The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  We had only known each other for about a month. Leon talked a good game, but, seeing as how we literally went days without even glimpsing a woman, it was all talk as far as we were concerned. Until that night in the Falling Leaf. It was a pretty prosaic name for a standard-issue shithole, but the place did have the two prerequisites for soldiers on a night off in town: a lot of beer and, at a nearby table, a supply of giggling girls.

  We flirted with all of the skill and energy that three 18-year-olds could muster, which is to say, with more energy than skill. Henry and I devolved into what we believed was charming goofiness, and we got our share of laughs. But Leon played on a different level, a first-division game. He zeroed in on the prettiest, and the blondest, and the least Jewish of the three—although to be entirely accurate, the closest any of these girls had come to a Jew was in the pages of Leviticus. He locked eyes with her and wouldn't let go, even when talking to somebody else. It was masterful.

  When the blond got up to use the facilities, Leon immediately followed, and Henry and I were left at the table with our two new friends. It was clear that we were going nowhere with them, and would settle for a peck on the cheek at the end of the night and a pleasant nocturnal memory later on, but that was fine. Because Leon would have a story to tell, and it would be the kind of story that we could get him to tell and retell, adding new details with each recitation, a new moan here, an extra fondle there. It is true that traveling armies are fueled mostly by manpower and horsepower, but the under-appreciated accelerant is sexual bragging. Just the week before, we had marched all the way from Wolfsberg to Völkermarkt—maybe 10 miles—without even realizing it, so enraptured were we by Corporal Friedhoffer's tales of the summer he spent working in a bakery with two twins from Steyr.

  So it was all delightful until a man burst through the front door, glanced around, zeroed in on the two girls sitting with us, and bellowed, "Where is she?"

  In subsequent years, we would encounter this type of situation multiple times on our nights out with Leon. Dozens of times, once or twice a year, easily. It would become a game for Henry and me. The guy came into the café, started looking around, got increasingly agitated when he couldn't find the female he was seeking, and Henry and I would make eye contact and give each other a sign: one finger meant boyfriend, two meant husband, three meant father.

  Three fingers were the worst. And although we hadn't yet developed the code, that first night would have been three fingers. He wasn’t sober, and was starting to pat the knife on his hip—yes, the knife. The girls said the lovely Heidi was in the bathroom and that they would go get her. We grabbed an empty glass from a nearby waiter—who typically would have been affronted by our impudence, but who this time was very happy that someone else was taking care of the matter—and our new friend sat down, the beer calming him almost instantly. The three girls were back in a minute, the blond so sufficiently put together that only in your imagination could you see where Leon's hands had been. The subsequent conversation was as awkward as you might expect, and Henry and I drank up and waved for the bill and started for our coats. It was going to be a clean escape, until we prepared for our final swallow and everyone raised their glass for a farewell toast. It was then that the old man got this quizzical look on his face, and then the anger built in the boiler, and then came the accusatory shout as he pointed at the table: "Whose glass is that?" Followed quickly by, "Where is he?"

  It was all instinct at that point: I grabbed the knife and Henry took a single swing at the old man, which dropped him back in his chair. I literally threw our money at the waiter, and we ran. We ran all the way back to our camp, probably more than a mile, where we found Leon waiting for us. In the end, our story was better than his.

  The emergency room doctor was laughing and shaking as he stitched up Leon. Leon said, "Hey, Doc, calm down. You sure you're okay to do this?"

  "It's six stitches along your eyebrow—my father was a butcher, and he could have done it. No one will ever see."

  "Where was your father's shop?" I asked.

  "Jokl's, on Fruchtgasse," he said. And then it all clicked in.

  "Are you Karl Jokl?"

  "Yes," he said, tying the final knot and snipping the suture with a tiny pair of scissors.

  Karl Jokl had been an assistant professor of surgery at the university. His name had been in the newspapers multiple times over the years, commenting on new techniques and such. He had even been a government minister for a time, advocating for prenatal care for mothers. They’d built a lot of clinics when the Social Democrats were in charge. They were all closed now, though. And now Jokl was stitching up a brawler on a Friday night, the only doctor in the place, with more brawlers undoubtedly to come.

  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 was 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; there was only one small drop on his jacket sleeve. He looked in the mirror, combed his hair with his fingers, and smiled. He 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

  Café Louvre was a newspaper hangout at the corner of Wipplingerstrasse and Renngasse, really a foreign correspondents' hangout. Leon first went there to make contacts, and later started bringing Henry and me. 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 had gone, leaving a quiet glow. We hadn't seen the sun in a week, which wasn'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, was how I noticed this guy walking toward my table from about 50 feet away. I was sitting alone, as Henry had just left for the bathroom, and Leon had invited himself to sit with three blonds a few tables over. He said it was one of the rules of Shiksa Roulette—a game of his own invention—that there needed to be an odd number of shiksas for the single Jew to have a chance. He was fingering his stitched-up eyebrow, and they all se
emed suitably impressed.

  The guy reached the table and introduced himself as Robert Something-or-other, and he was the Vienna correspondent for Prager Tagblatt.

  "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 and offered a seat. 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 was 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, this time not looking as he passed the nearby brunette with the nearby ass, and 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 with me? I could tell them where to get drunk in Graz, or where to get laid in Düsseldorf, 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 blonds. "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. Sometimes it 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 tonight."

  "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 round, 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 together 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 the opera?"

  I laughed. The last time was on a school field trip, when they took us backstage and showed us the big costume wardrobe, and I got a big laugh from my mates by grabbing one of those blond Brunhilda wigs and putting it on when 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 seven. I'll meet you there."

  It suddenly occurred to me that I had never actually agreed to go, but now it was certain that I was going, regardless. During the walk home, I played the conversation over in my head and still hadn't come to any conclusion when I saw Hannah, our secretary, bundled up and sitting on the steps of my building, 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 for 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 p.m.

  And then we sat, with a bottle from the cupboard, two glasses and our shared grief, still raw and unformed. We could only guess at what had happened. A heart attack was the 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 then 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 to Cologne. It was one of the things Otto had 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 contact between visits, just to make sure everything was okay. 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 have taken 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.