Charley had “his room” in La Casa en el Bosque from his first visit, which was to say long before Sweaty. Originally, it had then been “the Blue Room,” the one from which he had just been expelled. After Sweaty, in consideration of “what the girls”—Alek’s and Dmitri’s daughters — would think of illicit cohabitation, the Blue Room had become Svetlana’s room, and the not-nearly-as-nice room he walked into now, his.
“The trouble with getting kicked out of bed at oh-six-hundred, Max,” Charley said as the dog met his eyes and turned his head, “is that I can never get back to sleep. Is it that way with you?”
There was no question in Charley’s mind that Max understood everything he said to him.
Without realizing that he was doing so, he had spoken in Hungarian. Max had been born and raised in Budapest, where he had lived with Eric Kocian, publisher of the Budapest edition of the Tages Zeitung.
Max cocked his head the other way, and then moved it again in what might well have been a nod, signaling that he, too, had trouble getting back to sleep after having been kicked out of bed.
Eric Kocian had been an eighteen-year-old unteroffizier—corporal — in the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. Wounded, he had sought shelter in the basement of a ruined building, where he found a seriously wounded oberst—colonel — who he knew would die unless he immediately received medical attention.
At considerable risk to his own life, Kocian had carried the officer, Oberst Hermann Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, through heavy fire to an aid station. While doing so, he was again wounded.
At the aid station, doctors decided that the Herr Oberst be loaded onto a Junkers JU-88 for shipment out of Stalingrad. And done so immediately, as the Russians were about to take the airfield, after which there would be no more evacuation flights.
At the airstrip, Oberst von und zu Gossinger refused to allow himself to be loaded aboard “the Aunty Ju” unless Unteroffizier Kocian was allowed to go with him. There was literally no time to argue, and the young unteroffizier, dripping blood from his last wound, was hoisted aboard.
The aircraft — the last to leave Stalingrad — took off.
Surprising the medics, Oberst von und zu Gossinger lived and had recovered to the point where he was on active duty when the surrender came. Having found his name on an SS “Exterminate” list, his American captors quickly released him from the POW camp in which he and Kocian — now his orderly — were confined.
The oberst returned to the rubble of his home and business in Fulda, and Kocian went to Vienna, where he learned his family had been killed in an air raid. Kocian then went to Fulda.
It became a legend within the Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., organization that the type for the first postwar edition of any of the Tages Zeitung newspapers had been set on a Mergenthaler Linotype machine “the Colonel” and “Billy Kocian” had themselves assembled from parts salvaged from machines destroyed in the war.
Billy Kocian began to resurrect other Tages Zeitung newspapers — starting in Vienna — as the Colonel gave his attention to resurrecting the Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., empire in other areas.
After deciding he had all the Viennese gemütlichkeit he could stomach, Kocian moved to Budapest as soon as the Communists were gone, where he devoted his time to needling the Soviet Union and bureaucrats of all stripes on the pages of the Budapester Tages Zeitung,holding the editors of the seven other Tages Zeitung newspapers to his own high standards, and playing with his Bouvier des Flandres dog, Max.
Max was really Max IV, the fourth of his line. Billy had acquired Max I after checking into — and finding credible — the legend that a Bouvier des Flandres had bitten off one of Adolf Hitler’s testicles while Der Führer was serving in Belgium during the First World War.
Max II and Max III had appeared when their predecessors had, for one reason or another, gone to that great fireplug in the sky. Max IV was something special. It was quickly said that Billy Kocian was so enamored of Max IV that the animal could have anything it wanted.
What Max IV wanted became painfully obvious when the dog scandalized the guests of the luxurious and very proper Danubius Hotel Gellért — where he and Billy lived in a penthouse apartment overlooking the Danube — by pursuing a German shepherd bitch through the dining room, the lobby, and down into the Roman baths below the hotel, where he worked his lustful way on her for more than two hours.
As soon as he could, Billy procured suitable female companionship for Max. She was a ninety-something-pound Bouvier, one he named Madchen.
The Max — Madchen honeymoon lasted until Madchen realized she was in the family way and sensed that Max IV was responsible. Thereafter, she made her desire to painfully terminate his life by castration quite clear whenever Max IV came within twenty feet of her.
So, what to do? Billy dearly loved Max IV, but he had come to love Madchen, too, and couldn’t find it in his heart to banish her, after what Max IV had done to her.
The answer came quickly: give Max IV to Karlchen.
Karlchen was the Colonel’s grandson.
Karlchen had played with Max I as an infant; they had loved each other at first sight. When Max II had come along, same thing. It was only because of Karlchen’s mother’s awful sickness, her arguments that with the Colonel and her brother gone, and her being sick, she couldn’t care for the dog, that he hadn’t given Max II to Karlchen right then, to take his mind off things.
But Billy had taken Max II to Rhine-Main airfield to see Karlchen off to the United States just before his mother died. When Billy saw how the boy, crying, had wrapped his arms around the dog, he decided that Max II should go with him.
That had resulted in a front-page headline by the bastards at the Frankfurter Rundshau: “Tages Zeitung Publishing Empire Chief Jailed for Punching Pan-American Airlines Station Chief Who Refused Passage for Fifty-Kilo Dog.”
Things were different when Madchen banished Max IV from the canine connubial bed. Karlchen was now not only a man, but in the Colonel’s footsteps, an oberstleutnant in the American Army himself. He denied being an intelligence officer, but Billy had been around armies long enough to know better than that. Run-of-the-mill lieutenant colonels don’t fly themselves around the world in Gulfstream III airplanes.
The next time Karlchen — now known as Charley — appeared in Budapest, Uncle Billy explained the Max IV — Madchen problem to him. Charley had understood.
“Let’s see what he does when I tell him to get on the airplane. I’m not going to force him to go.”
He stood inside the door of the Gulfstream.
“Hey, Max,” he called in Hungarian. “You want to go to Argentina with me?”
Max looked at Billy for a moment, then trotted to the airplane and took the stair-door steps three at a time.
Billy Kocian went back to the penthouse in the Danubius Hotel Gellért and shared three bottles of the local grape — known as Bull’s Blood — with Sándor Tor. Tor, after doing hitches in the Wehrmacht, the French Foreign Legion, and the Budapest Police Department, was now chief of security for Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., and Billy’s best friend.
During their conversation, Billy told Sándor that he now knew what his father must have felt like “when, wagging my tail like Max just now, I left home to go in the goddamn Wehrmacht.”
“Let me get a quick shower and then I’ll get dressed, and we’ll go for a walk,” Castillo now said to Max IV. “I just can’t go back to sleep.”