Yalta Boulevard (3 page)

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 this, 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.

At the moment his memory stopped, he had been in an empty park with a dead body and a living man. Besides his heart, the foliage bending under the weight of Bertrand Richter, and Josef Lochert’s heavy smoker’s breaths behind him, there had been no sound. He was struck from behind.

Josef Lochert had knocked him out last night. Then he had taken Brano’s wallet and returned it to the hotel.

Not to kill him, but to leave him there for the Austrian police to pick up, beside the body of Bertrand Richter.

He didn’t know why, though that would come later, but he was sure of this story. Now he worried about where he was at this moment. On a plane, headed home.

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

“I’m telling you,” said the Austrian, “You don’t look right to me at all. You need some water or something?” He waved to a stewardess, but they were already descending.

As the plane taxied to the gate, Brano watched the other passengers unbuckle their belts and reach beneath their seats for their hand luggage. A child across the aisle muttered to her mother, then turned to smile at Brano. She was missing two front teeth. Brano tried to smile back. The young Austrian said, “It’s good to be among the workers again, eh?”

Brano walked to the front of the plane as the stewardess stood up without a smile. “Please wait until we’ve opened the door.”

He nodded but remained where he was. She gave him a short look and went to the hatch to peer out the window. A man in orange work clothes was rolling metal stairs up to the plane, while behind him four men stood in leather coats, casting long shadows as the sun set. The one in the front, fatter and older than the others, raised his red face to the light. It was not Colonel Cerny but a man farther up the chain of command, the Comrade Lieutenant General. An old-guard soldier who had distinguished himself fighting the Nazis, he was now an inveterate alcoholic running the counterintelligence division.

The stewardess grunted as she unscrewed the lock, then pushed the hatch open. Brano stepped out onto the stairs. The Lieutenant General spoke to the other three men, who jogged up to wait for him at the bottom.

As he descended, he realized he knew these men as well, but peripherally. Young, hard men adept at following orders. Once he reached them, two grabbed his arms and led him across the tarmac.

“Comrade Lieutenant General,” said Brano.

The older man tugged on his collar. “Don’t comrade me, Brano. You’re in the shit now.”

He tried to control his voice. “I don’t understand.
GAVRILO
has been taken care of.”

“Despife you. Don’t start with your stories, okay? Lochert’s already sent in his report, and you …” The Lieutenant General shook his pink head. “I don’t even want to talk to you.” He turned and walked toward the airport.