foreground was a pair of handsome young Germans drinking vodka tonics by the ledge. One noticed him and smiled, then leaned to whisper to his friend, who glanced over and shrugged.
“They want us back home,” Brano said as he took the other seat. “There’s a flight at eleven in the morning.”
“What about the hijacking?”
“Nothing we can do here, and I suspect there won’t be much to do in the Capital. The Turks have the passenger manifest, and the Ministry’s looking into the records of four Armenians who were on the flight-we should hear something when we return.”
“Four Armenians with the exception of Libarid?”
“Yes.”
Gavra pulled out a cigarette as a ship in the Bosphorus moaned. “What about Mas? He could be connected to this. Maybe he was also waiting for Libarid.”
Brano shook his head. “It’s just a terrible coincidence. Libarid was on a plane that some Armenians wanted to use to get back at the Turks. It’s bad for us; it’s bad for Mas. It’s bad for everyone.”
“I see.”
“And I called the station. Gave the news to Emil. He’ll pass it on to Imre and Katja.” Brano was squinting in the light.
“Was it hard?”
The old man shrugged. “I’ve delivered this kind of news often enough. I think it’s going to be hard on him, though. Emil Brod does his best, but he’s not well equipped to deal with tragedy.”
“And you are.”
“Well, if I wasn’t, I doubt I’d still be alive.” Brano paused. “There are only two of us now.”
“Two of whom?” Gavra noticed that the Germans were paying their bill and leaving.
“Two veterans.” He frowned. “Stefan was killed back in the fifties, and at the same time Ferenc-Ferenc Kolyeszar, you’ve heard of that samizdat of his, The Confession — he was sent into internal exile and has been in a work camp the last three years. And now Libarid.” Brano blinked a few times, coming out of his reverie. “You’re not going out tonight, are you?”
“What?”
“I don’t want to have to kick some poor girl out of your bedroom in the morning,” Brano said, but without scorn.
Peter
1968
The foreign soldier’s beers settled his frayed nerves and helped him drop into a deep, dreamless sleep for hours, until he was woken by gunshots outside. He blinked in the darkness, at first only hearing Josef snoring in the other bed. Peter crawled to the foot of his cot and peered out the window. Down on Pod Stanici, against the silhouette of another building, he saw a tiny burst of flame and heard another rat-a-tat. He couldn’t make out the figure with the gun, nor the intended victim. Boots crunched against the sidewalk, and as he waited for another gunshot he remembered that same sound just outside eske Bud jovice. A field, a shouted order from the road, then all three of them running westward through the stumps of harvested corn. Toman ahead of him, Ivana just behind. Toman was cursing- Fucking Peter, fucking goddamned Peter — beneath the rat-a-tat. Peter looked back in time to catch Ivana’s beautiful heavy-eyed face suddenly seize up. Then she fell forward, as if she’d tripped. Toman, ahead, was no longer shouting words, only long, painful notes, and Peter realized that he’d passed Toman’s writhing body in the stalks. But he kept on running as the rat-a-tat stopped and he heard one of the men at the road shouting at another in Russian. Though he knew Russian, he couldn’t make out the words.
“What is it?”
He turned back to see Josef’s face emerge from the gloom. “Gunshots. Outside. But I can’t see.”
Josef rubbed his eyes. “Took days before I could sleep through it.” He climbed back into his cot and pulled the sheets to his chin. “Peter?”
“Yeah?”
“How did you get caught? I didn’t think there’d be a problem getting across.”
Peter looked out at the street. “It was my own fault. I wanted to start a fire.”
“A fire?”
“It was cold. We were in a field, and I was cold. Nighttime in the countryside. I hadn’t brought a good coat. They told me not to start one, but they were asleep and I was so cold. I didn’t think anyone would see.”
“But they did.”
“The worst luck,” said Peter. “A Russian jeep came along the road. And we were woken by the bullhorn. It was morning then. The jeep, it had…it had a machine gun on it, and when we ran they fired at us.”
“Savages.”
He cleared his throat. “We scattered. I can only assume they made it. I went south, and the Russians followed me. They picked me up in the town.”
“You were incredibly stupid.”
“I know.”
“But at least you didn’t get anyone killed.”
“Yeah,” said Peter. He took a breath. “I’m thankful for that.”
Gavra
The old man woke him earlier than expected. Six o’clock, and it was just dumb luck, Gavra later reflected, that he had decided to be a good boy the night before. He’d spoken to the Germans in the hotel bar, two Heidelberg cops in town for the Interpol conference. They were attractive and seemed to like Gavra, but after his fifth vodka, he became suspicious of his own judgment. He began hearing the old man’s voice in his head. Waking up to Colonel Brano Sev proved he’d been right not to trust himself.
Brano was excited. “The Istanbul police have worked quickly. Last night, they raided an apartment of the Army of the Liberation of Armenia and rounded up three conspirators.” He explained this quickly, and Gavra rubbed his eyes, trying to understand.
“One of the men talked,” Brano continued. “Turns out they have no connection to the ASALA, the Prisoner Gourgen Yanikian Group, or even the Yanikian Commandos, the ones who tried to set off a bomb in New York two years ago. But guess how they decided to hijack that particular plane, on that day.”
“How?”
“A telephone call.”
“From who?”
“From Wilhelm Adler.”
Only then did Gavra wake fully. Wilhelm Adler, or “Tappi” to the newspapers, had famously spent years in West Germany with the proto-Marxist Red Army Faction, blowing up offices and airport terminals and kidnapping business leaders in an effort to free the older RAF generation-Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler, Ulrike Meinhof-from prison. Just as West German police were about to close in on him in June 1974, he crossed into East Germany, and General Secretary Honecker, as always, welcomed the socialist warrior with open arms.
“So East Germany’s in on this?”
Brano shook his head. “Adler moved out of Democratic Germany not long after he arrived there. He’s been in our country for the last seven months.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Not a lot of people do. Now get your clothes on.”
