“Guten Abend,” she said when she noticed him.
“Good evening.”
She smiled. “One of our boys. What can I get you?”
He rapped the counter with a knuckle. “A beer, I think.”
Her name was Monika, and she asked how long had he been here, where was he from, and was he going to stay?
He nodded morosely into his glass, as if he really were one of them.
“Don’t worry, dear.” She placed a calloused hand on his wrist. “It gets better.”
He looked at her.
“You did the right thing,” she said. “You came here. It’s all going to change from this point on.”
“That’s good news.”
For the next hour, he drank while Monika asked the occasional question—not probing, just to show she was interested. She seemed to respect his vague answers, because she had been around long enough to know that not all exiles wanted to regale the world with stories of their escapes. When she asked what he did for a living, he paused. He would have liked, at that moment, to speak of one of the elaborate pasts he’d toyed with in the Schönbrunn gardens, but one never knew who would walk through the door and prove him wrong. He didn’t know how long he’d be here, and with each week the chances of being discovered would multiply. He said, “I was a spy.”
She stopped wiping the glass in her hand. “You’re kidding.”
“I finally saw the error of my ways.”
“You’re not pulling my leg?”
“I wish I was.”
“What did you do?”
Spies come in different flavors, and Brano chose the blandest. “I worked in the Metropol, mostly. I spent time with Western businessmen and passed on what I learned.”
“To Yalta?”
Brano nodded.
She put down the glass. “That’s the last thing I’d expect someone to admit. So it must be true.”
A low-level operative—really, a mere informer—was an easy cover to maintain. No records were kept on such people, and while it was an embarrassing thing to admit, it was better than the complete truth. He smiled at Monika—a shy, embarrassed smile—and said, “It’s not the kind of thing I’d want to advertise, but I should come clean about it sooner rather than later.”
Then the noise began, in the form of a short blond man who stomped through the doors and shouted in German, “Where the fuck is he, huh? Where the fuck is that useless bastard?”
Monika raised her voice. “Don’t shout in my bar, Ersek.”
Ersek’s watery eyes blinked at her a few times. “Just tell me where the fuck Sasha is.”
“I haven’t seen him all day.”
“Don’t give me that, Monika. You’re protecting him.”
“You’re a paranoid man. Have a beer and shut up.”
Ersek looked around the bar, then grunted and climbed onto a stool. He nodded at Brano and accepted a beer from Monika. She said, “You better stay calm in my place or I’ll kick you out.”
Ersek smiled, lips wet. “No you won’t.”
She winked at Brano. “On top of being a pain in the ass, this guy’s Norwegian. Don’t know why I let him in here.”
“Because I publish half your clientele.” He turned to Brano, his high voice warbling. “You’d think there would be some appreciation, wouldn’t you? A guy from Oslo starts printing up all the half-intelligible mutterings of these barely evolved people, and what does he get for it? He gets a guy like Sasha who doesn’t turn in anything because he’s meditating on his compositions. Tell me, back in your country is ‘meditating’ a euphemism for ‘drinking’?”
“Sometimes it is,” said Brano.
“Well, then, I won’t start printing your stuff, either.”
“Meet Ersek Nanz,” said Monika.
Ersek stuck out a cold palm, and Brano took it. “Brano Sev.”
“You’re new?”
“A couple weeks old.”
“You’re not a writer, are you?”
“Not at all.”
“No,” Monika said under her breath. “He isn’t.”
“Good.” He took a swill of beer. “People seem to think that being oppressed is the only qualification you need to be a writer.”
“Sometimes it’s enough to give you a story to tell,” said Monika.
“But you have to know how to write it.”
“Then why do you bother?” asked Brano.
Ersek looked at him. “Huh?”
“Why waste your time with bad writers?”
Ersek blinked a few times, and when he spoke he almost whispered. “Because Monika’s right. Someone’s got to get their stories out.”
“Then stop complaining.”
“Your second one’s on me,” said Monika.
Ersek tilted his head, paused, then moved his stool closer as Monika placed another beer on the counter. He’d been a publisher here, he told Brano, for the last five years. “A guy told me it was an easy gold mine. I think he was trying to ruin me.” The idea had been that there was no reputable publisher printing first-person accounts of Eastern Europeans who had fled to the West; the only publishers were receiving funds from the CIA, “making crappy propaganda.” Ersek shrugged. “And it made sense to me. You’ve got a ready market in all these exiles, wanting to hear their own stories. But you know what I didn’t take into account?”
“What?”
“Exiles are cheapskates. That’s what they are, down to the last man. And in the end, they don’t give a damn about their fellow exiles.”
“Is that really true?”
“Take it from me, friend. I’ve seen them all.”
And he had. He’d published many names Brano had heard before in the Ministry. There was Bálint Urban, who fled just after the war and wrote narrative poems about wartime misery. Stanislaus Zambra, “like most of these guys,” was obsessed with a single event that he re-created in each novel; for him, it was the murder of his sister in 1961 in the prison beneath Yalta Boulevard, committed while he was in the same cell, watching.
“I don’t know why I bother with Sasha Lytvyn, though. Even when he’s sober his writing isn’t all that great.”
Brano leaned forward. “Sasha Lytvyn?”
“You know him?”
Brano shook his head, but he did know Sasha. He’d last seen him over a decade ago, in the early fifties, when Sasha Lytvyn parachuted with a partner into the forests north of Sárospatak with a pistol, a map, and a shortwave radio transceiver. He had been recruited by the benignly named Office of Policy Coordination, which, under the Truman administration, carried out a clandestine war, parachuting recent émigrés back into the East in order to foment revolution. That CIA office had built its army from the ranks of the displaced persons camps of postwar Europe, trained them in sabotage, and tossed them out of airplanes.
But almost nothing they did was secret, at least to the East. The Office of Policy Coordination was riddled with leaks, including the famous Kim Philby; and in the end its leader, Frank Wisner, had a mental breakdown, living out his final years with the English until paranoia and mania finally led him to end his own life two years ago.
That evening in 1952, Brano had been on the reception committee when Lytvyn and his partner descended through the birches into a ring of well-informed soldiers. He’d been an amiable prisoner, answering questions with the carefully constructed cover story Brano and his associates had already been briefed on. But, with time, Lytvyn did deliver his secrets, as they always do; his partner, however, didn’t survive the interrogation. Once it was over, Lytvyn was put to work in the eastern mines. Then, like many, he was released in the ill-planned amnesties of 1956. After that, he must have found his way here.
“He’s got a lot of stories,” said Ersek. “But these stories have made him a dribbling wreck of a man.”
“I imagine,” said Brano. “Who’s the best?”
Ersek didn’t hesitate. “Filip, hands down. Filip Lutz. You heard of him?”
; Brano, smiling slightly, shook his head.
“But even the great Filip Lutz,” said Ersek, “even he suffers from the condition all these exiles share.”
“What’s that?”
“Insufferable goddamned nostalgia.”
And as if on cue, someone put a coin into the jukebox and the bar was filled with a melody Brano knew, played on strings, the prewar national anthem that had been banned in 1947. A couple of drunks in the back stood up on wobbly legs, glassy-eyed, and placed their hats over their hearts.
2 APRIL 1967, SUNDAY
•
“What do you think, Brano?” Ludwig spoke today without inflection.
“About what?”
“The Carp. You spent a long time there Friday night, talked to a lot of people.”
“It’s good to talk with your own kind sometimes.”
“Any of them old friends?”
“I did recognize a couple faces, but I don’t think I ever knew them.”
“And no one approached you.”
“Just to introduce themselves. We’re a polite people.”
Ludwig nodded into his whiskey. “But you did it the smart way.”
“Smart?”
“You told them the truth. Or a kind of truth. It surprised me at first—I thought you’d arrange some innocuous cover.”
“Too complicated,” said Brano. “Thanks for the mail, by the way.”
“Mail?”
Brano reached into his pocket and brought out the pamphlet A Communist War? Ludwig raised his eyebrows as he accepted it.
“Your reading materials are improving, Brano.”
“You didn’t put it in my mailbox?”
Ludwig shook his head, smiling as he read. “The Committee for Liberty in the Captive Nations? When I give you political tracts, they won’t be from American fundamentalists.” He shook his head. “Maybe Friedrich did it. He’s quite the churchgoer. But these people …”
“What about them?”
Ludwig handed back the pamphlet. “Unimportant. They want a war to eradicate communism. Not a cold war, but a hot one.”
“Everyone has an opinion.”
Ludwig nodded.
“Tell me something,” said Brano. “Why did you bring me here?”
“To the Mozart?”
“To Austria. I don’t have much useful information for you, and we both know my people won’t contact me while you’re watching. You’re spending a lot of resources on an operation with little payback. It doesn’t make sense.”
Ludwig emptied the whiskey into his mouth and signaled the waiter for another. “What makes you think we were responsible for bringing you here?”
“I know the Americans arranged it—Jan Soroka went to their embassy—but I haven’t seen an American since I arrived. Just you.”
Ludwig shrugged. “All I had to do was clear our side of the border and share the information on Hungarian border movements—times and locations—so you and the Sorokas could walk through. Pretty easy. In return, I got you.”
“For how long?”
“That’s for me to know, Brano. Let’s change the subject, shall we?”
“As you like.”
“Remember Erich Tobler on Hauptstraße?”
“Of course.”
“Well, we’ve had a pretty extensive talk with him. At first he said he didn’t know Bertrand Richter. He’d never heard of the guy.”
“I remember.”
“He stuck to his story a long time.”
“So he’s stronger than you thought.”
“Well, not so strong.”
“No?”
“We became a little inventive with him, coming up with persuasions. And, finally, he did admit to the murder.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is, Brano, I don’t believe him. He doesn’t know any of the details of the killing. He can’t verify a thing.”
Brano put his chin in his hand. Ludwig looked very tired, as if he’d spent the whole week working on poor Erich Tobler. “You know,” he said, “I once interrogated a man in East Berlin, at the Gedenkstätte Hohenschœn-hausen.”
“The Stasi’s interrogation center.”
“Yes. We suspected he had killed one of our men not far from the Brandenburg Gate. He told us he didn’t even know the man. Then, after a while, he told us everything. He had killed the man, and he offered details of the killing. As with Erich, the facts didn’t match, and we were sure he was just giving us what we wanted to hear so the interrogation would end. But we were wrong. He’d planned everything; he’d had his layers of cover carefully set up. After we let him go, he killed another of our operatives—this time there were witnesses—and …”
“The man you told me about. The one you killed.”
Brano shrugged.
Ludwig accepted a fresh whiskey from the waiter and held it beneath his chin. “Unfortunately, we can’t follow the matter any further with Tobler.”
“He’s dead?”
“Let’s just say he’s disappeared.”
The jukebox was playing very loud rock-and-roll music. Brano didn’t recognize the tune, and he didn’t think he wanted to know it. Ersek Nanz was at the bar with a fat man who needed a shave. Ersek swiveled on his stool, already drunk, though it was only eight. “The mysterious Brano Sev. Where have you been?”
“Here and there.”
The fat man turned in his chair to look at Brano, using thumb and forefinger to adjust his wire-rimmed glasses, while his other hand clutched a newspaper.
“Meet my best and brightest,” said Ersek. “Filip Lutz.”
Filip Lutz cocked his head and stuck out a big, wobbly hand as Ersek leaned close and whispered something into his ear. Lutz’s eyes widened. “The spy?”
“Ex-spy,” said Brano. He’d expected Monika would spread the word, but he hadn’t expected it to come back to him so soon.
Lutz wouldn’t release his hand. “We, my man, must have a talk when I’m sober. I want to know your whole story.”
“It’s not very interesting.”
“They’re all interesting,” he said, letting go finally and waving to signify the entire bar. “All of them. I’m collecting stories from everyone, for a new book, called Escape from the Crocodile.”
“Crocodile?”
“You know that nightclub in the Capital? The one all the Russians go to?”
“Ah,” said Brano. “I see now.”
“Not bad, eh?”
“Not bad at all,” Brano lied.
“Tomorrow, you come to the Café-Restaurant Landtmann—you know it? By the Burgtheater.”
“I know it.”
“That’s my office. Can’t stand to make my own coffee. You come by any time you like and tell me your story. It’s a deal?”
“It’s a deal.”
“Monika,” said Ersek, “set our friend up with a palinka.”
“Did you see this?” asked Lutz. He handed over yesterday’s Kronen Zeitung and pointed at a photo on the front page of four young men with outlandish scarves around their necks walking away from an airplane. The headline: ROLLING STONES EHER ZAHMER.
“They’re a musical group, aren’t they?” asked Brano.
Lutz glanced at Ersek, then laughed. “You really haven’t been out long, have you?”
Brano shrugged, which allowed Lutz the opportunity to launch into a monologue on the cultural relevance of the Rolling Stones’ appearance in Vienna. “It’s the new generation making itself heard. And it doesn’t matter how poorly these kids play their instruments. They’re becoming the mouthpiece of the world.”
Ersek said, “I give rock and roll five more years at most. At most.”
Brano’s palinka arrived, and Lutz proposed a toast to the children of the world, but Ersek refused.
“They want to destroy European culture, and I can’t toast that.”
“They are European culture,” said Lutz.
“My sister,” said Brano, “
thinks European culture is Christianity.”
“Isn’t it?” asked Ersek.
“They call it the Dark Ages for a reason,” Brano said.
“You’re right,” said Lutz. He looked at Ersek. “He’s right. Christianity just slowed culture down.”
“Exactly,” said Brano.
“It was capitalism that got Europe on its feet again.”
Brano looked at him.
“Burgeoning middle class and all that. Who do you think commissioned the best painters of the Renaissance, Nanzi?”
Ersek shook his head. “Christ, I don’t care. Let’s just toast something. How about your new car?”
Lutz raised his glass. “To my Fiat Dino. The most stylish creature to ever grace the motorways of Europe.”
Brano drank with them, lipping the bitter brandy. He cleared his throat. “Is it really so lucrative?”
Lutz furrowed his brow.
“Collecting exiles’ stories. A new sports car can’t be cheap.”
“I’m a busy man. I write my column for Kurier. Maybe you’ve read it.”
“Once or twice, yes.”
“I’ve got other projects in the works, though, more active journalism.”
“Shh,” said Ersek. “The secret works of a mad genius.” He raised his glass to Filip Lutz’s mad genius.
Lutz winked at him. “I’m going to shake up a few Politburo lackeys before I’m done.”
“Oh?” said Brano. “How are you going to do that?”
Filip Lutz shrugged, the first and last sign of modesty that night. “You, like Ersek, will know when the rest of the world knows.”
“The whole world?” asked Brano. “You’re an ambitious man, Filip Lutz.”
“The only man in this bar,” said Ersek, “whose ambition matches his ability.”
“Come on, boys. I’m turning red now.”
So Ersek returned to his favorite subject, the incompetence of writers from their country, though Lutz shook his head. “You’ve never been there, Nanzi. You don’t understand where these people come from.”
“I don’t understand? Are you telling me I don’t understand?”
“Did you know,” said Lutz, “that the Americans have invented an oven that doesn’t use heat? It uses radiation—microwaves. That’s a culture worth studying, Nanzi. I don’t know why you bother with us.”
36 Yalta Boulevard Page 18
