himself into a standing position. “I suppose I should take another bath.”
Gerhard sniffed. “I was hoping you’d be the one to say that.”
The warming water ran into the tub, and Brano gazed at himself in the mirror above the sink. The weak half gave his face a suspicious look, like a wicked character in one of those films Ludwig loved. His left eyelid hung low, and his left cheek, beneath his spotty beard, had become flaccid. There was a razor behind the mirror, but he didn’t use it. He did use Gerhard’s toothbrush to scrape the detrius from inside his mouth. Then he sank into the water and, briefly, plunged his head under.
He had panicked-he knew this. After the one strand connecting him to his home had broken-or he had broken it, by killing Josef Lochert-Brano had panicked and fled. He hadn’t even worried about the border guards along the lake, had only plunged in without forethought; this, in the end, worried him more than the possible stroke. He had, in the space of a few minutes in a Viennese bathroom, collapsed. He could have stayed in Vienna, could have even marched out to that shadow waiting on the street and explained that the Vienna rezident had tried to kill him. Ludwig would have been amused, but in the end he would have been satisfied that Yalta considered Brano a defector and was trying to silence him.
He came up and took a breath. He wiped his eyes with his right hand and blinked at the bathroom.
His mistakes were now irrelevant. Brano Sev was on the Austrian border, physically less than he had been, and he could either stay under the guardianship of these strangers, trying to find a way into Hungary, or he could return to Vienna.
That second possibility scared him most, so he set it aside for the moment.
Gerhard could perhaps be trusted, but the doctor was an unknown. He met with numerous people each day and had a wife, and one loose word to the wrong person could lead anywhere. The doctor was Hungarian, and as such he respected the legalities of paperwork; he would certainly feel the need to file something on the crippled, waterlogged stranger in need of his care.
So Brano would leave.
He could not walk through the border, because the Austrian post would be looking for him. He would have to wade through the marsh again, or find a point south of Sopron to make the farmland trek to the barbed wire. But in his state, that would be impossible.
And so, the option that he held at an arm’s length came back to him.
Everything was in Vienna. In its intrigues lay the answers he’d been pursuing. In Vienna lay what was left of his career. And in Vienna, he thought as he stared at the murky water, lived Dijana Frankovic.
He unplugged the tub and reached for the towel. Insecurely, he stood and dried himself, then slipped into the robe. Before leaving, he squatted by the floor drain and popped it open. The pistol was wet, so he used the towel on it, then dropped it into the pocket of the robe.
Gerhard took out a bottle of Monopolowa potato vodka. He offered a toast to Brano’s successful escape from the Empire, and Brano accepted the toast cordially. The liquor warmed him, but after that he drank no more. He refilled his glass and affected sleepiness, but each time spilled his shot into the rug beneath the table, watching as Gerhard, always willing to accept one of Brano’s inventive toasts-to Gerhard’s health, to the spawning zander of the lake, to an end to the troubling situations history forces upon us-became more drunk and exhausted. Finally, around one, when Gerhard was having trouble remaining in his chair, Brano helped him to the bed. “I’ll stay on the couch tonight,” Brano told him. “You deserve a decent night’s rest.”
While the old man slept, Brano counted out two hundred schillings and left them on the kitchen table, then took one of Gerhard’s overcoats from a rack beside the front door. Inside the pocket, he found the keys to his car.
There were no lights around the house, and for a moment it felt like Bobrka, with its treacherous holes. He drove south, to where the roads again became erratic and the earth soft. This time he did remember, and repeatedly played the geography of his Austrian entrance in his head.
He parked near the marsh where Gerhard had found him, and only now understood that he had been at the wrong place. Had he not been incapacitated by that stroke, he would have struggled from one end of the marsh to the other and come out still in Austria. He had to go farther.
His limp troubled him as he walked, but not as much as the low guard towers he knew were hiding not far away in the darkness. When an occasional flash of light came his way, he lay flat in the grass and waited, then, each time with more difficulty, climbed to his feet and moved on.
Then he spotted the upturned blue rowboat on the bank of the marsh that he and the Sorokas had once waded across.
He looked up. The clear sky was choked with stars.
He squatted in the water alongside the cold hull. Then he plunged his hand into the water.
23 APRIL 1967, SUNDAY
“ So, I don’t want to be rude, but what happened to you?”
Brano looked away from the road at the truck driver, a big man with a mustache that curled up at the ends.
“You get into a fight or something?”
“Never know who you’ll run into late at night.”
“That’s for sure,” said the driver. “I once picked up a guy north of Graz. Skinny kid, hair a little long, but nice enough looking. We started talking and he tells me he’s trying to stop the war in Vietnam.” He grunted. “A little kid. So I ask him how he expects to do that. With this, he tells me, and pulls out a gun as big as my forearm. Can you believe it?”
“Unbelievable,” said Brano, involuntarily touching the weight in his pocket.
“At the next gas station you can bet I drove off before he was back from the toilet.”
Brano gave the man a half smile and returned to the road. The sun had just crested the hills behind them, casting long shadows, and ahead the outskirts of Vienna were coming into view. He’d parked Gerhard’s Volkswagen on the northern shore of the lake and walked with a dead milkman’s wet passport to the highway. He didn’t have to wait long for a ride, and this talkative man, shipping lumber from eastern Hungary to Vienna, had kept him awake.
“I’m Heinrich. What’s your name?”
“Jakob,” said Brano. “Jakob Bieniek. You can let me off at Floridsdorf.”
“I can take you through the center if you want. I’ve got to check in with my office.”
“Thank you.”
He got out at the Museum District and took a tram north along the Ringstra?e. The morning was cool, breezy, and gray, the shaking tram filled with only a few early risers. They yawned into their hands, but Brano was too exhausted to do even that. More than anything, more than even Dijana Frankovic, he wanted a bed. He got out at Schottenring and crossed the street. The embassy was on Ebendorferstra?e, between Universitatsstra?e and Liebiggasse, so he took a parallel street to Liebiggasse, then approached the corner and waited.
There was the regular uniformed guard, standing outside his pillbox with a machine gun hanging off his back. He was trying to light a cigarette with matches. Through the iron fence, a ground-floor light was on. At the very least, Brano would be something to brighten someone’s otherwise dull Sunday morning.
The street was half full of parked cars. Those nearest him were empty, blocking the cars farther up the road. He stepped out to get a better look, then slipped back behind the corner when the guard tossed down his empty book of matches, looked around, and crossed the road. He approached a car Brano could not see and bent over the window. The guard spoke a second, reached through the window, and brought a lighter to the cigarette in his mouth.
Brano backtracked and crossed Ebendorferstra?e two blocks away, then approached again from the opposite side. From this corner, he could not see the embassy but could plainly see the gray Renault with the half-open window and the cigarette smoke misting out. Inside, Ludwig’s crew-cut employee looked exhausted.
At ten, stores began to open, and he bought necessities-toothbrush and paste, a razor and shaving cream,
