“He’ll be fine,” I said, then sighed audibly. “Listen. Do you mind if I borrow your car? I’d like to clear my head.”
Dijana rubbed my arm tenderly. “Of course.”
“I’ll go up for my hat,” I said. “Be right back.”
“Take your time,” said Dijana. “And let me give you some spending money.”
She really was very nice. They both were. Brano was an unbelievably lucky man.
THIRTY-FIVE
Brano and Ludwig parked in a lot near the airstrip beside another BMW. They talked over the details of the operation with two of Ludwig’s men and verified their radios were operating. The two assistants waited just outside the airport entrance; Brano and Ludwig would wait outside the arrivals gate for the blue-plated embassy car to leave. Once they were in pursuit, they’d radio ahead to the others, and everyone would go into town together, sandwiching the embassy car with Jerzy Michalec inside.
Then, on the Ring Road around the old town, the first car would screech to a stop, turning aside so Michalec couldn’t pass, and Brano and Ludwig would do the same thing. Ludwig had already tipped off a journalist from Der Standard, who would be waiting at the intersection with a camera.
It proceeded according to plan. Brano pointed at a tall old man in a hat and sunglasses who stepped into the back of the embassy car, and then he radioed to Ludwig’s men. There were a couple of points along the A4 where Brano worried they were losing the car, but Ludwig knew the roads, and he knew how to drive so that he wouldn’t be noticed. The traffic thickened, but Ludwig remained on track, and when they reached the Ring Road, Ludwig even pointed at a man standing by the crosswalk at Dr. K. Renner and Volks-gartenstraSe. “There’s Jan. He’s got the camera.”
Brano picked up the radio and said, “Now.”
The BMW in front turned sharply, screeching up on two wheels, and stopped. Doors popped open, and Ludwig’s men jumped out, guns in view, screaming in German for the driver and passenger to show their hands.
From behind, Ludwig and Brano did the same thing. Brano, because of his age, moved slower, but they waited for him to reach the back door and rip it open, finding an old man in a hat and sunglasses wailing in our language for him to please not shoot. Brano lowered his gun and took the sunglasses off the man’s face. A moment of shock.
According to Der Standard’s evening edition, the old man’s name was Gustav Hegy, one of Michalec’s personal assistants, of which he had many.
It took a minute, Brano working back over everything that had come before this moment. He was smart-he’d always been smart- and even with so little information he was able to see that I’d betrayed him. He grabbed Ludwig and shouted, “Airport!”
A half hour before that moment, I sat in the driver’s seat of Brano’s Volkswagen, Brano’s heavy Walther PP on the passenger’s seat. I’d stopped a few cars behind Ludwig’s BMW and waited as the old man got into the embassy car and Brano and Ludwig followed. Then I started the engine. Ten minutes later, Jerzy Michalec appeared with his large bodyguard, looked around, and walked over to a Mercedes taxi.
I gunned the engine and squealed around parked cars, nearly hitting a woman crossing the lane. At the sound of the tires, Michalec looked up. He couldn’t make out my features but knew the Volkswagen was coming for him. He stepped back from the waiting taxi and tugged his bodyguard’s sleeve, and the big man reached into his jacket.
I struck the back of the taxi, knocking it a few feet, and pushed open my door. With the pistol in my left hand, I reached around the windshield. I fired twice. The recoil hurt my palm. The bodyguard, still reaching for his gun, jerked and fell on the pavement, kicking wildly.
Screams burst out, and people ran. Michalec froze, then dived behind the taxi. I got out of the car, my heart banging. The taxi driver’s hairy hands were raised above his head, his eyes wide. I told him to lie down, but since I spoke in my language, he didn’t understand.
My ears hurt. My hands and feet and stomach ached. I continued around the front of the taxi, the Walther low, but found only the groaning bodyguard on the concrete, his wide, enormous chest wet with blood.
I looked around-Michalec had disappeared. Somehow. Then, on the other side of the taxi, I saw him trying to run and realized my mistake. He had slipped around the crushed rear of the taxi.
I went after him, down the covered arrivals lane, and when he stepped out from a car to cross back into the airport, I stopped, raised the gun, gasping, and shot-but missed.
He made it through the glass doors as I shot again, shattering glass behind him, but it didn’t slow him at all. I followed, clutching the heavy pistol, and when I got inside, passing a brightly lit gift shop empty of people, I had to stop to figure out where he’d gone. Off to my left, past a McDonald’s, two uniformed guards stared at me, confused, then reached for their sidearms. So I ran right, past an unstaffed information desk, through bewildered travelers, and out a pair of glass doors to the sidewalk again. Directly in front of me, by a sign reading SUDBAHNHOF-WESTBAHNHOF, a large, sooty yellow bus pulled away from the curb.
Its windows were tinted, but between gasps of cold air I could just make out a form collapsing into the fifth seat-an old man, also gasping, pulling at his tie.
Then the bus was gone in a roar of stinking exhaust, making a wide berth for the commotion around the mess I’d caused-the wreck of Brano’s VW, the taxi, and Michalec’s now-unconscious bodyguard. Policemen spoke into radios, and onlookers crowded in.
For a moment, I believed it was finished. I’d finally reached the end. My heart thumped against the inside of my chest, so painful that I expected that tingling in the arm and the sharp seizure of a heart attack. A part of me even welcomed the rest.
But there’s something in human beings that, despite all the disappointments, shame, and heartbreak, keeps us ticking. I don’t know what it is, but it came for me during that two-second pause. A dirty green Opel pulled up to the bus stop and let out a young woman. My legs moved me forward. The woman, a pretty brunette standing beside the open passenger door, smiled queerly at me. Then she saw the pistol in my hand. She screamed.
Behind me, a man-probably one of the security guards- shouted, “Halt!”
I didn’t halt. I pushed the young woman aside, got into the car, pointed the pistol at the older woman behind the wheel, and told her to drive: “Fahren!”
As I write this now, the entire scene seems completely improbable. A pistol, a chase, two old men who would be of better use dying in front of their televisions, and a car hijacking.
But this is how I remember it, and I’m backed up by the Vienna airport’s security footage, which is now on file with Ludwig’s superiors in the Defense Ministry, the Bundesministerium fur Lan-desverteidigung, at RoBauer Lande 1, Vienna. You can certainly ask to see the video; whether or not they let you is a different matter.
What you won’t see on that black-and-white video feed is the face of Frau Ingrid Shappelhorn, the fifty- eight-year-old widow who had just dropped off her daughter, Christiane, to catch a flight to meet her fiance, a Dutch journalist named Rolf. Of course, Christiane didn’t make her flight, and Rolf was left standing in the Brussels airport, bewildered. Ingrid, the most unfortunate of them all, was stuck with a sixty-four-year-old madman clutching a Walther PP, screaming at her to drive. Which she did in a panic, tires burning against the road.
I go into all this because it’s important. I won’t call it a moral in this scattershot narrative, but it’s something like that. The price of revenge is that everyone around you pays. Gisele Sully, Brano and his family, even Ludwig-and a decent Austrian family I’d never even met before.
“Schneller!” I shouted as she swung around the wreck I’d made minutes ago.
Unlike her daughter, Frau Shappelhorn didn’t scream, which impressed me. A heavy woman who’d spent the last six years without a husband, she was someone who took the punches as they came. She gunned the engine and shifted gears, and we sped down the ramp, past the short-term parking lot. Beside her I sat fidgeting, sweating, trying to get air, and inexplicably checking my watch-it was 3:07. My poor veins were ready to burst. Everything had happened so quickly, faster than my brain could work.
“Where?” she said.
