The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

"Herr Kovacs."

  "Herr Bain. You're here to fire my company, am I right?"

  He was taken aback. This wasn't how it was supposed to work. "Well, yes I am."

  "Thank you. And go fuck yourself."

  I turned and walked out, not waiting to see or hear his reaction. I was elated as I reached the sidewalk—it always feels good to tell somebody to go fuck themselves, especially when the retort isn't in the form of a balled fist.

  My next appointment wasn't for two and a half hours, and I realized I had just missed lunch. I got a sandwich at Goldberg's.

  12

  The little local train from the Linz station got me to Mauthausen in about 20 minutes. Rather than taking a taxi to the quarry, I decided to walk. It was about two miles, but it was a nice day. The path wended through clusters of small homes built into the hillsides and on ridges that overlooked great valleys. The quarry was pretty far away; up in the distance, ruggedly imposing.

  How my father knew Edgar Grundman, the owner of the quarry, was a mystery to me. The old man never traveled anywhere. Maybe Grundman had been to Brno at some point, I didn't know. All I knew for sure was that the Kovacs family had no intention of getting into the granite business.

  "Who would we get to run it—you?" the old man said on the phone, laughing. It might have been the only time I had heard him laugh in a year.

  "So why do I have to listen to him?"

  "Just be polite when you turn him down."

  "But this is a waste of time."

  "You have plenty of time. Just do it."

  I was slightly winded as I reached the quarry. Herr Grundman was waiting for me at the door.

  "I was watching you. That's a good walk in city shoes."

  I looked down at my brogues, shined every week, now covered in gray dust. "City shoes? Country shoes? What's the difference?"

  "The blisters on your feet when you take them off tonight will be explanation enough. You know, there is a world outside the Vienna city limits. You probably think a big nature adventure is a trip to get drunk in Grinzing."

  He was right, but so what? Outside of Vienna was a world full of Hitler-loving anti-Semites.

  "This is a pretty area," I said. "The quarry has a rough beauty that is hard to imagine if you haven't seen it."

  The office was a working foreman's office, not an owner's office. Work schedules and delivery notices were posted on the wall, along with an Ottakringer beer calendar that featured two attractive swimsuits. A broken piece of some bit of machinery was disassembled on a side table awaiting a reworking of the mechanical jigsaw puzzle.

  "You still get your hands dirty every day?"

  "Not really. I supervise, mostly. But I like the work. I like being in the middle of it."

  This isn't how my father ran the mine. He only showed his face outside the office to yell at people. My father wore city shoes always.

  "So if you still enjoy it, why are you selling? And how do you know my father?"

  "That's two different questions. I'll start with the second one. I have never met your father in person. I did know your mother."

  Mama got the Spanish flu and died in 1918. It was God's last, worst joke. The war that was supposed to last six months lasted more than four years. And near the end, just when everybody thought it was going to be safe again, the flu epidemic wiped out millions more. They buried her before I was discharged. I didn't even get a photo of her.

  "We met at a Fasching ball in Vienna in 1894. I was 19. She was 17. If I close my eyes, I can still see the dress she was wearing: pink, very light pink, with a ruffle at the hem. To say I was smitten doesn't begin to explain it. Well, maybe it does. She was in town for two weeks, and we saw each other every day—balls, the opera, coffees. I know it was quick, but we were both very much in love."

  You never think of your parents that way, not when you are a kid, not even when you are grown. I knew her family was some kind of minor Czech nobility, and that they didn't entirely approve when she married the grubby mine owner's son, but they didn't cut her off completely. I knew my grandparents in the big house in Dukovany, on the banks of the Jihlava, with the fields and forest surrounding it. I learned to shoot a rifle there. I got my first kiss there, from the housekeeper's daughter.

  "So why didn't you get together? Was it my father?"

  "No, he wasn't in the picture then. The problem was that your mother was Catholic and I am Lutheran. It was impossible."

  "That's it? Really?"

  "A mixed marriage is still hard today for people of a certain station. It was impossible then, for her. I understood."

  Every year in January, the anniversary of when they met, my mother sent a letter, updating Grundman on her life. He would reply and do the same. But the letter in 1919 was written in a different hand, a man's.

  "Your mother saved the letters, and your father found them after she died. He wrote to tell me, and we have kept up the correspondence. It's mostly about business, but he does mention your brother and his grandchildren, and you, of course."

  "All very complimentary, I'm sure."

  Grundman smiled. "He loves you, you know. Your father just doesn't always understand you. He always says that he can't believe how much you are like his brother, Otto. I'm so sorry about his passing."

  I thanked him. "I can't believe he writes you every year."

  "Every year. I think it keeps your mother alive, for both of us, even though we never mention her name."

  I didn't know what to say. My mother had another love. My father had a heart. This was a lot to process, and I was having some trouble with it all. The silence grew uncomfortable. Grundman jumped in.

  "The other question—why am I selling if I still enjoy it? This is something I would never tell your father, and you don't tell him, either. But I would like to tell you in confidence. Really, you can't tell anyone."

  He began with a quick survey of Nazi sentiment in Linz. I told him what had happened in front of Goldberg's, and about my very abbreviated lunch with Ulrich Bain. I still didn't know where this was going.

  "It's terrible, probably worse than you think. There are thousands of Herr Bains. I grew up with these people and Hitler is one of them. Hell, his parents are buried right outside Linz in Leonding cemetery. We'll line up and put flowers in their rifles when the Germans march in. It's only a matter of when."

  I mentioned Mussolini, our great Italian protector. Grundman said, "That fool? You could buy him off with a five-mark whore. He's no protection. Hitler will offer him a tiny sliver of the Tyrol, and he'll go away. Hitler will take the rest. We can't stop him."

  "So what does that have to do with selling?"

  "Part of it is strictly business. When the Nazis come in, I guarantee they take the quarry away from me within six months. 'Resources in the national interest of the Fatherland,' or some such. They might give me 20 percent of what it's worth if they're feeling generous. Most people here are so in love with him that they can't see the next move, though. So I'm selling now, and I'm going to get a decent price."

  "Not from us. You know that, right?"

  "Oh, yes. I just consider this visit an extra letter from your father, a bonus."

  Now it was my turn to smile. "So will you take the money and leave Austria? Where will you go?"

  "No, I'm staying. I have my little house in the village—you walked past it—and I plan to stay busy."

  "Doing what?"

  Grundman leaned in. "This is the part you really can't tell anyone. I'm only telling you because I think you'll understand. I just can't live with the idea that this thug is going to destroy my country. There are at least some people who agree with me and are willing to act. I want to organize them. I want to finance them."

  "You'll be in Dachau in a week. These people aren't kidding."

  "I can't think that way. I'm 62, but I still have my health. I can outwork a 35-year-old in the pit when I feel like it. So I have that, and I will have plenty of money when I sell. I have to do some
thing. Most of the people who think like me are younger—younger than you. They have energy, but also stupidity. I can guide them, help protect them."

  "It's suicide."

  "Maybe. Maybe you're right. But what's the alternative? There is no hiding from this. Read Mein Kampf. He's not stopping until somebody stops him."

  "But you?"

  Grundman shrugged. The look on his face was part defiance, part helplessness. It's the picture I couldn't shake, all the way back on the train to Vienna.

  13

  It was Henry's place by then, but I would always call it Henry's dad's place. And place is the word—not restaurant, not café, not bar, not dance hall, not gambling emporium, not brothel. Because it was all of those things. Nowhere else in Vienna could you get a crisp schnitzel for three marks and an hour of individualized entertainment in one of the back rooms for 10 marks more. As his dad used to say: "I am in the business of quenching all thirsts." The sign outside said, simply, Fessler's.

  The back rooms were, not surprisingly, in the back. Working forward, there was a decent-sized dance hall in the middle third of the building, with a five-piece combo in one corner and lighting that made the room not quite dark but not quite adequately lit, and of various faint colors that had been accomplished by dipping the light bulbs in food coloring. I’d once had a summer job with Henry's dad, and keeping up with the light bulbs was part of the task.

  "Mood lighting, Alex," is what he told me. "So you can see but also so you can pretend you can't see, if you are in the mood to pretend."

  The front third of the building was divided in half, a dozen tables for the café on the left, a long, handsome wood bar on the right. When I walked in, Henry was sitting at the end of the bar, as always. Come in at 2 p.m., and he was sitting there, inevitably with an open ledger book, going over figures. At 6, he was likely in conversation with a bartender or waiter about something or another. At 10, which was when I walked in, he was having his only drink of the night, a martini, before going home and leaving Max, his oldest bartender, in charge for the rest of the evening.

  "A Monday night? What's the occasion?"

  "Quiet week," I said.

  It was anything but, of course. Half the time, I was walking around and thinking about Johanna. The other half of the time, I was repeatedly recounting the conversation in Stephansdom. Never before in my life had the wondrous daydreams about a new woman been crowded out by something else. But that's what was happening.

  There were so many reasons not to get involved. There were business reasons, specifically that the Kovacs Mining Company was profiting somewhere between handsomely and obscenely off of the Nazis, and, well, who cuts off their financial lifeline for some kind of romantic fantasy? Because that's what this was. I hated him, and I might have hated his followers even more, but who was going to stop Hitler? Me? It was absurd, and the risk was genuine, despite what the guy in church said. I could end up in Dachau, the family business could be blackballed in Germany, and for what? So that the Czech government would know ahead of time the exact caliber of the artillery that would be firing upon St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague?

  Thinking practically, thinking risk-reward—Papa would have been so proud, the man whose favorite retort to pretty much any idealistic notion was, "Don Quixote didn't live on the Danube"—there was just no real upside to getting involved.

  "You seem like you're someplace else," Henry said, and then he smiled a dirty smile. "Is it that . . . what is her name?"

  "Johanna."

  "Come on, details."

  "Aren't we a little old for details?"

  "Okay, but there are details, right?"

  I smiled. That would be my answer.

  Headlights suddenly lit the bar, coming through the front window. A big-ass Daimler was parking on the sidewalk, right against the building. The driver's door slammed and in walked a police officer in a captain's uniform. Henry eyed him, and then looked at me. The smile wasn't dirty anymore.

  I looked at him, quizzically. "Friend or foe?"

  "Both. Just business."

  I knew what the business was. Before he left, Henry's dad had his hand in a bunch of areas, some more legitimate than others. He employed dozens of what he called "my guys." Some of them offered "protection" for neighborhood business. Others collected debts. Still others worked in the family's discount alcohol and cigarette business. Then there was this place, from the front of the house to the back of the house.

  By the standards of the day, Henry's dad was a benevolent mobster. He would not allow his guys to be involved with illegal drugs. The protection charges were not onerous and did actually offer an element of protection in a city where burglary rose in lockstep with the unemployment rate. The gambling and loansharking were real, and people who did not pay did occasionally get beaten up, but it was never worse than that. Henry's dad always told his guys, "Know your clients. Don't let them get in so deep that they are left without alternatives." He actually fired a guy once, a very good earner, and told him, "What good are these customers to me tomorrow if you have to beat the life out of them today?"

  But that was all over now. The family had sold off just about all of their businesses, except for Fessler's. But given the goings-on in the back room, the police still had to be accounted for. That was why Henry and I watched the host, Max, reach beneath the reservation book at his stand up front, pull out an envelope, and hand it to the good captain, who pocketed it in one motion. It was just the cost of doing business. I had seen Henry’s father hand the envelope to old Schindler in the back alley on Saturday mornings a few times.

  But instead of leaving with his extracurricular salary, the cop walked into the bar and approached us. Introductions were made. Captain Hans Fuchs seemed to be the prototypical Nazi: late 30s, blond, athletic, confident, oozing smarm. The Vienna police department was full of his type. There were probably more devout Nazis working the second shift in Vienna police precincts than there were in most Munich beer halls. So this was nothing new.

  The truth was, Henry and I made our livings in the same way—that is, by talking to assholes. Whether you're in the bar business or the sales business, mindless conversation with despicable people is part of the job. Yet Henry was having trouble here, while I talked with Fuchs about the cold weather and the misfortunes of FK Austria this year. "Even Sindelar is so messed up, he couldn't hit the Danube from the embankment," I said. Fuchs made some crack about the goalie being "like a sieve for spätzle," and I kept looking over for Henry to join in but he just kept withdrawing into himself, silence wrapped in obvious concern. Fuchs noticed, too.

  "Quiet tonight, Herr Fessler."

  "Problems here—staff problems. I'm sorry."

  "There must be a lot of staff issues here. So many different jobs under one roof." His wink was about as unsubtle as a wink could be, cartoonish almost. No, cartoonish actually. Without the good manners to accept his bribe and be done with it.

  "It's the kitchen staff. I must check something—excuse me, Captain." And Henry was gone, leaving me and my new best friend. We had done weather, and we had done soccer, which left Schuschnigg, but I wasn't going there, not with this junior Himmler in training. Thank God he was as uncomfortable with the silence as I was. He got to his feet and said a quick goodnight and was gone—door slam, headlights again flooding the bar, and then roaring off into the February night.

  I waited a minute for Henry, but he never came back.

  14

  Whenever I didn't feel like making my own breakfast, which was most days, I ate at Café Hawelka. If Café Central was all marble and multiple domes on the ceiling and the faint odor of perfume wafting from the next table and waiters who seemed to have studied choreography, Café Hawelka was dark wood and beer cases stacked in the vestibule, and a clock permanently stopped at 12:31. There were four booths, and this was the kind of place where people scratched their initials into the wood. Or, because it was 1937, you sometimes got more than that, like two lovers' initials
encircled by a heart and joined in the middle by a swastika. But the breakfast—eggs scrambled and served in a small cast-iron skillet with some bacon and cheese and the proper amount of grease on top to douse a hangover—made it just about perfect. And, because this was Vienna, the skillet would be placed upon a china plate, and the whole thing would be delivered on a metal tray.

  I grabbed Der Abend from the rack and sat with it and my coffee as the food cooked. The wooden dowel holding the paper together was worn by decades of warm hands, cold hands, sweating hands, worn by thousands of people reading about Jutland and Versailles and Hitler and Daladier and Lenin and Freud and Marx and Lloyd George and Hitler and Hitler and Hitler. The shellac was gone from the knob at the bottom, and most of the cherry stain, too.

  The headlines were a variation on a common theme this winter: Hitler this, Mussolini that. The only comic relief, as the paper chronicled for the third straight day, was the investigation into who hired the skywriting plane that drew a hammer-and-sickle in the bright blue Vienna sky the other morning, only to be chased unsuccessfully by six military aircraft.

  Craving my eggs, absorbed by the paper, I was startled by a man in a dark suit and a darker expression who sat down at my table. I looked at him. He said nothing.

  "Do I know you?"

  The look on his face morphed into pure, aggressive disdain. He practically spat the word: "Stephansdom."

  "I never got a good look at you. You told me not to look."

  The look on his face grew even more disdainful, if that was possible. Only the waiter's arrival to take his coffee order softened it.

  I had obviously been thinking about it pretty much nonstop. It really upset me—and I had the toilet paper receipts to prove it. I worried about Hitler, and about the future, like everyone in Vienna—but my worries were also wrapped around a comfortable life where money wasn't a problem, and my responsibilities were easily managed, and where Johanna was now in the picture. She was challenging but also . . . comfortably challenging.