Gehlen had told Cronley Seven-K would, in her dual role as an agent of Mossad, the Jewish intelligence organization, use the money to smuggle Zionists out of the Soviet Union and to Palestine.
Cronley had last seen her when he had been in Vienna to meet Ivan Serov, who wanted to swap Colonel Robert Mattingly for Colonel Sergei Likharev and his family.
When they came back from their dinner meeting at the Drei Husaren restaurant, Seven-K had been sitting, dachshund in lap, having a coffee in the Bristol lobby.
Although their eyes had met—for no more than two seconds—Cronley knew she had recognized him. But that had not been the time to cry, Well, look who’s here!
And Cronley instantly decided neither was this.
If she wants to see me, she’ll be taking coffee in the lobby again.
And maybe I’ll have the chance to ask her if another $200,000 will get Otto’s wife and her brother out of the AVO prison in Budapest. If DCI won’t spring for that, Cletus and I wil
l.
Otto Niedermeyer got in the front passenger seat beside Charley Spurgeon, and Cronley got in the back with Colonel Wasserman, and Spurgeon started off down Ringstrasse past the ruins of the Vienna Opera.
“Somebody got to the Ford family,” Wasserman said.
“Excuse me?”
“The Fords are going to pay for the rebuilding of the Opera.”
“Really?”
“And they started a fund to rebuild St. Stephen’s Cathedral. I guess this city really gets to people. It’s gotten to me.”
“It got to my wife,” Niedermeyer said, turning in the front seat. “I met Carol here, proposed to her here, and we got married in St. Stephen’s. We were supposed to go to Venice for the wedding trip, but we never got further than the Imperial Hotel, where she had made reservations.”
“Pity you couldn’t have brought her here with you,” Wasserman said.
“Yeah, it is.”
Niedermeyer was still sitting so he could look into the backseat. Cronley averted his eyes. He didn’t want to look at him.
—
“Well, here we are in Grinzing,” Spurgeon said. “And there’s Cobenzlgasse.”
Cronley saw they were in a sort of square. To the left, the streetcar tracks leading from Vienna ended. There was a circular section of track that permitted the streetcars to turn around for return to Vienna.
The square was lined with stores, many of which had hanging signs reading HEURIGER.
“What’s a Heuriger?” he asked.
“A place where you can get a monumental headache drinking wine made from grapes that last week were hanging from the vine,” Niedermeyer said. “It’s a sacred Viennese custom.”
Spurgeon started driving up the cobblestones of Cobenzlgasse. Almost immediately he saw that the left side of the road was lined with very large houses behind fences. To the right there were snow-covered vineyards.
“Not too slow, Charley,” Colonel Wasserman cautioned, “we don’t want to appear too curious.”
Spurgeon accelerated.
Cronley had just noticed a Heuriger on the left side of the road, apparently closed for the winter, when Niedermeyer said, “Olga Reithoffer, her name was Olga Reithoffer. And there it is! Number 71.”
“Bingo!” Zielinski said.
“No wonder you had trouble remembering it,” Cronley said.