“To make sure he was dead, I suppose,” his grandfather had said. “And I’ll tell you something else, Karlchen.”
“Enough, Poppa!” his mother had said.
“You know what the SS was, Karlchen? The worst of the Nazis?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Most of their officers, the bastards, were Austrians, not Germans.”
At that point, his mother had dragged him out of the room and taken him to a pastry shop called Demel’s. Over a cup of hot chocolate almost hidden by a mountain of whipped cream, she had told him that Grosspappa had had bad experiences in the Army with the SS and Austrians.
“What kind of bad experiences?”
“In Russia, he saw all the terrible things the SS did, and he
had an SS officer on his staff who reported everything your grandfather did. But, meine hartz, all the Austrians aren’t like that, and you shouldn’t pay too much attention to Grosspappa.”
The story about eviscerated imperial bodies had of course stuck in the mind of a ten-year-old boy, and, a decade later, Sergeant Carlos G. Castillo of the United States Corps of Cadets had found in the library of the United States Military Academy at West Point confirmation of both that interesting custom and of what his grandfather had told him about the officer corps of the Schutzstaffel: somewhere between seventy and eighty percent had been Austrian.
He’d asked one of his professors about it. Colonel Schneider had told him it was probably something like the joke about people converting to Roman Catholicism trying to be more Catholic than the pope.
“After the anschluss, Castillo, one way to keep from being treated as a second-class German because you hadn’t been born in Germany before the anschluss was to become a true believer in National Socialism and Adolf Hitler, and, if you could, join the SS and put on the death’s-head insignia. ”
Castillo let the drape fall back into place and unpacked. Then he took a shower, put his dirty linen in a plastic bag to have it washed—he had no idea how long he would be in Vienna —and then left his small suite and walked down to the lobby.
He stopped before entering the lobby and mentally filed away pictures of people sitting there who could see people getting off one of the elevators. That done, he started across the lobby and at the last moment stopped himself from picking up a copy of the international edition of the Herald Tribune that the hotel had stacked on a table for the convenience of its guests.
Americans—and some English—read the Herald Tribune. A reporter from the Tages Zeitung probably would not.
He went through the revolving door, declined the offer of a taxi, and went and stood on the corner for a moment, taking in the sights, and making mental notes of other people standing around where they could see who entered and left the Hotel Bristol.
Then he walked down Kaertnerstrasse to Philharmonikerstrasse and turned left, walking past the sidewalk café of the Hotel Sacher, again making mental note of the people sitting at its tables.
The bar inside the Sacher—just barely visible from the street—was where he was supposed to go every afternoon at five until Pevsner made contact.
That done, he made his way to Demel’s and made breakfast of white chocolate-covered croissants and hot chocolate topped with whipped cream.
He thought of his mother.
And he thought: If I were Michael Caine or Gene Hackman or Whatsisname, the latest 007, and doing what I’m doing, I would have a gun. Several guns. With which, shooting from the hip, I could hit a bad guy at fifty yards and drop him permanently.
But that’s not the case here.
I’m about to meet with a really bad guy and I don’t have so much as a fingernail file with which to defend myself. I could have, of course, packed a fingernail file in my suitcase, thus eluding the attentions of my coworkers in the Department of Homeland Security at the airport.
And a knife. But not a gun. The only way I could legally get my hands on a gun here is from the CIA and they wouldn’t give me one without authorization, which would be hard to get, inasmuch as they don’t know why I’m here and Hall is not about to tell Powell.
Tonight, I can probably buy one. That will mean first finding a hooker and, through her, her pimp, and through him a retail dealer in firearms—as opposed to Mr. Pevsner, who is in the wholesale weapons business—who will get me a pistol of some sort for an exorbitant price, not a dime of which can I expect to get back from the government.
But I can’t do that until late tonight, and it’s possible, but improbable, that when I go to the Sacher bar Pevsner will send someone to fetch me to the rendezvous. To which I would be very foolish to go without a weapon of some sort.
To which I would be foolish to go armed with all the weapons in the combined arsenals of Mssrs. Caine, Hackman, and Whatsisname, 007.
The answer is a knife. Knives.
Despite the best efforts of professionals in the knife fighting profession to teach me how to use a blade, the archbishop of Canterbury is probably a better knife fighter than I am.
But as it’s said, desperate times call for desperate measures.