A Death in Vienna

policy with the brightest minds in the field at Harvard. After graduation, the doors to the Agency were thrown open to him. Then the Empire crumbled and a new threat rose from the sands of the Middle East. Fluent German and a graduate degree from Harvard didn’t count for much in the new Agency. Today’s stars were human action figures who could live off worms and grubs and walk a hundred miles with some hill tribesman without complaining of so much as a blister. The American had got Vienna, but the Vienna that awaited him had lost her old importance. She was suddenly just another European backwater, a cul-de-sac, a place to quietly end a career, not launch one.
    Thank God for the Vogel affair. It had livened things up a bit, even if it was only temporary.
    The American turned into the Boltzmanngasse and paused at the formidable security gate. The Marine guard checked his identification card and permitted him to enter. The American had official cover. He worked in Cultural. It only reinforced his feelings of obsolescence. A spy, working with Cultural cover in Vienna. How perfectly quaint.
    He rode the lift up to the fourth floor and paused at a door with a combination lock. Behind it was the nerve center of the Agency’s Vienna station. The American sat down before a computer, logged on, and tapped out a brief cable to Headquarters. It was addressed to a man named Carter, the deputy director for operations. Carter hated chatty cables. He’d ordered the American to find out one simple piece of information. The American had done it. The last thing Carter needed was a blow-by-blow account of his harrowing exploits at Café Central. Once it might have sounded compelling. Not anymore.
    He typed five words—Avraham is in the game—and fired it into the secure ether. He waited for a response. To pass the time, he worked on an analysis of the upcoming election. He doubted it would be required reading on the seventh floor at Langley.
    His computer beeped. He had a message waiting. He clicked on it, and words appeared on the screen.
    Keep Elijah under watch.
    The American hastily tapped out another message:What if Elijah leaves town?
    Two minutes later:Keep Elijah under watch.
    The American logged off. He put aside the report on the election. He was back in the game, at least for now.
    GABRIEL SPENT THErest of that evening at the hospital. Marguerite, the night nurse, came on duty an hour after he arrived. When the doctor had completed his examination, she permitted him to sit at Eli’s bedside. For a second time, she suggested Gabriel talk to him, then she slipped from the room to give him a few moments of privacy. Gabriel didn’t know what to say, so he leaned close to Eli’s ear and whispered to him in Hebrew about the case: Max Klein, Renate Hoffmann, Ludwig Vogel . . . Eli lay motionless, his head bandaged, his eyes bound. Later, in the corridor, Marguerite confided to Gabriel that there had been no improvement in Eli’s condition. Gabriel sat in the adjoining waiting room for another hour, watching Eli through the glass, then took a taxi back to his hotel.
    In his room he sat down at the desk and switched on the lamp. In the top drawer he found a few sheets of hotel stationery and a pencil. He closed his eyes for a moment and pictured Vogel as he had seen him that afternoon in Café Central.
    “Are you sure we’ve never met before? Your face seems very familiar to me.”
    “I sincerely doubt it.”
    Gabriel opened his eyes again and started sketching. Five minutes later, Vogel’s face was staring up at him.What might he have looked like as a young man? He began to sketch again. He thickened the hair, removed the hoods and crinkles from the eyes. He smoothed the furrows from the forehead, tightened the skin on the cheeks and along the jawline, erased the deep troughs leading from the base of the nose to the corners of the small mouth.
    Satisfied, he placed the new sketch next to the first. He began a third version of the man, this time with the high-collared tunic and peaked cap of an SS man. The image, when it was complete, set fire to the skin of his neck.
    He opened the file Renate Hoffmann had given him and read the name of the village where Vogel had his country house. He located the village on a tourist map he found in the desk drawer, then dialed a rental car office and reserved a car for the morning.
    He carried the sketches to the bed and, with his head propped on the pillow, stared at the three