36 Yalta Boulevard

by Olen Steinhauer

  Brano stared at him.

  “Pack. You’re flying out of here.” Lochert uncovered the mouthpiece. “Yeah, it’s me. I’ve found him. No, but you won’t believe the condition.” He waved a hand at Brano and said to him, “Come on.”

  Brano emptied out the wardrobe as Lochert spoke.

  “Exactly … Two o’clock, TisAir. Right. The main terminal.” Then he hung up. “The ticket’s being reserved. All you have to do is pay for it.”

  Brano stopped packing. “Where am I going?”

  “You’re going home, Brano. Where you belong.”

  They took care of the bill together, the flaxen desk clerk watching carefully. “A receipt, please,” said Lochert, and she made one out under his name, Josef Lochert. The bellboy opened the front door and nodded courteously when Brano handed him a tip.

  When they got into a white Mercedes parked farther down Weihburg-Gasse, Brano noticed the plates. “Diplomatic car?”

  Lochert started the engine. “Useful. I can speed if I want.”

  Brano watched the city slide by as they made their way along the Ringstrasse past enormous Habsburg monoliths. They didn’t speak for a while, until Brano asked, “Did I kill him?”

  “Bertrand?”

  “Yes.”

  Lochert stared at the road a moment, then shrugged. “Yeah, of course you did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, Brano, he was a traitor. Don’t become moral on me, now. That man got what was coming to him.”

  “But how was he a traitor?”

  “He was selling us out to the Austrians. We used the code GAVRILO because we didn’t know who he was. Is that clear enough?”

  “Who’s we?”

  Lochert tapped the wheel and looked over at him. “You really don’t remember a thing, do you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Both of us work for the Ministry for State Security, on Yalta Boulevard.”

  “The Ministry for …” Tourists jogged across the road in front of them. “I’m a spy?”

  Josef Lochert laughed a loud, punchy laugh. “Listen to you! Major Brano Oleksy Sev asking me if he’s a spy!”

  “What about Dijana Franković?”

  He licked his lips. “She’s nobody, okay? A whore. And trouble. Forget about her. And stop with the questions. You’ll get all your answers soon enough.”

  Lochert dropped him off at the Flughafen Wien departures door and handed his bag over from the backseat. Brano placed it on the curb. “You said it’s reserved?”

  “Yeah,” said Lochert from inside the car. “Hand over your passport at the TisAir desk. It’s the two o’clock flight.”

  “Okay.”

  “Have a good trip, Brano,” he said. “Now close the door.”

  Brano watched the Mercedes drive away.

  The airport was cool, with a vast marble floor leading to a row of airline desks. He waited behind a businessman arguing with the young woman standing under the TISA AERO-TRANSPORT sign, until the man, frustrated, walked off. The woman smiled at Brano.

  “May I help you?”

  “I have a reservation.” He handed over his passport. “The two o’clock flight.”

  The woman examined a list on the desk. “I’m afraid there’s no reservation for you, Herr Sev.”

  “But my friend made the call.”

  She read over the list again. “No, there’s not one here, but it doesn’t matter. There’s a free seat.”

  He paid for the ticket, handed over his bag, and asked for the bathroom. “Just past the lounge,” she said, pointing.

  He lit a cigarette as he passed tired-looking travelers sitting with their bags, some reading newspapers, others books. Beside the bathrooms was a line of pay phones, and he considered trying Dijana Franković’s number again. Much later, he would wonder if calling again would have changed anything that followed. But there’s never any way to know these things.

  He washed sweat from his forehead and stared at himself again in the mirror. He was becoming used to this round, flat-cheekboned face and could even spot his ethnicity—Polish features. From the northern part of his country, perhaps. But that was all the mirror told him.

  At the urinal, he felt dizzy again, the spot on the back of his head aching. A large man in a suit took the urinal next to him, then looked over.

  “You all right?”

  “I’m fine. Just a little dizziness.”

  This Austrian, Brano noticed, didn’t unzip his fly. “You’re Brano Sev, right?”

  “I—” He zipped himself up. “Do I know you?”

  “No, Brano,” said the Austrian. He reached into his jacket pocket but didn’t take his hand back out. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  The dizziness was intensifying. “Where?”

  “We’ll have a little talk.”

  “I have a plane to catch.”

  As the Austrian stepped closer, his hand withdrew, holding a small pistol. “Forget about the plane, Brano.”

  Brano’s head cleared. He leaned forward, as if to be sick.

  “Hey, are you—” said the Austrian, crouching, but didn’t finish because Brano swung his head back up into the man’s nose, at the same time thrusting a fist into the man’s stomach. The Austrian stumbled back, a hand on his bloody nose, the other trying to keep hold of the pistol. Brano kneed him in the groin and twisted the gun hand until he had the pistol. He stepped back.

  The Austrian stared at him, covering his nose and his groin.

  “How many more?” said Brano.

  “Jesus, Brano. I wasn’t trying to kill you.”

  “How many more?”

  The Austrian leaned against the sinks, then looked in the mirror. His eyes dripped and his nose bled. “Just one. He’s watching the front exit.”

  “How long before he comes inside?”

  “Ten, fifteen minutes. Look at this goddamned nose!”

  “And you. You know who I am?”

  “I wouldn’t be any good if I didn’t know who you were. The new Kristina Urban, the Vienna rezident.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  The Austrian was becoming impatient. “Who do you think I work for?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “The Abwehramt, obviously. What’s with all these questions?”

  Everything Brano had done in this bathroom had been automatic, as if he were being controlled from somewhere else. Now he tried to think. The Abwehramt was Austrian foreign intelligence. He was the Vienna rezident, who controlled his country’s intelligence operations in Vienna. And he had killed a man named Bertrand Richter.

  “Why do you want me?”

  “Because we were told to get you.”

  “Why were you told to get me?”

  The Austrian finally let go of his groin and uncovered his nose. It was beginning to swell. “You’ve been in this business long enough to know that we just do what we’re told, and we seldom know why.”

  “Come here,” Brano said as he walked to one of the stalls. He opened the door. “Come on. Inside.”

  He stepped back as the Austrian entered the stall and turned around.

  “Face the wall.”

  “Christ, Brano. There’s no need to shoot me.”

  Brano swung the pistol into the back of the Austrian’s neck and watched him crumple onto the toilet.

  At the gate, he wondered when the man in the stall would wake up, rush out to his colleague or call airport security, and come to take him away. But over the next twenty minutes no one came, and as he paced he thought about the name the Austrian had told him—Kristina Urban. The name, for some reason, made him think of flight. He tried to work through the details—a dead man, a woman’s phone number, a hotel, a man named Josef Lochert. Brano was a spy, the Vienna rezident, and the Abwehramt were after him.

  He thanked the stewardess who stamped his ticket, then boarded the crowded plane.

  His seat was next to a young Austrian—twenty, maybe—who lit a
cigarette as soon as he sat down and refused to buckle his belt. “They make me feel trapped,” he said in a whisper.

  Brano nodded, but at that moment he remembered why the name Kristina Urban evoked flight. Last month, the Abwehramt had tossed her from a high window of the Hotel Inter-Continental.

  “Feeling trapped makes me anxious,” the young Austrian told him.

  “Me, too.”

  “You should try hashish. Settle you down.”

  Brano was no longer listening. The dizziness came back, and he leaned forward, settling his head against the next seat.

  “You all right?” said his companion.

  The stabilizing pressure of takeoff eased his sickness, and when the wheels left the ground he remembered more.

  It had begun at home, in the Capital, in the office of a very old friend, Laszlo Cerny, a man with a thick, unkempt mustache, a colonel in the Ministry for State Security. GAVRILO was the subject of a file open in front of him, and now, on the plane, he remembered its contents. On 6 May, in Vienna’s Stadtpark, a routine money exchange had been stopped by Viennese intelligence before the exchangers could even meet. Then, on 18 June, an apartment used to radio messages across the Iron Curtain had been raided. Three people had been caught—among them Kristina Urban, the Vienna rezident. Two weeks later, she was thrown out the hotel window.

  Brano closed his eyes as they gained altitude.

  He arrived in Vienna just last month to replace Kristina Urban and to uncover the leak that the Ministry had code-named GAVRILO. Before setting up in the cultural attaché office of the embassy on Ebendorferstraáe, he had specialists go over the building again. Seven electronic bugs were found, so Brano, to the dismay of the head of embassy security, Major Nikolai Romek, decided to work out of the Hotel Kaiserin Elisabeth rather than risk more security leaks. From there, he visited three suspect operatives and fed each one false information. Theodore Kraus believed that two men would meet and exchange codebooks inside the Ruprechtskirche on 14 July, Ingrid Petritsch believed that Erich Glasser, an employee of Austrian intelligence, would deliver classified files to a Czech agent in the Hotel Terminus on 28 July. And Bertrand Richter was told that a shipment of automatic rifles would be smuggled from Austria into Hungary near Szom-bathely on the evening of 8 August in a West German truck.

  Bertrand Richter.

  He could see the man now. Short, with dark features, a foolish smile; a drunk. But a wonderful drunk. Worth all the schillings poured into his account, because in social situations information flowed around him effortlessly. So for two years the Ministry on Yalta Boulevard had used this excitable dandy, and in exchange gave him the means to remain in that social circle he most loved.

  But on the night of 8 August, that arrangement ended when Josef Lochert—yes, Lochert was his assistant from the embassy—waited at the Hungarian border with binoculars and watched the Austrian police stop and search each truck with West German plates. Lochert reported to him with a smile: We’ve found GAVRILO.

  Which was why Bertrand Richter was dead.

  “This is my first trip east.”

  Brano looked at the young Austrian. “What?”

  “My first time,” he said. “You study the Revolution from books, you read your Marx and your Lenin, but there’s nothing like seeing a people’s republic firsthand. That’s what the leader of my discussion group says.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” said Brano, because now he could remember his home as well.

  He unbuckled his belt and, holding the backs of seats to maintain his balance, began walking to the bathroom at the front of the plane. He watched passengers flipping through magazines and newspapers to see if any turned to look at him. Though none did, he didn’t trust that that meant he was alone. The more he remembered, the more he was sure that someone on this plane would want to stop him from wreaking any more destruction on the world.

  He had reported the identity of GAVRILO with a coded telegram sent from the embassy and received the coded reply later that same day, from the office of his old friend Colonel Cerny.

  The bathroom door was locked, so he waited at the head of the plane, watching faces. It had been his responsibility, he remembered, to make the arrangements for GAVRILO’s death.

  Bertrand Richter was holding a party, ostensibly for the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, on 14 August, yesterday—in fact, Bertrand hardly needed an excuse to host a party, but as an atheist he enjoyed the irony. Perhaps to extend this irony, he had invited Brano. From a pay phone, Brano called at nine-thirty and told Bertrand he could not make the party because of an emergency. As suspected, Bertrand wanted to know the details. Come down here and I’ll show you, Brano told him. It’ll just take twenty minutes. Tell your guests you’re getting more food, but don’t bring anyone.

  Where?

  The Volksgarten. Temple of Theseus.

  Is this about the fourteenth of May?

  Brano didn’t know what he was talking about. What about the fourteenth of May?

  Josef Lochert, standing beside him, waved a hand for Brano to hurry up.

  Nothing, said Bertrand. I’ll be right over.

  The bathroom door opened and an old woman came out, smiled at him, and made her way back down the aisle. Brano locked the door behind himself and used toilet paper to wipe his face dry. He had worked for the Ministry twenty-two years; he was unmarried. Discovering his life as if for the first time, it seemed the life of a lonely man. But a man of no small importance—a major in the Ministry for State Security, located on Yalta Boulevard, number 36. Colonel Cerny, he also remembered, was his immediate superior, and he’d known him over two decades. He’d even helped this man, seven years ago, to deal with the suicide of his wife, Irina—a hotheaded Ukrainian whose photo remained on Cerny’s desk to this day.

  As someone tried the door, he sat on the toilet, holding on to the sink and breathing heavily.

  Last night, at the Temple of Theseus in the Volksgarten, he and Josef Lochert had waited forty minutes, and when Brano returned to the pay phone and called again, there was no answer. So Brano went to Bertrand Richter’s house in order to draw him out personally.

  The smoky apartment was full of revelers in various states of drunkenness who never noticed the phone was off the hook. Someone had pulled out an acoustic guitar. He couldn’t find Bertrand—no one seemed to know where he was, nor did they care—and then he asked the tall, pretty woman whose dark eyes had followed him around the house. Bertrand’s girlfriend, he remembered. A Yugoslav tarot-card reader.

  Dijana Franković said, Bertrand? I tell him go to hell. Da. He is boring. The whole room was singing “Love Me Do” by the Beatles. She was very drunk, and she pulled him aside. Brano Sev, I am in the love with you.

  It was too late, he decided, to follow through on the operation. Bertrand Richter could be killed another day. So when she asked, he walked her back to her apartment, listening to her lecture on the Serbian word “zbrka”—The essence, she said, is when is much too many thing, so nothing can you touch. Despite his apprehension—a woman who would say “love” to a near-stranger was plainly unbalanced—he submitted. He went upstairs with her, and after two hours returned to his hotel. An unsigned telephone message waited at the front desk: Come now.

  He returned to the Volksgarten, thinking not of Bertrand Richter but of the contours of Dijana Franković’s body.

  Jesus, Brano, where the hell have you been?

  While he was at the party, Josef Lochert had decided to wait by the front door. And when Bertrand returned to his home, drunk, moaning about the woman who had spurned him, Lochert suggested they go for a ride to clear their heads. He drove Richter to the Volksgarten and walked him to the Temple of Theseus. They climbed the steps and, once inside the temple, he beat Richter with a truncheon until he was dead.

  Lochert had dragged the body behind the bushes that ringed the temple. It was after two in the morning, and he was unamused by Brano’s disappearance. Wait until Yalta hears about thi
s, you just wait.

  Brano ignored that. You’ve removed all identification?

  Of course. The wallet’s in my pocket.

  But Brano looked for himself and found a library card inside Richter’s pants. What about this?

  Keep it as a souvenir. Just help me with him.

  The last thing Brano remembered was rolling up his sleeves and dragging Bertrand deeper into the bushes. The man’s head was a mess of blood and skull shards by this point—blood smeared across Brano’s forearm—and he remembered not wanting to look too closely. At midthought, his memory stopped.

  Then he woke, with a dead man’s library card and no memory, to the coarse sounds of an Austrian policeman.

  “You’re not getting sick, are you?” asked the young Austrian.

  Brano sat down heavily. “Flying’s not easy.”

  “Don’t worry. Tisa Aero-Transport has a one hundred percent safety record. I checked on it.”

  “The company’s only been in existence five years,” said Brano. “Let’s hope they have a perfect record.”

  The Austrian grunted, and Brano closed his eyes, working back over the morning—waking, the policeman, wandering to the hotel, and getting his keys. The envelope with his wallet. Why didn’t he have his wallet on him when he woke?

  It had been dropped off sometime last night, the clerk had said. But by whom?

  The seat-belt indictator lit above his head, and he fastened his. The young Austrian smirked. “They can’t make me do it. Let them just try.”

  “If there’s turbulence, you could get tossed over the seats.”

  “It’s not my fault if they can’t fly straight.”

  Brano looked at him. “Why are you traveling?”

  “I told you. My discussion leader thinks it’s a good thing. And since I just got voted treasurer, the others felt I should bring back the first report from the socialist lands.”

  “I see.”

  “Who knows? If I like it, maybe I’ll stay.”

  “That wouldn’t be fair to your comrades.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess you’re right.”

  Brano rubbed his sore head.