Yalta Boulevard (30 page)

Brano prodded carefully. He’d been given a clear, unambiguous order, but nothing quite added up. His imagination could not manage a buffoon like Lutz at the helm of an international conspiracy. The answer would only be found in whatever Lutz was now working on behind a pile of extinguished cigarette butts. But this was the one subject Lutz refused to expand on. Brano’s casual questions met with the defiant answer that his work was not yet ready for public consumption and, once, the reminder that Lutz, because of his writings, was a dangerous man. “Come on, Brano. You’re my friend. Why would I want to put you in danger?”

Brano found he had no good answer for that.

“So?”

Brano furrowed his brow as the coffee arrived in a cup so delicate he feared he might break it.

“So are you here to tell me your tale of intrigue? For
Escape from the Crocodile?”

“That’s just what I was here to do.”

Lutz took notes in a worn spiral notebook as Brano spun his story. Like always, he stuck close to the truth. He talked about a childhood in Bóbrka and his move, after the war, to the Capital. They’d both been there at the same time, so they shared stories of deprivation and the Russian soldiers’ atrocities. Brano said that this had always been difficult for him, that he could see the moral problems inherent in his career. A large part of his job had been to cover up Russian crimes, while arresting those who had, it seemed, done nothing.

“I thought you were just an informer.”

Brano had considered sticking to the bland version he’d told Monika—a trench coat in a hotel—but Lutz, given Lochert’s assessment, would be able to see through the lie. “That’s the story for the Carp.”

Lutz took a breath. “Then why did you stay with it?”

“Because it was all I had. I couldn’t be a farmer anymore—my family no longer owned land. What else was I to do? And you remember, it was no small thing in those days to be in a position to get a little extra bread and salt.”

“You kept your family in salt.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

Filip Lutz looked at the notes he’d written, then back at Brano. “What, exactly, did you do?”

“I tracked down dissidents.”

That earned a raised eyebrow, then a nod when he explained that he even measured the loyalties of people within his own Ministry for State Security. He kept a desk in the homicide department of the People’s Militia, measuring the loyalties of the militiamen as well.

“Did you arrest many of them?”

“Not many. A few.”

“Did you only work inside the country?”

“No.”

“Exotic places?”

“Some.”

“Where?”

Brano cleared his throat and apologized. “I’m not really comfortable with too many details. Not yet.”

Lutz said he understood. “When did you become disillusioned?”

Brano paused, then lied smoothly. “I’d always been disillusioned, in my own way. But it was always an abstract disillusionment.” He said he was a believer in Marx, in the promise of communism, and he knew sacrifices had to be made. But how many sacrifices have to be made before you stop and say,
This is enough?

“How many does it take?”

“It takes hundreds. Thousands. Either that or simply one sacrifice that affects you personally.” Brano told him that while he was at home he had been framed for a murder.

“Framed?” Lutz pulled back a little, elbows rising from the table. “For murder?”

“My superiors, they framed me for murder in order to get rid of me. I’d already been kicked out of the service, but that wasn’t enough. They wanted my career to end in a prison cell.”

Lutz stared at him. Then he wrote a few more lines and asked about Brano’s family—his mother, his sister, his father. Brano told the truth. They lived in their village far from the Capital. His father had fled west after the war.

“Was that it, maybe?”

“Was that what?”

“Was that,” said Lutz, warming again, “perhaps the seed of your discontent? That your own father refused to live under communist rule?”

“My father had no conviction. He was just a coward. And in the West he probably died a coward.” “He’s dead?”

“I assume so. There was never any word from him.”

Lutz, after a moment, wondered about any ex-wives or scattered children and was visibly irritated by Brano’s negative answer. “Something,” he said. “I need something more. A story doesn’t make a reader cry just because the main character gets into trouble. Something in the character must hook the reader, make him care. Make him think this guy’s not just another state security officer who got uncomfortable. What’s your hook?”

Brano stared at him, opened his mouth, and closed it. “Why do you want to make your readers cry?”

Instead of taking the number 38 tram north, he returned to Web-Gasse and telephoned Dijana to say he would see her tomorrow. “I just need a night alone.”

“You don’t like it here?”

“I didn’t say that, Dijana. You know I like it there.”

“Okay,” she said, then paused. “I think I can to see what you mean. You will be alone?”

“Of course, Dijana.”

“Poljubac
,” she said. Kiss.

“Poljubac.”

He turned on the television. He did not want to be alone, and he didn’t want to be without her. More than that, though, he didn’t want to treat her coldly, and he knew he would. He wanted to ignore the photographs he’d hidden behind his refrigerator but couldn’t. Dijana was, at the very least, an informer for the Russians, who never trusted their satellites to do anything independently.

No, he would not see Dijana today, and perhaps not tomorrow, either. He had a man to kill.

But Filip Lutz, though he might have a certain misdirected talent for writing, was no organizer. He was the kind of man one used as a mouthpiece for an operation, or as a front. You put him in public so that attention would be drawn away from what was really going on. The Committee for Liberty in the Captive Nations was probably being used similarly. In public, they could be seen as the fools of reaction, while their quieter members, perhaps the old man Andrew, worked steadily in the background, with utmost seriousness.

Filip Lutz was simply unable to head a conspiracy that aimed at bringing down any government. He spoke too much; he lived too much on his pride.

Still, Yalta—and therefore Cerny—believed this so strongly that it had arranged a byzantine conspiracy to place Brano at Lutz’s side, in order for him to kill Lutz.

He’d killed enough men in his time not to be dissuaded by the act itself. Murder is just a governmental tool, be it assassination or war. More than once, Brano had been called on to execute old comrades, a few he was even fond of; but in each instance he had understood the inevitability of that final option.
Mokrii rabota
—wet work—was never done without justification.

Perhaps the only justification he needed was that he had been given a clear, unambiguous order from Yalta Boulevard. There was a time when that had been enough.

14 APRIL 1967, FRIDAY
•

Day 26. The Subject has altered his schedule over the last two weeks. Beginning with visits to the Carp (suggested by our own people—see report of 30 March), then a party at the residence of the Italian ambassador—hosted by Ersek Nanz, Norwegian publisher—and a surprise: his visit to the Committee for Liberty in the Captive Nations for a lecture by Filip Lutz
.

This agent’s perception of the Subject’s relationship with Lutz began as suspicion. Considering Lutz’s role as a thorn—albeit a small thorn—in the side of the socialist world, any new figure in his life is examined carefully, and the Subject is a security risk of the highest order. But after a series of meetings between Lutz and the Subject, this agent has become less suspicious. First, at Ersek Nanz’s party, the Subject was seen by sources sharing a hashish pipe with Lutz (which, we now understand, was one catalyst for the Subject’s erratic actions in the Volksgarten that same night—see Day 20). Later, as mentioned above, the Subject attended one of Lutz’s strongly anticommunist lectures. (He did, however, leave early, but only at the insistence of Fräulein Dijana Franković, Yugoslav, who invited him back to her apartment.) Yesterday, he visited Lutz at his local café, the Landtmann. The subject of their conversation was not verified, but from this agent’s vantage point at the window, it seemed extremely personal. And today, the Subject returned to the Landtmann for another conversation with Lutz
.

This agent’s assessment is that the Subject is genuinely interested in Lutz—in his stories and his persona, which we all know can be very intoxicating. Considering the Subject’s admitted depression after his arrival, it seems he has found in Lutz a possible, if ironic, friend. The additional entrance of Dijana Franković into his life can also be taken as a positive move, for the Subject will not consider himself, as he put it the night of Ersek Nanz’s party, “alone.”

Lutz had been talking for an hour, fat hands spread across the table as he recounted his previous night with the interpreter from Ersek’s party, who had come to the Carp at his invitation. He’d manhandled her to another bar, where they wouldn’t be interrupted, then kissed her in a dark corner. She wouldn’t come home with him, but, he admitted, perhaps that was best, for on their walk to his car, she placed her hands on her knees and vomited on the sidewalk.

“And you? How’s she treating you? Dijana—that’s her name?”

“Very well, Filip.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“You’re not allowed to be discreet with me, my man.”

Brano ran his tongue over his teeth. “Tell me about your big project and I’ll learn to be indiscreet as well.”

Lutz cradled his water glass below his chin. “Something’s gotten into you, Brano, and I’m going to figure it out if it kills me.”

“Only curiosity. Does it have something to do with those American fundamentalists?”

“The Committee?”

“Yes, the fundamentalists.”

Lutz pursed his lips, half-considering. “You know the difference between fundamentalists and your run-of-the-mill Christians? They don’t half-believe. If something is true, it’s goddamned true all the time. You’ve got to respect their lack of moral ambiguity.”

“I know some Marxists like that. How long have you been involved with them?”

“A few years now. They do great work in the schools.”

“Loretta told me. Is Sasha Lytvyn working with them, too?”

“Yeah, Sasha mentioned he knew you. Then he stopped coming to the Carp.” He shook his head. “No—he’s too scattered to join any organization.”

“Did he tell you how he knew me?”

“Just that it was a long time ago.”

Brano looked at him a moment. He said, “Sasha parachuted into the country in ’fifty-two. He was part of an American operation to commit sabotage behind the Curtain. I caught him, then I interrogated him.” Brano waited a second, then added, “You could say I tortured him.”

Lutz wiped his mouth. “No, he didn’t tell me that.”

“What about the old man I saw at your lecture? He had a white beard.”

“Andrew?” Lutz began tapping the table unconsciously.

“Yes,” said Brano. “Andrew Stamer. American?”

Lutz nodded, tapping away. “He’s American now. He escaped back in the forties. Smart guy!”

“What does he do for a living?”

Lutz rocked his head as he spoke. “He had some kind of business back in New York or New Jersey. Laundromats, I think. He made his money and retired early. That was smart, too. Then he helped Dr. Rathbone start the Committee. He told me he wanted to give something back.”

“He’s one of the quieter ones, isn’t he?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean he doesn’t give lectures like you do.”

“I think his official title is international coordinator.”

“A grand title,” said Brano. He drank the last of his coffee and set the cup down. “But listen, I actually could be of help to your project. We both know I have a few talents.”

Lutz stopped tapping and stretched his feet beneath the table. He cleared his throat. “Take a rest, okay? You’ve got every reason to relax a while and just be satisfied. You’re in the West. You’ve got a girl who’s half your age. Hell, you’re friends with me! But learn some patience, Brano. Trust me. Next month the world will look like an entirely different place.”

“And I’ll have you to thank for it?”

“If you want to see it that way. But what about you? You’re more relaxed than when you arrived—that’s something. She’s good in bed, is she?”

Brano blinked at him.

“My God, man, you’re blushing!
Kellner!”
he called, snapping the air. “A bottle of Veuve Cliquot!”

A waiter halfway down the room looked up from a table and nodded.

“So tell me everything, you dirty bastard.”

“I’ll only say I’m very fond of this girl.”

“You should be,” said Lutz. “Men our age don’t get this every day. Watch out you don’t get a heart attack in the middle of it.”

Brano and his sunburned shadow left the Landtmann an hour later, taking the tram back to Web-Gasse. Half a block away from number 25, the shadow paused, and when Brano looked he saw why. She was standing outside his door. She strode up to him in a short coat, then wrapped her arms around his neck.
“Dragi
, I am missing you. You are hungry?”

“I can be.”

“Dobro
. I take you to dinner.”

Although he didn’t want to go there, the only local place he knew was the Liebengaste, and so, with their sunburned companion just outside the window, they settled at a table. The waitress who brought the menus nodded at him, remembering his last visit. He ordered schnitzels for them both, then, after the waitress had left, leaned toward Dijana. “I’m sorry, did you want schnitzel?”

“I don’t care, Brani. I just want to seeing you.”

He lit her cigarette and tried to avoid looking out the window.

“Last night,” she said as she took a drag, “I was at Jazzklub Abel. Not for the work, but a drink. Poor Abel—you should see him. He is very sad. But he asking me about you. He say,
What this Brano Sev do?”