her breath. Afterward he lay beside her, stroking her hair. He could not sleep, not the night before a journey back to Vienna. But there was something else. He felt as though he had just committed an act of sexual betrayal. It was as if he had just been inside another man’s woman. Then he realized that, in his mind, he was already Gideon Argov. Chiara, for the moment, was a stranger to him.
4 VIENNA
PASSPORT, PLEASE.”
Gabriel slid it across the countertop, the emblem facing down. The officer glanced wearily at the scuffed cover and thumbed the folio pages until he located the visa. He added another stamp-with more violence than was necessary, Gabriel thought-and handed it over without a word. Gabriel dropped the passport into his coat pocket and set out across the gleaming arrivals hall, towing a rolling suitcase behind him.
Outside, he took his place in line at the taxi stand. It was bitterly cold, and there was snow in the wind. Snatches of Viennese-accented German reached his ears. Unlike many of his countrymen, the mere sound of spoken German did not set him on edge. German was his first language and remained the language of his dreams. He spoke it perfectly, with the Berlin accent of his mother.
He moved to the front of the queue. A white Mercedes slid forward to collect him. Gabriel memorized the registration number before sliding into the back seat. He placed the bag on the seat and gave the driver an address several streets away from the hotel where he’d booked a room.
The taxi hurtled along the motorway, through an ugly industrial zone of factories, power plants, and gasworks. Before long, Gabriel spotted the floodlit spire of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, looming over the Innere Stadt. Unlike most European cities, Vienna had remained remarkably unspoiled and free of urban blight. Indeed, little about its appearance and lifestyle had changed from a century earlier, when it was the administrative center of an empire stretching across central Europe and the Balkans. It was still possible to have an afternoon cake and cream at Demel’s or to linger over coffee and a journal at the Landtmann or Central. In the Innere Stadt, it was best to forsake the automobile and move about by streetcar or on foot along the glittering pedestrian boulevards lined with Baroque and Gothic architecture and exclusive shops. Men still wore loden-cloth suits and feathered Tyrolean caps; women still found it fashionable to wear a dirndl. Brahms had said he stayed in Vienna because he preferred to work in a village. It was still a village, thought Gabriel, with a village’s contempt for change and a village’s resentment of outsiders. For Gabriel, Vienna would always be a city of ghosts.
They came to the Ringstrasse, the broad boulevard encircling the city center. The handsome face of Peter Metzler, the candidate for chancellor from the far-right Austrian National Party, grinned at Gabriel from the passing lamp posts. It was election season, and the avenue was hung with hundreds of campaign posters. Metzler’s well- funded campaign had clearly spared no expense. His face was everywhere, his gaze unavoidable. So was his campaign slogan: EINENEUEORDNUNGFUREINNEUESOSTERREICH!:A NEW ORDER FOR A NEW AUSTRIA! The Austrians, thought Gabriel, were incapable of subtlety.
Gabriel left the taxi near the state opera house and walked a short distance to a narrow street called the Weihburggasse. It appeared no one was following him, though from experience he knew expert watchers were almost impossible to detect. He entered a small hotel. The concierge, upon seeing his Israeli passport, adopted a posture of bereavement and murmured a few sympathetic words about “the terrible bombing in the Jewish Quarter.” Gabriel, playing the role of Gideon Argov, spent a few minutes chatting with the concierge in German before climbing the stairs to his room on the second floor. It had wood floors the color of honey and French doors overlooking a darkened interior courtyard. Gabriel drew the curtains and left the bag on the bed in plain sight. Before leaving, he placed a telltale in the doorjamb that would signal whether the room had been entered in his absence.
He returned to the lobby. The concierge smiled as if they had not seen each other in five years instead of five minutes. Outside it had begun to snow. He walked the darkened streets of the Innere Stadt, checking his tail for surveillance. He paused at shop windows to glance over his shoulder, ducked into a public telephone and pretended to place a call while scanning his surroundings. At a newsstand he bought a copy ofDie Presse, then, a hundred meters farther on, dropped it into a rubbish bin. Finally, convinced he was not being followed, he entered the Stephansplatz U-Bahn station.
He had no need to consult the brightly lit maps of the Vienna transport system, for he knew it from memory. He purchased a ticket from a vending machine, then passed through the turnstile and headed down to the platform. He boarded a carriage and memorized the faces around him. Five stops later, at the Westbahnhof, he transferred to a northbound train on the U6 line. Vienna General Hospital had its own station stop. An escalator bore him slowly upward to a snowy quadrangle, a few paces from the main entrance at Wahringer Gurtel 18- 20.
A hospital had occupied this plot of ground in west Vienna for more than three hundred years. In 1693, Emperor Leopold I, concerned by the plight of the city’s destitute, had ordered the construction of the Home for the Poor and Invalid. A century later, Emperor Joseph II renamed the facility the General Hospital for the Sick. The old building remained, a few streets over on the Alserstrasse, but around it had risen a modern university hospital complex spread over several city blocks. Gabriel knew it well.
A man from the embassy was sheltering in the portico, beneath an inscription that read:SALUTI ETSOLATIOAEGRORUM: TO HEAL AND COMFORT THE SICK. He was a small, nervous-looking diplomat called Zvi. He shook Gabriel’s hand and, after briefly examining his passport and business card, expressed his sorrow over the death of his two colleagues.
They stepped into the main lobby. It was deserted except for an old man with a sparse white beard, sitting at one end of a couch with his ankles together and his hat on his knees, like a traveler waiting for a long-delayed train. He was muttering to himself. As Gabriel walked past, the old man looked up and their eyes met briefly. Then Gabriel entered a waiting elevator, and the old man disappeared behind a pair of sliding doors.
When the elevator doors opened on the eighth floor, Gabriel was greeted by the comforting sight of a tall, blond Israeli wearing a two-piece suit and a wire in his ear. At the entrance of the intensive care unit stood another security man. A third, small and dark and dressed in an ill-fitting suit, was outside the door of Eli’s room. He moved aside so Gabriel and the diplomat could enter. Gabriel stopped and asked why he wasn’t being searched.
“You’re with Zvi. I don’t need to search you.”
Gabriel held up his hands. “Search me.”
The security man tilted his head and consented. Gabriel recognized the frisk pattern. It was by the book. The crotch search was more intrusive than necessary, but then Gabriel had it coming. When it was over, he said, “Search everyone who comes into this room.”
Zvi, the embassy man, watched the entire scene. Clearly, he no longer believed the man from Jerusalem was Gideon Argov of Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Gabriel didn’t much care. His friend was lying helpless on the other side of the door. Better to ruffle a few feathers than to let him die because of complacency.
He followed Zvi into the room. The bed was behind a glass partition. The patient didn’t look much like Eli, but then Gabriel wasn’t surprised. Like most Israelis, he had seen the toll a bomb can take on a human body. Eli’s face was concealed behind the mask of a ventilator, his eyes bound by gauze, his head heavily bandaged. The exposed portion of his cheeks and jaw showed the aftereffects of glass exploding into his face.
A nurse with short black hair and very blue eyes was checking the intravenous drip. She looked into the visitors’ room and briefly held Gabriel’s gaze before resuming her work. Her eyes betrayed nothing.
Zvi, after giving Gabriel a moment to himself, walked over to the glass and brought him up to date on his colleague’s condition. He spoke with the precision of a man who had watched too many medical dramas on television. Gabriel, his eyes fastened on Eli’s face, heard only half of what the diplomat was saying-enough to realize that his friend was near death, and that, even if he lived, he might never be the same.
“For the moment,” Zvi said in conclusion, “he’s being kept alive by the machines.”
“Why are his eyes bandaged?”
“Glass fragments. They were able to get most of them, but he still has a half-dozen or so lodged in his eyes.”
