Bucharest Unbound: A Cold War espionage thriller, page 1
BUCHAREST UNBOUND
RICHARD WAKE
MANOR AND STATE, LLC
Copyright © 2024 by Manor and State, LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part II
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Part III
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Part IV
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
REVIEW
Afterword
PART I
1
The American Bar was, as ever, tiny, relatively uncrowded, and devoid of women. It was where we always began the night when we were in our 20s — after the first war, before the second, young and dumb and hopeful. The Manhattans were strong at the American back then, and the conversation tended toward the women we intended pursuing at the next stop of the evening. Leon called the placed “the starting blocks,” the place where the pursuit would begin with some alcoholic preparation. Then, as now.
“Does she have a name?” I said.
“Frieda,” Leon said.
“Age?”
“A gentleman doesn’t ask.”
“Which lets you out. Age?”
“Twenty-nine,” Leon said.
“Jesus Christ.”
“It’s within the bounds of acceptability.”
“Yeah, if you’re a statutory rapist.”
“Hey, hey, I break no laws — never have.”
“Except the laws of decency.”
“You’re just jealous.”
“Whatever happened to half your age plus seven being the lower limit?”
“That’s for amateurs,” Leon said. “And, you know, she has friends.”
I snorted. “You do know that we both turn 50 this year.”
“Just a number,” he said.
“A big fucking round number.”
“Listen, Mr. Alex Kovacs, the number is only as big and as round as you let it be.”
I snorted again. This had always been the way of our relationship — Leon having copious amounts of sex, me having less; Leon trying to encourage me to have more, me putting him off. He slowed down a little during the war in Paris, when we were in the Resistance, but it was temporary.
“A sexual blip” is what Leon called that time when he talked about it, which wasn’t often. But when he did, the words were always accompanied by a slap to his temple. In his mind, that short stretch of his life was like when the radio lost the signal for a second, and you fixed it with a sharp rap on the side of the cabinet.
“You ever think about it?” I said.
“About what?”
“Paris. Leaving Paris. Coming back here.”
“Back home, you mean?”
“Here. Home. Whatever.”
At the end of the war, Leon and I were in Paris and without a clue about the future. Neither of us had lived in our hometown, in Vienna, since 1938. It had been seven years away from home but, given the cavalcade of events in those seven years, it might as well have been 70. It was me who suggested we come back home. My reasoning then was simple enough. The Resistance years had been brutal. We had both done things that were best buried in the recesses of our memories — but true burial would be impossible, at least for me, if every time I turned a corner to buy a baguette, I was reminded of some or other atrocity that had been committed by the Nazis in Paris or by me.
The way I explained it back then was, “A soldier, after the war, goes home — and home isn’t the battlefield where he did his fighting.” Leon ultimately agreed, and we made our way back to Vienna. What we found was a divided city, a wrecked city in many ways — physically by the bombing, but wrecked in other ways as well.
Leon, though, resumed living. He got another newspaper job and worked in his spare time on what he hoped would be his magnum opus, a history of the French Resistance. We had lived enough of it ourselves, after all — in Lyon and Limoges, in fetid alleys and barren countryside, and in Paris most of all — that he could easily sell his personal story. But he wanted it to be more than that, and he pecked away at the book when he could.
Like I said, he resumed living. Me, not so much. I had plenty of money in the bank but not much else — no career to speak of, no friends other than Leon. And I couldn’t settle. I was paralyzed by my restlessness, if that made any sense. And I was guided by — consumed by, really — the idea that I really was only good at one thing anymore: espionage. And if my work for the Gehlen Organization after the war took me to places where I made a difference — and it did — that objective good was always being weighed against the moral compromises along the way. When you routinely have a conversation with yourself where you justify the murder of one man because of some nebulous, greater good, well, that is one fucked-up way to live your life.
But it was even more than that. The temporary, tattered relationships. And the necessary rootlessness. And the inability to make anything remotely resembling a true and lasting connection with another human being other than Leon. And the odd comfort I felt in being isolated. And that other conversation with myself about how it wasn’t possible to get close to anyone so why even try? Like I said, fucked up.
I would come home to Vienna between missions and hate it. Even as my feelings about the Gehlen Organization grew darker, I just couldn’t come home and embrace the light — and a normal life.
“I mean, seriously, Alex. You don’t want to go back to Paris, do you?” Leon said.
“Not really, but—”
“What about all that business of living on the battlefield?”
“I didn’t say I wanted to go back. It’s just the idea does pop up now and then. I just can’t get comfortable in Vienna. I’m not sure why.”
“Let me fix you up with one of Frieda’s friends.”
“Sex isn’t the answer.”
“Maybe not the only answer, but a start,” Leon said.
With that he began to tell me a story about the one before Frieda, and the things she did with various vegetables and household utensils, when the door of the American opened behind my back.
Leon paused his story at the chapter on turkey basters and looked over my shoulder.
“What?” I said.
“Grim death just arrived.”
2
Fritz Ritter was my boss at the Gehlen Organization but he was more than that. Back when, he had been an old running buddy of my late Uncle Otto. Fritz was a traveling inspector for the Abwehr, German army intelligence. Otto, like me, was a traveling salesman who serviced the clients of the family magnesite mine. They met in the 1920s when they found themselves on adjacent barstools — and when they discovered similar proclivities when it came to the pursuit of unattached women on the road.
In the late 1930s, Fritz found himself working against the Nazis from within the Abwehr. When Otto was killed because he inadvertently found himself caught between Fritz and a persistently nosy Gestapo captain, and I attempted to pursue the truth, Fritz ended up using me but also protecting me. That has always been our relationship, using and protecting.
I felt a bond, through everything. Leon, meanwhile, thought I was blind. From his point of view, “Fritz will use you until you’re useless, and he’ll protect you until he can’t. Either way, you end up fucked in the end.”
Anyway, Fritz sat down and ordered a round. The pleasantries consisted of two words: “Alex… Leon.” Two words and two nods, and then he started talking about something in Bucharest. I stopped him and gestured in Leon’s direction with my thumb.
“Not a problem,” Fritz said. “We checked him out a long time ago. The guy I had do it, he came back and said you two might as well be fucking married. And then the guy said, ‘They’re different but really the same. Two assholes in a pod.’”
“No higher compliment,” Leon said. And then Fritz began telling his story. It involved a botched operation in Bucharest, one in which a Gehlen operative had been killed. It also was, at its foundation, a demonstration of the fundamental premise of the Gehlen Organization’s existence. That is, Gehlen — a former Nazi intelligence officer — provided the United States with the personnel and contacts that it lacked behind Churchill’s Iron Curtain, and the United States provided Gehlen with the cash it needed to exist and to grow.
“So, an American op?” I said.
Fritz nodded.
“But our guy was the one who got whacked?”
Another nod.
“And the Americans?”
“Warming their asses by the fire, and blaming everyone else who was within reach, and reminding us — as punctuation after every fucking sentence — how much their money meant to our survival.”
“Sounds like Americans,” Leon said.
“Said the espionage expert,” Fritz said.
“I’ve dealt with American men. I’ve fucked American women. They always make it about the money in the end.”
Fritz raised his glass in salute.
“So, what exactly happened?” I said.
“Exactly isn’t part of this conversation, unfortunately. Fog of war and all that. It was supposed to be a pretty simple thing. The group—”
“Wait, wait, back up. What group?”
Fritz gave Leon a look. It was the “this is really secret, asshole” look. Leon’s reply was a nod that was appropriately grave. Knowing him, though, it was all a put-on. Leon didn’t consider anything to be that grave and hadn’t since the end of the war. He had seen grave during his time in the Resistance. This, I’m sure he thought, was just adults playing at adult games, the dead body notwithstanding.
“The group is an anti-Communist, I don’t know, squadron,” Fritz said. “A dozen people, maybe. Homegrown opposition, based in Bucharest. The Americans got a guy in there from Budapest, somehow, and he helped them, shall we say, gather together a group of the like-minded. He helped form them, and he funded them, but he was out of his depth and had the humility to admit it — that, or his bosses admitted it for him. That’s where we came in.”
“So, we sent a guy,” I said.
“We didn’t have to send him — he was in Bucharest already. It’s the Gehlen special talent. We have somebody in every eastern shithole you can think of. Usually several somebodies.”
Fritz went on to sketch out what he knew, acknowledging that what he knew was almost entirely what the Americans had told Gehlen. There were six Bulgarians who had slipped over the border to Hungary when the Communists took over, and who wanted to go back to Sofia and form their own anti-Communist group. It shouldn’t have been that difficult. The Gehlen guy knew the area, and the six had slipped over the border once themselves, so as Fritz said, “Not a cinch, but hardly a long shot.”
“But alone?” I said.
“I know, I know,” Fritz said. “Fatal flaw.”
“Literally.”
“For whatever it’s worth, I wouldn’t have designed it that way or permitted it if I had been told. But I wasn’t told.”
“Why not?”
“Bit of a cowboy, our man in Bucharest,” Fritz said. “But I had him on a pretty long leash.”
“That’s a mistake.”
“Said the guy who fucking throws away the leash whenever I send him anywhere — throws it away before he checks into his first hotel.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Not to interrupt your reminiscences, but what do these groups do — you know, the one in Bucharest?” Leon said.
“Sabotage, mostly. Blow up fuel depots. Bomb government buildings. Just be a pain in the ass.”
“A lethal pain in the ass, no?” Leon said.
“Goes without saying,” Fritz said, and then he continued. The place where the border crossing was to take place was near a Romanian town called Pilu. It was about two miles from the border. There was a main road, which everyone involved knew to avoid. Instead, there were dirt tracks — narrow paths, really — the smugglers along the border had been using forever. On one of the paths, there was a dilapidated lean-to where the Gehlen guy sheltered, waiting for the six to cross.
“The information was clear,” Fritz said. “He radioed it to me before the mission. The intelligence he was working with said Pilu. The intelligence said the lean-to. But it was a goddamned disaster. I didn’t hear from him, his people in Bucharest didn’t hear from him, so after a day, they went looking. Our guy was dead in the lean-to — throat cut. The six Bulgarians were all dead about 100 yards away, just on the Romanian side of the border. All shot.”
“Christ. So where did the intelligence come from? Did he develop it on his own?”
“It came from the American,” Fritz said. “His bosses swear it was legitimate.”
“And where did the American get if from?” I said.
Fritz shrugged.
“That’s the fog of war part,” Fritz said. “I’m reliant on what our American cousins are telling me. We have the dead body and they have a million explanations. That’s kind of how it goes when something goes wrong. Truth is, the Americans didn’t invent ass-covering. I got to be an Abwehr general, and I have to admit, well, nobody gets to be a general without developing that skill set.”
We all took a drink, and then Leon said, “Maybe the Romanians fucked up — wouldn’t be the first time.”
Fritz listened to that and looked at me. I burst out laughing. So, he looked at Leon again and then at me again.
“It’s a long story,” Leon said.
“That involves a woman he slept with in Paris before the war. She said she was a Romanian countess.”
“Some fucking countess,” Leon said.
“The special kind of countess who gives you the crabs,” I said.
Fritz burst out laughing and immediately pivoted to a story from about 1930 that involved him, Uncle Otto, two girls from Frankfurt, and a creaky set of bunk beds.
“And the crabs,” Fritz said. “Otto got them, not me. I’m pretty sure I didn’t shake his hand for a year.”
3
Of course, Fritz wanted me to go to Bucharest.
Of course, I expressed my skepticism even as I knew all along that I was going, and that the truth was, I was happy to be going. This was the dance, though. There was something about my relationship with Fritz that I demanded it and he tolerated it. And all through the conversation, Leon sat with his arms folded and a wan smile on his face. Occasionally, he shook his head and laughed.
After five minutes of Fritz going through the logistics of me getting there, I said, “But what’s the point?”
“To find out the truth,” he said.
“The truth about what?”
“About everything.”
“That’s a little all-encompassing, no? The truth about everything? Maybe you can send Sartre, or Kant.”
“Can’t send Kant.”
“Why not?”
“He doesn’t speak the language,” Fritz said.
“Neither do I.”
“But you’re a quick study.”
