Yalta Boulevard Read Free Page B

in exchange gave him the means to remain in that social circle he most loved.
    But on the night of 8 August, that arrangement ended when Josef Lochert—yes, Lochert was his assistant from the embassy—waited at the Hungarian border with binoculars and watched the Austrian police stop and search each truck with West German plates. Lochert reported to him with a smile: We’ve found GAVRILO .
    Which was why Bertrand Richter was dead.
    “This is my first trip east.”
    Brano looked at the young Austrian. “What?”
    “My first time,” he said. “You study the Revolution from books, you read your Marx and your Lenin, but there’s nothing like seeing a people’s republic firsthand. That’s what the leader of my discussion group says.”
    “Don’t get your hopes up,” said Brano, because now he could remember his home as well.
    He unbuckled his belt and, holding the backs of seats to maintain his balance, began walking to the bathroom at the front of the plane. He watched passengers flipping through magazines and newspapers to see if any turned to look at him. Though none did, he didn’t trust that that meant he was alone. The more he remembered, the more he was sure that someone on this plane would want to stop him from wreaking any more destruction on the world.
    He had reported the identity of GAVRILO with a coded telegram sent from the embassy and received the coded reply later that same day, from the office of his old friend Colonel Cerny.
    The bathroom door was locked, so he waited at the head of the plane, watching faces. It had been his responsibility, he remembered, to make the arrangements for GAVRILO ’s death.
    Bertrand Richter was holding a party, ostensibly for the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, on 14 August, yesterday—in fact, Bertrand hardly needed an excuse to host a party, but as an atheist he enjoyed the irony. Perhaps to extend this irony, he had invited Brano. From a pay phone, Brano called at nine-thirty and told Bertrand he could not make the party because of an emergency. As suspected, Bertrand wanted to know the details. Come down here and I’ll show you , Brano told him. It’ll just take twenty minutes. Tell your guests you’re getting more food, but don’t bring anyone .
    Where?
    The Volksgarten. Temple of Theseus .
    Is this about the fourteenth of May?
    Brano didn’t know what he was talking about. What about the fourteenth of May?
    Josef Lochert, standing beside him, waved a hand for Brano to hurry up.
    Nothing , said Bertrand. I’ll be right over .
    The bathroom door opened and an old woman came out, smiled at him, and made her way back down the aisle. Brano locked the door behind himself and used toilet paper to wipe his face dry. He had worked for the Ministry twenty-two years; he was unmarried. Discovering his life as if for the first time, it seemed the life of a lonely man. But a man of no small importance—a major in the Ministry for State Security, located on Yalta Boulevard, number 36. Colonel Cerny, he also remembered, was his immediate superior, and he’d known him over two decades. He’d even helped this man, seven years ago, to deal with the suicide of his wife, Irina—a hotheaded Ukrainian whose photo remained on Cerny’s desk to this day.
    As someone tried the door, he sat on the toilet, holding on to the sink and breathing heavily.
    Last night, at the Temple of Theseus in the Volksgarten, he and Josef Lochert had waited forty minutes, and when Brano returned to the pay phone and called again, there was no answer. So Brano went to Bertrand Richter’s house in order to draw him out personally.
    The smoky apartment was full of revelers in various states of drunkenness who never noticed the phone was off the hook. Someone had pulled out an acoustic guitar. He couldn’t find Bertrand—no one seemed to know where he was, nor did they care—and then he asked the tall, pretty woman whose dark eyes had followed him around the house. Bertrand’s girlfriend, he