Which was why, drifting into an uncomfortable sleep, he began to picture a life in the Salzkammergut, a house on a lake, the simple existence of chopping firewood and visiting the local market, of mixing with the kinds of farmers who had once populated his childhood. Dijana was there, with her tarot cards and acoustic guitar and her inventive syntax. It was a world where the cost of any skirmish was only hurt feelings.
That’s when he considered it first in its entirety. An escape. Finding her was simple. A car could be acquired. And under the names Herr and Frau Bieniek they would check into a quaint pension surrounded by mountains.
A first step, until he’d wandered the local graveyards to find a stillborn child born the same year as him, 1917, whose identity he could borrow.
He sank into his dream uncritically, slipping through years, houses in southern France or the Italian coast, and wondered why he’d never thought through all of this before.
The Jazzklub Abel was on the other side of the Danube Canal, over the Marienbrucke, past the Church of the Brothers of Mercy, at Gro?e Moihrengasse 26. The evening shadows hid the grime as he walked down from Johannes-von-Gott Platz, and through the front door he entered a courtyard fallen into disrepair. There was no sign of Ludwig’s men; perhaps he’d given up. In the back, beside a gnarled fence, was a flat, abandoned apartment building with a small, hand-painted sign- JAZZKLUB ABEL — attached to its windowless door. It was almost seven o’clock, but he heard nothing from inside. The door was locked. He rapped with the knuckles of his right hand.
After a minute, he knocked again and heard heavy footsteps on the other side. Then the door opened, and he was faced with a large man in his sixties, bald, wearing tortoise-shell glasses like the British spy in the film Brano had seen a long time ago.
Ja? ”
Brano tried to smile. “Is Dijana here? I’m a friend.”
“Dee?” Abel Cohen frowned as he made the connection. “So you’re the one.”
Brano shrugged.
“Well, come in.”
He opened the door for Brano, then trotted down concrete stairs without looking back. Brano followed him into a long basement with a low, arched ceiling blackened by decades of cigarettes. An empty wooden stage sat at the far end, and crowded throughout were round tables and chairs.
“No business?” asked Brano.
“We’re just opening,” Abel said tonelessly, then walked behind a wooden bar through a door. “Dee!” he called as he disappeared.
“ Da? ”
Whispers.
Then she was in the doorway, wiping her fingers quickly with a white towel. “Oh, Brani.”
She flung herself at him, kissing his face as she held on to his neck. Each time he opened his mouth to speak, she covered it with hers, humming mmm. Finally, she pulled back.
“Where you have been?” she said with feigned anger.
“I’ve been working.”
“My spy ” she said. “And you feel… how you feel?”
“Excuse me.”
They both looked up at Abel, who stood in the kitchen doorway.
“I need to open up. And a cigarette.”
“You need a cigarette?” Brano reached into his pocket.
“No,” said Abel. “I’ll have a cigarette outside.”
“ Danke, Abelski,” said Dijana. “We’ll talk quickly.”
Abel, more sheepishly than his size would suggest, jogged up the stairs. They felt a cool wind as he opened the door and stepped outside.
“He is good, no?”
“He seems so.”
“Tell me, dragi. You stop to working and I take care of you. You are sick. We go to Salzkammergut?”
Her expression was hopeful in a way that only women can make convincing. Childish and naive. Brano had spent a lifetime taking apart the imperfections in earnest expressions, but with Dijana it was impossible. Her earnest expressions were exactly what they seemed. He imagined that face in that house on that lake. Earnest, trusting.
During his walk from the hotel to here, he’d gone through that dream again, but critically, picking it apart, analyzing it. There was only one flaw he could find, but it brought down everything: What would the lies, and a mind like his, corrupted from a young age, do over the years to a woman who could not be taken apart, who did not calculate and scheme? On the Marienbrucke the answer came to him: They would ruin her.
He said, “There’s something I have to tell you first.”
“ Da,” she said. “I know. You is a spy for your country. You tell me that.”
“There’s more,” he said. “You have to know this.”
“Okay.” She nodded, her face very serious. “I am on the ready.”
What he wanted to do now, more than anything, was to come up with some innocuous fiction-that he had no money, or that he was married. Or even the simple truth that he was leaving. But despite the sometimes comical effect of her grammatical blunders, Dijana Frankovic was the most serious of women. She had spent the last years rebuilding her life from nothing and would not accept half measures. Her decisions-whether her decision to be with him or her decision to take on a low-paying waitress job because she’d uncovered the fraud of her previous career-were absolute. She had more integrity than anyone else in this cold city, and she deserved the truth. So he said, “Bertrand. I was involved in his death.”
She let go of him. “You kill Bertrand?”
“No,” he said, “but I arranged it. I believed at the time that he was selling information. He worked for us-for me-and I thought he was selling our secrets to the West. It was a mistake. I was wrong. But I had reason to believe it. There was a reason, it seemed, at the time.”
He was babbling, so he stopped. Her expression was more like surprise than anger, and perhaps that’s why he clarified it for her.
“I ordered his execution.”
Footsteps clattered behind him. Two young men-Wolfgang and another long-haired friend-followed by Abel. They all nodded hello as they passed.
“I must to working,” said Dijana. She brought a hand to her mouth, the nail of her thumb caught between her teeth.
“I had to tell you.”
“ Da,” she said, staring at some point in the air between them. “Thank you for your honestly. But I must to working.”
She turned away; and he, feeling as if he were at that party again, stoned, wanting nothing more than to keep this remarkable illusion, reached out and grabbed her wrist.
With more speed than he would have expected, she spun around and struck his face with her open hand.
“Get away from me, Brano Sev.”
28 APRIL 1967, FRIDAY
Brano raised the melange to his lips, sniffing the frothed milk sprinkled with cinnamon, but found no scent. It was fatigue, he knew, the result of a night in an uncomfortable bed, reviewing each moment leading up to that still-sore bump on his head. He drank the coffee quickly, feeling it scald his throat, then motioned to the waiter for another. He lit a cigarette.
It was shocking, the amount of abuse his poor body had survived.
He’d been in Austria over two months now, but it felt like two years. Last night he’d replayed all those people in an endless loop. Lutz and Nanz, Ludwig and Franz. Monika at her eternal bar, and even the pitiful Sasha Lytvyn.
