The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  28

  By the time I got back to the hotel, I had pretty much decided that I was getting out of the spy business. There was no way they weren't on to me. Maybe they were being extra cautious because I was a foreigner, or perhaps it was because of the magnesite—the blast furnaces wouldn't work without the magnesite, and the steel couldn't be made without the blast furnaces, and the armaments factories couldn't be built without the steel, and the Führer couldn't dominate the world without the armaments. So maybe I was safe, and maybe Vogl was just fucking with my head, just in case. Or maybe he was just waiting for permission from a higher-up to strip me down to my underwear and throw me into one of his playpens in the cellar at EL-DE Haus.

  Either way, Vogl had succeeded. I was getting out. I was going to lift up the little leather strip from the sole of my shoe, and take out the three tiny pieces of microfilm, and burn them in my hotel room’s bathroom sink, and rinse the ashes down the drain, and then rinse them again, and then wait for my train with a determination never to have anything to do with this whole business again.

  I mean, it was insane. I was just a fucking magnesite salesman. I was in so far over my head that it was beyond absurd—and for what? I didn't know what was on the microfilm, but from what Major Peiper had told me, the information wasn't all that different from what Czech intelligence already knew. It would reinforce the idea that the Wehrmacht wasn't all that the Goebbels propaganda machine said it was, and maybe it was even weaker than the Czechs expected, but we were talking about a matter of degree here. For that, for a matter of degree, I was supposed to risk electrodes from a car battery attached to my balls—this was my most common nightmare about those screams I had just heard at EL-DE Haus—followed by a taxi ride to Dachau? No. Hell no.

  Besides, from a purely operational standpoint, even my controller in Vienna, if he knew about my second meeting with Vogl, and his tour of the home office, would probably conclude that I had been compromised and that the prudent thing to do was destroy any evidence and protect myself.

  "First rule—don't do anything stupid and don't get yourself killed," was what he told me, right at the beginning. Well, ignoring what had just happened with Vogl would be stupid. Everyone would agree with that.

  Nobody followed me on the walk back to the hotel—I was pretty sure of that. Besides, the Gestapo wasn't likely to be all that subtle if they were coming to get me. Returning to the room, I locked the door and put on the chain as well, as if that would hold up to a persistent black boot. I looked around again for any sign that anyone had been visiting. The problem was that the maid had been in, and the bed was made, and the bathroom had been cleaned, and everything had been tidied. The briefcases appeared to be where I had left them, and the desk and the rented typewriter were in place and ready for my afternoon of paperwork, if I could find the ability to concentrate.

  I grabbed a glass of water from the bathroom and tried to wash the taste of vomit out of my mouth. Then I sat down in the desk chair and removed my shoes, determined to rid myself of the evidence. Sitting there on the third floor, with the window open on the warm September day, I suddenly heard tires screech and doors slam—two big black cars, four men getting out, two in black suits, two in black uniforms, standing on the sidewalk, looking around. One of the suits saw me, gawping out the window. He stared through me. I was frozen in place. I'm not sure I exhaled until I saw them turn toward the apartment building across the street and one of the uniforms began pounding on the door. There was no immediate answer, and he pounded some more.

  After a minute, a woman opened the door. The uniform insisted that she come outside, gesturing, pointing. She hesitated, but only briefly, ultimately staying with one of the suits while the other three rushed inside. It wasn't two more minutes before they were back, half-carrying a man in an undershirt, no shoes or socks, and trousers with the belt still undone. The woman screamed but quieted when the man in the black suit menaced her with a raised arm and a balled fist. Her brother/husband/lover/whoever was shoved into one of the cars and handcuffed to a railing inside. The cars then drove off, tires again squealing. The woman remained on the steps, now alone, wailing. Looking around, a dozen windows up and down the street were filled with faces. The whole thing didn't take five minutes.

  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 the 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 Beneš, 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 outside my window? What precautions would any of them have taken against Nazi aggression if they had toured EL-DE Haus, smelled the shit, heard the screams?

  I was sitting on the end of the bed, 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, client complaints and suggestions, 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 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 seven, 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 getting too drunk that I missed 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 to replace burned-out light bulbs—when none other than Detective Muller grabbed the stool next to mine. Muller was the cop who’d 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 was pretty sure Herschel understood it the second time and insisted on the third merely for its comedic value. It was a long day tending bar in a place like that, and you took your laughs where you could 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 th
e 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 was also 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 in my 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 one-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, but 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 okay 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 could see him making that decision. Cologne hadn’t made 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, upper 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 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 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 now, 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 was no way Otto would do anything to put himself at risk. I'd often thought that he would crucify me if he knew about my courier work for the Czechs—and the truth was, if he were alive, I probably would never have agreed to do it in the first place. 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 was convinced that the reason he never married Hannah was that he knew he could never change and that she knew it, too. I was 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. A raging husband turning the paddle he used on his children onto Otto, while 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 such 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 was 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 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 a 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.