Red winter

Chapter VI

Finally, the night of the grand ball arrived. The diplomats and their wives arrived in car and carriages, under the thin falling snow that somehow overshadowed the last rays of the day's sun.

The ball takes place in the country estate of the Baron of Wels, a house built to demonstrate power and cause admiration and respect, with the construction having its own dome over the great hall, where we would have the waltzes of the ball. The clock was close to midnight and the French quadrille was ending, the couples left the center of the hall and the musicians were preparing for the next dance while young singles ran around the hall in search of ladies to accompany them.

Everything seemed to be going very well, it would be an excellent ending to the diplomatic negotiations and the counterintelligence operation against the communists, but this is not a fairy tale, and the happy ending is relative.

Minutes before midnight the music stopped after the sound of a muffled scream and the shattering of a glass. The silence was sepulchral. After mere seconds the cause of silence was in the middle of the hall, surrounded by the few guards on the property and by the guests who looked surprised and curious, and somewhat scared.

Andries Paulos, the communist spy who had attacked me in the theater and who had fled the counterintelligence operation, was holding a lady hostage at gunpoint and making a single demand: "I want Baron von Brenner, here, now!"

I didn't show any resistance, I presented myself in front of the communist kidnapper. Thus began the negotiation and revelation of anguish.

"What you want from me?" that was my question as I approached slowly with my hands raised and my gun in one of them.

"Your death, a reckoning for taking everything I had from me" he replied looking directly into my eyes, despite the tears threatening to fall.

"I need you to calm down and release the lady" I said moving a little closer.

"Don't take another step, or I'll shoot her and you and anyone else who dares to move" he said taking the gun from the woman's head and pointing it at me "You have no right to make demands after having killed who II loved most and who loved me most in this life. Now I have nothing but my need for revenge and to put an end to it all".

His voice was altered, he speaks loudly and hesitantly, his gaze was wide and he looked like that of a frightened animal cornered by its predator, but with energy and motivation to fight until the end.

Before anything could be done the clocks struck midnight, cuckoos and bells chimed the arrival of midnight just as trumpets announce the arrival of a king. Frightened or not, Andreas fired, the sound muffled by the clocks but it was just enough for me to fight back.

The result of those two shots was a shattered window and a dead man. The bullet fired from my weapon hit Andreas directly in the chest, so that the blade went through his ribcage, the lady hostage was unharmed, despite the moments of fear she spent at gunpoint.

That was the bloodiest winter Vienna has seen in years. A plot of conspiracies and espionage that if it didn't come out of one of the characters themselves, nobody would believe.