A Death in Vienna (4 page)

“What do you want me to do?”

“Marry me, Gabriel. Stay in Venice and restore paintings. Tell Shamron to leave you alone. You have scars all over your body. Haven’t you given enough to your country?”

He closed his eyes. Before him opened a gallery door. Reluctantly he passed through to the other side and found himself on a street in the old Jewish quarter of Vienna with Leah and Dani at his side. They have just finished dinner, snow is falling. Leah is on edge. There had been a television in the bar of the restaurant, and all the meal they had watched Iraqi missiles raining down on Tel Aviv. Leah is anxious to return home and telephone her mother. She rushes Gabriel’s ritual search of his car’s undercarriage.
Come on, Gabriel, hurry. I want to talk to my mother. I want to hear the sound of her voice.
He rises, straps Dani into his car seat, and kisses Leah. Even now he can still taste the olives on her mouth. He turns and starts back to the cathedral, where, as part of his cover, he is restoring an altarpiece depicting the martyrdom of Saint Stephen. Leah turns the key. The engine hesitates. Gabriel spins round and screams at her to stop, but Leah can’t see him because the windshield is dusted with snowfall. She turns the key again….

He waited for the images of fire and blood to dissolve into blackness; then he told Chiara what she wanted to hear. When he returned from Vienna, he would go to see Leah in the hospital and explain to her that he had fallen in love with another woman.

Chiara’s face darkened. “I wish there were some other way.”

“I have to tell her the truth,” Gabriel said. “She deserves nothing less.”

“Will she understand?”

Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. Leah’s affliction was psychotic depression. Her doctors believed the night of the bombing played without break in her memory like a loop of videotape. It left no room for impressions or sound from the real world. Gabriel often wondered what Leah saw of him on that night. Did she see him walking away toward the spire of the cathedral, or could she feel him pulling her blackened body from the fire? He was certain of only one thing. Leah would not speak to him. She had not spoken a single word to him in thirteen years.

“It’s for me,” he said. “I have to say the words. I have to tell her the truth about you. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and I’m certainly not ashamed of you.”

Chiara lowered the duvet and kissed him feverishly. Gabriel could feel tension in her body and taste arousal on 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.

“P
ASSPORT, 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:
E
INE
N
EUE
O
RDNUNG
F
ÜR
E
IN
N
EUES
Ö
STERREICH
!:
A N
EW
O
RDER FOR A
N
EW
A
USTRIA
! 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 of
Die 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 Währinger Gürtel 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:
S
ALUTI ET
S
OLATIO
A
EGRORUM
:
T
O
H
EAL AND
C
OMFORT THE
S
ICK
. 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.”

“Is there a chance he’ll be blind?”

“They won’t know until he regains consciousness,” Zvi said. Then he added pessimistically, “
If
he regains consciousness.”

A doctor came into the room. He looked at Gabriel and Zvi and nodded once briskly, then opened the glass door and stepped into the ward. The nurse moved away from the bedside, and the doctor assumed her place. She came around the end of the bed and stood before the glass. For a second time, her eyes met Gabriel’s, then she drew the curtain closed with a sharp jerk of her wrist. Gabriel walked into the hall, followed by Zvi.

“You all right?”

“I’ll be fine. I just need a minute to myself.”

The diplomat went back inside. Gabriel clasped his hands behind his back, like a soldier at ease, and drifted slowly along the familiar corridor. He passed the nurses’ station. The same trite Vienna streetscape hung next to the window. The smell was the same, too—the smell of disinfectant and death.

He came to a half-open door bearing the number 2602-C. He pushed it gently with his fingertips, and the door swung silently open. The room was dark and unoccupied. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder. There were no nurses about. He slipped inside and closed the door behind him.

He left the lights off and waited for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Soon the room came into focus: the empty bed, the bank of silent monitors, the vinyl-covered chair. The most uncomfortable chair in all of Vienna. He’d spent ten nights in that chair, most of them sleepless. Only once had Leah regained consciousness. She’d asked about Dani, and Gabriel unwisely told her the truth. Tears spilled onto her ruined cheeks. She never spoke to him again.

“You’re not supposed to be in here.”

Gabriel, startled, turned quickly around. The voice belonged to the nurse who’d been at Eli’s side a moment earlier. She spoke to him in German. He responded in the same language.

“I’m sorry, I just—”

“I know what you’re doing.” She allowed a silence to fall between them. “I remember you.”

She leaned against the door and folded her arms. Her head fell to one side. Were it not for her baggy nurse’s uniform and the stethoscope hanging around her neck, Gabriel would have thought she was flirting with him.

“Your wife was the one who was involved in the car bombing a few years back. I was a young nurse then, just starting out. I took care of her at night. You don’t remember?”

Gabriel looked at her for a moment. Finally, he said, “I believe you’re mistaken. This is my first time in Vienna. And I’ve never been married. I’m sorry,” he added hastily, heading toward the door. “I shouldn’t have been in here. I just needed a place to gather my thoughts.”

He moved past her. She put her hand on his arm.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Is she alive?”

“Who?”

“Your wife, of course.”

“I’m sorry,” he said firmly, “but you have me confused with someone else.”

She nodded—
As you wish.
Her blue eyes were damp and shining in the half-light.

“He’s a friend of yours, Eli Lavon?”

“Yes, he is. A very close friend. We work together. I live in Jerusalem.”

“Jerusalem,”
she repeated, as though she liked the sound of the word. “I would like to visit Jerusalem sometime. My friends think I’m crazy. You know, the suicide bombers, all the other things…” Her voice trailed off. “I still want to go.”

“You should,” Gabriel said. “It’s a wonderful place.”

She touched his arm a second time. “Your friend’s injuries are severe.” Her tone was tender, tinged with sorrow. “He’s going to have a very tough time of it.”

“Is he going to live?”

“I’m not allowed to answer questions like that. Only the doctors can offer a prognosis. But if you want my opinion, spend some time with him. Tell him things. You never know, he might be able to hear you.”

H
E STAYED FOR
another hour, staring at Eli’s motionless figure through the glass. The nurse returned. She spent a few minutes checking Eli’s vital signs, then motioned for Gabriel to come inside the room. “It’s against the rules,” she said conspiratorially. “I’ll stand watch at the door.”

Gabriel didn’t speak to Eli, just held his bruised and swollen hand. There were no words to convey the pain he felt at seeing another loved one lying in a Viennese hospital bed. After five minutes, the nurse came back, laid her hand on Gabriel’s shoulder, and told him it was time to leave. Outside, in the corridor, she said her name was Marguerite. “I’m working tomorrow night,” she said. “I’ll see you then, I hope.”

Zvi had left; a new team of guards had come on duty. Gabriel rode the elevator down to the lobby and went outside. The night had turned even colder. He shoved his hands into his coat pockets and quickened his pace. He was about to head down the escalator into the U-Bahn station when he felt a hand on his arm. He turned around, expecting to see Marguerite, but instead found himself face-to-face with the old man who’d been talking to himself in the lobby when Gabriel arrived.

“I heard you speaking Hebrew to that man from the embassy.” His Viennese German was frantically paced, his eyes wide and damp. “You’re Israeli, yes? A friend of Eli Lavon’s?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “My name is Max Klein, and this is all my fault. Please, you must believe me. This is all my fault.”