36 Yalta Boulevard

by Olen Steinhauer

  24 MARCH 1967, FRIDAY

  •

  Day 5. The Subject, it seems to this agent, is a man in love with ritual, with repetition. He rises at 6:30 each morning and makes one cup of coffee in his apartment, then showers and dresses. Around nine, with a book in hand, he strolls up Liniengasse to where it meets Gumpendorfer Straße, purchases a copy of Kurier from a kiosk, then continues to Eszterhÿzy Park. On a bench in the shadow of the flak tower, he skims the newspaper, then reads his book. (Purchased 21 March, but title not yet ascertained.) The morning’s coffee runs through him, and he walks to a tree—the same one each day, three back from his bench—and urinates. (This agent hesitates to mention it, but this strikes him as evidence of the Subject’s degraded social conscience—a result of the socialist mentality.) At noon, the Subject walks into the inner city, buying a sausage from a Würstelstand and eating in the street—a different street each day—window-shopping and sometimes settling on a bench to watch passersby. Each evening, he finds a bar—again, a different one each day—and settles with his book or newspaper and a beer in the back corner, often ordering a schnitzel and fried potatoes for dinner. After two beers, he pays and returns to his apartment (never after 21:00), watches television, and goes to sleep.

  The only significant diversion from this routine occurred on Monday, 20 March (Day 1), when, at 11:00, the Subject entered the Raiffeisenbank at Michaelerplatz and withdrew a significant amount of money. He hides the schillings in an ice-cream box he keeps in the freezer.

  “Grüß Gott,” said the waitress, a pretty blonde in a foolish-looking folk costume.

  Brano placed his book on the table, facedown. “Grüß Gott,” he said. “May I have a melange?”

  “Anything else?”

  “Some water. With gas.”

  He watched her weave around full tables to the pastry counter and give the order to a big man beside an espresso machine, who looked as if he ran the Espresso Arabia. Around him Brano heard German, French, Italian, and English. Children sat sullenly with their parents, who flipped through guidebooks. Through the window, Kohlmarkt was full of businessmen and tourists; leaning in a doorway, his shadow, a heavy man with a sunburn, wiped his nose.

  Brano had lived under observation before. In West Berlin, he lived for months with the knowledge that he was being watched. The KGB, whether or not they were doing work in the interests of socialism, kept an eye on agents from both sides of the Curtain. It helped a man to stay on the correct path. Cerny had once joked that the Russians couldn’t get anything done in Berlin because they used all their manpower to watch one another, and this was perhaps true.

  But he had never quite gotten used to surveillance. It made even a man as self-conscious as Brano Sev more self-conscious, so that when he paused on a street corner, it felt like a pose, and when the second beer in a Viennese bar caused his head to tingle, he made a special effort to walk straight when he left, so that his shadows would have nothing of interest to report.

  Over that first week he established a dull routine for his watchers’ reports, wondering all the time if Ludwig really expected him to walk to the embassy on Ebendorferstraße, drag Josef Lochert outside, and announce that he was the local rezident. Maybe he did. Instead, Brano gave him tedium. That, within the confines of his comfortable imprisonment, was rebellion enough.

  On the second day, Brano had purchased a book—Stratégie Ouvrière et Nécapitalisme, by André, Gorz—visited his local park, and wandered the streets of Vienna. To avoid anything of interest, he hid his distaste for the monoliths of the old Habsburg regime, the equestrian statues and palaces from a time when even his own country was ruled from this capital. Although he sometimes paused to consider baskets of painted eggs sold by old women from the countryside, he spoke to no one save the occasional waitress.

  The sunburned man followed him most days, and by Wednesday he seemed to have caught a cold—he wiped his nose with the side of his hand all the way through the Volksgarten. Brano considered offering him his handkerchief, but instead stopped a moment by the Temple of Theseus, with its naked young man whose genitals were covered by a leaf. The concrete base read DER KRAFI UND SCHONHEIT UNSERER JUGEND. The strength and beauty of our youth.

  It made as little sense to him then as it had seven months ago, waking up with a headache and no identity.

  “Mélange,” said the waitress as she placed an Austrian caffe latte on the table. “And water.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  The waitress began to turn, then paused, looking at the book on the table. “Is that Andre Gorz?”

  Brano tilted his head. “It is.”

  “I find his analyses a little weak, but he has some good ideas, don’t you think?”

  “I haven’t read much yet.”

  She squatted so her head was just above the table and lowered her voice. “Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I think in the end he’s becoming too much of an apologist for capitalism. And of course they eat this up. Anyone who suggests that violent revolution isn’t necessary is just not seeing things straight.”

  “That’s a good point,” said Brano. “I’m not from here—”

  “I know. Your accent.”

  “Do you think Austria’s ripe for revolution?”

  “Oh, I wish!” She laughed expressively. “But no. There’s too much American money coming in. If Austria were left on its own, then recession would come, and there would be a move toward revolution. But everyone here thinks the Americans can do no wrong. As if they’re saving us from some horrible fate.” She tapped the table with a long, red-painted fingernail. “I was in Zagreb last year. No one can tell me those Yugoslavs are hating their lives. They own their own apartments. Half of them have bought a summer home on credit. I can’t even afford my rent!”

  “More people should travel.”

  “You’re not kidding.” The waitress glanced back, then stood up. “I suppose I should get back, so I can pay my rent. Geez. What a scam.”

  Brano smiled.

  It was good to break the silence, good for his head. Days spent inside himself led to unreal perspectives. This was why the intelligence services of the world used silence to tame their subjects. Emotions became too acute, and paranoid suspicions became facts. This was what silence had done to Jakob Bieniek.

  Brano found the waitress, paid for his coffee, and added a handsome tip.

  “For the Revolution,” he said, and she winked at him conspiratorially.

  His sunburned shadow followed him from the Espresso Arabia, down Kohlmarkt, and to a bus that brought them back to Mariahilfer, a few streets before his. Then he backtracked, turning down Theoboldgasse, thinking of betrayal.

  He could not be sure, but a week of silence had begun to take its toll, undermining his conviction that he was less a victim than a pawn in a grandiose plan dreamed up by Yalta. All he could see was a series of betrayals. The Doctor had not done what he had promised outside Budapest, and Pavel Jast’s betrayals were blatant. Captain Rasko, it turned out, was only interested in closing his little murder investigation as easily as possible, and, yes, he had even begun to trust Soroka—there were moments during that long ride through Hungary when he almost accepted that Jan simply had pity on his situation. Brano hated his own naiveté.

  Most important, Colonel Laszlo Cerny had ignored the evidence Brano had collected on the Bieniek murder and had obviously been behind the Doctor’s failure to appear at the Madai farm. He’d allowed Brano to be questioned with a car battery in an Austrian safe house for a month. Now, five days into his comfortable imprisonment, no messages had been left for him at the Eszterházy Park dead drop. He was beginning to suspect that Cerny, and therefore the Ministry, had abandoned him.

  But he would continue, because there was nothing else left for him to do.

  Brano paused at the corner of Eszterházy Park. His shadow stood at the other end of the block, wiping his nose again. Brano crossed the park and sat on his bench near the ba
se of the enormous flak tower—a remnant of Hitler’s last-ditch efforts to defend his Reich—then opened his book.

  Capitalist planning exists for the express purpose of maintaining the existing social relationships and orientations, of consolidating capitalism by rationalizing it, and, by coordinating private and public decisions, of reducing the inherent risks …

  But he was barely reading, distracted by the stiffness in his left pocket: the bent nail he’d extracted from the frame of his sofa that morning. Around it he had wrapped and taped a piece of paper on which was written a series of numbers that, when decoded, read WEB-GASSE 25, v/3—b. SEV.

  He stared blankly at the book for almost an hour, the zbrka of his thoughts keeping him warm, before he finally closed the book, stood up, and walked three trees behind his bench. He transferred the nail to his right pocket, the one he’d ripped a hole in, and unzipped his pants. There were some Japanese tourists taking photographs of the flak tower, but they didn’t notice him. As he urinated, he dropped the nail through his pant leg and stamped it into the wet ground.

  26 MARCH 1967, SUNDAY

  •

  The Café Mozart was around the corner from the Hotel Sacher, at Albertinaplatz’s crosscurrent of traffic, across from the Kapuzinerkirche’s equestrian statue. Brano had walked the whole way into town, crossing empty streets and closed storefronts. Even for a Sunday, Vienna seemed to have shut down. The vacant buildings of the Museum Quarter were stone sentries over an evacuated city. Only once did he spot a crowd, hovering outside a church, but he was running late and didn’t want to investigate.

  Brano paused in front of a pastry counter laden with Austrian sweets. The café was full, perhaps the only open place in town. Ludwig waved from the corner, where he sat with a small black briefcase beside his crossed legs. Brano passed four old women in mink stoles smoking at a round table as the Austrian rose to shake his hand. “A very happy Easter to you, Brano.”

  “Oh, so that’s what it is.”

  “What?” asked Ludwig as he waved to a waiter.

  “Nothing.”

  “Mélange good for you?”

  “Of course.”

  “One mélange,” he told the young black-and-white-suited waiter. “And a small whiskey.”

  “It’s early, Ludwig.”

  “And it’s a holiday. Tell me,” he said once the waiter had left, “how are you settling in? You look tired. There are bags under your eyes.”

  Brano looked at himself in the beveled mirror behind Ludwig’s head; the Austrian was right. “I’m not sleeping well.”

  “Well, that’s bad news. Loneliness can be a difficult thing.”

  “I’m used to it.”

  “Maybe we can set you up with some introductions.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “What’s that book you’ve got? None of my boys can figure out what it is.”

  Brano showed him the cover of Stratégie Ouvri

  ère et Néocapitalisme.

  “Trying to start world revolution in France, Brano?”

  “We have to start somewhere.”

  “Did you bring your passport?”

  Brano took it out of his jacket and handed it over.

  From his briefcase, Ludwig took out a slip of paper, a stamp, an inkpad, and a stick of glue. He found a clean page in the passport, rubbed glue on it, and pressed the slip into the page with the side of his fist. Then he used the inkpad and stamp to place the blue seal of an eagle with ruptured shackles on the page. He waved the open passport like a fan. “Any friends show up?”

  “Friends?”

  “Old friends. They’re bound to find you soon.”

  “No, no old friends.” Brano took back the passport. “Have you received inquiries about me?”

  “Your people seem to have counted you among their many losses. They’re silent.”

  “What about my other old friends?”

  “Which ones?”

  “The Sorokas.”

  Ludwig peered out the window. “I suppose it’s no secret. Their kid got a nasty cold after swimming that marsh. It’s to be expected. He’s in a London hospital now, while they wait for American visas.”

  “Feel insulted?”

  “That they didn’t stay in Austria? No, we don’t have the mystique of the New World.” He looked up as the waiter set down a whiskey and a mélange, then raised his glass. “To the people who do, surprisingly, prefer it here.” He knocked back the shot. “You might hear from one of them.”

  “Yes?”

  “Fräulein Franković.”

  To avoid betraying his feelings, Brano took a quick swallow that burned his tongue. “She knows I’m in town?”

  “We choose our secrets very carefully. Your presence in Vienna is not one. Anything you want to know?”

  “About what?”

  “About her.”

  Brano shook his head and settled back into his chair. He wanted to know everything, but not from this man; instead he gazed out at the street, where his chubby, sunburned shadow was blowing his nose. “He’s not up to your regular standards, is he?”

  “You get who you can these days.”

  “How is Karl?”

  When Ludwig slapped the table, his empty glass rattled. “I knew you liked that guy! Karl worried you hated him because of that battery trick, but I told him—I said, Karl, you’re just too damn likable!”

  “Sure,” said Brano. “He’s a fine man.”

  “Know why we’re here, in the Café Mozart?”

  “Because this is where you’ve installed the microphones.”

  Ludwig shook his head. “We can install microphones anywhere we like, Brano. No, it was for you. A little fun. Ever see the film The Third Man’.”

  “I’ve never been much for moving pictures.”

  “Oh, you should be. One of these days they’ll get rid of books, mark my words. But this particular film is a little about what we do.”

  “It’s about imprisoning people in apartments?”

  “Not that literal, Brano. Come on. It’s from just after the war, a kind of spy movie. Takes place in Vienna. And while Graham Greene was writing the script, he lived in the Hotel Sacher and came here each day to take notes. How do you like that?”

  “Graham Greene,” said Brano. “I believe he’s a good friend of Kim Philby. Maybe I should see his film.”

  Ludwig crossed his arms. “Unfortunately, the place I’d rather take you has been closed since the war. The Café Central. I think you’d prefer it there. Your proletarian hero Comrade Trotsky used to play chess on those tables.”

  Brano tapped the table with his fingertip. “He’s no hero of mine. Trotsky was a class traitor who deserved what he got in Mexico.”

  Brano was pleased to see that the Austrian didn’t know whether he should take the comment seriously. “You know,” Ludwig said finally, “something’s bugging me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Our old dead body, Bertrand Richter.”

  “I told you what I knew.”

  “Of course you did. But we picked up the guy you said killed him. What was his name?”

  “Erich Tobler on Hauptstraße.”

  “Right, right. Well, the thing is, he’s never heard of Bertrand Richter.”

  “And you believe him.”

  “I don’t know what to believe, Brano. I’m of half a mind that you’re the one who killed poor Bertrand. But Erich and I have more talks scheduled. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  “I’m sure you will, Ludwig. You know what you’re doing.”

  The smile returned, broad and toothy. “You’re quite a charmer today, Brano. It’s nice to see that side. Go on. Enjoy the day.”

  “I’m curious about something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s Easter Sunday, and you’re here with me. Don’t you have a family to spend the day with?”

  Ludwig’s smile faded. “I don’t think we’re here to discuss my personal life.”<
br />
  Brano nodded at his empty coffee cup. “Will the Second Republic take care of this?”

  “Business expenses.”

  “I guess that’s one advantage.”

  Ludwig squinted as Brano stood and picked up his book. Then he nodded as he got the joke.

  Brano walked back home slowly, watching churches along the way spill the faithful into the empty streets. The sunburned shadow remained a half block away, leisurely wandering, and at Web-Gasse 25 Brano noticed a second shadow sitting in a new Volkswagen across the street. An old man with a thick, white mustache and beard, to compensate for his decaying hair. The old man looked vaguely familiar—perhaps a face from West Berlin. He watched Brano unlock his door and go inside but made no move.

  Ludwig’s shadows were more conspicuous by the minute.

  Through the holes in his mailbox door he spotted a letter. He retrieved the unstamped envelope as an old woman nodded a Grüß Gott at him on her way out, and in the elevator opened it. Inside was a yellow English-language pamphlet published by the “Committee for Liberty in the Captive Nations,” titled A Communist War? Below the title was the image of a hammer striking a sickle.

  He opened his door, then went inside and locked it. He took the pamphlet to the living room and tilted it in the sunlight, looking for invisible indentations that weren’t there. He sat on the sofa, smiling as he read, for it was clear then that Ludwig, or his bearded associate, did have a sense of humor after all.

  A COMMUNIST WAR?