The Paper Man


 Also by Billy O’Callaghan
 SHORT STORIES
 In Exile
 In Too Deep
 The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind
 The Boatman and Other Stories
 NOVELS
 The Dead House
 My Coney Island Baby
 Life Sentences
 
 
 Billy O’Callaghan
 
 THE PAPER MAN
 
 
 
 
 VINTAGE
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 Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
 
 First published by Jonathan Cape in 2023
 Copyright © Billy O’Callaghan, 2023
 The moral right of the author has been asserted
 Cover photograph © SZ Photo/Scherl/Bridgeman Images
 ISBN: 978-1-473-59816-4
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 for my mother, Gina,
 who’ll forever be what love is
 
 
 Anschluss: Vienna, 3 April 1938
 After a long cold beginning to the year, a surprise mid-March thaw brings actual heat. Even with the fresh-seeming feel of summer, though, fires across the city continue to be lit, and those who have known such false ends before remain cautious of a last wintry bite, so that by noon most days, if there is not a good breeze blowing, the skies above Vienna are greased with smoke and turned the fatty buttermilk pallor of church candles.
 There is a game that nobody wants to miss. Tickets have been given freely, because this isn’t just a sporting contest, it is an event, symbolic of so much. The Anschluss; more than a handshake, more than an embrace, a unifying, of brothers and of blood. And from today, in the instant that the final whistle is blown, Austria as a national team – and to all intents as a nation – will cease to be.
 Those without tickets have no choice but to turn to touts, so the city’s criminal element gets forging, understanding the killing to be had. The trick is not to gouge, and to have youngsters do the selling, put them on street corners or the least-lit booths of those cafes and bars who might be willing, for a modest skim of the profits, to allow such business to be done, with all due discretion and the guarantee that there is to be no trouble and not even so much as a raised voice. Keeping things to just two or three marks, reasonable and affordable, in the fortnight ahead of the game; then bumping the price to five for the couple of days before, and then, in the hours immediately preceding kick-off – once the thought of missing out has turned people sufficiently desperate, and because suspicions will be aroused if those who can take advantage, and are practically expected to, should for whatever reasons choose otherwise – going to as high as ten. Sixty thousand genuine tickets will pack out the Prater Stadium in Leopoldstadt, sixty thousand fists clutching small legitimate stubs of paper or constantly patting the pockets into which they’ve been tucked; and at least as many again and by some estimations as much as twice that number, will arrive at the turnstiles with their forged scraps and be directed unceremoniously away. Many in the waiting line laugh openly and gloat at the idea that anyone could be so gullible as to pay out good money to a tout, but others who look on shake their heads in sympathy, and even some sense of brotherhood, probably feeling their own stomachs stir in dread that a similar fate might await them once they reach the entrance gate, because even though they’ve received their tickets freely and in an apparently legitimate way nothing feels quite guaranteed any more, that level of certainty has slipped from life as they know it.
 Hours ahead of kick-off the streets heave with people, and soldiers stand by, squads of eighteen or twenty-four, grey-coated despite the brightness of the sun, and armed. A strange day, the air within the city trying for happiness, and bluster, but hazy with some pervading melancholy. Kids run, men stride on, eager to be inside the stadium for a good position on the terraces, a central spot behind one of the goals and halfway up the decks or higher, for the fullest possible perspective and so that there won’t be too much displacement when the crush inevitably happens, when the big gates are thrown open the fifteen or twenty minutes after the game begins in an effort to clear the surrounding roads of latecomers and the ticketless and a surge takes place. Beneath the surface joviality, there’s a darkness about the mood that soldiers and citizens alike are aware of, and if a few in uniform attempt to exchange banter with those passing by, even with rifles held across their chests and that much more throat to their accents, a kind of barking edge that jars against the languid Viennese lilt, it is because they are still, for the most part, just young men keen on fun, and because, in theory at least, football remains a game for everyone. This won’t be an open match, but no one wants to talk today about the shameful side of things. Instead, there is teasing, from the Germans but from the daring few among the Austrians, too: So, this is why you boys have come to Vienna, is it? To see how the game is meant to be played? Or, Try not to take today’s beating too much to heart now, soldier. The Paper Man makes shreds of everyone. Your lot just happens to be next in line. Jibes,