36 Yalta Boulevard

13 APRIL 1967, THURSDAY

The Cafe-Restaurant Landtmann sat across from the Burgtheater, part of the ring of enormous Habsburg buildings around the Innere Stadt. In its dark wooden walls, mirrors and intarsias of bouquets-blond walnut inlaid in the dark walls-looked down on a cramped scene of marble-topped tables stuffed with politicians involved in serious discussions over late breakfast. A woman offered to take his coat; when he declined, she frowned and told him it was the tradition, that all coats were taken, so he handed it to her. She gave him a slip of paper with a number on it. Again, Brano felt underdressed.

He found Lutz in the back, beneath a tall, narrow mirror in which he could see himself approach, a short man in this crowd. Lutz’s tiny table was overflowing with empty cups and saucers, dirty spoons, and a full ashtray. He was reading from a stack of typed pages that he put away when he noticed Brano. He smiled and stuck out his hand but didn’t have room enough to get up.

“Delightful to see you, Brano. Delightful. What’ll you have, a coffee? Something stronger?”

“Just coffee.”

Lutz took care of the ordering and stretched beneath the table.

“You’ve been working hard,” said Brano.

“As always, my man. As always.”

“Writing?”

“Reading. Government reports, that sort of thing. It’s dull enough to make you want to shoot yourself.”

“Why are you reading government reports?”

“Sometimes it’s the only way to learn things.”

“Is this that Politburo-shaking project?”

Lutz considered him. “You, my friend, are going to have to wait, just like the rest of the world.”

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 Bobrka 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.