Yalta Boulevard (36 page)

She pulled her head off his shoulder to look at the railing. “He is—”

“He’s all right. I didn’t want to kill him.”

Three men in ties fidgeted nearby, as if something were required of them but they didn’t know what it was.

“I’m a policeman,” Brano told them.

The men looked at each other.

Very seriously, he said, “Now, please excuse us.” He took Dijana’s hand and began walking away.

“What you are doing?” Dijana whispered, barely suppressing a giggle.

“Just keep walking.”

Once they’d reached the other side of the bridge, Brano glanced back. The men were gone.

“Brani, what is happen?”

“Follow me.”

Still holding her hand, he led her to the end of Gredlerstraße, then left on Taborstraße, to the Church of the Brothers of Mercy. He pushed through the wooden doors into a plain entryway with notices for upcoming sermons.

“
Dragi
is Catholic now?”

They continued into the church, but an iron gate closed off access to the pews, so they moved back into a dark corner, beneath enormous portraits of saints.

“
Dragi
,” she said. “What is wrong with you? You look bad. Your hair …“ She removed his hat and touched his shaved scalp with cool fingers, her nose wrinkling.

“It’s a kind of disguise,” he said.

She put her hands on his beard, a thumb touching the sloped left corner of his mouth. “What is—”

“I’m all right, don’t worry about me.”

She hugged him again. “I was very worry.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I had to leave.”

“Who is this men?”

“What men?”

“They come,” she said, looking at his forehead. “They ask where are you. This man, Luvi—”

“Ludwig?”

“
Da
, Ludwig. He say you kill a man. Brani, tell me. This is true?”

“Yes.” When he said this he was looking at the marble checkerboard floor. “He was trying to kill me.”

“Kill you? But
why
, Brani?”

“I can’t explain.”

“
Dragi
, you make no sense.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just had to talk to you again.”

“And I to you, but what you must say?”

He had nothing to say. He’d followed her all day and had attacked a man to get to her. All that he’d known was that it was necessary. He rubbed his eyes.

He had become that thing that for men in his business was the beginning of the end. Dijana had turned him into a sentimental old man.

He stroked her hair as far behind her ears as it would go and whispered, “I just want to say I miss you.”

Then he pinned her to the cold church wall and covered her mouth with his. After a minute, he pulled back, watching how she licked her lips. “I like the way what you miss me. But I must to tell you something.”

He waited.

“I was on the Carp today. Of course, like every day, I looking for you. But this man, he come and talk.”

“His name is Andrew. I saw him.”

“You saw him?”

“I was following you.”

She arched an eyebrow and cocked her head. “
Da?
”

“
Da
.”

She kissed him again. “Well, this man, I knowed him, too. From before. He was friend for Bertrand.”

“Not one of his Russian contacts?”

She shook her head. “No. He friend for Lutz and for that Josef Lochert. And now he looking for you. He say he your father.”

Brano looked into her eyes, waiting for something to clear up the grammatical mistake that had obviously ruined the sense of what she wanted to say. “Can you repeat that?”

“This man, he your father. Well, he want to meet with you. He say if I see you, I will to tell you.” She leaned closer. “Brani?”

He had stepped back a few paces, his back now against the iron gate protecting the pews. Andrew, they had called him. The Americanization of Andrezej. How could he not have seen this? How could he not have recognized him? She put her hands on his shoulders. He leaned his head close to her ear and whispered, “My father?”

“Pa
da
. You not know?”

He shook his head against her shoulder as she rubbed the back of his head.

“
Shh
,” she said. “I am sorry.”

Brano could not remember the last time he had wept. Perhaps when Regina Haliniak left him for Zoran the lieutenant—but no, not even then. It was possible that the last time he’d wept was during the war, after his friend Marek Piotrowski was killed. But that time, at least, there had been a reason for weeping. Now, in a Viennese Catholic church, he was crying uncontrollably on this girl’s shoulder, and he didn’t know why. She cooed and kissed his bald head, and her voice finally brought him out of it.

“You will to meet him?”

He wiped his nose with a palm, then raised his head. “I should. What else did he say?”

She thumbed some wetness from his cheek. “He say he is reason what you are here. In Vienna. And he give me this.” She reached into a pocket and handed him a napkin from the Carp, with
Inter-Continental 516
written on it in pencil. “He say you call him, and he will come right away.” She touched his face again. “You will call? He seem very worry.”

“Yes. I will call.” He sniffed again and looked around. The church’s arid smell was getting to him. “We should go now. They’ll be looking for me.”

“You come home, I will take care for you.”

He kissed her, and she held on to his neck as he explained. “If I stay with you, they’ll find me. They’re already watching you—the man I attacked was with you all day.”

“
Pa da
. I knowed that. He’s very bad, no?”

“It’s my fault. They’re looking for me.”

“Then we go,” she said, smiling. “We make a trip to Salzkammergut and swim in the lake.”

“We will, but I need a few more days to figure things out. Right now, I’m confused.”

“
Zbrka?
”

“
Da
,” he said. “
Zbrka
.”

“What you must figure out?”

He sighed, staring at her ear as he brushed down her hair. “I never left my job.”

“You never—” She shook her head. “You say that again.”

He continued staring at her ear to avoid her eyes. “I’m still working for the Ministry for State Security. That’s why I’m in Vienna. And now I have to decide what to do.”

When he finally looked at her eyes, they were wet. She did not know whether to be angry or not.

“You’re going to the jazz club now?”

“
Da
,” she muttered. “I must to work.”

“Then work,” he said. “I’ll find you in a few days, and hopefully we can go to the lake. Really.” He raised her chin with a forefinger. “It’s the only thing I want now.”

She nodded.

“And, of course, you didn’t see me.”

“Of
course
,” she said, and punched him in the ribs.

In the entryway she wiped some tears from her eyes, then kissed him. She straightened the lapels of his coat.

“You will to grow out your hair again?”

“You don’t like it?”

She snorted when she laughed, and Brano hugged her. Over her shoulder, he saw the bulletin board of notices for future sermons, and one caught his eye. It was for the fourteenth of May, to celebrate when the Holy Spirit descended as tongues of fire and a rushing wind, and gave Jesus” disciples the power to speak so that all languages could understand them.

The fourteenth of May, a Sunday, was Pentecost.

She pushed him back and gave a teary smile. “You will to talk with your father?”

“I will, Dijana. I will.”

“Good,” she said. “I think it good we know our parents.”

26 APRIL 1967, WEDNESDAY
•

Brano chose
the Café-Restaurant Europa because of the telephone booth across the street from its wide windows, which allowed an unhindered view of its long interior. He first bought tea in a paper cup from the pastry counter and told them he would need to reserve a table that afternoon for a business meeting. “How many?” asked the woman behind the counter. Brano said he didn’t know, but if he could have their phone number, he would call an hour before they arrived. She wrote it down for him.

He crossed to the telephone booth and dialed the Hotel Inter-Continental. A desk clerk patched him through to room 516. The voice that picked up was deeper than he remembered, but there was still that lisp to each s, caused, he had always assumed, by that chipped front tooth.

“Yes?”

“It’s me.”

“Brani. I’m so glad you called.”

“The Café-Restaurant Europa, on the corner of Kärtner and Donnergasse. You’ll be here in fifteen minutes if you leave now.”

Brano hung up. He had also chosen the Europa for its distance from the Inter-Continental. His father could arrive quickly enough, but not so quickly that Ludwig, with his resources, would not arrive first.

But over the next fifteen minutes, as he stood in an apartment doorway and watched cars glide by, sometimes honk, and Viennese cross the street, read papers, and scold children, nothing struck him as suspicious.

Though there were plenty of holes in the story, he felt he understood the outlines. The Committee for Liberty in the Captive Nations was planning a coup d’etat. He could doubt this if he were only going by Lochert’s word, but Jan’s friend Gregor had been killed after spotting Brano’s father and a Yalta Boulevard officer at a nuclear reactor. Lutz had made no secret of a May event, and Bertrand Richter, on the night of his murder, had let the day slip: 14 May, which turned out to be the kind of Christian holiday the Committee for Liberty would naturally choose—tongues of fire and rushing wind.

But why? Why had Brano been drawn into a fundamentalist conspiracy? Only Dijana’s revelation suggested an answer, and when he looked up he saw the answer approaching from the east, along Himmelpfort. Though Brano had seen him before, only now, with the knowledge of who he was, could he imagine away the beard and take off years. Andrezej Fedor Sev was a little shorter than he’d been in ’45, and he’d grown thick around the torso beneath his badly pressed raincoat. The white beard gave his round, pale face a generous feel that Brano could not recall from childhood.

He reentered the phone booth and took a few breaths to get rid of that choked feeling in the back of his throat. His father stopped at the café door, peering through the window. Then he went inside. Perhaps for Brano’s benefit, he chose a table by the window. A waitress took his order, and he rested his chin in his hand. He seemed neither agitated nor confused by his son’s absence.

Brano took a couple of minutes to check the street again, then put a coin into the telephone.

“Europa,” said a woman.

“
Bitte
, may I speak with one of your customers? He’s the older gentleman sitting next to the window, alone.”

He could see the woman behind the pastry counter look up from the phone. “Moment.”

She came up to Andrezej Sev’s table, bent over him, and spoke. He got up and went with her to the counter.

“Yes?” said Brano’s father.

“I’m afraid I’m very careful these days.”

“Brani. We could have just talked on the phone in my hotel.”

“I wanted to find out if I could trust you.”

“And? Can you?”

“Dijana said you wanted to tell me something.”

“I’d rather see you face-to-face.”

“Let’s take this in stages.”

His father nodded into the telephone, then looked around to be sure no one was listening. He was a careful man, more than when Brano was a child. “I’m the reason you were brought over. A deal with Jan Soroka—I’d help him get his family if he would lure you out.”

“I know this. But you couldn’t do it without Austrian help.”

“Yes, another deal. They called off their border guards and helped with the Hungarian side. In exchange, they were allowed to question you for a period of time.” Andrezej Sev paused. “I heard about the car battery. I’m very sorry, I didn’t think it would come to that. I won’t let it happen again.”

“Why did you want me here?”

“You’re my son, Brano. You saved me once, and when I heard what happened to you back in August—that you made a blunder—well, I thought I could save you as well. Your only safety lies on this side of the Iron Curtain.”

It was just a voice, he kept telling himself, a voice on the phone. Nonetheless, that
zbrka
of childhood crept upon him. As if he were a confused child returning home to his father’s stern voice, knowing he’d done something wrong but not knowing what it was. “How did you learn about that?”

“I keep an eye on my children. How’s Klara?”

“She lives in a house with bad paint.” He paused. “And I believe she hates me.

“Nonsense.”

“You couldn’t have sent a letter?”

His father paused again. “What do you want from me, Brano? Apologies? You’re the one who sent me away.”

He placed a hand on the window of the booth to steady himself. “You sound like Mother now.”

“Brano Oleksy Sev,” said that voice.

“Yes, Tati?”

“We’ll get sentimental later. You can even hit me if you like. But now I’m trying to save your life. You killed Josef Lochert, and, no matter the reason, you know the only thing that awaits you back home is a firing squad.”

Brano nodded into the phone because he’d known this ever since the Comrade Lieutenant General mentioned a pickup in the Stadtpark. He sniffed, then cleared his throat. “You and Filip Lutz are trying to overthrow my government.”

“You make it sound so easy.” Andrezej Sev snorted a laugh. “Is that what Lochert told you before you killed him?”

Brano closed his eyes. “Lochert tried to make me believe that Filip Lutz was running the operation, but that was only to protect the real head. You. You were the one seen last June at the Vámosoroszi test reactor by a worker named Gregor Samec.”

“I don’t remember being there.”

“But you were. Perhaps you were scouting landing areas, or perhaps you were figuring out how to create a meltdown. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter now. But you were with someone else, a state security agent. I want to know who it was.”