A Death in Vienna

crowd. The men pressed forward to clutch his hand or slap his back. The women kissed his cheek. Metzler had definitely made it sexy to be a conservative again.
    The journey to the head of the room took five minutes. As Metzler mounted the podium, a beautiful girl in a dirndl handed him a huge stein of lager. He raised it overhead and was greeted by a delirious roar of approval. He swallowed some of the beer—not a photo opportunity sip, but a good longAustrian pull—then stepped before the microphone.
    “I want to thank all of you for coming here tonight. And I also want to thank our dear friends and supporters for arranging such a warm welcome outside the hotel.” A wave of laughter swept over the room. “What these people don’t seem to understand is that Austria is forAustrians and that we will choose our own future based onAustrian morals andAustrian standards of decency. Outsiders and critics from abroad have no say in the internal affairs of this blessed land of ours. We will forge our own future, anAustrian future, and that future begins three weeks from tonight!”
    Pandemonium.
    26
    BARILOCHE, ARGENTINA
    THE RECEPTIONIST ATtheBarilocher Tageblatt eyed Gabriel with more than a passing interest as he stepped through the door and strode toward her desk. She had short dark hair and bright blue eyes set off by an attractive suntanned face. “May I help you?” she said in German, hardly surprising, since theTageblatt , as the name implies, is a German-language newspaper.
    Gabriel replied in the same language, though he adroitly concealed the fact that, like the woman, he spoke it fluently. He said he had come to Bariloche to conduct genealogical research. He was looking, he claimed, for a man he believed was his mother’s brother, a man named Otto Krebs. He had reason to believe Herr Krebs died in Bariloche in October 1982. Would it be possible for him to search the archives of the newspaper for a death notice or an obituary?
    The receptionist smiled at him, revealing two rows of bright, even teeth, then picked up her telephone and dialed a three-digit extension. Gabriel’s request was put to a superior in rapid German. The woman was silent for a few seconds, then she hung up the phone and stood.
    “Follow me.”
    She led him across a small newsroom, her heels clicking loudly over the faded linoleum floor. A half-dozen employees were lounging in their shirtsleeves in various states of relaxation, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. No one seemed to take notice of the visitor. The door to the archives room was ajar. The receptionist switched on the lights.
    “We’re computerized now, so all the articles are stored automatically in a searchable database. I’m afraid that goes back only as far as 1998. When did you say this man died?”
    “I believe it was 1982.”
    “You’re lucky. The obituaries are all indexed—by hand, of course, the old-fashioned way.”
    She walked over to a table and lifted the cover of a thick, leather-bound ledger book. The ruled pages were filled with tiny handwritten notations.
    “What did you say his name was?”
    “Otto Krebs.”
    “Krebs, Otto,” she said, flipping forward to theK s. “Krebs, Otto . . . Ah, here it is. According to this, it was November 1983. Still interested in seeing the obituary?”
    Gabriel nodded. The woman wrote down a reference number and walked over to a stack of cardboard boxes. She ran a forefinger along the labels and stopped when she arrived at the one she was looking for, then asked Gabriel to remove the boxes stacked on top of it. She lifted the lid, and the smell of dust and decaying paper rose from the contents. The clips were contained in brittle, yellowing file folders. The obituary for Otto Krebs had been torn. She repaired the image with a strip of transparent tape and showed it to Gabriel.
    “Is that the man you’re looking for?”
    “I don’t know,” he said truthfully.
    She took the clip back from Gabriel and read it quickly. “It says here that he was an only child.” She looked at Gabriel. “That doesn’t mean much. A lot of them had to erase their pasts to protect their families who were still in Europe. My grandfather was lucky. At least he got to keep his own name.”
    She looked at Gabriel, searching his eyes. “He was from Croatia,” she said. There was an air of complicity in her tone. “After the war, the Communists wanted to put him on trial and hang him. Fortunately, Perón was willing to let