36 Yalta Boulevard

by Olen Steinhauer

  And why would he leave his country? He knew why others left: They were impatient. Socialism, like any egalitarian system, is not born whole. It moves slowly from the inequities of capitalism to the long restructuring of the dictatorship of the proletariat, before finally reaching the full glory of pure communism. Lenin made no secret of progress’s sluggishness. Those who left were individualists, or opportunists, who felt that the realization of true human equality was not worth a few years of discomfort. Brano felt differently. He did not mind the occasional breadlines, the glitches in production that filled the shoe stores with only one style of footwear, nor the periodic interruptions in hot water and electricity that individualists decried. Perhaps Ludwig was right; he was an idealist.

  The opaque byzantine machinations of Yalta were also becoming clearer. If Cerny knew he would be picked up in Austria—and he had to suspect this—then printing his murder conviction in The Spark made sense, as did the Doctor’s failed promise. Cerny knew the Austrians would never believe Brano had left his home for ideological reasons. So he had given Brano a personal reason.

  Brano, in the eyes of the Austrians, would be another Bogdan Stashin-ski, the KGB assassin who had defected in 1961, in Paris, after just two jobs. Simply because he couldn’t take it any longer.

  But again, why? Soroka was far from his reach, and once again Brano was alone with the enemy. Ludwig’s threat to send him back home was merely that—a threat. So, here he would stay.

  On the third night, Ludwig settled on the sofa and crossed an ankle over his knee. “Tell me, then. Why have you come to Austria?”

  “I’ve been framed for a murder, and the only way out of it was to leave the country.”

  “Of course. An ex-member of the Ministry for State Security is framed by a drunk peasant, and he can’t get himself out of the mess? You must think we’re idiots, Brano.”

  “I can only tell you what I know.”

  “Which is all we ask.”

  Brano waited.

  “All right. Your people run a lot of operations out of Vienna. Who doesn’t, these days? Neutral countries breed this kind of intrigue. Tell us about them.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Because you choose not to?”

  “I simply cannot.”

  “Okay,” said Ludwig. He got up again. “We’ll talk later.”

  Ludwig was patient. He came and went many times, and in the periods between, Brano ate pastries with the fat guard, and sometimes they watched television—insipid programs with names like Batman and Gespensterparty.

  The struggle, it seemed, was not against fear but boredom.

  His guards were polite but well trained; they knew their duty. Their silence was meant to give Brano a sense of relief each time Ludwig returned and spoke. That relief would help Brano to eventually open up.

  At least, that was how he understood the technique until the seventh time Ludwig returned to the house, three weeks into his stay.

  He smiled like every other time, but now he had a small briefcase. He placed it on the coffee table. “You’re feeling well, Brano?”

  “I feel all right.”

  “Good, good.” Ludwig’s eyes wandered, lost for a second, then he sat down. “You’ll never guess what happened today, in India.”

  “I probably won’t.”

  Ludwig smiled. “Svetlana Alliluyeva walked into the United States embassy in Delhi and asked for asylum.”

  “Stalin’s daughter?”

  “The very one. Seems she was delivering her lover’s ashes to the Ganges, and after thinking it over decided there was no longer any reason to remain in that hellhole they call the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Well, believe it, Brano. It’ll make the news by tonight. Want to know what’s in here?” he said, tapping the suitcase.

  Brano shrugged.

  Ludwig opened the latches, then raised the lid. He turned it around so Brano could see.

  Inside was a corroded battery a little smaller than one used in an automobile—red letters told him it was made by the Italian Fiamm company. Attached to the terminals was a red switch with two long leads ending in alligator clips.

  “What’s that for?” he asked stupidly.

  “Karl,” said Ludwig.

  The fat one stepped behind the chair and grabbed Brano’s arms, twisting them back and quickly tying his wrists together with a braided rope.

  “I don’t understand,” said Brano.

  Ludwig tied his ankles together, and then Karl placed the burlap bag over his head again.

  Through the darkness, Ludwig spoke to him. “You’ve been through these sorts of things. We know this. And it was my hope that, knowing what was possible, you would choose to work with us. But you’ve been stubborn. So, then. Austrian hospitality, it seems, can only get one so far, and now we must rely on the methods of our fathers.”

  Brano felt hands on his chest. They grasped his shirt and ripped it open. He heard the click of a button hitting the floor. A sharp, cold pain in his left nipple—the first alligator clip—then the other.

  “Karl?” he heard. “Can you show me how to work this damn thing?”

  This, then, was what he was trained for. No longer boredom, but fear—not of pain, but of the knowledge that your life is no longer in your hands. How long he lasted he wasn’t sure, but the cold, jaw-grinding shocks went through him many times—short pulses that became, over time, longer. Sometimes he could hold the pain in his hand, but often it slipped through his fingers and filled his rigid body. His organs hardened with each shock, and his fingers clenched behind his back. And, like everyone in the end, he talked.

  He gave them a list of names. That was where he started, with the list of Yalta Boulevard’s local informers, because the first impulse of anyone who has been broken is to give away others. Retribution isn’t a worry—all you want is your life back.

  Then he gave them two names they already knew: Austrian agents who also worked for Yalta. One had been bought, the other blackmailed with photographs of him in bed with a young Polish boy. Brano told what little he knew of the information they had handed over.

  But these admissions were decisions; even through the pain he could still think. The two double agents had served their purpose months ago and were no longer of use. The informers he handed over were a mix of the uncooperative and unproductive. And in a city like Vienna there were so many of these that the names could go on for a long time, giving the illusion of completeness yet in reality telling nothing.

  Then Ludwig reached further back, to 1964. He was in West Berlin, no? Brano quickly verified this. And who was the West Berlin rezidenft Again, this was a man who had since been brought back home, so he answered. And what did Brano do there? He followed orders.

  Ludwig closed the circuit.

  “More specific, Brano.”

  He told them of various operations he’d taken part in over that year, none of which concerned Austria. He’d helped manage three informers, had once run a disinformation campaign against British intelligence, had arranged the practical details of two incoming operatives, and had killed one man.

  “Name?”

  He admitted that as well, because by now he could no longer distinguish what was important from what was not. All questions had answers.

  “What about Bertrand Richter?”

  “He was giving you information.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “I gave him false information, and he delivered it to you. He told you a West German truck would carry guns into Hungary. He had to be eliminated.”

  “By whom?”

  “By Erich Tobler,” he lied.

  The sound of paper shuffling. “That’s the informer who lives on Hauptstraße.”

  “Yes,” said Brano. “He’s the one.”

  “We assumed it was you. You did leave Austria the same evening the body was discovered.”

  “It wouldn’t make
sense for me to do it myself—I was the rezident. There are people trained for that.”

  “Okay,” said Ludwig. Papers again. “Tell me why you’re in Austria.”

  “I’ve told you a hundred times.”

  “You’ve lied to me a hundred times.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Try again, Brano.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  Movement. Then a hand removed the burlap bag. He blinked, the light stinging his eyes, and looked down at the metal teeth digging into his nipples, the bruises around them, and the blood. He could no longer feel his chest.

  Ludwig was on the sofa, and between them the coffee table was covered with scribbled pages ripped out of a notebook. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I don’t know why you’re being so unreasonable. We all know you’re not here because of a drunk peasant. You’re here for another reason. And this reason has a name: Dijana Franković.”

  Brano stared at him, unable to answer. After all the secrets spilled and networks made useless, Ludwig was asking about a matter of personal desire. Perhaps they thought she was part of his network, he didn’t know. But bringing her up provoked that one thing Brano had been able to sidestep for three weeks. It was one of Cerny’s dictums: Never hate your enemy. Hatred means you underestimate; your hatred makes you blind.

  “Dijana Franković is connected to nothing. I can’t explain it.” He inhaled, trying not to weep, his stomach knotting. “Dijana Franković is an innocent. She just stumbled into the wrong man. She fell in love.”

  Ludwig smiled doubtfully, the same smile Colonel Cerny gave him when he told Brano she was obviously a spy. “Tell me, Brano. You were sent to follow Jan Soroka, to track his path. Why, then, once you knew you’d be picked up by us, didn’t you arrest the Sorokas, or simply turn back?”

  Brano was asking himself the same question. He took a deep breath, and the tight flesh on his rising chest began to ache. He’d had orders, but he could have interpreted them however he liked. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “It wasn’t just her in love with me.”

  “I knew it!” Ludwig slapped his knee and turned to Karl. “Didn’t I tell you? All idealists are, beneath the surface, just romantics. Didn’t I say that?”

  Karl nodded.

  Brano exhaled and closed his eyes. Then he opened them, blinking, but couldn’t quite get the living room into focus. He felt very old.

  19 MARCH 1967, SUNDAY

  •

  He’d spent the last week sore and sleepless, fearing each night that when Ludwig came the next day, it would be with Dijana Franković in tow, and he’d give way to the hatred that tugged at him. But when Ludwig arrived each morning, it was with a notebook and pen, and the questions continued. Until Sunday, when he brought a cardboard box. Brano shifted uncomfortably on the sofa. Ludwig set the box on the coffee table. “Go ahead, Brano. Something for you.” Brano reached forward and opened it.

  Inside was a suit, slate gray jacket and pants, and beneath, a pressed white shirt.

  “Try it on. I guessed your measurements yesterday. Let’s see how well I did.”

  Ludwig had guessed perfectly. Despite the soreness in his nipples when he buttoned the shirt, each piece of clothing fit as if it had been measured for him, and the material was strong and very fine. Ludwig put his hand on his chin.

  “Like new, Brano. Very good.”

  “What now?”

  “Now, we take you to your new home.”

  They used the burlap bag again, and when it was removed they were making their way through farmland toward Vienna. It was the same car that had brought him in from the Fertő Lake, the gray Renault. Karl sat in the backseat with him while the tall guard drove. Ludwig, in the passenger seat, gazed ahead as the road widened and rose, the familiar cityscape coming into view.

  “Where’s my new home?”

  Ludwig twisted back and winked. “A surprise.”

  They entered Vienna from the southeast, through the Simmering and Landstraße districts, then along the Ringstraße that circled the inner city, past the Stadtpark and the immense buildings of the Museum Quarter. Along Mariahilfer Straße, storefronts loomed, the sidewalks packed. A left just before the Westbahnhof, a few more streets, then they parked.

  “Not a bad area,” said Ludwig. “You can do your shopping just up the road.”

  “So I’m allowed to leave?”

  “Leave?”

  “My new home. You’re not taking me to prison.”

  Though he’d often smiled, this was the first time Ludwig laughed in Brano’s presence, a choked sound from a red face. “Christ, Brano. You’ve got an imagination.”

  His new home was a quaint apartment building at number 25 Web-Gasse. White Secessionist women’s faces looked down from a high floor.

  “How long?”

  “What?”

  “How long are you going to let me stay here?”

  “As long as you want, Brano. Just check in with us weekly—each meeting we’ll renew your visa—and sometimes we can talk. Why should we treat you the way you treat people?”

  “How do I treat people?”

  “Just read the newspaper, Brano. Everyone knows what you guys do.”

  Brano almost replied, but the week-old soreness beneath his shirt convinced him otherwise. His impulse was to give a list of agents who had been lost in Vienna over the last three years. Ignac Janke had turned up in a landfill outside town with burn marks covering his chest and two fingers missing. Alfonz Schmidt drowned, but from motor oil poured down his throat. Kristina Urban, the old Vienna rezident, at least experienced a moment of flight when she was thrown from that high window of the Hotel Inter-Continental. And last September, after returning to the Capital, Cerny told him that one of his three agents suspected of being GAVRILO, Theodore Kraus, had turned up at an Austrian farmhouse. He had somehow escaped his captors, though by that point he was blind and mute, the result of haphazard operations with a kitchen knife.

  “There’s a war on,” he said. “None of us know what to expect.”

  The Austrian shrugged. “You’re right about that, Brano. Just consider yourself blessed.”

  They took a rickety elevator to the fifth floor; then Karl placed Brano’s suitcase just inside the barred door of number 3.

  The apartment was large enough for a family—two bedrooms and a vast kitchen, a dining room filled with a huge polished table. Everything was stocked: food, furniture, linens; his clothes had even been hung in the wardrobe. It was unimaginably large compared to his twelfth-floor two-room in a concrete tower back in the Capital. “Hope you don’t mind the style,” said Ludwig.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Tell that to my wife.”

  Karl seemed to think that was funny.

  “No one lives on this floor, though some old folks are below you. They shouldn’t be any trouble.”

  “I’m sure they won’t be.”

  In the living room, by the twenty-inch television, Ludwig sat on the blue sofa. “It’s an easy deal, you can’t deny it. Once a week you and I meet. Let’s say Sunday, at one. Sound good?”

  “Okay,” said Brano. “Where?”

  “Café Mozart on Albertinaplatz. You know it?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Good. Café Mozart at one every Sunday.” He placed Brano’s maroon passport on the coffee table. “This has a one-week visa stamp. Each Sunday I’ll give you a new one. For that, you and I talk, and I don’t do all the talking. You understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “If you’re contacted by anyone—and I’m sure you will be at some time—you let me know. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And you don’t leave Vienna.”

  “I expected that.”

  “You should, Brano. Because we’re giving you everything. Here,” he said, handing over a small stiff card with a long number on it. “That’s your account nu
mber at the Raiffeisenbank. Don’t go crazy, now. We’re just civil servants, after all.”

  “Of course.”

  “On the other side I’ve written my work number. For emergencies.” “Okay.”

  Karl took a ring of three keys out of his pocket and placed it on the coffee table. “Any questions?” asked Ludwig.

  Brano looked at Karl standing behind Ludwig, smiling, his hands clasped in front of himself. Then he focused on Ludwig. “Why?”

  Ludwig flared his nostrils and breathed loudly. “Because, Brano, we’re no fools. You’ll only be of use to us when you’re on the street. In a prison cell you’re no use to anyone.”

  “But why do you trust me?”

  “Who ever said I did?” He forced a chuckle. “Brano, I don’t trust you at all. But consider this a job. Right? We’ve got enough unemployed in Vienna.”

  He patted his thighs and stood up. He stuck out his hand.

  Brano shook it.

  Then Ludwig and Karl walked out the door.

  For a while Brano stood in the empty living room, staring at the door. He thought nothing, except that silence—the physical silence of an empty room—was a strange thing. Then he snatched the keys from the coffee table and locked the door.

  He crept back past the sofa to the French windows. They were open, covered by translucent white curtains that stirred in the breeze. He tried to see the street but couldn’t without leaning his head out to where it could be seen from below. So he parted the curtains and quickly peered down.

  The space where they had parked was empty.

  He looked again to be sure, then gazed down the length of the street—from Mariahilfer down to Gumpendorfer Straße—and saw only a few car roofs and some pedestrians, small from this height, going to and from their homes. His hands on the window frame shook, but not from elation. He knew that what he did not see still existed. To prove it to himself he walked over to the beige telephone that hung on the wall in the foyer, beside the bare coatrack, and lifted the receiver to his ear. He hung up and repeated the procedure three times, each time recognizing that additional click of the phone tap he would have installed had he been them. Then he turned back to the living room, and in the fan-shaped overhead lamp, in the dials of the large television, in the electric clock hanging on the wall—in all these things he knew he had an enemy.