36 Yalta Boulevard

26 APRIL 1967, WEDNESDAY

Brano chose the Cafe-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 Cafe-Restaurant Europa, on the corner of Kartner 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 cafe 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 Vamosoroszi 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.”

“I don’t remember that at all, Brani.”

He opened his eyes as Andrezej Sev broke away from the telephone to speak with a large man in a white chef’s hat.

“They want their phone back. Can I answer your questions face-to-face?”

“One last thing,” said Brano. “Are you going to wildly parachute soldiers into the country on Pentecost? While the Hungarians or the Czechs just close their eyes as you fly over their territory?”

“You’ve been doing so well up to now, Brani,” said Andrezej Sev. “You’ve been making your father proud. But of course we’re not parachuting anybody in on Pentecost.”

“Because,” said Brano, scratching the paint flaking off the telephone. “Because they’re already there. You’ve already sent in your men, probably through the same path Jan used to get in.”

“You can think what you like, Brano. I have a feeling Yalta Boulevard will find your stories hard to swallow, given the storyteller. Ja, ja,” he said to the chef. “Brani, can we meet?”

“I’ll call.”

“Well, I-” Andrezej Sev began, but by then Brano had hung up.

His father had changed in the last twenty years. It was the same man-he had no doubt of that-but perhaps it was the American lifestyle that had made him into such a natural liar. He knew how to tease his son with half facts and outright fabrications. There was no reason to believe that he had brought Brano here for his safety; the fact was, it was his father’s operation that had ended his career back in August. Andrezej Sev worked with the American fundamentalists, and the CIA was likely part of his background as well. There were too many loose threads; everything remained just beyond his reach. And this, as Dijana had explained, was the essence of zbrka.

He took a tram down to Soroka’s neighborhood and rang his bell but got no answer. Behind the building was a large courtyard with grass and picnic tables and groups of mothers chatting while their children ran in circles. He sat at an empty table and stared at the children without seeing them.

He understood the outline. His father, using the cover of the Committee for Liberty, had worked with Lochert, Lutz, and Richter over what must have been a number of years, recruiting emigres, training them, and then sending them back into the country to wait. Loretta Reich, the Committee’s secretary, had been kind enough to point out that his father had been close to Frank Wisner, who ran the earlier attempts to undermine the People’s Democracies. Andrezej Sev had no doubt learned from Wisner’s endless mistakes. Now their men had been placed-all they were waiting for was the prearranged date.

And in the middle of it all, his father was trying to convince him to defect.

Brano rubbed his head as children squealed, running past him.

There had been perhaps three moments during that phone call when he wanted to cross the street, walk up to Andrezej Sev, and hit him. Because he sounded like all fathers of the world who drop contact for years and then expect to be welcomed back. Like exiles, they live so long in their cloistered worlds, distracted by their petty obsessions, that it never occurs to them that their families no longer need them and, in fact, no longer want them.

But that wasn’t it, he realized as a small blonde girl ran over to him to retrieve her ball. Narrow-mindedness and stupidity were no reasons to strike a man. It was commonness. It was that Brano’s father turned out to be like all fathers in the world. He was a disappointment.

By evening he had returned to the Kaiserin Elisabeth. The woman at the desk set down her book when he approached. She stood up. “Mister Bieniek?”

“Yes?”

She handed him an envelope. “This is for you.’

“Thank you.”

There was a brief note inside, on Kaiserin Elisabeth stationery: Johannesgasse 4, 11:20.

“When did this come?”

“Around noon. A phone call.”

“Where is Johannesgasse?”

“Very near. Down Kartner Stra?E, away from the cathedral, two blocks.”

“You don’t know the name of the person who left this?”

She shook her head. “I asked, but he said you’d know who he was.”