36 Yalta Boulevard

15 APRIL 1967, SATURDAY

She didn’t have to be at the Jazzklub Abel until one, so they spent the morning in her apartment lazily, eating and making love, until a headache crept up on him. She gave him aspirin and boiled tea.

Brano could think of a hundred different ways to punch holes in the story she’d told him. For any good operative there were many layers of cover, each more convincing than the next. The thing that worried him most was her acceptance. She knew that he had worked for state security all his life, yet she had decided to simply believe that his life’s work was now over. Her father had been sent to a prison because of men like him, and she had left her country because of those same men. She had found refuge in the West and then, inexplicably, had chosen a lover from that world.

Brano found himself thinking over his tea that even if she were telling him the truth, he would never be able to accept it completely. He was, as she had pointed out, terrible.

“You are cold again.”

“What?”

She pulled her robe over her shoulder. “I can see when you, your head, it is far away.”

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s the way I am.”

She grunted and reached for her tea. “Pa da. Is what I am learning.”

In the afternoon he walked her to the Marienbrucke, which crossed the Danube Canal into the Second District, where the Jazzklub Abel lay.

“Why you not come with me?” she asked. “You can to meet Abel.”

“I don’t think Abel wants to meet me.”

“Why not? He’s not boy.”

“Maybe I don’t want to meet him.”

“Dragi,” she said, and kissed his cheeks. “You is not so cold after all.”

He smiled.

“And your head? How is it?”

“It hurts.”

She straightened the lapels of his jacket and kissed his forehead, then whispered, “I don’t want to making your head more bad, but there is a man behind you what is watching us.”

“Does he have a sunburn?”

“You mean his face?”

“ Da,” he said.

“Yes, is very bad.”

“He’s just watching me, don’t worry.”

“Who he is?”

“He’s Austrian.”

“Ah,” she said, nodding and looking over his shoulder. “He is always with you?”

“Always. To be sure I’m not getting into trouble.”

“You know what?”

“What?”

“I make stupid choice for a man, no?”

“Yes, Dijana. You made a terrible choice.”

She snorted a laugh, kissed him again, then headed off. He watched her cross the steel bridge, waiting until she was just out of sight, before turning back.

As usual, Filip Lutz was at his back table, surrounded by soiled cups and saucers, and a full ashtray. Ersek Nanz was there, too, leisurely stretched out in his chair, listening to his friend’s lecture. Through the windows, Brano’s shadow wrote something in a notepad.

“Our senior intelligence officer has arrived!” said Lutz. “Come, come.”

Ersek turned in his chair with some effort, sticking out a hand. Brano patted his back and sat down. “I’m not feeling particularly intelligent today.”

“Just today?” asked Ersek. He was brushing dry his upper lip, where the beginning of a mustache was forming. “You’re doing better than the rest of us. Turns out one of the principal shareholders in Nanz Editions just died of a heart attack. Now his executors want to sell his piece to pay off his debts. You want to invest in publishing?”

“With what? Ask Filip.”

Lutz opened his hands. “I already own thirty percent.”

Brano scratched his sore forehead to mimic serious thought. “I suppose I could get someone to sell my Trabant back home.”

That received a few seconds of obligatory laughter.

“How’s your girl?” asked Lutz.

Nanz straightened. “Yeah, you don’t bring her out, do you?”

“Why didn’t you tell me you knew her?”

Both men fell silent, until Lutz said, “We don’t know her that well.”

“Not from what she says.”

Ersek leaned forward. “How does she say it?”

“She says you two and Bertrand Richter were all very close.”

“That’s how it is among expats,” said Lutz. “We form close friendships for a while, then we stop.”

“You stopped when Bertrand was killed.”

Ersek found a cigarette and popped it into his mouth. “You have to admit, Brano, that puts a strange tone on a friendship, when your friend’s dead.”

“Even more so when he’s killed,” said Lutz.

“Do the police know who killed him?”

“The Austrian police couldn’t find a hooker in the Canal District with a handful of koronas. But he was a good guy.”

“A bore, though,” said Ersek. “You have to admit.”

“Sure,” said Lutz.

“I don’t know about Lutzi,” Ersek continued, “but to tell the truth, I was nice to him because he had a pretty girlfriend. I think a lot of people were the same way. And now-now I’ve got a reason to be nice to you!”

Lutz rapped the table. “Let’s change the subject, okay? It’s no good for my indigestion.”

The change of subject seemed an excuse for Lutz to regale them with the details of his latest date with the interpreter, with whom, this time, he had finally achieved success.

“You’re a bastard,” said Ersek. “A lucky bastard.”

Lutz squeezed out from behind the table. “That I am.” He patted Nanz’s shoulder, excused himself, and lumbered off to the bathroom.

“What do you think of Dijana?” asked Brano. “Honestly.”

Ersek considered him. “I liked her. A little baffling, but you probably know that. All those Balkan chicks are. And she gets around, if you know what I mean.”

“No. I don’t know what you mean.”

“You asked, right? But she’s perceptive as hell, that one, and great to look at.”

“And Richter? Was their relationship good?”

“Who ever knows these things? He was crazy about her, that’s for sure. He was paranoid someone would take her away. He accused each of us at one point or another. Me, Lutz, even that cold fish from the embassy, Josef Lochert-you know him?”

Brano hesitated. “No. No, I don’t.”

“Well, Lutzi brought him to the Carp one night for a good time.”

The air seemed to dry up. “This Josef Lochert is a friend of Filip’s?”

“Sure,” said Ersek. “They’ve known each other years. Longer than I’ve known Filip. But if you meet Lochert, you’ll understand why Bertrand got upset. He has a way of staring that’s entirely impolite, and he gave it to Dijana. Bertrand went off the handle completely and tried to take him outside for a fight.”

“They fought?”

Ersek shook his head. “Nah. I wanted to see Bertrand get kicked, but Lutz stepped in and made peace. What did he say? Yes. If we fight one another, then there’ll be no fight left when we need it. Or something like that. Very poetic.”

When Brano realized he was tapping the table like a nervous old man, he placed his hands in his lap.

After a couple of drinks, Brano feigned fatigue, which the men immediately associated with his sex life. They laughed as he reddened and gave him masculine slaps on the back, whistling as he walked away. His sunburned shadow followed him south, in the tram, all the way to Web-Gasse.

In his bathroom, he prepared the note that demanded an 11:30 appointment the next day, just before his scheduled meeting with Ludwig, and wrapped it around the nail. He stuck it in his pocket, grabbed his book, and left again. The light was failing, but he didn’t care. He walked up Liniengasse to Gumpendorfer, then found his bench at Eszterhazy Park. He stared at the open book.

Brano remembered a time, which seemed very long ago, when he could move slowly in the street and etch out a painstaking portrait of a dull, daily life, all for the benefit of the socially infirm men who followed him. But as he closed the book far too soon, the urgency came in the form of his mother’s voice. Brani, do you think this is the family I always hoped for?

He pressed his hands to the bench to help himself up, wandered to the third tree, and unzipped his pants. He had to concentrate to get anything out of himself, and when he transferred the nail to his right pocket, dropped it through his pant leg and stomped, it was into earth that was dry and unyielding.

The sunburned man standing at the base of the flak tower watched him curiously.

Dijana stayed at Web-Gasse that night, and they cooked together, stopping once to make love on the kitchen counter. “Dragi!” she said, as if anything could surprise her. Then they half-watched late-night television and split a bottle of wine that they soon brought to his bed. She told him she wouldn’t stand for masculine untidiness and would clean his apartment the next day. He smiled and rolled her over, into the pillow, so she could not see the zbrka all over his face.