Cerny rubbed his temples. “They weren’t supposed to use my information. That was the deal. Not directly, at least. But some idiot in Langley began trading it with your friend Ludwig. I have no idea why. And Ludwig, with about as much subtlety as an elephant, ripped apart the network. See, the danger of conspiracies is that the more people involved, the more chance there is for idiocy. Then Richter started talking to the Russians, and it felt like the whole thing was unraveling. So you were sent in to fix the situation.”
“You would be saved from suspicion, get rid of your leak, and keep the American money coming.”
“Something like that.”
Brano looked into his face. He had thought it would look different now, Machiavellian, but it looked as paternal as it always had. “And do you believe like my father, that it doesn’t matter that this whole thing will be crushed by Russian troops within days?”
“You don’t understand,” said Cerny. “You’ve been inside too long. We’re not trying to collect power. We’re trying to weaken an evil power, the one we’ve both served all our lives.” He shifted in the seat and grinned almost bashfully. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, all this talk is disrupting my bladder.”
Brano did not hate the colonel. Hatred and love were not things that mattered in the end. He simply wanted to understand, and he could not. He could follow the stories, the arguments, even the justifications. Yes, everyone knew the system was corrupt. But even if the system is corrupt, the fact is that it is your system; it is your world.
He got out of his seat to let Cerny pass. He watched the old man move slowly down the corridor and pause at the bathroom door, look back, and smile again before going inside.
Brano had wanted it this way, for him and the colonel to speak as equals, for him to learn all he could in a secure environment. He wanted to know as much as he could before handing the colonel over to the men who would be waiting for them at the airport. And the colonel, like Ewa Nubsch, felt the need to tell Brano everything. The colonel needed to make his first confession to a friend.
He didn’t know how long he had slept; he only knew that he was waking. A voice, at first unintelligible, spoke to him through a speaker:… making our descent. Please fasten your seat belts. He opened his eyes and saw, first of all, that the seat beside him was empty.
He was on his feet. In the next seat back, a small boy stared at him, and at the front of the plane, an impatient-looking man stood beside the toilet door with his arms crossed over his chest.
That was when he knew.
He crossed the distance quickly but felt pain in his weak left leg, as if it were trying to hold him back. He reached for the locked door as the man said, “Hey-I was here first.” He pounded on it and listened, but heard only the roar of the engines.
He told the man to get back.
“Look, I was-”
Brano grabbed the man’s shirt and pushed him into a pair of empty seats, then banged again. He braced himself against the wall and shoved his right foot into the door.
It popped open a couple of inches, then slammed shut again.
Brano pushed and found resistance. As he pressed, something slid back and the door opened farther, enough for him to stick his head in.
Cerny was on the toilet, his jacket and shirt off. His knees were tight between the door and the wall, and in his forearm was a syringe.
Brano squeezed through and got the door shut again. Cerny’s blue head was tilted back against the wall, mouth open beneath that disheveled mustache. When Brano removed the syringe, the plane trembled, the flaps tilting for descent, and he had to hold the sink to steady himself.
A woman’s voice outside the door was telling him something.
Brano removed the plunger and brought it to his nose. There was no smell. And when he touched the inside with a finger, it came up dry.
Then he leaned against the door and stared at the colonel. There are many ways to kill yourself. Sometimes all it takes is a little air.
POSTLUDE
14 MAY 1967, SUNDAY
Brano Oleksy Sev paused at the top of the metro steps, a hand gripping the rail. Skodas and Trabants and Ladas shook over the cobblestones around the statue at the center of Victory Square: a handsome couple sharing the burden of a flag held aloft. It was very warm, and as he made his way along the crosswalk to Victory Park, at the beginning of Yalta Boulevard, he unbuttoned his jacket. Behind him, the Central Committee building, wide and gray, looked over everything.
He walked through the gate to where more trees were covered in fresh yellow blooms and couples settled in the grass, eating bagged lunches. At the end of the trail lay a memorial to the war dead of all centuries, a bronze soldier sitting on a boulder, his rifle lying across his knees. In front of it, the wide back of the Comrade Lieutenant General faced him. Beneath his arm was a manila folder.
“Good afternoon,” he said as Brano approached. His red alcoholic’s cheeks were puffy. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m still easily tired, but otherwise I’m all right.”
“Excellent,” the Lieutenant General said. “So you’re happy.”
“I think that would be asking a lot.”
The big man frowned. “Do you want to know?”
“Yes,” said Brano. “I do.”
There had been four men at the airport when he landed, and they didn’t wait for him to come out. They found him squatting beside Colonel Cerny’s body in the back of the plane, mute, gripping the old man’s hand.
Then, inevitably, they placed him in the back of a white Mercedes. Like Ludwig’s men, they were adept at silence. They brought him into town, him staring through the window like a tourist at the dirty Habsburg buildings that were so much smaller than the ones in Vienna. They brought him to Yalta Boulevard, number 36.
He found himself dreaming of Austrian interrogation techniques when they tied him to a hard chair in the middle of a concrete cell, then turned off the light.
It didn’t seem to matter how much he told them. He answered each question earnestly, hiding nothing, not even the existence of Dijana Frankovic, but still they treated him like a liar. And he found that, after a few days, he also began to wonder if he was lying. What was he leaving out? Who was he protecting? He wasn’t protecting himself; he admitted his mistakes and lack of foresight. When they asked who was to blame for the death of Colonel Cerny, he told them he was to blame.
By the end of the week, he was unable to speak because his teeth, which had once been so perfect, were bleeding too much.
Then he woke in a hospital bed, the Lieutenant General gazing down on him. Our celebrated Comrade Sev, he said, but without a smile.
Now, though, the Lieutenant General was all smiles.
“You’ll be happy to know the streets are peaceful, Brano. Generally so. We’ve had three incidents-two here in the Capital, and one at the reactor in Vamosoroszi. Some joker tried to get inside, and we had to shoot him. The other two we picked up on the edge of town this morning. They had a truck full of old rifles. They were going to the Second District to distribute them to the others.”
“And the others?” asked Brano.
The Lieutenant General shook his head. “No one showed up. It seems the scheme required a cue. The two arms dealers told us that. There would be a notice in The Spark announcing, of all things, a flower show. How do you like that? Flowers! Cerny’s wonderful imagination yet again.” The Lieutenant General wiped his lips. “But since he wasn’t around to place the notice, well, no one came to get their guns. Pretty anticlimactic, don’t you think?”
