Viennese bar caused his head to tingle, he made a special effort to walk straight when he left, so that his shadows would have nothing of interest to report.
Over that first week he established a dull routine for his watchers’ reports, wondering all the time if Ludwig really expected him to walk to the embassy on Ebendorferstra?e, drag Josef Lochert outside, and announce that he was the local rezident. Maybe he did. Instead, Brano gave him tedium. That, within the confines of his comfortable imprisonment, was rebellion enough.
On the second day, Brano had purchased a book- Strategie Ouvriere et Necapitalisme, by Andre, Gorz-visited his local park, and wandered the streets of Vienna. To avoid anything of interest, he hid his distaste for the monoliths of the old Habsburg regime, the equestrian statues and palaces from a time when even his own country was ruled from this capital. Although he sometimes paused to consider baskets of painted eggs sold by old women from the countryside, he spoke to no one save the occasional waitress.
The sunburned man followed him most days, and by Wednesday he seemed to have caught a cold-he wiped his nose with the side of his hand all the way through the Volksgarten. Brano considered offering him his handkerchief, but instead stopped a moment by the Temple of Theseus, with its naked young man whose genitals were covered by a leaf. The concrete base read DER KRAFI UND SCHONHEIT UNSERER JUGEND. The strength and beauty of our youth.
It made as little sense to him then as it had seven months ago, waking up with a headache and no identity.
“Melange,” said the waitress as she placed an Austrian caffe latte on the table. “And water.”
“Thank you very much.”
The waitress began to turn, then paused, looking at the book on the table. “Is that Andre Gorz?”
Brano tilted his head. “It is.”
“I find his analyses a little weak, but he has some good ideas, don’t you think?”
“I haven’t read much yet.”
She squatted so her head was just above the table and lowered her voice. “Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I think in the end he’s becoming too much of an apologist for capitalism. And of course they eat this up. Anyone who suggests that violent revolution isn’t necessary is just not seeing things straight.”
“That’s a good point,” said Brano. “I’m not from here-”
“I know. Your accent.”
“Do you think Austria’s ripe for revolution?”
“Oh, I wish!” She laughed expressively. “But no. There’s too much American money coming in. If Austria were left on its own, then recession would come, and there would be a move toward revolution. But everyone here thinks the Americans can do no wrong. As if they’re saving us from some horrible fate.” She tapped the table with a long, red-painted fingernail. “I was in Zagreb last year. No one can tell me those Yugoslavs are hating their lives. They own their own apartments. Half of them have bought a summer home on credit. I can’t even afford my rent!”
“More people should travel.”
“You’re not kidding.” The waitress glanced back, then stood up. “I suppose I should get back, so I can pay my rent. Geez. What a scam.”
Brano smiled.
It was good to break the silence, good for his head. Days spent inside himself led to unreal perspectives. This was why the intelligence services of the world used silence to tame their subjects. Emotions became too acute, and paranoid suspicions became facts. This was what silence had done to Jakob Bieniek.
Brano found the waitress, paid for his coffee, and added a handsome tip.
“For the Revolution,” he said, and she winked at him conspiratorially.
His sunburned shadow followed him from the Espresso Arabia, down Kohlmarkt, and to a bus that brought them back to Mariahilfer, a few streets before his. Then he backtracked, turning down Theoboldgasse, thinking of betrayal.
He could not be sure, but a week of silence had begun to take its toll, undermining his conviction that he was less a victim than a pawn in a grandiose plan dreamed up by Yalta. All he could see was a series of betrayals. The Doctor had not done what he had promised outside Budapest, and Pavel Jast’s betrayals were blatant. Captain Rasko, it turned out, was only interested in closing his little murder investigation as easily as possible, and, yes, he had even begun to trust Soroka-there were moments during that long ride through Hungary when he almost accepted that Jan simply had pity on his situation. Brano hated his own naivete.
Most important, Colonel Laszlo Cerny had ignored the evidence Brano had collected on the Bieniek murder and had obviously been behind the Doctor’s failure to appear at the Madai farm. He’d allowed Brano to be questioned with a car battery in an Austrian safe house for a month. Now, five days into his comfortable imprisonment, no messages had been left for him at the Eszterhazy Park dead drop. He was beginning to suspect that Cerny, and therefore the Ministry, had abandoned him.
But he would continue, because there was nothing else left for him to do.
Brano paused at the corner of Eszterhazy Park. His shadow stood at the other end of the block, wiping his nose again. Brano crossed the park and sat on his bench near the base of the enormous flak tower-a remnant of Hitler’s last-ditch efforts to defend his Reich-then opened his book. Capitalist planning exists for the express purpose of maintaining the existing social relationships and orientations, of consolidating capitalism by rationalizing it, and, by coordinating private and public decisions, of reducing the inherent risks…
But he was barely reading, distracted by the stiffness in his left pocket: the bent nail he’d extracted from the frame of his sofa that morning. Around it he had wrapped and taped a piece of paper on which was written a series of numbers that, when decoded, read WEB-GASSE 25, v/3-b. SEV.
He stared blankly at the book for almost an hour, the zbrka of his thoughts keeping him warm, before he finally closed the book, stood up, and walked three trees behind his bench. He transferred the nail to his right pocket, the one he’d ripped a hole in, and unzipped his pants. There were some Japanese tourists taking photographs of the flak tower, but they didn’t notice him. As he urinated, he dropped the nail through his pant leg and stamped it into the wet ground.
26 MARCH 1967, SUNDAY
The Cafe Mozart was around the corner from the Hotel Sacher, at Albertinaplatz’s crosscurrent of traffic, across from the Kapuzinerkirche’s equestrian statue. Brano had walked the whole way into town, crossing empty streets and closed storefronts. Even for a Sunday, Vienna seemed to have shut down. The vacant buildings of the Museum Quarter were stone sentries over an evacuated city. Only once did he spot a crowd, hovering outside a church, but he was running late and didn’t want to investigate.
Brano paused in front of a pastry counter laden with Austrian sweets. The cafe was full, perhaps the only open place in town. Ludwig waved from the corner, where he sat with a small black briefcase beside his crossed legs. Brano passed four old women in mink stoles smoking at a round table as the Austrian rose to shake his hand. “A very happy Easter to you, Brano.”
“Oh, so that’s what it is.”
“What?” asked Ludwig as he waved to a waiter.
“Nothing.”
“Melange good for you?”
“Of course.”
“One melange,” he told the young black-and-white-suited waiter. “And a small whiskey.”
“It’s early, Ludwig.”
“And it’s a holiday. Tell me,” he said once the waiter had left, “how are you settling in? You look tired. There are bags under your eyes.”
Brano looked at himself in the beveled mirror behind Ludwig’s head; the Austrian was right. “I’m not sleeping well.”
“Well, that’s bad news. Loneliness can be a difficult thing.”
