Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

After deciding he had all the Viennese gemütlichkeit he could stomach, Kocian moved to Budapest as soon as the Communists were gone, where he devoted his time to needling the Soviet Union and bureaucrats of all stripes on the pages of the Budapester Tages Zeitung, holding the editors of the seven other Tages Zeitung newspapers to his own high standards, and playing with his Bouvier des Flandres dog, Max.

Max was really Max IV, the fourth of his line. Billy had acquired Max I after checking into—and finding credible—the legend that a Bouvier des Flandres had bitten off one of Adolf Hitler’s testicles while Der Führer was serving in Belgium during the First World War.

Max II and Max III had appeared when their predecessors had, for one reason or another, gone to that great fireplug in the sky. Max IV was something special. It was quickly said that Billy Kocian was so enamored of Max IV that the animal could have anything it wanted.

What Max IV wanted became painfully obvious when the dog scandalized the guests of the luxurious and very proper Danubius Hotel Gellért—where he and Billy lived in a penthouse apartment overlooking the Danube—by pursuing a German shepherd bitch through the dining room, the lobby, and down into the Roman baths below the hotel, where he worked his lustful way on her for more than two hours.

As soon as he could, Billy procured suitable female companionship for Max. She was a ninety-something-pound Bouvier, one he named Madchen.

The Max–Madchen honeymoon lasted until Madchen realized she was in the family way and sensed that Max IV was responsible. Thereafter, she made her desire to painfully terminate his life by castration quite clear whenever Max IV came within twenty feet of her.

So, what to do? Billy dearly loved Max IV, but he had come to love Madchen, too, and couldn’t find it in his heart to banish her, after what Max IV had done to her.

The answer came quickly: give Max IV to Karlchen.

Karlchen was the Colonel’s grandson.

Karlchen had played with Max I as an infant; they had loved each other at first sight. When Max II had come along, sam

e thing. It was only because of Karlchen’s mother’s awful sickness, her arguments that with the Colonel and her brother gone, and her being sick, she couldn’t care for the dog, that he hadn’t given Max II to Karlchen right then, to take his mind off things.

But Billy had taken Max II to Rhine-Main airfield to see Karlchen off to the United States just before his mother died. When Billy saw how the boy, crying, had wrapped his arms around the dog, he decided that Max II should go with him.

That had resulted in a front-page headline by the bastards at the Frankfurter Rundshau: “Tages Zeitung Publishing Empire Chief Jailed for Punching Pan-American Airlines Station Chief Who Refused Passage for Fifty-Kilo Dog.”

Things were different when Madchen banished Max IV from the canine connubial bed. Karlchen was now not only a man, but in the Colonel’s footsteps, an oberstleutnant in the American Army himself. He denied being an intelligence officer, but Billy had been around armies long enough to know better than that. Run-of-the-mill lieutenant colonels don’t fly themselves around the world in Gulfstream III airplanes.

The next time Karlchen—now known as Charley—appeared in Budapest, Uncle Billy explained the Max IV–Madchen problem to him. Charley had understood.

“Let’s see what he does when I tell him to get on the airplane. I’m not going to force him to go.”

He stood inside the door of the Gulfstream.

“Hey, Max,” he called in Hungarian. “You want to go to Argentina with me?”

Max looked at Billy for a moment, then trotted to the airplane and took the stair-door steps three at a time.

Billy Kocian went back to the penthouse in the Danubius Hotel Gellért and shared three bottles of the local grape—known as Bull’s Blood—with Sándor Tor. Tor, after doing hitches in the Wehrmacht, the French Foreign Legion, and the Budapest Police Department, was now chief of security for Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., and Billy’s best friend.

During their conversation, Billy told Sándor that he now knew what his father must have felt like “when, wagging my tail like Max just now, I left home to go in the goddamn Wehrmacht.”

“Let me get a quick shower and then I’ll get dressed, and we’ll go for a walk,” Castillo now said to Max IV. “I just can’t go back to sleep.”

Max leapt with amazing agility and grace for his size onto the bed, put his head between his paws, and closed his eyes, as if saying, “Okay, you have your shower and I’ll take a little nap while I’m waiting.”

—

Charley came out of the bathroom and asked, “Ready?”

Max got gracefully off the bed, walked to the French doors, and waited for Charley to open it. When he had, Max went through it, walked to a five-foot-tall marble statue of Saint Igor II of Kiev, who had been Grand Prince of Kiev before becoming a monk, which stood in the center of the patio, and raised his right rear leg.

“You know what’ll happen if Sweaty sees you pissing on her favorite saint again.”

Max ignored him, finished his business at hand, and then walked to the opening in the patio wall leading to the walkway and waited for Charley to join him.

The walkway led toward the shore of Lake Nahuel Huapi. When Charley went through the opening, lights along the path automatically came on.

Nothing of La Casa en el Bosque or its outbuildings was visible from the lake, or from the Llao Llao Hotel, which was across the lake, but the reverse was not true. At four places along the nearly half-mile shoreline there were, just about entirely concealed by huge pine and hardwood trees, four patio-like areas from which just about all of the lake, and the hotel, was visible.