“Yes, comrade.”
“And you’re wired.”
“It’s taken care of.”
“Good,” said Romek. He scratched his cheek. “I’m not going to threaten you, because I don’t have to. You know what will happen if you try to get away.”
“Yes,” said Brano. “I know.”
The Hotel Inter-Continental sat at the far end of Johannesgasse, a gray, glass-plated monolith dominating the Stadtpark. The embassy Mercedes dropped him off a couple of blocks short of it, then drove on. He walked past the wide front entrance, avoiding the lobby that would be packed with businessmen and tourists and informers of all nations. No doubt Ludwig’s men were lounging there now. He instead walked around to Am Heumarkt, where, next to the Putzerei Wascherei, he found an open door marked
PERSONALEINGANG
STAFF ENTRANCE
HOTEL INTER-CONTINENTAL
WIEN
He glanced back. On the opposite corner of the intersection, hands deep in his pockets, Romek leaned against a store window. Brano entered the building.
In the long tiled corridor, he passed carts overflowing with the day’s dirty towels and uniforms, and when staff members passed him he avoided their eyes. Not obtrusively, but in a casual way that suggested he was a preoccupied man who belonged here. It was a difficult look that took years of experience to acquire, and was made no easier by the bruise creeping up his neck. But he did not hesitate, and that look brought him to the stairwell at the end of the corridor.
When he reached the fourth floor, he had to stop to catch his breath before continuing to the fifth. The corridor was empty, save a maid’s cart with cleaning fluids and towels and sheets beside an open door.
Room 516 lay at the end, by a window that overlooked the skating rink behind the hotel. Children and adults slid around, sometimes falling, helping one another up, then continuing on their circular path. As he stared, he listened to the door beside him, waiting a full minute. He heard a television giving news in German. A toilet flushed; a door opened and closed. Bed-springs. Brano reached into his left pocket and pressed the switch. Although there was no noise, he could feel, beneath his arm, the vibration of the recording wire being pulled into the take-up reel. He turned to the door and knocked.
The television silenced and the eyehole darkened. Then the door was open, Andrezej Sev smiling at him.
His father’s face, this close, was as it had always been in the photographs that filled that guest room in his mother’s house. There was the addition of age, a beard, and when he smiled his front teeth were clearly visible- clean and white and strong. But this was truly his father.
Brano touched his own front tooth. “What happened?”
Andrezej Sev looked confused a moment. “Oh, this!” He still lisped his s. “American dentist-he capped the tooth. I see yours are looking good as well.”
“I got braces some years ago.”
“So we both share the sin of vanity. But what happened to your neck?”
“I’m clumsy.”
Andrezej Sev kept a poor home. Dirty clothes lay in a loose pile in the corner, and the sheets had tumbled off the bed, as if after a night of hectic sex. This was nothing like the brutally tidy farmer he’d once known.
“Ludwig went crazy looking for you,” said his father, smiling. “He called me every day demanding your whereabouts.”
“He’s given up?”
“It seems he was transferred to a new desk.”
Brano opened his mouth, then paused. “Accounting?”
“That’s what I heard.”
Standing here beside his father, he found himself regretting Ludwig’s demotion. Brano placed his hat on the small desk, where, beside a portable Remington typewriter, lay a short stack of typed pages.
“Your memoirs?”
Andrezej Sev flushed. “Letters,” he said. “To my family.”
“Your American family.”
“My wife’s named Shirley. From Tennessee.”
“Tennessee.” Brano settled in the desk chair, picturing Loretta Reich from the Committee for Liberty and her expressions. “Children?”
“Two girls.”
“And they have names?”
“Stacy and Jennifer.”
Brano, despite himself, cracked a smile.
“I didn’t want to burden them with foreign names.”
“I imagine.”
Andrezej Sev, still standing, looked at his feet. “Brani?’
“Yes?”
“How’s your mother?”
“She’s fine,” he said, wondering why the question, from this man, irritated him. “I mean, no. She feels her life’s a waste without you. And Klara, beyond the bad paint job, married an idiot. But she seems happy with her life.”
Andrezej Sev settled on the bed and patted his thighs, his voice deepening. “No one’s happy with their life. You don’t fool yourself into believing that kind of rubbish, do you?”
“That would be asking a lot. But my life functions. I make do.”
“Make do.” His father smiled. “I used to think that way, before I came west. It’s hard to explain, but when you arrived in Bobrka and told me to leave, I was almost… well, I was relieved.”
Brano adjusted himself in the chair, crossed one leg over the other, and looked at Andrezej Sev looking at his son’s knee.
“You remember what the war was like for me,” he said. “A German factory. I’d return home, and your mother was-she was… I don’t want to talk ill of her, but she wasn’t easy to live with. But back then I thought like you do. Happiness wasn’t what this world had to offer. Survival, yes. Survival and making do. Then I got out of that world. First to a displaced persons camp in Hamburg. There were some American soldiers there, collecting information from emigres. I made friends with them. And by “forty-eight they asked me to join a new organization.”
“The Office of Policy Coordination.”
He nodded.
“We’re all apparatchiks for someone.”
His father squinted, then went on. “I moved to Virginia and helped train agents.”
“How long did you do this?”
Andrezej Sev shrugged. “Until “fifty-three? Yes, “fifty-three.”
“Until the rollback operation was shut down.”
The elder Sev got up and took an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes from the dresser. He offered one, but Brano declined. So he lit one for himself and sat on the bed again. “We’re getting off track. The point is that my relationship to happiness changed. I still knew I’d never achieve happiness, but the Americans firmly believe you must try to find it. It keeps them in motion.”
This was a different man. The younger Andrezej Sev would have never gone into lengthy discussions of the intangibles of happiness or even love. Andrezej Sev had had the classic provincial mind-survival and subsistence. America had changed him into a creature with the leisure time to worry about such things; he’d become a creature of weekend television and football games and Main Street parades, while his new country’s soldiers slaughtered villagers in the jungles of Asia. And he’d become proud-pride was all over him. They were strangers on opposite sides of an iron fence.
