Victory Square

THIRTY-FIVE

Brano and Ludwig parked in a lot near the airstrip beside another BMW. They talked over the details of the operation with two of Ludwig’s men and verified their radios were operating. The two assistants waited just outside the airport entrance; Brano and Ludwig would wait outside the arrivals gate for the blue-plated embassy car to leave. Once they were in pursuit, they’d radio ahead to the others, and everyone would go into town together, sandwiching the embassy car with Jerzy Michalec inside.

Then, on the Ring Road around the old town, the first car would screech to a stop, turning aside so Michalec couldn’t pass, and Brano and Ludwig would do the same thing. Ludwig had already tipped off a journalist from Der Standard, who would be waiting at the intersection with a camera.

It proceeded according to plan. Brano pointed at a tall old man in a hat and sunglasses who stepped into the back of the embassy car, and then he radioed to Ludwig’s men. There were a couple of points along the A4 where Brano worried they were losing the car, but Ludwig knew the roads, and he knew how to drive so that he wouldn’t be noticed. The traffic thickened, but Ludwig remained on track, and when they reached the Ring Road, Ludwig even pointed at a man standing by the crosswalk at Dr. K. Renner and Volks-gartenstraSe. “There’s Jan. He’s got the camera.”

Brano picked up the radio and said, “Now.”

The BMW in front turned sharply, screeching up on two wheels, and stopped. Doors popped open, and Ludwig’s men jumped out, guns in view, screaming in German for the driver and passenger to show their hands.

From behind, Ludwig and Brano did the same thing. Brano, because of his age, moved slower, but they waited for him to reach the back door and rip it open, finding an old man in a hat and sunglasses wailing in our language for him to please not shoot. Brano lowered his gun and took the sunglasses off the man’s face. A moment of shock.

According to Der Standard’s evening edition, the old man’s name was Gustav Hegy, one of Michalec’s personal assistants, of which he had many.

It took a minute, Brano working back over everything that had come before this moment. He was smart-he’d always been smart- and even with so little information he was able to see that I’d betrayed him. He grabbed Ludwig and shouted, “Airport!”

A half hour before that moment, I sat in the driver’s seat of Brano’s Volkswagen, Brano’s heavy Walther PP on the passenger’s seat. I’d stopped a few cars behind Ludwig’s BMW and waited as the old man got into the embassy car and Brano and Ludwig followed. Then I started the engine. Ten minutes later, Jerzy Michalec appeared with his large bodyguard, looked around, and walked over to a Mercedes taxi.

I gunned the engine and squealed around parked cars, nearly hitting a woman crossing the lane. At the sound of the tires, Michalec looked up. He couldn’t make out my features but knew the Volkswagen was coming for him. He stepped back from the waiting taxi and tugged his bodyguard’s sleeve, and the big man reached into his jacket.

I struck the back of the taxi, knocking it a few feet, and pushed open my door. With the pistol in my left hand, I reached around the windshield. I fired twice. The recoil hurt my palm. The bodyguard, still reaching for his gun, jerked and fell on the pavement, kicking wildly.

Screams burst out, and people ran. Michalec froze, then dived behind the taxi. I got out of the car, my heart banging. The taxi driver’s hairy hands were raised above his head, his eyes wide. I told him to lie down, but since I spoke in my language, he didn’t understand.

My ears hurt. My hands and feet and stomach ached. I continued around the front of the taxi, the Walther low, but found only the groaning bodyguard on the concrete, his wide, enormous chest wet with blood.

I looked around-Michalec had disappeared. Somehow. Then, on the other side of the taxi, I saw him trying to run and realized my mistake. He had slipped around the crushed rear of the taxi.

I went after him, down the covered arrivals lane, and when he stepped out from a car to cross back into the airport, I stopped, raised the gun, gasping, and shot-but missed.

He made it through the glass doors as I shot again, shattering glass behind him, but it didn’t slow him at all. I followed, clutching the heavy pistol, and when I got inside, passing a brightly lit gift shop empty of people, I had to stop to figure out where he’d gone. Off to my left, past a McDonald’s, two uniformed guards stared at me, confused, then reached for their sidearms. So I ran right, past an unstaffed information desk, through bewildered travelers, and out a pair of glass doors to the sidewalk again. Directly in front of me, by a sign reading SUDBAHNHOF-WESTBAHNHOF, a large, sooty yellow bus pulled away from the curb.

Its windows were tinted, but between gasps of cold air I could just make out a form collapsing into the fifth seat-an old man, also gasping, pulling at his tie.

Then the bus was gone in a roar of stinking exhaust, making a wide berth for the commotion around the mess I’d caused-the wreck of Brano’s VW, the taxi, and Michalec’s now-unconscious bodyguard. Policemen spoke into radios, and onlookers crowded in.

For a moment, I believed it was finished. I’d finally reached the end. My heart thumped against the inside of my chest, so painful that I expected that tingling in the arm and the sharp seizure of a heart attack. A part of me even welcomed the rest.

But there’s something in human beings that, despite all the disappointments, shame, and heartbreak, keeps us ticking. I don’t know what it is, but it came for me during that two-second pause. A dirty green Opel pulled up to the bus stop and let out a young woman. My legs moved me forward. The woman, a pretty brunette standing beside the open passenger door, smiled queerly at me. Then she saw the pistol in my hand. She screamed.

Behind me, a man-probably one of the security guards- shouted, “Halt!”

I didn’t halt. I pushed the young woman aside, got into the car, pointed the pistol at the older woman behind the wheel, and told her to drive: “Fahren!”

As I write this now, the entire scene seems completely improbable. A pistol, a chase, two old men who would be of better use dying in front of their televisions, and a car hijacking.

But this is how I remember it, and I’m backed up by the Vienna airport’s security footage, which is now on file with Ludwig’s superiors in the Defense Ministry, the Bundesministerium fur Lan-desverteidigung, at RoBauer Lande 1, Vienna. You can certainly ask to see the video; whether or not they let you is a different matter.

What you won’t see on that black-and-white video feed is the face of Frau Ingrid Shappelhorn, the fifty-eight-year-old widow who had just dropped off her daughter, Christiane, to catch a flight to meet her fiance, a Dutch journalist named Rolf. Of course, Christiane didn’t make her flight, and Rolf was left standing in the Brussels airport, bewildered. Ingrid, the most unfortunate of them all, was stuck with a sixty-four-year-old madman clutching a Walther PP, screaming at her to drive. Which she did in a panic, tires burning against the road.

I go into all this because it’s important. I won’t call it a moral in this scattershot narrative, but it’s something like that. The price of revenge is that everyone around you pays. Gisele Sully, Brano and his family, even Ludwig-and a decent Austrian family I’d never even met before.

“Schneller!” I shouted as she swung around the wreck I’d made minutes ago.

Unlike her daughter, Frau Shappelhorn didn’t scream, which impressed me. A heavy woman who’d spent the last six years without a husband, she was someone who took the punches as they came. She gunned the engine and shifted gears, and we sped down the ramp, past the short-term parking lot. Beside her I sat fidgeting, sweating, trying to get air, and inexplicably checking my watch-it was 3:07. My poor veins were ready to burst. Everything had happened so quickly, faster than my brain could work.

“Where?” she said.

I wasn’t sure. Did I want her to run down the bus with this little car? No. “South train station,” I said, remembering the sign at the bus stop. “Drive normally.”

She let off the gas and switched gears again as a taxi pulled in front of us.

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

“You can put away the gun,” she said. Though she was calm, there was fear in her voice. I felt ashamed.

“But you are taking me, right?”

“If the police don’t stop us first.”

At the time, I couldn’t see just how cool Frau Shappelhorn was. Now I can. I slipped the pistol into my coat pocket and rubbed my face, trying to keep my eyes open. I couldn’t take much more of this. I said, “There’s going to be a ticket gate when we leave the airport.”

“Yes,” she said.

“You have a ticket?”

“Of course.” She pointed at the dashboard, where a single orange stub lay.

“Go through like normal.”

“Okay.”

I’ll never understand why she didn’t try something. We rolled up to the ticket booth, the man inside said, “GruB Gott,” and she said it back, handing over her ticket, and then the mechanical arm rose, and she drove through. When we reached the A4 heading into town, she admitted something: “I thought they’d stop us back there. They should’ve radioed ahead to stop us.”

“Oh,” I said, because that hadn’t occurred to me.

I learned the answer later, also from Der Standard. The ticket booths were connected to the terminals by an underground communications system. That day, the system was being tested because of problems, and it failed when they tried to make contact. Because of the embarrassment over my escape, from the following day all the booths were equipped with wireless radios.

It takes twenty minutes to drive from the Vienna airport to the Sudbahnhof, and in that time Frau Shappelhorn began to ask questions. “What’s going on?” was her first.

I thought about telling her. I wanted to say, I’m tracking the man who killed my wife, who’s taking over my country. Even then, overcome with so much physical pain and confusion, I knew it would sound paranoid. It would frighten her more. So I said, “I need to catch someone.”

“You need a gun for that?”

“I think so.”

“So you need to kill this person.”

“No,” I lied. “I just need to catch him.”

The bus was nowhere in sight, and I wondered if we’d passed it. That would be a good thing. I could reach the bus stop at the Sudbahnhof and wait for him to exit, or go into the bus myself. If we weren’t stopped beforehand.

Had I done the right thing? I didn’t know. I knew how Brano felt-he must have hated me.

Anyway, it was done. I’d begun the chase because I felt I had no other option. I didn’t want Jerzy Michalec enjoying the comforts of an Austrian jail cell and eventual extradition back home, or to France. Because revenge has nothing to do with due process-revenge wants to be sharp, and final.

Frau Shappelhorn drove steadily along the A4. She said, “You don’t want to tell me more?”

“There’s no point.”

“Sure there is. Maybe I can help.”

“No,” I said. “The last person who helped me ended up dead.”

It was the wrong thing to say, but I wasn’t thinking straight. The car swerved briefly, and I reached over to steady the wheel; someone blew his horn and passed us. “So you’re in trouble,” she said.

I even grinned. “Can’t you tell?”

That didn’t make her feel any better.

I said, “Just drop me off near the Sudbahnhof. A block away. Police will probably be waiting for me, and I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

That seemed to help a little, but I regretting having said it. I wasn’t really sure what I’d do when I reached the train station, and it would have been smarter to keep the car. But I wasn’t smart. I’ve never been smart.

I tried to imagine that I was Jerzy Michalec, a criminal who knew he’d been doubly conned. First, by the Austrians-surely he watched Brano and Ludwig follow his double’s car. Second, by the person who had warned him. In the bus, he had no way of contacting the embassy, which would start looking for him at the airport. Brano and his Austrian friends would soon do the same, also posting men outside our embassy.

Michalec could get out at the Sudbahnhof or go on to the final stop at the Westbahnhof and then try to contact the embassy. But if he believed the Austrian government was out to get him, that it was also watching his embassy, then he wouldn’t feel safe here.

There was only one thing a man like Jerzy Michalec would do. He would flee Vienna on the first train leaving.

“Have you accepted Jesus?” said Frau Shappelhorn.

I blinked, unsure if I’d heard her right. “What?”

“Jesus Christ. Have you accepted him as your personal savior?”

“Please,” I said. “I don’t want to hear about that.”

She nodded at the road. “Sure. But you’d be surprised. No matter how terrible your situation seems, Jesus Christ can help. He helps millions every day.”

I looked out at the road, then at her. She was as serious about this as I was about Michalec. She took the exit for the Sudbahnhof.

She said, “You have to pray. That’s the first step. You have to ask Him to come to you, but you have to be ready to accept His Glory.”

“Take this left,” I said, but she was already taking it, and up ahead I saw a police car with blinking lights but no sirens. The station was a block ahead. “Let me out here.”

She pulled to the curb along Wiener Gurtel, and I opened the door. Then, as an afterthought, I reached over to cover her hand on the gearshift. “I’m sorry about this. But thank you. I’ll consider giving Jesus Christ a try.”

I think that’s what she wanted to hear. It meant that her day hadn’t been an entire waste.