Authors: M. J. Rose
Pasohlávky, Czech Republic
Monday, April 28
th
—2:00 p.m.
F
inished filling up the rental car with petrol, David locked it and walked into the small store to get coffee. He needed to refuel, too. Stress kept him up most of every night—stress or nightmares—and by midafternoon he was always exhausted. The coffee was hot and bitter and, sitting in the car by the side of the highway, he drank it as if it was medicine. Something else that used to be enjoyable…now meaningless. When was the last time he felt real pleasure? Before the birthday party. Tasting blood, he realized he’d bitten the inside of his cheek.
After he finished the coffee he opened the knapsack, pulled out the package wrapped in foil imprinted with birthday cakes, put it on the floor of the passenger seat and then slowly and methodically inspected the knapsack.
He’d been cautious in arranging this buy but terrorist cells were not known for their honorable practices, and Paxton had been too smug. It only took him five minutes
to discover a tracking device imbedded under the rubber tab on the end of the zipper like a small and vicious insect.
Over the years, David had cultivated relationships with criminals, convicts and members of underground extremist networks on all sides of every issue. He’d ferreted out secrets, sharing relevant ones with the world, holding others in abeyance for the right story at the right time. On assignment with fellow reporters over beers in bars when they were all far from home and exhausted, they’d argue the question of whether a free press encouraged or discouraged crimes by making them public. Regardless, their job was to expose the truth and David had done that job well enough to have three Pulitzers to show for it. Getting those stories he’d often been at risk. But never like this.
At least his arrangements to buy the Semtex were handled anonymously, which meant Paxton and his team at Global weren’t tracking David Yalom, but rather a delivery of Semtex to a man who’d used a false identity. So on one front he might still be safe. But there was still Abdul to consider. Had Hans Wassong told the Palestinian anything or had he been acting on his own with plans to collect the bounty after the act was done? David had expected that he might run into adversity on this journey but so far he might have underestimated who would deliver the most dangerous threats.
An encroaching storm smudged the line that differentiated the hills from the horizon. The presence of a tracking device in the backpack suggested the absence of anyone in the near vicinity watching him. In such an isolated area, a tail would have been too easy to spot; the electronic trace was smarter.
Leaving the backpack in the car, David grabbed his empty cup, got out of the car and walked toward a refuse
bin. Just as he passed a parked navy sedan that had a map opened on the dashboard, he tripped and the cup went flying, the dregs of the coffee spilling. Bending over, David was hidden from sight for a few seconds. When he stood he was holding the coffee cup, which he pitched into the wire mesh can.
Two minutes later he turned the key in the ignition on his rental car and pulled out of the lot and back onto the road. As he headed toward Vienna he imagined Paxton’s men glued to a ground-penetrating radar screen watching a blip of light, riveted by the indicator, so pleased with themselves that they had their target in sight.
For the rest of the drive he checked his rearview mirror often to be certain no one was following him, almost wishing more than once that someone was and that they’d stop him and save him from the black bubble of rage before it made its next appearance.
Vienna, Austria
Monday, April 28
th
—4:05 p.m.
“I
t’s not an accident that Sigmund Freud coined the phrase ‘death mania’ while living in Vienna,” Jeremy told his daughter as they reached the gates of the Zentralfriedhof cemetery and he paused for a second, taking a deep breath before entering the city of the dead. “The Jewish section is this way.” He pointed into the distance. They’d come directly from the funeral service, which had been well-attended and heartbreaking.
On both sides, the lane they walked down was bordered with fifteen-foot-tall arborvitae trees standing like feathery pyramids and through them Meer glimpsed the manicured lawns, sculptured monuments and the rising roofs of mausoleums. The air was rich with birdsong and the scent of evergreen. “This is a beautiful place,” she whispered, surprised.
“Yes, quite different from other cemeteries in other countries, isn’t it? Vienna’s always had a preoccupation with
death—dressing it up, writing music to it, commemorating it in art…there’s even a museum devoted to it.”
“What’s in a museum devoted to death?”
“Grave-digger tools, coffins, funeral sashes, urns. The art of the undertaker through the ages. One of my favorites is the life-saving bell that’s buried with you. If you find yourself being buried alive you can make sure your mourners hear you.
“Here we are,” he said as he opened a rusty gate and she followed him into a rundown and overgrown area. Many of these tombstones had collapsed and fallen to rubble. Weeds overwhelmed whatever shrubbery had once been well tended. Compared to the rest of the cemetery, this was a slum.
“Why is it like this here?”
“There are several separate cemeteries sharing this one giant central space—Catholic, Protestant, Russian Orthodox and Jewish. All but the Jewish section have received uninterrupted care from the children of the children of the children of the dead.” Jeremy stepped off the path to avoid pieces of a fallen tombstone. “Barely three thousand Austrian Jews even survived the war,” he continued, “and afterward none returned to Vienna. So for more than sixty years, no one’s been here to pay the rent on these graves or take care of them. Recently the government, partly in thanks to the effort Fremont Brecht’s made, has pledged to restore our cemetery. What he’s done for Austrian Jewry is astonishing. Fifteen years ago he was a well-respected public figure from a good Catholic family. And then he published a memoir called
Our Secret History
about Austria’s deep-seated anti-Semitism and his own hidden Jewish heritage.”
“How did he hide being Jewish for so long?”
“He didn’t know until then, until his father died and he
found out his birth mother, a Jewess, had died in childbirth and his father had remarried a gentile widow four months later. If not for the second marriage that covered up the past so conveniently, Fremont might have been sent to the camps when he was a boy.”
“What was the reaction when the book came out?”
“It was a scandal. Shook a lot of people up. As he’d feared, there was a serious anti-Semitic reaction but it only made him more determined to work for Jewish reform, acceptance and restitution. And he has, tirelessly.”
“But?”
He looked at her, questioning.
“You’re not saying something, Dad. I can hear it in your voice.”
Jeremy shrugged again. “It’s a bone of contention between us. He believes keeping a contemporary and progressive face on modern Judaism is important in a country still accused of having anti-Semitic leanings.”
“And you?”
“I think he’s doing us a disservice. Our mysticism is an important and respected part of our religion.”
They’d arrived at a cordoned-off plot where a recent grave had been dug but other than the gravediggers standing off to one side, smoking and waiting for the end of a service that had not even begun, no one was there. Jeremy spoke to them while Meer inspected the names and dates on decrepit stone markers nearby.
“We’re too early,” he said when he came back. “I’m always too early to burials. Afraid to keep the dead waiting, I guess.” He looked around. “Come, we have time for me to show you where the great composers are and sculpture along the way. Maybe even some bird-watching. More than twenty-five species live here.”
Soon they were out of the shambles and back into the extravagant landscaping. “An artist named André Heller called this place an aphrodisiac for necrophiles. Even for all its macabre attention, I think the way the Viennese deal with death is healthier than the way we deal with it in America,” Jeremy said. “There, they try to sanitize dying. Bury it, no pun intended, as if it’s something so dark and secretive it shouldn’t even be examined. Here in Vienna it’s the opposite. There’s even a term for a beautiful corpse—
Schoene Leich
. It’s an obsession that goes all the way back to the Hapsburgs and the crazy ideas they had about how to be interred. I’m afraid I’m being too morbid.”
“You are, but what did the Hapsburgs do?”
Jeremy gave his daughter a wry smile. “Some call it the divide-and-conquer burial strategy. Their bodies are entombed in the Imperial Crypt in Kapuzinergruft church. Their intestines are in urns in St. Stephens. And their hearts are interred in small silver jars in the Herzgruft.”
“The heart crypt?”
“You’ve heard of it?”
“Their mummified hearts are there?”
“Yes. It’s a tourist destination. Not one of the major ones, but it draws the curious. Did you read about it?”
“I must have. Why are their intestines and their hearts separated from their bodies?”
“It started in the early 1600s with an emperor, I think Ferdinand IV, who wanted to lay his heart at the feet of the mother of God—”
“I’d like to see it,” she interrupted.
“I might be able to get you in before it opens to the public tomorrow morning but I won’t be able to go with you.”
“I’ll go by myself, it’s fine. You know, I’m all grown up now and don’t really need a babysitter.”
“Actually, you do—two people are dead,” he whispered harshly. “Inspector Fiske doesn’t have a single lead. Serious professionals are at work here and they haven’t made any mistakes. At least none that the police have found. You have to promise me you won’t go anywhere alone.”
Meer’s inclination was to argue, but she didn’t.
“Maybe Sebastian can go with you. Or maybe I can rearrange the time of my meeting to be there. I’ll ask him. Maybe Malachai will want to go, too. Especially if I can arrange for a private visit.”
“How many babysitters do I need?” She smiled.
“No, I was just thinking that he’d like to see it.”
On either side of them, taller evergreens cast dark, long shadows over them.
“I didn’t know you spoke German,” Jeremy said after a long pause.
“What? I don’t.”
“You did this morning, when the fire alarm went off.”
She shrugged. “I must have picked it up since I’ve been here.”
“And on a whole block of buildings you knew exactly which one was the Society.”
“How could I? I’ve never been here before.”
“This time.”
“Dad.” She spoke softly, making an effort to keep the rancor from her voice, not completely succeeding. “Let’s not have this conversation. Not here, not now.”
“Sweetheart, you can’t keep pretending the—”
“I’m not pretending. I’ve made a choice about how I want to live my life so we can skip the lecture about the wheel of souls and the angel of forgetfulness and the divine sparks of light and all the other mystical reincarnation
theories from the Kabbalah. You and Malachai can talk about it when you see each other and I’m not in the room.” Even though she wasn’t as certain as she usually was, Meer had fallen back on the way she’d always responded to this argument, using half her own words and half her mother’s. It was the same fight she listened to her parents have when she was supposed to be asleep and they thought she couldn’t hear them. Meer wondered how exactly she’d paraphrased her mother because her father looked so disquieted.
“Your mother made quite an impression on you, didn’t she?” he said. “I wish I could convince you that great peace comes with believing.”
She was about to disagree but he stopped her. “No, you’re right. Not now. We should get back for the ceremony. If we take this path I can still show you what I brought you here to see.”
The sound of their individual footsteps on the walkway marked the physical and emotional distance between them and they continued on in silence for a few hundred meters until they reached a small plot of grass with an iron grill in front of it. Surrounded by conical evergreens, the white obelisk reached skyward, simple and yet majestic. On the frontispiece was a one-word name in gothic black letters. The sorrow stabbed quickly as Meer realized she was looking at Beethoven’s gravestone. Her mouth was dry and so were her eyes, but she felt sad and hollow.
Her father waited a few minutes and then said, “We should go now.”
Passing stone markers as they walked back, Jeremy pointed out Johannes Brahms’ and then Franz Schubert’s resting places.
As they passed the beautiful monuments to lives lived and people lost, Meer noticed the occasional bunch of
flowers in front of a grave—usually at the resting place of someone famous. Her mother had once told her that a person never really died as long as someone still loved them.
“All the great Austrians are buried here. Architects, politicians, artists, writers—quite a few Memorists here too. I think if we stay on this path we might pass…” Her father stopped at a monument of a male angel with beautifully detailed wings. “Yes, here it is.” The grief on the statue’s face was so genuine, Meer was riveted by him and the way his hand rested on the tombstone he guarded, as if it were a living being he loved, not an inanimate object.
“Whose grave is this?” she asked.
“The wife of the Society’s most important founder,” he said, then read the inscription on the tombstone. “Margaux Neidermier, 1779–1814. A world of memory will forever sound in this one mournful, golden chord.”
Vienna, Austria
Monday, April 28
th
—6:08 p.m.
“B
e careful,” the client on the other end of the phone warned him for the third time.
Paul Pertzler was annoyed. Since he’d been hired, this client had lectured him as if he were a clumsy oaf. He’d stolen the Beethoven letter and the antique gaming box but he couldn’t be trusted to touch the precious items? Moving the camera, he aimed it away from the box onto an empty section of the wall, careful not to reveal anything identifying.
“I’ve lost the picture.” The voice on the other end was restrained but frustrated.
Smiling to himself, Pertzler just waited.
“Are you there? I said I’ve lost the picture.”
Pertzler thought about cutting the computer connection that allowed him to speak to the buyer and simultaneously show the item.
“What are you doing?” the voice demanded.
Even paying top dollar didn’t buy his employer the right to be rude.
“Where’s the camera?”
Repositioning the camera, Pertzler angled it back on the gaming box. “Computer glitch, so sorry.”
“I’ve seen enough of the outside, let’s go inside,” the client said. “We need to check that everything’s intact. Give us an overview first, if you will.”
Pertzler panned the contents, slowly moving the camera over each small compartment.
“Now, please show us the whist markers close up.”
Pertzler stared down at the various gaming pieces without any idea which ones were whist markers. He didn’t like the buyer’s attitude and would prefer not to ask what whist markers looked like.
“Those chips made of mother of pearl. To your right.”
Moving the camera right, Pertzler zoomed in and wondered if the “we” that the buyer used was a figure of speech or a ruse to give the impression there was a group involved instead of an individual. Pertzler knew better than to indulge in speculation like this. He was good at his job because he didn’t get distracted wondering about irrelevancies. Except he’d made mistakes on this job. Two people were dead. A shame for several reasons but especially because the dead attracted the authorities in a way that stolen goods didn’t.
“Now, show us the cribbage board, that’s a scorekeeping device for a card game that dates back to the 1600s. We didn’t see it in the overview but it should be there. It’s probably made of bone or wood and has many holes in it.”
“I think this is it, no?” Pertzler adjusted the light so it illuminated the left corner and then moved the camera across the surface of an ivory object yellowed with age.
“Wonderful. Now there are four decks of cards, with gold edges. Can we look at each one of those more closely?”
One after another, Pertzler focused the camera on each deck.
“I’m afraid this is going to get a bit tedious, but I need you to go through each deck with us. Show us the front and back of every card. We’re going to be freezing the frames and keeping them as static shots.”
“It’s your time. You’ve paid for it.”
The buyer was amused and chortled. “So we have, so we have.”
The process took the better part of the next two hours and was, as his client suggested it would be, laborious.
“All right then,” the client said finally. “We’re done.”
“Where would you like your items delivered?”
“For now we’d like you to hold tight to both the gaming box and the letter you found in Geneva. Is that possible? We expect you can keep it as safely as anyone else.”
Pertzler specialized in marital assets recovery. Typically, that meant stealing jewelry and artwork back from husbands who preferred their exes not keep all the spoils, or wives who wanted a family heirloom to remain on their side of the family. It was highly unusual for a client, or the group of clients, to ask him to keep possessions.
“For how long?”
“A week. No more. We would also like to know if you also do surveillance work?”
“I do, yes.”
“We are going to need you to start right away.”
They discussed money, agreed to a price, and then the buyer described who they wanted followed and how and when they’d be calling in for updates as well as a number
to call in case of emergencies. “Leave a message, if it’s necessary to get in touch with us.”
“What would constitute an emergency?”
“Use your judgment.”
After ending the marathon call with that enigmatic coda, the client hung up. Pertzler rose from his desk and stretched the way his cat did after waking up from a long sleep in the sun. She sat watching him from the couch. A black cat with white markings. The apartment smelled musty from all the cigarettes he’d smoked while he was on the phone and he opened the window, standing there for a few moments, watching the sun sinking below the horizon. This time of day always depressed him and he went into the kitchen and cut a thick slice of a chocolate cake he’d bought the day before but his cell phone rang just before he could take the first bite.
Pertzler had two phones, one on which he accepted incoming calls but never used to call out and the other, which he used to call out but never shared the number.
“Hello?”
“Hi. Are we still going to the cinema tonight?”
Pertzler recognized Klempt’s voice. No salutations were necessary. It was safer this way for both of them. A brief discussion ensued about what movies were playing. The two men decided on the seven-o’clock showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s
Rope
and planned on meeting at the theater a half hour before to get a beer at a nearby tavern.
It was the kind of conversation no one paid attention to if they happened to overhear it but if someone had been listening and checked the movie theaters they would have discovered there were no Hitchcock films playing in all of Vienna that night. So there would be no way to figure out which theater the two men were meeting at, if they were meeting at a theater at all.
They didn’t, in fact, meet at a theater, but at the Hummer bar. If they’d said they were going to see a Godard movie they would have met at the bar called the Guess Club II. If they’d chosen a Fellini film it would have been the Fledermaus and so forth. There were ten bars coded, so they could avoid being seen at the same one too often.
Klempt was already nursing a beer when Pertzler arrived.
“I got a call about a freelance job,” Klempt reported after some small talk. A computer hacker and corporate espionage specialist, he and Pertzler worked together often, availing each other of their specific expertise.
“Will it pay well?”
“Very well.”
“You want another?” Pertzler asked, noticing Klempt’s empty tankard.
He checked his watch. “My wife…I’d better not.”
Pertzler made a joke about his friend being under his wife’s thumb and the two laughed.
Only there was no wife. It was more code they’d perfected over the past fifteen years of working together. If they erred on the side of being too careful, it served them well.
Out on the street they headed toward the same subway station and only then, after they were both sure they weren’t being followed, did Pertzler ask about the job.
“I have a client who would like to hire you to find something that has been lost,” Klempt said.
“Lost?”
The light changed and even though there was little traffic, they stopped at the curb.
“Interesting word, no? The client said lost. I questioned him and asked if it had been stolen. He said he preferred lost.”
“Sounds like a fruitcake.”
Klempt shrugged. “Lost. Stolen. It doesn’t matter. I need you to steal it back.”
“How much?”
Klempt named a substantial five-figure sum.
Pertzler nodded. “Do you have a photograph?”
Klempt pulled an envelope from his pocket.
“Good night,” Pertzler said, taking it and walking off in the opposite direction.
Fifteen minutes later, back in his kitchen, Pertzler opened the envelope and found page 16 from the Dorotheum auction house catalog. All the information he needed was written in the margins but he wasn’t reading the words, he was staring at the photograph.
Page 16 showed an antique gaming box, circa 1790. The very same one that he had been hired to steal last week.
That he had stolen. And that was in his living room, right now.