“We will, but I need a few more days to figure things out. Right now, I’m confused.”
“ Zbrka? ”
“ Da,” he said. “ Zbrka.”
“What you must figure out?”
He sighed, staring at her ear as he brushed down her hair. “I never left my job.”
“You never-” She shook her head. “You say that again.”
He continued staring at her ear to avoid her eyes. “I’m still working for the Ministry for State Security. That’s why I’m in Vienna. And now I have to decide what to do.”
When he finally looked at her eyes, they were wet. She did not know whether to be angry or not.
“You’re going to the jazz club now?”
“ Da,” she muttered. “I must to work.”
“Then work,” he said. “I’ll find you in a few days, and hopefully we can go to the lake. Really.” He raised her chin with a forefinger. “It’s the only thing I want now.”
She nodded.
“And, of course, you didn’t see me.”
“Of course,” she said, and punched him in the ribs.
In the entryway she wiped some tears from her eyes, then kissed him. She straightened the lapels of his coat.
“You will to grow out your hair again?”
“You don’t like it?”
She snorted when she laughed, and Brano hugged her. Over her shoulder, he saw the bulletin board of notices for future sermons, and one caught his eye. It was for the fourteenth of May, to celebrate when the Holy Spirit descended as tongues of fire and a rushing wind, and gave Jesus” disciples the power to speak so that all languages could understand them.
The fourteenth of May, a Sunday, was Pentecost.
She pushed him back and gave a teary smile. “You will to talk with your father?”
“I will, Dijana. I will.”
“Good,” she said. “I think it good we know our parents.”
26 APRIL 1967, WEDNESDAY
Brano chose the Cafe-Restaurant Europa because of the telephone booth across the street from its wide windows, which allowed an unhindered view of its long interior. He first bought tea in a paper cup from the pastry counter and told them he would need to reserve a table that afternoon for a business meeting. “How many?” asked the woman behind the counter. Brano said he didn’t know, but if he could have their phone number, he would call an hour before they arrived. She wrote it down for him.
He crossed to the telephone booth and dialed the Hotel Inter-Continental. A desk clerk patched him through to room 516. The voice that picked up was deeper than he remembered, but there was still that lisp to each s, caused, he had always assumed, by that chipped front tooth.
“Yes?”
“It’s me.”
“Brani. I’m so glad you called.”
“The Cafe-Restaurant Europa, on the corner of Kartner and Donnergasse. You’ll be here in fifteen minutes if you leave now.”
Brano hung up. He had also chosen the Europa for its distance from the Inter-Continental. His father could arrive quickly enough, but not so quickly that Ludwig, with his resources, would not arrive first.
But over the next fifteen minutes, as he stood in an apartment doorway and watched cars glide by, sometimes honk, and Viennese cross the street, read papers, and scold children, nothing struck him as suspicious.
Though there were plenty of holes in the story, he felt he understood the outlines. The Committee for Liberty in the Captive Nations was planning a coup d’etat. He could doubt this if he were only going by Lochert’s word, but Jan’s friend Gregor had been killed after spotting Brano’s father and a Yalta Boulevard officer at a nuclear reactor. Lutz had made no secret of a May event, and Bertrand Richter, on the night of his murder, had let the day slip: 14 May, which turned out to be the kind of Christian holiday the Committee for Liberty would naturally choose-tongues of fire and rushing wind.
But why? Why had Brano been drawn into a fundamentalist conspiracy? Only Dijana’s revelation suggested an answer, and when he looked up he saw the answer approaching from the east, along Himmelpfort. Though Brano had seen him before, only now, with the knowledge of who he was, could he imagine away the beard and take off years. Andrezej Fedor Sev was a little shorter than he’d been in ’45, and he’d grown thick around the torso beneath his badly pressed raincoat. The white beard gave his round, pale face a generous feel that Brano could not recall from childhood.
He reentered the phone booth and took a few breaths to get rid of that choked feeling in the back of his throat. His father stopped at the cafe door, peering through the window. Then he went inside. Perhaps for Brano’s benefit, he chose a table by the window. A waitress took his order, and he rested his chin in his hand. He seemed neither agitated nor confused by his son’s absence.
Brano took a couple of minutes to check the street again, then put a coin into the telephone.
“Europa,” said a woman.
“ Bitte, may I speak with one of your customers? He’s the older gentleman sitting next to the window, alone.”
He could see the woman behind the pastry counter look up from the phone. “Moment.”
She came up to Andrezej Sev’s table, bent over him, and spoke. He got up and went with her to the counter.
“Yes?” said Brano’s father.
“I’m afraid I’m very careful these days.”
“Brani. We could have just talked on the phone in my hotel.”
“I wanted to find out if I could trust you.”
“And? Can you?”
“Dijana said you wanted to tell me something.”
“I’d rather see you face-to-face.”
“Let’s take this in stages.”
His father nodded into the telephone, then looked around to be sure no one was listening. He was a careful man, more than when Brano was a child. “I’m the reason you were brought over. A deal with Jan Soroka-I’d help him get his family if he would lure you out.”
“I know this. But you couldn’t do it without Austrian help.”
“Yes, another deal. They called off their border guards and helped with the Hungarian side. In exchange, they were allowed to question you for a period of time.” Andrezej Sev paused. “I heard about the car battery. I’m very sorry, I didn’t think it would come to that. I won’t let it happen again.”
“Why did you want me here?”
“You’re my son, Brano. You saved me once, and when I heard what happened to you back in August-that you made a blunder-well, I thought I could save you as well. Your only safety lies on this side of the Iron Curtain.”
It was just a voice, he kept telling himself, a voice on the phone. Nonetheless, that zbrka of childhood crept upon him. As if he were a confused child returning home to his father’s stern voice, knowing he’d done something wrong but not knowing what it was. “How did you learn about that?”
“I keep an eye on my children. How’s Klara?”
“She lives in a house with bad paint.” He paused. “And I believe she hates me.
“Nonsense.”
“You couldn’t have sent a letter?”
