Yalta Boulevard (40 page)

“I imagine so.”

“And what, then, would you suggest?”

Brano looked at his swollen left hand on the table. “I’m the one person who can talk to him. He wants me to defect.”

“Defect? To America? Well, that would be something, wouldn’t it?”

“If I wanted to defect, I would be gone already. I’ve had plenty of opportunities.”

“I suppose you have,” said Romek. He stood up, walked around the table, and squatted beside Brano. “Tell me,” he whispered. “Tell me what you would do if our roles were reversed.”

Brano looked into Romek’s strange eyes that seemed to want to flee his head. They both knew what Brano would do. He would place Romek on a plane home and pass on the order for Ministry interrogators to pick him up from the airport and place him in a cell. He would make sure Romek was worked on until he spilled the truth.

“Tell me.”

Brano cleared his throat. “I would send me to the Hotel Inter-Continental to speak with my father. Andrezej Sev will only talk to his son.” He paused. “If he believes I’m defecting, I might be able to get the name of the inside man.”

Romek looked at him a moment, immobile, then the laughter came. High and melodic, like a girl’s. “Oh, Brano!” He caught his breath. “That’s really very fantastic. Really. I’m supposed to give you the opportunity to, first of all, warn your father of everything we know. Second of all, to defect. And
third
of all, to live out your days in comfortable anonymity with your hot little Yugoslav!” He shook his head. “No, Brano, I’m not quite the clever man you are, but I’m not stupid. Come on.” He stood again and reached out a hand. “Why don’t you get some sleep while I consider my options. Who knows? In the morning you just might be dead.”

Dragan walked him upstairs to one of the third-floor bedrooms. It was small and modest, as only socialist diplomatic suites are, with gray walls and bars over the windows, through which he could see stars hovering in the night. Dragan didn’t say a thing, and when he left he locked the door from the outside.

Brano washed in the bathroom and shaved with the razor they had supplied—a convenience Brano would have denied Romek. His left hand moved well, though it sometimes tingled when he reached above his head to wash his prickly scalp. His forehead throbbed, so he covered it with a cold, wet towel and lay in bed.

He didn’t know if he should have taken Cerny’s offer to leave at that traffic light yesterday. He’d refused because of some kind of integrity he was having trouble finding in himself now.

If he had taken Cerny’s offer, what would have followed? That dream returned—a car to the Lake Districts, a new name, a new life with her. But after his session with Major Romek, he knew that that new life would have been a troubled one, always waiting for that quiet, lurking death brought on by some young, soulless boy trained on Yalta Boulevard.

No. He wouldn’t have done this, he now knew. Brano would have left that car, considered his options, then visited his father in the Inter-Continental. Because the only safety lay in his father’s hands. In America. A new identity, and a new life an ocean away from this one.

There was a knock at his door.

“Come in.”

He sat up as Cerny entered. “Look at you. Come over here, in the light. Let me see.”

Brano came over to the desk lamp, letting Cerny touch a bruise at the bottom of his neck. Brano grimaced.

“Goddamned savage,” said Cerny. “I told him to go easy on you. I told him you were to be trusted. But he’d gotten orders from someone higher than me, to do as he liked.”

“From the Lieutenant General.”

“Which is why we’re keeping everything from him for now. Romek told me what you’d suggested. He thought it was funny. Ha ha. Well, I told him it was the only chance we had to end this thing.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I can’t see any other way.”

Brano sat on the bed and looked up at him, but the bright desk lamp behind the colonel’s head obscured his expression. “Tell me. Why did you do that in the car?”

“I—” Cerny paused. He sat beside Brano, then cocked his head. “The first reason I told you. You’ve been through too much on this operation. Far too much.’ He put a heavy hand on Brano’s shoulder. “You mean a lot to me, One-Shot, even more since Irina’s …’ He snorted, then wiped his mustache. “I wouldn’t have survived without you. And in a way, you’re the only family I have.” He looked into Brano’s face. “There’s so much I would do if I thought it would make you, finally, a happy man. Something we both know you’ve never been.”

Looking into those familiar, damp eyes and at that unkempt mustache, Brano felt something like rest. They’d had so many years together, and in that time Cerny had never actually said such things to him. He’d shown it, sometimes, in their quiet moments, particularly during those months after Irina’s death, as Brano helped raise him out of that suicidal depression.

Then he felt something he was not used to: shame. He was ashamed that he usually forgot those tender moments, remembering only the times Cerny reverted to the colonel whose job it was to punish Brano’s mistakes.

Cerny patted Brano’s back, stood, and cleared his throat. “Don’t worry, One-Shot. I’m not half done yet.”

30 APRIL 1967, SUNDAY
•

He woke
to Cerny’s face hovering over his. “Good news.”

Brano rubbed his eyes. “Yes?”

“You’re going to try it.”

Brano sat up, awake now. “What about the Lieutenant General?”

“He doesn’t know a thing. I stayed up late with Romek and worked on him until he agreed.”

“You convinced him?”

“Remember, I know a lot of things about a lot of people.” He shrugged. “I blackmailed him.”

Brano dressed while the colonel sat at the desk, watching. Beside him, on the desktop, lay a pale cloth harness and a small box. “Here,” he said, reaching for the harness. “Romek wants you to wear this.” He helped Brano put it on—a strap went over his left shoulder and the harness wrapped around his chest. Cerny did the buttons in the back, making it tight. From the box he took a small wire recorder with three leads and slipped it into the pocket of the harness, just under Brano’s left armpit. Two leads ended in a tiny square microphone he hooked to Brano’s undershirt; the third, ending in a tiny switch, he let hang loose. “Put on your shirt.”

Brano did so, and Cerny stepped back, nodding.

“Listen,” he said as he grabbed Brano’s pants from the bed. “About the car. What I said yesterday.”

“Yes?”

Cerny used his thumbs to tear a small hole in the left pants pocket. “Well, I still feel the same way.”

Brano looked at him.

“Here,” he said, handing over the pants. “Put these on.” As Brano did so, he lowered his voice. “I want you to get the information from your father, yes. But what you do afterward … that’s your business. This,” he said, tapping the bulge by Brano’s left arm, “can always go in the Eszterházy Park dead drop. And besides.” He bobbed his eyebrows. “You could be of use to us in America.”

Brano slipped the on/off switch through the hole in his pocket, then put on his jacket. Cerny shook his head, smiling.

“It’s small as hell—technology amazes me.”

Brano nodded.

The colonel’s smile went away. “Don’t consider this anything other than what it is. My desire for your happiness.”

“I know,” said Brano.

They walked together into the corridor and down the stairs to the foyer, where Romek was waiting. “You’re looking rested, Brano. Are you ready for this?”

“Yes, comrade.”

“And you’re wired.”

“It’s taken care of.”

“Good,” said Romek. He scratched his cheek. “I’m not going to threaten you, because I don’t have to. You know what will happen if you try to get away.”

“Yes,” said Brano. “I know.”

The Hotel Inter-Continental sat at the far end of Johannesgasse, a gray, glass-plated monolith dominating the Stadtpark. The embassy Mercedes dropped him off a couple of blocks short of it, then drove on. He walked past the wide front entrance, avoiding the lobby that would be packed with businessmen and tourists and informers of all nations. No doubt Ludwig’s men were lounging there now. He instead walked around to Am Heumarkt, where, next to the Putzerei Wäscherei, he found an open door marked

PERSONALEINGANG

STAFF ENTRANCE

HOTEL INTER-CONTINENTAL

WIEN

He glanced back. On the opposite corner of the intersection, hands deep in his pockets, Romek leaned against a store window. Brano entered the building.

In the long tiled corridor, he passed carts overflowing with the day’s dirty towels and uniforms, and when staff members passed him he avoided their eyes. Not obtrusively, but in a casual way that suggested he was a preoccupied man who belonged here. It was a difficult look that took years of experience to acquire, and was made no easier by the bruise creeping up his neck. But he did not hesitate, and that look brought him to the stairwell at the end of the corridor.

When he reached the fourth floor, he had to stop to catch his breath before continuing to the fifth. The corridor was empty, save a maid’s cart with cleaning fluids and towels and sheets beside an open door.

Room 516 lay at the end, by a window that overlooked the skating rink behind the hotel. Children and adults slid around, sometimes falling, helping one another up, then continuing on their circular path. As he stared, he listened to the door beside him, waiting a full minute. He heard a television giving news in German. A toilet flushed; a door opened and closed. Bed-springs. Brano reached into his left pocket and pressed the switch. Although there was no noise, he could feel, beneath his arm, the vibration of the recording wire being pulled into the take-up reel. He turned to the door and knocked.

The television silenced and the eyehole darkened. Then the door was open, Andrezej Sev smiling at him.

His father’s face, this close, was as it had always been in the photographs that filled that guest room in his mother’s house. There was the addition of age, a beard, and when he smiled his front teeth were clearly visible—clean and white and strong. But this was truly his father.

Brano touched his own front tooth. “What happened?”

Andrezej Sev looked confused a moment. “Oh, this!” He still lisped his
s
. “American dentist—he capped the tooth. I see yours are looking good as well.”

“I got braces some years ago.”

“So we both share the sin of vanity. But what happened to your neck?”

“I’m clumsy.”

Andrezej Sev kept a poor home. Dirty clothes lay in a loose pile in the corner, and the sheets had tumbled off the bed, as if after a night of hectic sex. This was nothing like the brutally tidy farmer he’d once known.

“Ludwig went crazy looking for you,” said his father, smiling. “He called me every day demanding your whereabouts.”

“He’s given up?”

“It seems he was transferred to a new desk.”

Brano opened his mouth, then paused. “Accounting?”

“That’s what I heard.”

Standing here beside his father, he found himself regretting Ludwig’s demotion. Brano placed his hat on the small desk, where, beside a portable Remington typewriter, lay a short stack of typed pages.

“Your memoirs?”

Andrezej Sev flushed. “Letters,” he said. “To my family.”

“Your American family.”

“My wife’s named Shirley. From Tennessee.”

“Tennessee.” Brano settled in the desk chair, picturing Loretta Reich from the Committee for Liberty and her expressions. “Children?”

“Two girls.”

“And they have names?”

“Stacy and Jennifer.”

Brano, despite himself, cracked a smile.

“I didn’t want to burden them with foreign names.”

“I imagine.”

Andrezej Sev, still standing, looked at his feet. “Brani?’

“Yes?”

“How’s your mother?”

“She’s fine,” he said, wondering why the question, from this man, irritated him. “I mean, no. She feels her life’s a waste without you. And Klara, beyond the bad paint job, married an idiot. But she seems happy with her life.”

Andrezej Sev settled on the bed and patted his thighs, his voice deepening. “No one’s happy with their life. You don’t fool yourself into believing that kind of rubbish, do you?”

“That would be asking a lot. But my life functions. I make do.”

“Make do.” His father smiled. “I used to think that way, before I came west. It’s hard to explain, but when you arrived in Bóbrka and told me to leave, I was almost … well, I was relieved.”

Brano adjusted himself in the chair, crossed one leg over the other, and looked at Andrezej Sev looking at his son’s knee.

“You remember what the war was like for me,” he said. “A German factory. I’d return home, and your mother was—she was … I don’t want to talk ill of her, but she wasn’t easy to live with. But back then I thought like you do. Happiness wasn’t what this world had to offer. Survival, yes. Survival and making do. Then I got out of that world. First to a displaced persons camp in Hamburg. There were some American soldiers there, collecting information from émigrés. I made friends with them. And by “forty-eight they asked me to join a new organization.”