36 Yalta Boulevard

31 MARCH 1967, FRIDAY

Of course he knew the Carp. It was a dingy place in the narrow maze of Vienna’s old fishing district-on Sterngasse, off of Desider Friedmannplatz. He knew what and where it was, though he’d avoided it personally. He’d instead sent his informants into its dark interior to listen to the exiles’ stories of dissatisfaction. Ingrid Petritsch had been one of his better informants; she could maneuver herself among the barstools and flirt the information out of any man, because the exiles would say anything to impress a beautiful woman. They would always explain to her, as if to a child, that their own capital was superior to cold Vienna, though none of them had the courage to return home. Then Ingrid would touch their arms and ask for more.

But Ingrid, after Bertrand Richter’s death, decided she’d had enough. Cerny had told him this over drinks. She married an English businessman and was now living in London. A goddamned waste, he’d said. She won’t even talk to our local man now.

In the morning he woke later than usual and did not bother with Eszterhazy Park. Instead, he picked up a Kurier and took it east, to the vast grounds of the Schonbrunn Palace, where, when he wasn’t reading the newspaper’s personals, he gazed at squares of black soil in the enormous gardens being tended by workers in preparation for spring. He mixed with a busload of Italians who shouted at their wives and children, then stopped beside a Grecian sculpture and stared at the crisp blue sky, where a single unformed cloud floated.

At sunset, he took the tram back into town, to Schwedenplatz by the Danube, then found Sterngasse. It was a short pedestrian street ending in stairs, dirty by Viennese standards but relatively clean to Brano’s eyes. Arched above the door was a wooden carp, silver paint peeling off its ribs.

There were only a few customers this early, so Brano settled at the bar. The black-haired bartender, a woman of about sixty, smoked beside a wall of palinkas and vodkas, reading a newspaper. She wore large hoop earrings. Behind the bottles, a large mirrored wall allowed him to see his own tired face. In the corner, a wide, glowing jukebox played jazz music.

“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 Schonbrunn 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 Balint 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 Sarospatak 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 emigres 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.