour the plant while they chatted and joked with their workers. As if I cared whether they hated him to his face or only behind his back. Then we would go back to the office, where I listened to the owner complain about deliveries and such. Then I tried to get him to up his order by 5 or 10 percent. Ten percent had become my standard ask of our German clients—10 percent every six months—and I was getting it; Heil, etc. And then, when the work part was over, I took the owner out to dinner, followed by whatever, all on my expense account. Some were more interested in the whatever than others.
In Koblenz, Ewald J. Gruber owned the local steel mill. He was five-foot-nothing and stooped over besides, 70 years old, impressively unattractive, and truly believable as something you would put in your garden to ward off evil spirits and for nervy squirrels to piss upon. The Gnome.
But here was the thing about Ewald: He liked them young, and blond, and tall—really tall. I handled the introductions and, in exchange, I got my 10 percent order increase, plus the funniest thing I would see on the whole trip: little Ewald and his six-foot Brunhilda, hand in hand as they left the café.
"This time was a little different," I said. "This time he wanted two of them—12 feet of blonds, five feet of Gnome, no stepladder to help. I managed to make the arrangements with the girls, and when they left the café, I told them they had to do something for me. He was walking between them, holding each of them by the hand, and just at the door, they lifted him up and swung him through the air, both feet off the ground."
At which point, I reached into my breast pocket and pulled out the photograph that the bartender had snapped: the blonds, the Gnome, both feet off the ground. Leon spit out a stream of his Manhattan.
“Alex Kovacs, I can't believe you do this for a living," he said.
"Somebody has to."
We grabbed our coats and got ready to head to the Stardust, where there would be a band and some women and some dancing. It was a 10-minute walk, give or take, which was almost pleasant in November in Vienna if you were adequately fortified. Very quickly, though, we saw what looked like trouble ahead. In the late autumn of 1936, trouble in Vienna tended to be accompanied by a swastika, and it was this time. Well, a little swastika; the government had banned the party a couple of years earlier, which drove the Nazis underground, but they were still scampering in the dark. They didn't wear the full brown shirts with the red armbands anymore, just little buttons with the hooked cross.
Henry and Leon walked a little more quickly in the direction of the scrum on Lisztstrasse. Four or five knuckleheads, one holding a bottle, surrounded a single man, pushing him, yelling at him, taunting him. He was probably a Jew, or at least he probably looked like one. Leon was a Jew, and even though we were still a hundred yards away, I could see where this was headed.
"Leon, let this one go. There's five of them," I said.
"Fuck no."
"The police station is two blocks down—let's just go get a cop."
"Fuck that—the cop will probably help beat him up."
Leon was running now, Henry right with him, me a step behind. We got there, and there was a lot of yelling. Thankfully, no one was armed—especially after Henry de-bottled the one guy and smashed the schnapps against the wall. Leon was soon swinging with both fists, and Henry was whaling on this one fat Nazi. I managed to identify the guy on the other side—in bar fights, or any kind of group fight, there is inevitably at least one—who had no interest in fighting, either. It goes unspoken, but you both know that neither of you is going to throw a punch. What tends to happen is that you each grab the other guy by the lapels, and shout a few indignant fuck yous at each other, and if you play it just right, your jacket is minus a button, or maybe has an easily mended tear along one of the seams. So no real damage is done, but you have a small sartorial badge of honor.
Which was how this one was going to end, that is, until one of the Nazis pried a loose paving stone up out of the street and brained Leon. It staggered him, and it cut him above the eye, and blood ran down his face and dripped into the gutter as he tried to steady himself on one knee. Henry found a stone of his own, and, as he picked it up, a police wagon careened around the corner. Four cops piled out.
The Nazis ran. The cops did not pursue them. Instead, they stood there—shiny helmets, green capes, superior attitudes—and questioned us. Particularly this one scowling giant who smelled of beer, among other things.
"Let's see some identification, gentlemen."
"You've got to be kidding me," I said.
"Does he look like he's kidding?" said his sidekick, who was more normal-sized except for his smirk, which was as enormous as it was well practiced.
"They were beating up this kid, and we were rescuing him," Leon said, "and my head is bleeding, and you're—"
"You're a Jew, yes?" It was the smirker.
"Listen," Henry said, taking a step.
"Identification, now," the giant said, taking a bigger step. It was not a request.
So, identification it was, followed by our names getting copied into one of those little leather-covered cop notebooks, followed by a lecture about brawling in the streets, followed by a warning that it had better not happen again. Within five minutes of talking, the smirker managed to use the phrase "the Jewish element" five different times. He looked at Leon the entire time, never even once acknowledging the kid who was still on the ground, head between his knees, cowering against a building. The cop probably couldn't tell that I had grabbed Leon from behind by the waist of his pants and his belt, to reinforce the importance of not taking a swing at these guys. Leon knew this drill well—every Jew in Vienna did—but a little reminder never hurt.
Then it was over, the cops piling into their wagon and speeding off, their fun for the night now complete. As we got him to his feet, the Jew we’d rescued finally had a chance to thank us. He was just a kid, not 20 years old. He could barely get the words out, he was so shaken. He had pissed himself but seemed fine physically. He said he was okay to get home.
Leon, though, was going to need stitches.
2
Leon wasn't really cut severely, as it turned out. It was messy but not that deep. A nurse had taken a quick look and said a doctor would be with us soon. The conversation quickly turned to fights in the past.
"The first fight you ever dragged us into?" Henry asked.
"Moi?" Leon said.
"It was Caporetto," I said.
"You guys fought together in Caporetto?" the doctor said as he walked into the room.
Henry said, "We won, call it by the right name: Karfreit."
"Nah, Caporetto sounds nicer," I said, turning to the doc. "We fought in the battle, but the fight I'm talking about happened in a café near Caporetto."
This was in September of 1917, about a month before the Italians graciously ran like babies down the mountain as we chased them. Our army was resting and resupplying, and we’d had a night free in Klagenfurt. We’d learned over the years that Leon would fight about anything, for good reasons and bad reasons. Most of the time, though, the fights were for female reasons, which could be good or bad, depending.
