Brandenburg by Glenn Meade Read Free Book Online Page A

park were ghostly white as they passed the entrance, snow outlining their branches, the open spaces a gray expanse in the gloaming.
    She wasn’t limping now as they strolled toward the house. For someone of an artistic nature who had fallen ill, his father had once remarked, the doctor ought to prescribe a round of applause, not pills. Volkmann smiled in the darkness, remembering the remark.
    She looked up at him. “Wasn’t Carinni divine?”
    They had reached the park entrance, and Volkmann looked down at her. “I’ve heard you play better.”
    She smiled. “You’re a flatterer, Joseph. But you know the way to an old woman’s heart.”
    She stopped to regain her breath, and he watched as she looked around at the snowy park landscape, then moved toward theentrance, stepping through the open gates. He stayed close behind her.
    “This reminds me . . . ,” she said.
    “Tell me.”
    “Of when I was a little girl. Of Christmas. There was always snow in winter in Budapest.” She looked up at him and he could see her face dimly. “But that was all such a long time ago. Long before I met your father.”
    “Tell me again.”
    He had heard it all before, many times, her words like some comforting litany. The season of plenty in Budapest, and the anticipation of Christmas. When the blue flag was up on the frozen lake in Octagon Square, and the ice was thick enough for skaters, and the red candles flickered in the windows of warm houses, warm as an oven, the smell of burning oil lamps, great gray plumes of coal smoke rising in the cold air. Budapest long ago, the city of her childhood.
    But she was silent. Volkmann looked down, saw her wipe tears from her eyes. He touched her arm gently.
    “Come, you’ll catch cold.”
    She turned her head then, looked out over the cold white park. Volkmann moved to grip her frail arm before the melancholy took hold. As he looked at her face, he remembered the young woman she had been on the beach in Cornwall all those years ago.
    She looked up at him and he saw the grief in the wet brown eyes. “I miss him, Joseph. I miss him so.”
    Volkmann bent and took her wrinkled face fondly in both hands, kissed her forehead. “We both do.”

6

    ASUNCIÓN. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25
    The giant Iberia 747 banked onto final approach and began its descent into Campo Grande airport.
    Of all the passengers on board the packed flight to Paraguay’s capital that late afternoon, none was probably as tired as the middle-aged man in the dark-blue suit who sat quietly in row 23.
    The flight he had endured earlier from Munich to Madrid had been tolerable, but the long haul from Madrid to Asunción had taken its toll and now his dehydrated body ached.
    It was almost three months since he had last visited Paraguay. He hadn’t enjoyed it then, and it was unlikely he would enjoy it now. Mosquitoes. Heat. Temperamental natives. But this time his visit would be even briefer, twenty-four hours, and for that, he was grateful.
    The man in the blue suit picked up the leather briefcase from the floor in front of him and clicked it open. He flicked carefully through the documents inside, checked that everything was in order.
    A pretty flight attendant moved down the aisle, a last-minute check on seat belts. The man glanced up, saw the slim hips sway rhythmically toward him. The attendant paused, said something rapidly in Spanish as she pointed to the briefcase on his lap before moving on. The man in the blue suit clicked shut the case, tucked it neatly under the seat in front, and sat back.
    Beyond the port window he glimpsed the sprawling, ragged suburbs of Asunción: the flat-roofed, white- and yellow-plaster adobes and the tin-roofed shacks of the barrios. As the bowels of the big plane shuddered, he heard the whirr of the flaps extending and the dull thud of the undercarriage lowering into place.
    Five minutes later, he saw the yellow lights of the runway rush up beneath him, and then came the rumble of wheels on