At least the Inquisition was about keeping something together. Analysis is only about taking a person apart. I would rather die than see an analyst.
—Werner Herzog
In the watery yellow light of the late afternoon at the Konak, the Count stared from an open upstairs window. He wondered if he, too, should leave the city, for if Johan was to blame for the events of that pivotal Sunday, then Kaunitz should bear some of the burden. However, he was several degrees of separation from the epicenter, and it was not he who had entered a daydream on the topic of Lorelei’s undergarments and a feather, or entered a Sarajevan cul-de-sac without the skill to get out the way he had gone in.
But Johan had become the son Kaunitz had never envisaged. Besides arranging for Johan’s safe passage, the Count had arranged for a delivery to the Thoms residence in Argona. A bouquet of gardenias addressed to Elena, with a small note in a lemon-yellow envelope, quill-addressed and scarlet-wax-sealed with his ancient forefather’s royal ring.
Frau Thoms,
I am so sorry to hear of Johan’s disappearance. I am sure he will be all right, for he is made of stern stuff, your boy. As I feel partly responsible for the unfolding of events, please allow me to be of any assistance possible. The work I had arranged for Johan was well paid. As you are no longer likely to benefit from your son’s employ (for the immediate future), I have taken the liberty to furnish a private account with a little something for the two souls who gave the world something delightful and exquisite in your son and my friend, Johan Thoms. Do accept this to comfort your blow until that marvelous boy reappears to illuminate this barren and glum time. Please continue to be as proud of him as you always were. If you had seen him last Sunday morn, you would have burst. My, oh my, how smart did he look! If you did see him, just hold that thought, that image. And know that if it had not been for his quick thinking, there would have been bloodshed aplenty on the drive from the station; many more innocents, even children, could have been hurt.
If there is anything you need as a family or personally, of any nature, at any juncture, I would consider it politely hurtful if I were not the first to be asked to help.
Yours,
Count Erich von Kaunitz XV
Drago and Elena held each other as together they read the Count’s letter.
Elena seemed a foot smaller and twenty pounds lighter already. Drago just stared ahead. The thought flashed through Elena’s mind that there was something more than friendship or patronage in the relationship between the Count and her boy, but she dismissed it as irrelevant. The offer of help brought a tear to her eye. But it did not even register with Drago. He went into a lengthy episode, his hair twanging north, south, east, and west like the arms of some mad Hindu god he had once seen in one of the saucier of Johan Thoms’s tomes.
* * *
Johan’s feet hurt. He remembered embracing Kaunitz and taking a bag from him. He recalled talking to Herman on a road in the dark. He remembered not looking back. He tried to remember how long he had been walking. He could not.
He now felt a hole in his sock, and a burning blister. He wasn’t sure where he was and why. He was wearing his suit, though it was in far from good condition. The newness of his shoes had rubbed his heels raw. He hopped from leg to leg to check the extent of the injury, peering down the side of each brogue in turn. He felt sandpaper stubble on his face. His hair felt oily and gritty, and his shirt hung below his waistcoat. His loose tie exposed two open buttonholes above the knot. Though Johan did not know the day, he could gauge it by his facial hair. It was Tuesday. Apart from a couple of involuntary shrieks of pain up to the celestials in the balmy summer sky, his chin felt as if it had been pointing groundward for hours. He instinctively headed west, toward his lone compass of the setting sun. It would lead him to the Adriatic, the sea, and into Italy—a buffer from a reality to which he was currently myopic. He had been grabbing on to his kit bag, with far too much gusto, he realized. He stopped in his tracks, pulled the army satchel from his dusty shoulder, and opened the bag. Good old Kaunitz!
Then he remembered, hazily, Kaunitz pleading with him to stay at the estate. He knew that the Count himself knew that his request was useless.
The topography of the landscape suggested he was tens of miles from the city. He could see no signs of life in any direction. He was walking country roads, over hills. Other than a pair of carefully mating hedgehogs, he’d seen not a living soul. He had walked far, then. He must have slept a few hours since leaving. He sat on the verge under a pine tree. His thirst became intense, hunger in its slipstream. He went into his kit bag and pulled out a cigarette from a gold case. He had seen the case before, when he’d spent a day in the country. He checked through the papers, and he then lit his smoke and studied the forms more closely. They were all extremely official looking, with stamps in different languages, illegible, spidery paw prints from Lord-knows-whom. They appeared to offer him a certain lofty status, which his current appearance belied. Yet it was not as much status as was offered to him by a bankbook from the Bank of Vienna, with one solitary entry in the first column, as well as a beautiful hide-leather wallet, made all the more beautiful by its stuffed contents—at least forty, maybe fifty one-hundred-forint notes.
Dizzy relief overcame him. He recalled a similar feeling from his childhood. He took just one of the notes and dropped it into his inside jacket pocket, where he saw Schneider’s label. This dislodged his blocked memory: two corpses, professing their undying love in the back of a shiny Packard; gaping red holes in a neck and a pregnant belly. He puffed hard on the remnants of the cigarette, in a vain attempt to repress his memory. Dropping the butt to the dust under the tree, he closed his eyes tight. The pressure on his temples became immense. He tried to beat down the pain, but it only grew more intense. Now he was reminded of a different sensation from his early years, that of an umbilical cord, tight around his neck, images flashed cinematographically onto the screen of his inner eyelids: of his parents, shamed, in darkened rooms and behind closed doors; of Lorelei, wondering why he had abandoned her; the returning corpses.
How could anyone have turned such a dream of a situation into such abject horror?
How could anyone have grabbed so much notoriety from the jaws of notability?
How could anyone have fucked up so badly?
His head felt like it would implode. Eyes still closed, he took deep breaths to rid himself of the agony crushing his skull. He felt as though a hot knife were gouging out his left eye. He could not walk on in this heat. Franz and Sophie stared at him inquisitively, with their bullet holes pouring out a generously thick Merlot. He half prized open his right eye.
The pain notched up on the dial. He slipped toward unconsciousness, trying his best to think of smelling the Blue Rose of Forgetfulness. He tuned in instead to a personal showing of his worst nightmare:
Lorelei packs her things into the trunk. It has been delivered up by the sweaty porter, whom she had met previously under clearer skies. The manager has reserved her a sleeper cabin on the train, courtesy of an open check provided by Srna. She would enter the carriage from the same platform where the plumed Archduke had stepped several fateful days earlier.
She ponders how everything was as it had been before in the railway station. The station hotel hall clock still ticked, the trains were on the same tracks, the same city hugged the structure in its womb. Everything is the same, but everything has changed: all the constants in the world could not turn back time. She is smart, she knows this. (Johan did not; he was about to start his lengthy search for portals and wormholes in the space-time continuum.)
And with the sounding of a rude horn, a station is full of choking warm steam and the din of a rumpus caused by a rabble of drunken Gypsies. Her time in this ancient city would now end. On the train, she stares straight ahead, typically stubborn, unblinking. The train hits a new daylight, within minutes it reaches the countryside. The carriage heads north through a Europe still green.
Johan’s vision switched to mean and vengeful brows in uniforms, carrying revolvers and handcuffs, searching for the turncoat–agent provocateur–traitor who had ruthlessly sacrificed the Archduke and his princess. But none of them would think to look for that man in the still contours of a slumped figure beneath the branches of a tree in a field late in the day to the west.