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“Where’s Oberst Wasserman?” Wangermann demanded.
“I already asked him,” Cronley said. “He doesn’t know.”
“I asked where he is.”
“You just missed him,” Cronley said. “He didn’t say where he was going, but he said he’d be back in time for dinner.”
“And what are you doing in Vienna?”
“I came to see how much of my money Cezar Zielinski has lost at the vingt-et-un tables at the Viktoria Palast.”
“A lot,” Holzknecht said, chuckling.
This earned him a dirty look from Wangermann.
“My sources tell me that at about half past two this afternoon, eight of Wasserman’s men came here in three staff cars. Further, that they rode the elevator to this floor, suggesting they were headed for this suite. They reappeared in the lobby three minutes later, now brandishing submachine guns and forming a protective shield around an old woman—the same woman, from her description, who sips tea by the gottverdammt hour with a gottverdammt dachshund in her lap in the lobby—and marched her through the lobby. They put her in the middle staff car and all three took off, sirens screaming, down the Ring.
“Wasserman’s cars were later located as they were leaving the Schwechat airfield. The old woman was not in the cars, nor in the airfield terminal, which is interesting because no aircraft of any airline had left the airport in the previous three hours. You want to explain any, preferably all, of this, Captain Strasbourger?”
“Do you want me to bullshit you?”
“You arrogant little sonofabitch!”
“I’ll take that as a ‘no,’” Cronley said. “Hypothetically speaking, Herr Wangermann—”
“‘Hypothetically’?” Wangermann asked sarcastically.
“Let’s say, just for the sake of conversation, that a lady in her middle years—a Jewish lady, that’s important—came to you and said she had just escaped across the border from Gábor Péter’s Allamvedelmi Osztaly in Budapest, and requested asylum—”
“I’m surprised, Captain Strasbourger, that you even know what the AVO is, much less that sonofabitch Gábor.”
“I’m DCI, we know everything.”
“Scheisse,” Wangermann said, but he was unable to control his smile.
“So you are about to grant her wish when the Russian member of the Quadripartite Commission goes before the whole commission and says, ‘It has come to our attention that your Vienna Police, specifically Herr Walter Wangermann, is holding a notorious Hungarian criminal, by the name—let’s say—of Rachel Rothschild, and we demand that she be immediately turned over to us so that she can face Hungarian justice. Pulling the wings off flies and letting your dachshund piss on state-controlled fire hydrants is conduct that simply cannot be tolerated.’”
“Why does the AVO really want her?”
“I have no idea that I can share with you.”
“In other words, she’s been working for you? For the DCI?”
“There’s a rumor going around that she’s friendly with Reinhard Gehlen. But getting back to my hypothetical. What would you do under these hypothetical circumstances? Turn her over in handcuffs to the Communists?”
Wangermann didn’t reply.
“Or, maybe, since we both know that Gábor Péter executes people he doesn’t like by slow strangulation, would you maybe let her escape, thus giving the Reds the finger?”
“What finger?”
Cronley demonstrated.
“Let me give you another hypothetical,” Cronley went on. “Let’s say our hypothetical nice Jewish lady w
ith a dachshund didn’t go to you. Let’s say she met a fellow dog lover, say an American tourist—”
“You’re not an American tourist.”
