Kingdom of Shadows (16 page)

A silhouette.

Morath came wide awake, crushed the cigarette out on the floor, snatched the rifle from the corner and rested it on the windowsill.

Was it there? He didn’t think so. A ghost, a phantom—
the same phantoms we saw in Galicia.
Until the dawn.

But no. Not this time.

A shape, on one knee, tight to the wall of a building across the boulevard and very still. It stood, ran a few feet, and stopped again. It held, Morath thought, something in its hand.

He touched the bolt of the rifle, making sure it was locked, then let his finger rest gently against the trigger. When he squinted over the open sight, he lost the shape until it moved again. Then he tracked it as it stood, ran, and knelt down. Stood, ran, knelt down. Stood, ran.

Tracked, squeezed.

The policeman cried out and rolled off the couch. “What happened?” he said, breathless. “Are they here?”

Morath shrugged. “I saw something.”

“Where is it?” The policeman knelt by his side.

Morath looked, there was nothing there.

But it was there an hour later, in gray light, when they crossed the boulevard. “A runner!” the policeman said. “To supply the sniper.”

Maybe. Not much more than a kid, he’d been knocked backward and tumbled into a cellar entry and died there, halfway down the steps, arms flung out to stop his fall, a sandwich wrapped in newspaper dropped on the sidewalk.

At daybreak they walked back to the police station but it wasn’t there anymore. What remained was a burned-out shell, blackened beams, smoke rising from the charred interior. One corner of the building had been blown out—a hand grenade, Morath thought, or a homemade bomb. There was no way to know; there was nobody left to tell the story. He stayed for a while, talking to the firemen as they wandered around and looked for something to do. Then an army captain showed up and drove him back to the hotel. “It wasn’t only Novotny,” he said. “We lost three others. They bicycled in from an observation post when they heard a call on the radio. Then there was the police chief, several officers, militia. At the end, they let the drunks out of the cells and gave them rifles.” He shook his head, angry and disgusted. “Somebody said they tried to surrender when the building caught on fire but the Germans wouldn’t let them.” He was silent for a time. “I don’t know, that might not be true,” he said. “Or maybe it doesn’t matter.”

Back at the Europa, there was a spray of gladioli in a silver vase on a table in the lobby. In the room, Morath slept for an hour, couldn’t after that. Ordered coffee and rolls, left most of it on the tray, and called the railroad station. “Of course they’re running,” he was told. As he hung up the phone, there was a knock at the door. “Fresh towels, sir.”

Morath opened the door and Dr. Lapp settled himself in the easy chair.

“Well, where are my towels?”

“You know, I once actually did that. Back when. In a maid’s uniform, pushing the little trolley.”

“There must have been—at least a smile.”

“No, actually not. The man who answered the door was the color of wood ash.”

Morath started to pack, folding underwear and socks into his valise.

“By the way,” Dr. Lapp said. “Have you met the two women who sit in the lobby?”

“Not really.”

“Oh? You didn’t, ah, avail yourself?”

A sideways glance.
I told you I didn’t.

“They were arrested last night, is the reason I ask. In this very room, as it happens. Taken through the lobby in handcuffs.”

Morath stopped dead, a pair of silver hairbrushes in his hands. “Who were they?”

“Sudeten Germans. Likely working for the Sicherheitsdienst, SD, the SS intelligence service. It caused quite a stir downstairs.
In Marienbad! Well!
But the women hardly cared—they were laughing and joking. All the Czechs can do is keep them overnight in the police station, and they barely dare to do that.”

Morath slipped the brushes through loops in a leather case, then zipped it closed.

Dr. Lapp reached in his pocket. “As long as you’re packing.” He handed over a cellophane envelope, an inch square. Fitted neatly within was a photographic negative cut from a strip of film. Morath held it up to the light and saw a typed document in German.

A death sentence.
He’d put his drawings of the mountain fortifications in a manila folder and slid it down the side of the valise. He could, he thought, get away with that, even if he was searched. Could say it was a property for sale or a sketch for a planned ski lodge. But not this.

“What is it?”

“A memorandum, on Oberkommando Wehrmacht stationery. From General Ludwig Beck, who has just resigned as head of the OKW, to his boss, General von Brauchitsch, the commander in chief of the German army. It says that Hitler ‘must abandon the intention of solving the Czech question by force.’ Actually, he said a great deal more, in person, to do with getting rid of the Gestapo and the Nazi party bosses and returning Germany to ‘probity and simplicity.’ Then, in protest, he quit. And his successor, General Halder, believes these things even more strongly than Beck did.”

“I will be asked how I came to have it.”

Dr. Lapp nodded. “The Abwehr, military intelligence, is part of the OKW. We go to the same meetings, then, at night, to the same dinner parties.” He crossed his legs, tapped the heel of his shoe, and gave Morath a look that said,
of course you know where to put that.
He leaned over the table, took the Hotel Europa butter knife from the place setting, held it to the light and studied its edge, then handed it to Morath.

Morath took off his shoe and went to work on the heel. He was very tired and sick of the world and had to force himself to be patient and careful. He prized up a corner of the heel and slid the negative in. It didn’t work, he could see the space easily enough and he could feel it when he walked.

Dr. Lapp shrugged. “Improvisation,” he said, letting his voice trail away into a sigh.

Morath finished packing, pulled the straps tight on his valise and buckled them.

“I don’t know who you’ll find to talk to, Herr Morath, but the more powerful the better. We’re opening as many lines of communication as we can, surely one of them will work.” From his voice, he didn’t believe it, sounded as though he were trying to persuade himself that two and two was five. “All we ask of the English is that they do nothing.” He looked up at Morath. “Is that asking too much?”

Morath glanced at his watch, lit a cigarette, and sat down to wait until it was time to leave for the train. It was quiet in the hotel: muffled voices in the hall, the sound of a maid’s vacuum cleaner.

“My poor country,” Dr. Lapp said. He hunted around in the inner pocket of his jacket, took out a pair of spectacles in a leather case, then a small metal box. “Perhaps you’d better have this.”

Morath opened it and found a gold swastika pin. He fastened it to his breast pocket and went to look at himself in the bathroom mirror.

“Use it when you reach the German border,” Dr. Lapp said, one hand on the doorknob. “But please do remember to take it off before you cross into France.”

“The two women,” Morath said. “Were they after me, in particular?”

Dr. Lapp shook his head slowly and looked sad. “God knows,” he said. “I don’t.”

17 August. Bromley-on-Ware, Sussex.

Morath stood at the end of a gravel driveway as a taxi rattled off down the lane. Francesca’s friend, Simon the lawyer, came smiling toward him, walking across the saintly lawn. He wore shorts and sandals, a shirt with the cuffs folded back, a jacket thrown over his shoulders, a pipe clenched in his teeth, and a newspaper under his arm. Behind him, a brick house with many chimneys, a blue sky, a white cloud.

Simon took his bag with one hand and his arm with the other and said, “So pleased you could come, Nicholas.”

As Morath followed him toward the house, Cara came out, wearing a thin summer dress that floated as she ran. “Oh you are
terrible,
Nicky,” she said, angry and forgiving in the same breath, holding him tight against her. Relieved, he thought, because she knew he had been up to something he couldn’t talk about, but most of all unwilling to sulk at someone’s country house. “You will have to make it up to me,” she said as they went up the steps.

On the terrace, women in straw hats, men with white hair, a whiskey and soda for Morath.

“How do you do, name’s Bromley.”

So then it is your village, and your castle, and your peasants.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Bromley.”

“Heh, heh, that’s ‘Bramble’!”

“Mr. Bramble?”

“No, no. ‘
Bram
-well.’ Yes. Hmm.”

Cara’s bare behind was blue in the Sussex moonlight. “Not so loud,” she hissed.

“The bed squeaks—I can’t help it.”

“
Méchant!
We can’t make noise like that. Here, lie on your back.”

The bank of the river lay on the other side of a cow pasture. “Mind the cowpats,” Simon told him.

They sat on a bench by a huge willow, where the sun sparkled on the water as it left the shadow of the tree. “I have an old friend,” Morath said. “When he heard I was going to England for the August vacation, he asked me to take along some papers.”

“Oh?” Simon had thought
the private conversation
would be about Cara, women, that sort of thing. “Papers?”

“Confidential papers.”

“Oh.” Simon had a mop of brown hair that he pushed back off his forehead. “Are you a spy then, Nicholas?”

“No. Just someone who doesn’t like Hitler,” Morath said. “Doesn’t like Hitlers.” He told Simon about the Czechoslovakian mountain defense and the memorandum from General Beck. “My friend believes,” he explained, “that Hitler cannot be overthrown unless he fails. If your government holds firm, he will. One way or another.”

Simon took a minute to think it over. “It’s difficult, you see, because there are two sides to this. Like all politics, really. On one side, the side that doesn’t want to get involved, is Nevile Henderson, the ambassador to Germany. Very pro-German—pro-Nazi, it is said—and very anti-Czech. But Chamberlain
does
listen to him. Then, on the other side, there are people like Vansittart, the adviser to the foreign secretary, who’d be more in Churchill’s camp. So the question is, who do we talk to? For me, you see, Vansittart is the hero and Henderson the villain.”
Un homme néfaste,
Simon called him. A man who does harm.

“But then, if I find you a friend who can talk to Vansittart, eventually, aren’t you simply preaching to the choir?”

Morath thought Simon was in his late twenties but it sometimes amused him to be younger, to be terribly silly. Now, however, he seemed suddenly older, much older.

Simon stared down at the slow water. “So then,” he said. “What to do.”

Morath didn’t know. The serenity of the countryside—of the country itself—was like the airs of springtime, it made the Continent and its intrigues seem foolish and brutal and distant.

In the end, Simon got on the telephone and had a word with a friend of a friend.

Who stopped by for a drink that very evening. Left alone on the terrace with the family spaniel, they stumbled along in Morath’s hesitant English and the friend of a friend’s university French. Still, they managed. Morath explained the defenses and handed over the memo and passed along Dr. Lapp’s message as strongly as he could. He did somewhat better the following day, when friend of a friend—very good suit and military rank—brought along a smiling gnome who spoke Hungarian, Budapest Hungarian.

“We can always use a friend in Paris,” they said to him.

Morath declined with a smile.

They were never quite rude, after that. Inquisitive. How did
he
come to be involved with this? Was he simply an officer in the VK-VI, the Hungarian intelligence service? Had he met
Germans
? But it was none of their business and he didn’t tell them and was rescued, in the end, by Simon’s mother, who came out on the terrace and talked and laughed and flirted at them until they went away.

*

August 1938, the summer before the war. At night, the wireless crackled and the cicadas whirred. The Czechs mobilized, the British fleet mobilized, Benes offered Henlein and the Sudetenlanders everything either of them could think of—starting with complete autonomy and going on from there. But, not enough. In England, gas masks were issued and air-raid trenches dug in London parks. “But what will become of
you,
Nicholas?” Simon’s mother asked him at the lunch table.

He’d thought about that. More than he wanted to. He supposed he would be called back to duty, told to report to the regimental barracks, amid the chubby stockbrokers and balding lawyers, and ordered to fight alongside the Wehrmacht.

He discovered Cara, one night, wearing the Cartier bracelet, facedown on the bedspread, weeping into the pillow. “I shall tell my father,” she whispered, “that we must sell one of the
estancias,
because I am going to buy a villa in Lugano.”

At drinks the next day he was,
attacked
was the only word for it, by a neighbor in an army officer’s uniform, fierce, and crimson with anger. The man had a totally incomprehensible accent—his words disappeared in a thick black mustache—and Morath took a step back and had no idea what to do. It was Simon who saved him, whisking him away because he simply must meet the uncle from Perth. They were terribly, almost violently, kind to him at the house in Sussex. One rainy afternoon, when everyone but Morath and Cara played bridge, they dug deep in a chest and extracted a faded jigsaw puzzle,
The Defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Speaking of which:

On the twenty-sixth, the radio reported Admiral Horthy’s visit to the Reich, to Kiel, ostensibly as the last commander in chief of the Austro-Hungarian navy, to christen a new German battleship, the
Prinz Eugen,
and to have, the BBC said, “private consultations with Chancellor Hitler.” Nobody in the room looked at Morath; all eyes found something else infinitely more interesting. What the BBC didn’t say, the Count Polanyi did, three weeks later when they met in Paris. The whole business was staged so that Hitler could tell Horthy this: “If you want to join in the meal, you must help with the cooking.”