“Swept an hour ago, Mr. Mannberg.”
“Ludwig, please, Colonel Wassermann,” Mannberg said.
“Karl-Christoph, but I usually go with Carl, with a ‘C,’” Wassermann said, and then went on. “What are a couple of nice German-American boys like us doing in this business?”
“Fighting the Red Menace?” Mannberg said.
“And how can the Vienna CIC help the DCI in that noble endeavor?”
“Why don’t we have a taste of Slivovitz while I tell you?”
Wassermann said, “When I told my mother I was coming to Vienna—actually I’m a Hungarian-American boy, Mother is from Budapest—she strongly advised me to stay away from that fermented plum juice, but why not?”
Cronley remembered that the last time they were in Vienna, he had told Spurgeon that he was “sort of aide-de-camp” to Mannberg, and hurried to pour the Slivovitz.
Mannberg and Wassermann touched glasses.
“Does the name Ivan Serov mean anything to you, Carl?” Mannberg asked.
“If you’re talking about the Ivan Serov who is first deputy to commissar of State Security Nikolayevich Merkulov, it does.”
“Mr. Cronley and I are going to have dinner with Comrade Serov tonight at the Drei Husaren.”
“They do a very nice Paprikás Csirke,” Wassermann said in German. “Just like my mother used to make. Are you familiar with that, Mr. Cronley?”
He wants to know if I speak German. What’s that all about?
“No, sir,” Cronley replied in German. “My mother is a Strasbourger.”
“They simmer chicken in a paprika sauce until tender and then stir in sour cream,” he went on, still in German. “You really ought to try it.”
“Thank you, sir, I will.”
“What Comrade Serov wants to discuss is an exchange,” Mannberg said. “I’m presuming you know Colonel Mattingly’s gone missing.”
“General Greene called to tell me about Mattingly. He didn’t tell me the Reds have him.”
“He may not know,” Mannberg said. “We heard from a former Abwehr Ost asset. I don’t know if the chief, DCI-Europe, told General Greene.”
“I have to wonder why not. Is there—how do I say this?—friction between Greene and the chief, DCI-Europe?”
Wassermann’s eyes drifted to Cronley, then back to Mannberg.
Why did he look at me, Mannberg’s “aide”? Does he think I’ll talk? Or is there something else?
And why the hell did he ask that?
Has that sonofabitch Seidel been bad-mouthing me—DCI-Europe—to this Wassermann?
More important, has he been successful?
And is that somehow going to fuck up this meeting with Serov?
Seidel didn’t know about that.
Unless of course somebody I trust got on the phone and told him.
Shit!