Kingdom of Shadows (13 page)

“Well,” Morath said. He really didn’t care but pretended in order to please Cara. “Maybe Normandy’s better. Cool at night, and I like to swim in the sea.”

“Good. I’ll write this afternoon. We can see Francesca when she comes in the fall. For the clothes.”

Boris Balki telephoned and asked him to come to the nightclub. The Balalaika was closed for the August vacation, the tables covered with old bedsheets. There was no beer to drink, so Balki opened a bottle of wine. “They won’t miss it,” he said. Then, “So, you must be leaving soon.”

“A few days. The great migration.”

“Where do you go?”

“Normandy. Just outside Deauville.”

“That must be nice.”

“It’s all right.”

“I like the time off,” Balki said. “We have to paint, fix the place up, but at least I don’t have to make jokes.” He reached in a pocket, unfolded a page of cheap writing paper covered with small Cyrillic characters. “It’s from a friend of mine, in Budapest. He writes from Matyas Street.”

“Not much there. The prison.”

From Balki, a grim smile.

“Oh.”

“He’s an old friend, from Odessa. I thought, maybe, if somebody knew somebody . . .”

“Matyas is the worst—in Budapest, anyhow.”

“He says that, as much as he can get it past the censor.”

“Is he in for a long time?”

“Forty months.”

“Long enough. What’d he do?”

“Bonds.”

“Hungarian?”

“Russian. Railroad bonds. The 1916 kind.”

“Somebody
buys
that?”

Balki nodded, then, despite himself, started laughing. “Poor Rashkow. He’s tiny. ‘Look at me,’ he used to say. ‘If I tried to hold somebody up they’d stuff me in a drawer.’ So he sells things. Sometimes jewelry, sometimes paintings, even manuscripts. Tolstoy! His unfinished novel! But, lately, it’s railroad bonds.”

They both laughed.

“You see why I love him,” Balki said.

“They’re not actually
worth
anything, are they?”

“Well, Rashkow would say, not
now.
But think of the future. ‘I sell hope,’ he used to say. ‘Hope for tomorrow. Think how important that is, hope for tomorrow.’ ”

“Boris,” Morath said, “I’m not sure I can help.”

“Well, anyhow, you’ll try.” The
after all, I tried for you
was unspoken but not difficult to hear.

“Of course.”

“Before you go away?”

“Even if I can’t do that, I won’t wait for September. They have telephones in Deauville.”

“Semyon Rashkow.” Balki held the letter up to the light and squinted. Morath realized he needed glasses. “Number 3352-18.”

“Just out of curiosity, who wrote Tolstoy’s unfinished novel?”

Balki grinned. “Wasn’t bad, Morath. Really. It wasn’t.”

The last place he wanted to be, in Colonel Sombor’s office on the top floor of the Hungarian legation. Sombor sat erect at his desk, reading a dossier, using the end of a pencil to guide his eyes along a type-written line. Morath stared out the open window. Down below, in the garden, a porter, an old man in a gray uniform and a gray peaked cap, was raking the gravel. The sound was sharp in the silent courtyard.

He had to help; he felt he had to help. Balki wasn’t an affable barman, Balki was him, Morath, just in the wrong country, in the wrong year, forced to live the wrong life. A man who hated having to be grateful for a job he hated.

Morath had tried his uncle first, was told he was not in Paris, then reached Sombor at his office. “Of course, come tomorrow morning.” Sombor was the man who could help, so Morath went to see him, knowing it was a mistake every step of the way. Sombor had a title, something innocuous, but he worked for the secret police, and everybody knew it. There was an official spy at the legation, Major Fekaj, the military attaché, and there was Sombor.

“I don’t see you enough,” he complained to Morath, closing the dossier. Morath found it hard to look at him. He was one of those people whose hair looks like a hat—a polished, glossy black hat—and with his sharp, slanted eyebrows, he suggested a tenor made up to play the devil in a comic opera.

“My uncle keeps me busy.”

Sombor acknowledged Polanyi’s position with a gracious nod. Morath certainly wanted it to be gracious.

“Yes, I can believe it,” Somber said. “Also, I’m sure, this wonderful city. And its opportunities.”

“That too.”

Sombor touched his lips with his tongue, leaned forward, lowered his voice. “We’re grateful, of course.”

From a man who’d been forced, in 1937, to remove a portrait of Julius Gombos from his wall—Gombos was widely credited with having invented the philosophies of Adolf Hitler—not necessarily what Morath wanted to hear. “Good of you to say it.”
Grateful for what?

“Not the kind of thing you can allow,” Sombor said.

Morath nodded. What in hell’s name had Polanyi told this man? And why? For his own good? Morath’s? Some other reason? What he did know was that this conversation was not, not if he could help it, going to turn frank and open.

“Someone who has done a favor for me, for us”—Morath smiled, so did Sombor—“needs a favor in return.”

“Favors . . .”

“Well, what is one to do.”

“Quite.”

A contest of silence. Sombor ended it. “So, exactly what sort of favor are we talking about?”

“An old friend. Locked up in Matyas.”

“For?”

“Selling worthless bonds.”

“
Beszivargo?
” Infiltrator. Which meant, for Sombor and others, Jew.

Morath thought it over. Rashkow? “I don’t think so,” he said. “Not from the name.”

“Which is?”

“Rashkow.”

Sombor took a tablet of white paper and unscrewed the cap of his pen and carefully wrote the name down on the paper.

The
month in the country
gathered momentum, preparation on the avenue Bourdonnais proceeded at a fever pitch. The baroness had been written, then telephoned, then telephoned again. Cara’s MG had been washed, waxed, and filled with water, oil, and gasoline, the seats rubbed with saddle soap, the walnut dashboard polished to a soft glow. The picnic hamper was ordered from Pantagruel, then Delbard, then Fauchon. Did Morath like sliced beef tongue in aspic? No? Why not? The tiny folding table purchased, taken back to the store, replaced with a green horse blanket, then a fine wool blanket, brown with a gray stripe, which could also be used on the beach. Cara brought home a bathing suit this little, then this little, and then this little; the last one springing a seam as Morath whipped it off. And she should be damned glad, he thought, that there weren’t toothmarks in it—take
that
back to Mademoiselle Ninette on the rue Saint-Honoré.

Saturday morning, Morath had a long list of errands, carefully saved up as a pretext to escape from Cara’s packing. He stopped at Courtmain, at the bank, at the
tabac,
at the bookstore, where he bought Freya Stark’s
The Valleys of the Assassins
and Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms,
both in French translation. He already had a Gyula Krudy novel. Krudy was in essence the Hungarian Proust—“Autumn and Budapest were born of the same mother”—and Morath had always liked him. In fact, the baroness’s houses were stacked to the ceilings with books, and Morath knew he would fall in love with some exotic lost masterpiece and never turn a page of whatever he’d brought with him.

When he got back to the avenue Bourdonnais, he discovered there’d been a blizzard of underwear and shoes and crinkly pink paper. On the kitchen table was a vase with a dozen yellow roses. “These are not from you, Nicky, are they?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“Is there a card?”

“Yes, but it’s in Hungarian. I can’t read it.”

Morath could read it. A single word written in black ink on a florist’s card.
Regrets.

Three-thirty when Cara’s phone rang and a man’s voice asked him, very politely, if it would be altogether too much trouble to walk to the newspaper kiosk by the Pont D’Alma Métro.

“I’m going to get the paper,” he said to Cara.

“What?
Now?
For God’s sake, Nicky, I—”

“Back in a minute.”

Dr. Lapp was in a black Mercedes. His suit was blue, his bow tie green, his face as sad as Buster Keaton’s. There was really nothing to discuss, he said.

This was a privilege, not a sacrifice.

Still, Morath felt terrible. Perhaps if he’d been able to say something, to explain, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad.

“Messieurs et mesdames.”

The conductor had opened the door of the compartment and the rhythmic hammering of the wheels on the track grew suddenly louder. Morath rested the Freya Stark book on his knee.

The conductor held the first-class passenger list in his hand. “
’Sieurs et ’dames,
the dining car will open in thirty minutes, you may reserve for the first or second seating.”

He went around the compartment: businessman, middle-aged woman, mother and little boy—possibly English, then Morath. “Second, please,” Morath said.

“And that would be?”

“Monsieur Morath.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Can you tell me, what time we expect to be in Prague?”

“The timetable says four-thirty, monsieur, but, of course, these days . . .”

2 August 1938. Marienbad, Czechoslovakia.

Six-twenty in the evening, Morath came down the marble staircase and walked across the lobby. Grand hotels in spa towns were all of a type and the Europa was no different—miles of corridors, chandeliers, everywhere mahogany. Frayed carpets, frayed respectability, the former much rewoven, the latter a faint but detectable presence in the air, like the smell of the kitchen.

Two women in leather chairs smiled at him, widow and unmarried daughter, he guessed, come husband-hunting in Marienbad. Morath had been at the Europa for only a night and a day and they had flirted with him twice. They were handsome and well fleshed.
Good appetites,
he thought,
of all sorts.
Not unusual in that part of the world. The Czechs felt life owed them a little pleasure; they happily embraced the Protestant virtues but just as happily embraced each other. If a proposal of marriage was not forthcoming then, mother or daughter, rolling around in a creaky hotel bed might not be the worst thing in the world.

Morath walked out the entrance, into a genteel lane lit with gas lamps. There were mountains in the distance, dark shapes in the failing light. He walked for a long time, glancing at his watch every few minutes. He had once, dragged off to Evian-les-Bains by Cara’s predecessor, actually tried the treatment—packed in mud by laughing girls, then hosed down by a stern woman wearing a hair net. Victorian medicine. Victorian eroticism? Victorian
something.

He reached the edge of the town, a black, dense forest of pine rolling up a hillside above the street. Down below, the gas lamps twinkled. There were several orchestras at work and he could hear, when the wind was right, the violins. It was very romantic. Through the trees, a glimpse of the toy train that puffed its way up the mountain to the station called Marianske Lazne. Marienbad, in the Austro-Hungarian days. Hard to think of it any other way. The wind shifted, the distant violins floated up to him. Along with a faint smell of gunnery.

Now it was 7:10. There were candles on the tables of the tearoom in Otava Street. Morath studied the menu, mounted in a brass frame on a stand by the door. Inside, a Czech army officer watched him for a moment, then rose from his chair, leaving an uneaten pastry on his plate. To get to his feet, the officer used a stick, a good one, Morath saw, with a brass tip and an ivory head. He was not far from Morath’s age, with a soldier’s face and a neatly trimmed beard, blond and gray and red.

They shook hands in the street. “Colonel Novotny,” the officer said, with a motion of the head somewhere between a nod and a bow.

“Morath.”

An exchange of pleasantries. We are like, Morath thought, two provincial officials, meeting in the sleepy days of the old empire.

Novotny had a military car: the least expensive Opel, something like a Parisian taxicab, painted olive green. “We are going up toward Kreslice,” he said. “About forty kilometers from here.”

Morath opened the passenger door. On the seat was a holstered automatic pistol in a leather belt. “Oh, just put that on the floor,” Novotny said. “We’re in the Sudetenland here—it’s wiser to have something in the car.”

They drove on mountain roads, darker as they climbed, the beams of the headlights alive with moths. Novotny squinted through the windshield, the narrow dirt path twisted and turned and disappeared into the night. Twice they had to put branches under the wheels, and when they crossed bridges over mountain streams—built for wagons and oxen—Morath got out and walked ahead of the car with a flashlight. They passed one house only, a woodcutter’s hut. Up on the crest, something ran away from them; they could hear it, crashing through the underbrush.

“I brought my dog along once,” Novotny said, “coming up here. She went crazy. Ran around and around the car, scratching the windows with her paws.”

“What do you have?”

“Pointer bitch.”

“I’ve had them—couldn’t wait to go to work.”

“That’s her. She was crying because I wouldn’t let her out of the car. I’ve seen bear up here, and stag. Wild boar. The peasants say there’s lynx—kills their animals.”

Novotny slowed to a crawl, worked the car carefully around a hairpin curve. Morath could hear a stream a long way below them. “A shame, really,” Novotny said. “When we start fighting here, well, you know what happens to the game.”

“I know. I was in the Carpathians, in ’15.”

“This is, of course, where we want them.”

“In the mountains.”

“Yes. We watched them mobilize, back in May. Very educational. Tanks, trucks, cars, motorcycles. Big gasoline tankers. It’s not a secret, what they mean to do—read Guderian’s book, and Rommel’s. Everything’s motorized, that’s the sharp edge of the ax. After the first wave, of course, it’s all horses and artillery limbers, like everyone else. So, the logic goes, run them up the mountains, or make them go through the valleys.”