sure what I would have done if they’d talked back or resisted.”
“Shot them? That’s what they seemed to think.”
“It’s what they were supposed to think.”
“I get the idea you’ve done this before.”
She shook her head.
“Only in training.”
“For the Agency?”
“God, no!” She frowned at me.
“Austrian Intelligence? And please don’t say KGB.”
This at least got a laugh, a flash of the Litzi I thought I’d always known.
“The Verfassungsschutz. The federal internal security police, but it was ages ago. I’m an archivist now, well and truly. Professionally, I don’t even live in this century anymore, or even the last one.”
“An archivist with a gun?”
“On special loan. At midnight tonight it turns back into a pumpkin.”
We headed for the bridge, blending back into the flow of pedestrians and bicycles.
“Is that all you’re going to tell me?”
“What more do you want to know?”
“All of it, if you don’t mind.”
“Saving your skin isn’t enough?”
“No.”
She smiled again. Every time she did, I inched a little closer to being able to see how these two Litzis might actually coexist. It wasn’t as if she’d become this way overnight. We’d been apart for thirty-eight years. No doubt she had changed in all sorts of ways. Up to now my view of her had been clouded by nostalgia. Now I finally beheld her as she really was, a woman of experience, a woman with a past.
“I was only in for three years,” she said. “They recruited me during my last year at university. Since then, I’ve only done the odd errand here and there, a few favors during manpower shortages. But never anything serious, and nothing even close to dangerous.”
“So you were, what, nineteen when you volunteered?”
“Twenty, and I didn’t volunteer. They approached me. Apparently they got my name from someone at your embassy.”
“Dad was in Berlin by then.”
“I’m not saying it was your father. But they knew all about our little trip and how I’d been threatened by the Vopos and, by implication, the Soviets. Knew it right down to the name of the little town where they pulled us off the train.”
She stared at me longer than necessary as we moved onto the bridge, to the point where I almost felt compelled to deny any involvement. Then she looked straight ahead and resumed her account.
“They told me they could ensure that nothing like that would ever happen to me or my family again. No more threats. But first they needed my help against ‘those kinds of people.’”
“Russians, or East Germans?”
“Leftists in general. More to the point, the RAF.”
The Red Army Faction, she meant, the organization of ultra-left, ultra-violent young people-half of them female, oddly enough-who had operated in Germany from the late sixties to the turn of the millennium. Known originally as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, its members had been implicated in shootings, bombings, kidnappings, and robberies, a reign of terror across three decades that peaked in 1977 with a string of abductions known as the “German Autumn.”
“I thought the RAF was strictly German?”
“It was, but in late seventy-seven they came into Vienna and kidnapped a millionaire on his doorstep, and I think the authorities went a little crazy. For a while they were convinced that every little bunch of campus lefties was going to metastasize into the next RAF cell, and that’s where I came in.”
“You were undercover?”
She nodded. “I was supposed to infiltrate them. Some ultra-left group at my university.”
“How did it go?”
“Fine, for a while. But it ended badly.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, badly enough that they let me quit, then helped me find a job. They kept my involvement a secret. Even my husband never knew. To him I was just Litzi the sensible librarian.”
“I understand his point of view.”
She was quiet for a while as we negotiated the crowds on the bridge. I wondered what she meant by “ending badly.” In disgrace? Betrayal? Death? But by the time we’d crossed the Danube another question had occurred to me.
“Was this job-the one involving me-just another ‘little favor’ they asked you to do?”
She didn’t answer right away.
“As far as I know.”
“So that story you told me about the fat man in the seersucker, the character right out of Ambler, it never happened?”
“They told me to tell you that. I had no idea why until you showed me the description in the book.”
“Did you know it was going to be me at the Braunerhof?”
She shook her head emphatically.
“They had me tail you from your appointment earlier that morning at Kurzmann’s, the bookstore. A man with a brown paper parcel-that’s the only description they gave me. I was supposed to keep my distance until the rendezvous, and I wasn’t close enough to recognize you until you came out of the phone booth. Obviously they had good reason to pick me, but I’m sure they wanted my surprise to be genuine.”
“It definitely fooled me.”
“I wasn’t trying to fool you. Not about that. I was thrilled to see you, but I hated the idea of deceiving you. Hated it. That night after you left my apartment I sent word that I wanted out.”
Before we slept together, in other words. For some reason that mattered.
“They refused?”
“They said I could quit, but only if I stopped seeing you. I was supposed to be there to protect you, to watch your flanks.”
“And to report my movements.”
She shut her eyes, then nodded.
“Yes. That, too. And when I saw that the work was becoming dangerous, too dangerous for me to control, then I quit, in the hope that you would quit as well. But when you didn’t, well…”
“You continued following me?”
“Yes.”
“Under whose orders?”
“No one’s. I went AWOL. Threw away my phone, stopped checking in. I took certain measures in Prague to ensure I wouldn’t be followed, then came here on a bus. I guessed that you’d stop at Antikvariat Szondi, and that’s where I picked up your trail.”
“Where’d you get the gun?”
“An old contact. It’s like any other kind of business. Half of it is connections and calling in old favors. Even after people get out they always keep a hand in, whether they want to or not.”
“Like Breece Preston?”
“Yes, like him. The Hammerhead, too.”
“Why would the Verfassungsschutz be running this show?”
“I doubt they are. I’m just a resource they’re lending out. Like I said, connections and favors. I have no idea who your handler is, or who he works for, but obviously he has friends over here who still owe him.”
“So do you.”
“What do you mean?”
