AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“And you trust him?”
“He’s gotten me out of the deep shit before,” Miller said. “When I got shot down in Afghanistan, I knew I was really in the deep shit. I was bleeding like a stuck pig and I couldn’t walk fifty feet. And the weather was way below minimums, so I knew the candy asses wouldn’t launch a medevac chopper. And then all of a sudden a Black Hawk appears, right on the fucking deck. Charley’s flying it, wearing his rag-head suit and beard. He stole the Black Hawk to come and save my ass.”
“You told me that war story. But not about your pal dressed up like a rag-head. He’s a spook, too?”
“Yeah. And a Green Beanie. And we go all the way back to West Point. I trust him.”
“Okay, then. You going to pack? Porter wasn’t kidding about getting you out of here quick. They were breaking their asses at the embassy getting you on the next plane out.”
“I guess I better,” Miller said.
“I’ll make sure they don’t rob you blind when the shippers pack you up,” Fortenaux said.
“Thanks,” Miller said and went into a closet and started taking out suitcases.
[FIVE]
Room 426 Hotel Bristol Kaerntner Ring 1 Vienna, Austria 0840 7 June 2005
Castillo pushed open the heavy draperies over the window beside the bed and looked out. He could see the rear of the Vienna State Opera and the red awnings over the sidewalk café of the Hotel Sacher on Philharmonikerstrasse.
He had suspected as the bellman had led him down the corridor that he might have such a view but hadn’t been sure.
He put his head against the glass and looked to see how much of the front of the opera and the Opernring—“The Ring”—he could see.
Not much. It didn’t matter. He was simply curious.
Once, when he’d stayed at the Bristol as a kid—Gross-pappa Gossinger loved the opera and they’d come at least once a year—his grandfather had pulled aside the drapes in their suite and motioned him over.
He pointed down at the Opernring in front of the opera.
“You see that, Karlchen?” he’d asked. “That’s Austria.”
“Excuse me?”
“You see those three men, resetting a cobblestone?”
“Yes, sir.”
“In Hesse, when a cobblestone needs resetting they send one man to replace it. That’s all it takes. In Austria, they send three men. One does the work. The second drinks a beer and eats a wurst. And the third supervises the other two.”
“Poppa!” his mother had complained, which had only served to fuel his grandfather’s desire that his grandson should understand the Austrians.
“Behind all this gemütlichkeit, Karlchen, they’re really a savage people.”
“Poppa! Stop!”
“You know they had an empire here, Karlchen?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And an imperial family?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me tell you what they did when a member of the imperial family died, Karlchen. They cut open the body and took out the heart and the guts. Then they buried the heart in one place, the guts in another, and the gutted corpse in Saint Stefan’s Cathedral. If that isn’t savage, what is?”
“Why did they do that?” Karl had asked.
