The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  She was screeching. "I mean, it isn't even a choice. How can you turn down a ball in the Hofburg, right in the royal apartments, to go to one in the . . . wherever the hell it is?"

  "It's in the Morgenthaler Hall."

  "Oh, fine. And what was the last event they hosted? A swap meet?"

  In truth, it was a sale of surplus housewares from a small chain of three stores that had gone out of business. But there was no stopping this rant.

  "The royal apartments! Catering by Café Central! Desserts by Sacher! And what are the secretaries serving?"

  "I'm sure we'll eat scraps of wurst off the floor, and drink homemade schnapps out of chipped porcelain jugs. Come on, Johanna. You know why I have to do this."

  The truth was, I really wanted to do it—but I also had to do it. Otto, Hannah, and I had gone to the ball together every year. It was one of the dozens of balls in Vienna every winter, before Lent, organized mostly around professions. Everybody got dressed in formal wear and toasted the shitty weather. You would expect doctors and lawyers to have their own balls, and they did. But so did store clerks, government workers, even washerwomen. Leon said the newspaper ball was always a hilarious drunken mess. They were all the same—debutantes marched in at the beginning, a mass quadrille danced at midnight, a lot of waltzing happened in between—but they were all different, too, because the people were different. They were scheduled months ahead of time, but there were never enough days to avoid at least some conflicts. How was I to know that the secretaries' ball would be on the same night as the rich assholes' ball? Or that I would be invited to the rich assholes' ball?

  The argument degenerated, but only a little. I was able to leave before Johanna said something really hurtful. She was already mad that I’d had to make the extra trip to Cologne, and this just tipped her over. Or maybe it was the lingering embarrassment she felt about the museum opening. She would sometimes swing, from the modern woman with an education and a career and opinions to the daughter of the Baron and Baroness von Westermann. I couldn't quite figure her out, even after a year. And I still didn't think I could tell her about my other life.

  I couldn't tell Hannah, either. As far as she was concerned, Otto had jumped off of that bridge after receiving a bad diagnosis and that was that. She had come to live with it, to accept it. There was still a hint of sadness in her, but I was pretty sure most people couldn't see it. She had even considered accepting an invitation to the ball from the office manager at a law firm on the first floor of our building. Well, she said she considered it, but I didn't think she did.

  As it turned out, Morgenthaler Hall looked great. The band was pretty good. The drink was plentiful. We danced and laughed and shared memories of Otto. It was what we both wanted.

  "Here, let's sit," I said. It was about 11:30. We weren't at our table, but in two chairs near the edge of the dance floor. I grabbed two drinks from the bar, and we sat quietly, watching the waltzers waltz by.

  Finally, I just blurted out what I had been practicing all day.

  "You know it's time to go, right?"

  "Go home? It's still early. We haven't even had the quadrille."

  "Not go from here. Go from Vienna. Go from Austria."

  The city had grown so emotional since Schuschnigg's trip to Berchtesgaden—the Christians sadly expectant, the Jews quietly frantic. They couldn't cancel the balls, but people just weren't going out at night anymore, weren't doing anything spontaneous or frivolous. The Nazis in the streets were getting more noticeable; they still couldn't wear the swastika, but you saw more and more of the white knee socks and the breeches, which had been their subversive trademark. They were just strutting. It was happening, and everybody felt it. Leon said they weren't putting it in the paper, but that their police checks the week before had turned up five Jewish suicides. One guy cut his throat with a razor while standing at a bar.

  It was time for Jews like Hannah to get out if they could. It was past time.

  Her response when I brought it up was the same as always. It had become a reflex at this point. "I can't. My whole life is here."

  "You can and you must, because here isn't here anymore—or it isn't going to be, and soon."

  I reached into my breast pocket. I handed her the bank book from Zürich that Otto had left in the safe-deposit box. She opened it, saw her name next to Otto's on the "bearer" line, and began to weep.

  I explained about the letter from Otto, and how he had asked me to wait until it was time for her to leave before giving her the bank book. "He told me to convince you. It was the last thing he asked me in that letter."

  She held up the bank book. "But I already got the money from his apartment. I thought that was what he left me. Wait—"

  "Shush. The apartment money was from me—and don't worry, he left me plenty, much more than I ever expected. Consider it your company pension. But you need to go to your sister's in London."

  "But, how—"

  I reached into my pocket again and showed her two train tickets from Vienna to Zürich, one for each of us.

  "You have three days. You need to call your sister, and you need to go to your bank and get your money wired to this account in Zürich."

  I could get her into Switzerland, traveling with me on business. They were starting to get nervous about Jews arriving and never leaving, but this would work fine. Getting a visa from Zürich to London would be harder, but doable, given her sister's sponsorship, and especially given the numbers in that bank book.

  "But my furniture? All of my things? I can't."

  "You can and you will. You know it's time. You read the papers—Hitler could be here by lunchtime tomorrow, and then it will be too late. You have to go. And I swear to God, I'll drag you if I have to."

  She laughed. "Yeah, I'd like to see you try."

  The laugh told me I had won. She grabbed my hand, and we waltzed.

  44

  On Monday night, Leon wanted to drink at Rudy's, of all places. It was a working-class bar on Kandlgasse, in Schottenfeld. I was surprised, because Leon once famously said, famously and drunkenly late one night, in a line that would be repeated by Henry and me every time we heard Benny Goodman's "Stompin' at the Savoy," because that was the song that was playing as Leon sang:

  Wah-wah, the girls of Schottenfeld,

  Wah-wah, they smell like shittenfeld.

  But this was not about women. This was a night of what he called "winking," a combination of working and drinking. This was a derivation of our annual mid-December day of Christmas shopping and drinking, which he had dubbed "shrinking." Anyway, he said he needed to talk to a guy for a story, and wanted company while he waited for him to show up at his local. So, Rudy's.

  As we drank and waited, we did our best to avoid talking about Schuschnigg, and what might happen next. But after exhausting a recitation of my fight with Johanna, and Henry's fixation with Liesl, there really wasn't anything else to talk about except the story Leon was working on—which, as it turned out, was about Schuschnigg.

  "Look, I can't tell you," he said. "Not yet. If the guy comes in, I'll talk to him. Then maybe. But it's just too thin. Let's give it a little while more."

  "But who is he?"

  Leon paused. "Look, I’ll just tell you this: He's the foreman at Hans Albrecht and Sons, the printing company. And I'm pretty sure Schuschnigg is arranging some kind of rush printing job. But that's all I know."

  This was big, it seemed. Or maybe it was nothing. Leon just had that look about him, even though he also had that exhausted look about him. "Do you get the sense anybody in Café Louvre is on to it?"

  "No, but you never know. I've stopped in to check the last few nights—give them a few scraps, an early read on what's going to be in the paper, maybe a little gossip, then I just listen. The gossip helps them a lot, makes their bosses think they're on the inside of things, spices up their stories—the guy from Chicago calls it 'the raisins in the pudding.' So they let me listen. The guy from Manchester has all the so
urces, but I don't get the sense they have anything. The truth is, they all look like shit. Nobody's sleeping. They're all afraid to. They know this is going to be the biggest story of their careers and they're nervous as hell. Because they know, but they don't know. They're like all of us."

  I had never been a source for Leon, never told him anything I had learned on my courier trips, and he never asked. But it just seemed different now, time running faster somehow, all of us hurtling toward a horrible outcome. So I told him what I had found out in the confessional, about the Hitler meeting last fall, and Hossbach's notes, and Blomberg and Fritsch and Neurath, and how the major and his people were convinced that it was all happening soon.

  Leon was suddenly alive. "In a confessional? Can I use this?"

  "Not the confessional part. Not my name, obviously. But the information as background? Yes."

  "A lot of this has been hinted at, but if I could tie it together and call you 'a source with connections to the German military,' would that be okay?"

  I thought about it for a second and agreed. When I gave the information to my Czech contact, he pretty much yawned. I mean, what was the difference at this point? The bigger question was if I would tell Leon the rest of what happened that day in Cologne. When I did, well, it was because I had to tell someone.

  Leon listened and then whispered, "I knew he didn't kill himself," as if his vindication was all that mattered. But then he caught himself.

  "So what are you going to do about it?"

  I paused, then just dove in. "I'm thinking of killing Vogl, the Gestapo captain."

  Leon's first reaction was to laugh. But then he saw my face. "You're fucking serious, aren't you?"

  "It's all I can think about."

  "You can't. I mean, be serious."

  "You're telling me to be serious? You're telling me to be cautious? You?"

  "I mean, I'm impulsive. I'm an idiot sometimes, I'll grant you that. But even I know that killing a Gestapo officer in Cologne is crazy."

  "But why does it have to be crazy if you plan it right?" And then I sketched out the beginnings of the scheme I had been concocting.

  Leon listened, conceded a point or two, probed at what he thought were holes in my plan. But when I thought I was starting to convince him, he stopped the conversation. "No, this is absurd. Come on, this is real fucking life. This isn't just taking a swing at a couple of Nazi kids in a classroom. That was literally child's play compared to this."

  He was talking about something that happened in 1924. Leon and I had enrolled for a semester at Vienna University—Leon because he was on a kick to become a lawyer and change the world, and me because, well, because Leon was doing it. Uncle Otto shrugged and told me I could go ahead if I paid with my own money. As it turned out, we didn't even last until the end of the semester.

  Back then—and 1938 wasn't all that different, thinking back on it—the most rabid Nazis were at the university, true believers unencumbered by real-life experience, assholes with energy. The emotions seemed to boil over every few months—the signs posted on the notice boards more and more anti-Semitic, the speakers brought onto campus more hateful, and then the beatings of Jewish students. They were like mini-pogroms, tacitly supported by the administration and the faculty. And here was the beauty of the thing for the Nazis: Vienna city police were not allowed to set foot on campus because of some ancient law. They stood on the sidewalk and watched while Jewish kids were being curb-stomped 50 feet away. Then the stompers literally rolled the beaten kids the last few feet down the hill, where the police picked them up and dropped them into ambulances.

  One day, I was late for an introductory philosophy class that Leon and I were taking together, and as I walked up the stairs to the second floor of the building, I heard a commotion in our classroom down the hall. I peered through the small window in the door and saw about 10 junior Hitlers surrounding Leon, calling him names, shoving him, then worse—because Leon was giving it right back to them. They were kicking the shit out of him while the professor and the rest of the class watched, all arrayed beneath a crucifix hanging on the wall. And I watched, too, outside the door, frozen, counting the attackers rather than rushing in, seven, eight, nine . . .

  I didn't know what to do, or how long I was out there, but I saw a fire alarm and ran down the hall and pulled it. The loud ringing paused everything in the classroom for a second, and I just rushed into the vacuum. One of the Nazis kicked me in the balls, and another one shoved me headfirst into a desk, opening a small cut above my left eye. But with that, the bells were still ringing and the moment seemed to have passed. Their fun for the day over, the Nazis trooped out of the classroom, followed by the professor and the rest. I was left with a cut that didn't even need stitches. Leon was left with hamburger for a face and headaches that didn't go away for a week. I got him up and dragged him home.

  We never went back to university. Leon veered to journalism, where you didn't need a degree, and I went back to selling magnesite. But when Leon told the story of that day, then and in years after, I was always painted as what he thought I was: loyal, brave, a great friend. Only I knew how long I had stood outside that classroom and watched as my friend was beaten nearly senseless, too afraid to move.

  I thought of so many things in the days when I was planning what to do in Cologne. I thought of that day in 1924 a lot.

  45

  Johanna and I had not spoken since the Fasching argument, but we had made a date to drive out to her family's estate—that is, for me to drive her out in the big-ass Daimler that sat untouched for months in their garage. I showed up at the appointed time, not knowing what to expect. As it turned out, she greeted me with a long, dirty kiss and acted as if the argument had never happened.

  I had expected the car to be like everything the Westermanns owned: top-notch and shiny on the surface but less so underneath, farting explosively out of the tailpipe at regular intervals. But the machine was a beauty, in looks and in action. Apparently, it was because they used it so infrequently and because one of the housemen maintained the engine as a kind of hobby.

  The ride was about two hours, from city to suburb to farmland interrupted only occasionally by hamlets. Johanna started giving me driving directions at the end, and then we came upon an enormous iron gate that was closed.

  "Honk the horn," she said.

  I gave a polite tap. She leaned over, muttered one word—"amateur"—and hit the horn with a long, insistent blast like a lorry driver stuck behind a double-parked taxi in a narrow street. Within seconds, a man in some sort of half-assed uniform, with no hat or gloves but epaulets on his unbuttoned coat, appeared on the other side, walking casually. When he saw it was Johanna, the walk became a sprint and he did his best to do up the buttons. He got all but one.

  "I'm sorry, Miss Johanna, but we weren't expecting you." He fiddled with the lock on the gate but was obviously shaken.

  "Just open the damn thing," Johanna said.

  When he did, finally, she directed me forward with a wave.

  "That was pretty shitty, not telling them you were coming," I said.

  "Keeps them on their toes," she said.

  We drove through woods for maybe a quarter-mile, and then the view opened up. The house—naturally, sited on a small hill—was there, in all of its massive granite magnificence. I had seen bigger—you know, like the Hofburg and Schönbrunn—and it's true that this was a cottage by comparison, but it was still twice as big as most resort hotels in Salzburg. I stopped the car and admired it from a distance.

  "A dozen bedrooms?" I asked.

  "Fifteen."

  "And how many have you christened?"

  "None, yet," she said.

  There must have been a phone near the gate because, in the minute or so since, the troops had apparently been alerted. A butler in a tuxedo, a gardener in overalls, and a young housemaid in a hot little young housemaid getup were lined up outside the front door and waiting for us as we drove up. The butler opened the c
ar door and said, "Miss Johanna, I'm sorry we did not—"

  "I know, Merkins," she said. "Lunch for the two of us in an hour. Thank you."

  Johanna took my arm and led me around the outside of the house. After we had traveled what they deemed to be a safe distance, the butler and the rest hurried off. As we got around to the back of the house, we climbed a few steps up to a massive patio that overlooked the back side of the hill, a sweeping lawn, a small stream with a tidy stone bridge, and then more forest. In the far corner, near the bridge, another gardener hacked at some tall grass with a scythe.

  I pointed toward him. "So how many people do you employ to maintain this place?"

  "I think it's eight now—Merkins, a cook, two maids, two gardeners, a houseman, and our pretend security man at the gate. But it used to be twice that when I was a girl."

  "And how much time does your family spend here?"

  "The month of August, maybe three or four other weekends in the spring—oh, and the week of the harvest celebration."

  "Harvest? Is there a farm hidden out there somewhere?"

  "It's a tradition," Johanna said. She actually sniffed when she said it.

  I was getting the full von Westermann experience. It was the aspect of Johanna's personality that I liked the least. In fact, I hated it. It always amazed me how easily she swung from this cut-rate nobility bullshit to sitting naked on the floor of my apartment, cross-legged, drinking beer out of the bottle.

  "You know, we're probably selling," she said, snapping me out of my naked/cross-legged reverie.

  "Is that why—"

  "Yeah, I wanted to see it again."

  "So, when, do you think?"

  "Soon," she said. "My father has an offer. He's considering it."

  The legion of minor Austrian nobility was left with little choice but to sell off their possessions, bit by bit. The question of houses was always the biggest one. Most people in the von Westermanns' position made the decision to sell the city house in Vienna and retire to the family home in the country, where their roots were and where they could live out their lives amid crumbling piles of granite, letting go of one servant after another and hoping to die of cirrhosis before it was time to fire the last gardener. But the von Westermanns were doing it the other way, and Johanna saw the questions on my face.