significant gesture of solidarity, even sympathy.
“What is it between you two?” I finally asked. “You’re like a pair of identical twins, passing thoughts back and forth right over my head. It’s rude and it’s pissing me off. And I hope I made that sound like a joke.”
“You didn’t,” Litzi said, “but I understand. Our conspiracy of silence was completely unfair to you, but it was never about fairness, or even about you. I was loyal to your father’s privacy because he was loyal to mine.”
“About your work for the Verfassungsschutz?”
“Not just the work. The consequences.” She turned toward Dad. “You’ve always known, haven’t you? There must have been some kind of report afterward.”
He nodded gravely.
“You don’t have to tell him,” Dad said. “It’s got nothing to do with him or me.”
“That’s why I want him to know. Because it concerns only me. I hid it from my husband for eleven years of our marriage, and it’s one of the reason he left. He always knew something terrible was getting in our way, but he never figured out what it was, and then he stopped trying. If Bill and I are to continue as friends, he should know.” She turned to me. “Will we continue to be friends?”
The old Litzi Strauss bluntness was on full display, as endearing and unnerving as ever. I couldn’t possibly say no.
“Something more than friends, I hope.”
Then she told me her story, one last painful disclosure to cap a tumultuous day.
Making friends with the so-called radicals among her fellow university students had been easy enough. She liked them, even though she found their politics uncomfortably strident. They like her, too, and quickly came to trust her. As time passed, her reports to the Verfassungsschutz grew shorter and less detailed. Her handler complained, and so did her handler’s bosses. She asked to be released from the arrangement. Not without results, they said. They threatened to expose her.
Then she came up with something big-urgent word that a young German woman on the run, an actual member of the Red Army Faction, would soon be passing through Vienna, and needed safe harbor for one night only. Litzi found out the date and location, and passed them along. The result: a botched raid in which the German fugitive opened fire on the police. She was captured, as were two young women living at the house. But a third woman, new to the group and a friend of Litzi’s, was killed in the cross fire.
The campus group scattered in the wake of the tragedy, which provided Litzi with the perfect out. The government found her a job, and for the most part left her alone. But the image of her bright young friend followed her wherever she went.
“When I couldn’t conceive a child, I knew it was part of my punishment,” she said. “We tried clinics, fertility drugs, in vitro. Nothing worked. We even discussed finding a surrogate, but I knew I’d never be able to use another young woman for my own benefit, not again. And when my husband sensed my heart was no longer in it, well…”
She shrugged, as if trying to slough off the intervening years in a single gesture of surrender.
35
I walked Litzi home well after midnight, but didn’t stay. Both of us felt that my proper place that night was under my father’s roof. Too restless to go straight home, I detoured into twisting lanes and alleys through the heart of the city. Even there, Vienna was never completely at peace. The troubled and the restless were forever on the prowl, shoulders hunched. Car wheels hummed out along the Ring, and the legions of surveillance cameras gazed eternally from on high.
I ended up on a narrow street I remembered from my teens-playing soccer with friends, the ball bouncing wildly off walls and door fronts, skipping crazily on the cobbles. At the end of the block was an old bookstore that had once been a favorite of my father’s, smaller than Kurzmann’s but in far better shape. I recalled the fussy old proprietor, who’d had little patience for fidgety boys, although the shop itself had been a wonder, with a richer concentration of treasure than most of Dad’s haunts. By necessity, probably, since its holdings were crammed into a single square room with only a tiny office in the back.
I peered through the picture window into the gloom of its high shelves. A streetlamp lit the view. A tapping noise made me whirl around, but it was only water dripping from a downspout. I read the familiar name painted on the plate glass: Der Flugel, German for “The Wing.” Then I noticed something that had never registered before. Beneath the name was a tiny drawing of a piano. Flugel was also slang for a grand piano, because of its winglike shape when viewed from above.
In the middle of a busy day, with people and cars hurtling by, I doubt my mind would have been focused enough to make the connection that occurred next. But in the calm darkness of two a.m. the tiny piano stirred up an old name from deep in the readings of my past: Max Flugel, nickname Das Klavier, or the Piano.
He was a minor but remarkable character who first appeared in Lemaster’s A Lesson in Tradecraft — Flugel, the can-do fixer who ran a safe house in Hamburg. He also had another distinction, if my memory was correct. He once had an encounter with Heinz Klarmann, the freelance operative modeled after Lothar Heinemann.
Now the store had my full attention, especially as I recalled Lothar’s cryptic words about where he’d stashed the last remaining copy of his unpublished novel. It was “hiding in plain sight,” he’d said, and if I wanted to find it I had to “think like a book scout, think like a spy.”
I checked the store hours posted on the door. They opened at 10:00 a.m.
When I got back to Dad’s I pulled down his copy of A Lesson in Tradecraft and found the following exchange, set at Flugel’s safe house in Hamburg. It comes just after Heinz Klarmann’s narrow escape from a would-be assassin:
Klarmann stood a few feet inside the entrance, dripping November raindrops on the tatty carpet. He’d already tracked mud onto the floor, and Flugel watched from the end of the hallway in obvious disapproval, shaking his head and clicking his tongue.
“Shoes off, if you please!”
Klarmann grumpily complied.
“That jacket as well. Use the hook by the door. The filthy hat, too.”
“So is this to be the dockage fee for safe harbor? Perpetual attack by an anal-retentive key holder? Perhaps I should take my chances with the Russians.”
“Your life, your call. My house, my rules.”
For a moment Klarmann hesitated, as if actually weighing the option. Then he frowned and shrugged off his jacket, grumbling all the while. But he left the hat in place, and Flugel held his tongue even as Klarmann walked defiantly toward the stairs, the soggy hat dripping as regularly as the ticking of a clock.
And there you had it. A fussy proprietor named Flugel offering “safe harbor” for Lothar Heinemann’s alter ego. One didn’t even have to think like a spy to make this connection. Certain that I was on the threshold of discovery, I slept soundly.
In the light of morning I was more uncertain about my epiphany. It felt like a stretch, mere coincidence. But it was still intriguing enough to check out. I took precautions to keep from being followed, by boarding a series of trams and buses, then doubling back until I strolled up to Der Flugel shortly before 10:15. The door rattled open. No need for a bell in a shop this small.
An older man with wisps of hair plastered across a shiny scalp nodded to me from a stepladder. He was shelving books in the Mozart section, which took up half a wall.
“Guten Tag.”
I replied in kind and went straight for the fiction. The books were neatly alphabetized by author. Several nice finds leaped out at me, but when I reached the H ’s there was nothing by Lothar Heinemann; the volumes jumped directly from Heinrich Heine to Hermann Hesse.
I checked a few other categories-Local Interest, European History. No luck. So much for my moment of inspiration. I cleared my throat. The fellow on the ladder responded immediately.
“Are you looking for something special?”
“Do you have anything by Lothar Heinemann?”
