won’t dirty yourself with Austrian soil.” He took Brano’s empty cup. “Better go now. The manager will be checking on me soon. But take this.” He reached behind the counter and took out a copy of The Spark. “Keep it. You might be interested in page two.”
When Brano reached Kerepesi ut, having taken a tram south from the bridge through the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh districts, Madai was rounding the corner behind him. They met beside the truck without shaking hands. “I’ve been around this block four times,” said Madai. “Standing still makes me feel conspicuous.”
They left town again along the same road, neither speaking until they were out of the city. Brano cleared his throat. “So you made contact?”
“Yes, yes.”
“And?”
“And it’s all settled, Comrade Sev.”
“You don’t want to tell me?”
“There’s nothing to tell. We’ll be met by someone else, who will take over.”
“The man you contacted?”
“Probably.”
Brano looked at Madai’s hand tapping the wheel, and the blank eyes watching the road. He imagined Madai complaining to his contact about the ex-state security officer who came with him into town, and the contact, alarmed, reminding Madai of the techniques of vagueness. Don’t give him silence-let him trust you. But avoid details at all cost.
Madai kept the plans vague with the Sorokas at dinner. Jan nodded; he knew the routine. But Lia shook her head over her soup. She asked Brano if it all made sense to him as well.
Brano said it did, but he was still distracted by the newspaper he’d dumped in a garbage can on the edge of Margit Island. He had opened The Spark during that long walk back through the woods, and before scanning the headlines on page two, he had seen that it was yesterday’s paper. That only made his surprise more acute when he found the photograph of himself halfway down the second page, an old one from his file, under the headline:
MAJOR BRANO SEV, ARCH-MURDERER, FLEES THE COUNTRY!
The words had nearly doubled him over; he had to fight to avoid vomiting in the trash can. And it wasn’t until that drive back to the farm that he understood what it meant. News of his escape had reached The Spark on the same day he had left. Pavel Jast had learned of it from his friend Roman, then passed the news on to his superiors, who had expediently printed it in The Spark. Pavel Jast had been working for Yalta all along.
Lia was saying something.
“Yes?”
“What did you do in town, Comrade Sev?”
“Since I couldn’t meet our host’s friend, I walked by the Danube.”
“Pretty, was it?”
“I prefer our stretch of the Tisa. Not as grand, maybe, but it has its charm.”
“I like to swim,” said Petre. His head was just high enough to rest his chin on the edge of the table. “I’m a great swimmer.”
“I’m sure you are,” said Brano.
Jan rubbed his hair. “Eat, Petre. We’ll take you swimming in a few days.”
16 FEBRUARY 1967, THURSDAY
Again, Brano slept poorly. He lay in bed listening for feet in the grass outside, whispers, and a boot kicking in the front door, followed by shouts, screams, and perhaps even gunshots.
But az Orvos’s men did not arrive that night, nor the next morning, as the Sorokas used Madai’s cards to play a game that lasted hours. Madai spent the morning in the fields around the house in a heavy coat, examining the stunted, long-harvested cornstalks, while Brano browsed a Hungarian book on maize cultivation. He learned in the introduction that evidence had been found in Central American caves that maize domestication had been going on for eight thousand years. That page had been marked by a fold in the corner, and he wondered if Madai, when he questioned what he did with his life, cited this fact to prove he was part of an ancient tradition that gave his pesticides and harvesting machines symbolic power.
The silence that day was unique. It was a day of waiting, and in such a situation conversation becomes banal. Over cards, Jan sometimes sat back and chewed the inside of his cheeks, opened his mouth and, after reflection, closed it again. Lia was less indecisive; her jaw remained clamped shut all morning. Brano looked up from his book at Petre, who crawled around with a wooden model car Madai had given him, but even he did not make engine sounds.
Madai returned from the fields with wind-flushed cheeks and made lunch, recruiting Petre to help plate the sandwiches. When the boy dropped one on the floor and grew visibly upset, Madai assured him that he’d happily make twelve more if necessary. Over the meal, he told everyone that it would happen today, but not even he knew more than that. Brano doubted this but let it go. Despite the man’s petty lies, Brano found himself pitying this farmer-turned-counterrevolutionary. Because when the Doctor’s men arrived to take the Sorokas back home, Adam Madai, after interrogation, would end up somewhere in his fields with a bullet in the back of his head. The men were probably already here, crouched along the edge of the fields, watching.
Dwelling on the newspaper article gave him few answers. Yalta had commissioned Pavel Jast to kill Bieniek and frame Brano for the murder. Why? To give Brano a reason to escape with the Sorokas and track their route-and, he assumed, to close it down. Jast, using the murder as an excuse, spoke to Soroka, through Roman, to convince him to bring along Brano.
But killing an innocent man and framing Brano for it, then sending the story to The Spark — why this large machinery of conspiracy for such a simple case? The Sorokas weren’t important, at least not important enough to warrant this.
It reminded him of a phrase the Lieutenant General liked to use to describe the mind of counterintelligence, and particularly the mind of Colonel Cerny: “a byzantine imagination.” And he knew from experience that this kind of thinking could seldom be unraveled by a single agent. It was even possible that Jakob Bieniek had been connected to another operation for which he needed to be terminated, which then proved useful for Brano’s situation as well.
There was no telling, because Cerny had kept him in the dark. Perhaps Brano had not been brought back inside after all.
But there was another side at work. The West had given their amateur agent, Jan Soroka, Dijana Frankovic’s name as a cover. The Americans wanted something from him. Information, or simply him. They had not gotten anything out of him in Bobrka, and it was unlikely they’d try anything in Hungary. They wanted him in Austria, the one place he wanted to avoid. His safety lay on this side of the Curtain, with the Doctor’s men, and on the other side his future was a black, inarticulate mist.
So when, a little after lunch, they heard an automobile engine outside, then footsteps. Brano twitched. He took a breath, waiting for the boots to kick the front door, shattering hinges, but exhaled when he only heard the soft rap of knuckles on wood.
Madai opened the door and kissed the cheeks of a small blonde woman whose thin jawbone shifted as she smiled. Under her arm was a brown paper package.
Madai turned to them. “Time to go.”
The package contained three white outfits that the adults were instructed to put on. The clothes were loose fitting, like pajamas, and when they stepped outside in their coats they saw a small white box-truck with a beefy, white-uniformed man standing beside its back doors.
“Don’t be afraid,” the woman said in Hungarian as they approached the truck. “The others are too full of drugs to be a bother.”
“What did she say?” asked Lia.
Brano said, “The truck is headed for a mental home. There are real patients in the back, but they’re too drugged to cause trouble.”
