by Alan Furst
“I was in Budapest last week,” she said.
“How was it?”
“Tense, I should say. Underneath all the usual commotion. I saw your mother and sister.”
“How are they?”
“In good health. Teresa’s oldest girl may go to school in Switzerland.”
“Maybe for the best.”
“Maybe. They send you their love. You will write to them.”
“I will.”
“Your mother told me that Eva Zameny has left her husband.” She and Morath had, long ago, been engaged to marry.
“I am sorry.”
The baroness’s expression indicated she wasn’t. “For the best. Her husband was a hound. And he gambled terribly.”
A bell—the kind worked by pulling a cord—rang in the house. “That will be your uncle.”
There were other guests. The women in hats with veils, bolero jackets, and the black and white polka-dot dresses that were popular in springtime. Former citizens of the Dual Monarchy, the guests spoke the Austrian dialect with High German flourishes, Hungarian, and French, shifting effortlessly between languages when only a very particular expression would say what they meant. The men were well barbered and used good cologne. Two of them wore decorations, one a black and gold ribbon beneath a medal marked K.u.K.—Kaiser und Königlich, meaning “Imperial and Regal,” the Dual Monarchy; the other awarded for service in the Russo-Polish war of 1920. A refined group, very courteous, it was hard to tell who was rich and who wasn’t.
Morath and Polanyi stood by a large boxwood at a corner of the garden wall, holding their cups and saucers.
“Christ, I’d like a drink,” Polanyi said.
“We can go somewhere, after this.”
“I’m afraid I can’t. I have cocktails with the Finns, dinner with the Venezuelan foreign minister, Flores, up in the sixteenth.”
Morath nodded, sympathetic.
“No, not Flores.” Polanyi compressed his lips, annoyed at the lapse. “Montemayor, I should’ve said. Flores is, pfft.”
“Any news of home?”
“It’s what you passed along to me, when you came back from Antwerp. And worse.”
“Another Austria?”
“Not the same way, certainly. We are not ‘Ein volk,’ one people. But the pressure is growing—be our allies, or else.” He sighed, shook his head. “Now comes the real nightmare, Nicholas, the one where you see the monster but you can’t run away, you’re frozen in place. I think, more and more, that these people, this German aggression, will finish us, sooner or later. The Austrians pulled us into war in 1914—perhaps some day somebody will tell me precisely why we had to do all that. And now, it begins again. In the next day or so, the newspapers will announce that Hungary has come out in favor of the Anschluss. In return, Hitler will guarantee our borders. Quid pro quo, very tidy.”
“You believe it?”
“No.” He took a sip of tea. “I’ll amend that. To ‘maybe.’ Hitler is intimidated by Horthy, because Horthy is everything Hitler always wanted to be. Old nobility, aide-de-camp to Franz Josef, war hero, polo player, married into the cream of society. And they both paint. In fact, Horthy has now lasted longer than any other leader in Europe. That has to count for something, Nicholas, right?”
Polanyi’s face showed exactly what it counted for.
“So the current unrest . . . will be dealt with?”
“Not easily, and maybe not at all. We’re facing insurrection. Conservatives out, fascists in, liberals au poteau.” The phrase from 1789—to the guillotine.
Morath was surprised. In Budapest, when the Arrow Cross men dressed up in their uniforms and strutted about the city, the police forced them to strip and sent them home in their underwear. “What about the police? The army?”
“Uncertain.”
“Then what?”
“If Daranyi means to stay in as premier, he’ll have to give them something. Or there will be blood in the streets. So, at the moment, we find ourselves negotiating. And we will be forced, among other things, to do favors.”
“For who?”
“Important people.”
Morath felt it coming. Polanyi, no doubt, meant him to feel it. He set his cup and saucer on a table, reached in his pocket, took a cigarette from a tortoiseshell case and lit it with a silver lighter.
*
The last nights of April, but no sign of spring. The weather blew hard across the Métro staircase, wind and rain and fog with a taste of factory smoke. Morath held his overcoat closed and walked next to the buildings. Down a dark street, down another, then a sharp left and a blinking blue neon sign, Balalaika. The Cossack doorman, with sheepskin vest and fierce mustache, peered out from the shelter of the doorway, in his hand a black umbrella in the final hours of life on a windy night.
The doorman growled good evening, Russian accent thick and melodramatic. “Welcome, sir, to Balalaika, the show is now just starting.”
Inside, thick air; cigarettes glowed in the darkness. Red plush walls and a stunning hatcheck girl. Morath gave her a generous tip and kept his coat. Here, too, they wore their decorations. The maitre d’, six and a half feet tall with a sash and high boots, had a bronze medal pinned to his blouse, earned in service as mercenary and palace guardsman to King Zog of Albania.
Morath went to the bar and sat at the far end. From there he caught a glimpse of the stage. The Gypsy trio was sawing away in sentimental agonies, a dancer in sheer pantaloons and halter showed, in the blue klieg lights, just exactly what her faithless lover was giving up, while her partner stood to one side, hands clasped in fruitless longing, a red lightbulb in his pants going on and off in time to the music.
The barman came over, Morath ordered a Polish vodka, and, when it arrived, offered the barman a cigarette and lit it for him. He was a short, compact man with narrow eyes deeply lined at the corners, from laughing, maybe, or squinting into the distance. Beneath his red jacket he wore a shirt washed so often it was the pastel of an unknown color.
“Are you Boris?” Morath said.
“Now and then.”
“Well, Boris, I have a friend . . .” A little cloud of irony hung over the phrase and the barman smiled appreciatively. “He was in trouble, he came to you for help.”
“When was that?”
“Last year, around this time. His girlfriend needed a doctor.”
The barman shrugged. A thousand customers, a thousand stories. “I can’t say I remember.”
Morath understood, a bad memory was a good idea. “Now, it’s another friend. A different kind of problem.”
“Yes?”
“A passport problem.”
The barman used his rag to wipe down the zinc surface, then paused, and had a good look at Morath. “Where are you from, if you don’t mind my asking.”
“Budapest.”
“Emigré?”
“Not really. I came here after the war. I’m in business here.”
“You were in the war?”
“Yes.”
“Where was that?”
“Galicia. Up into Volhynia for a time . . .”
“Then back to Galicia.” The barman was laughing as he finished Morath’s sentence. “Oh yes,” he said, “that shithouse.”
“You were there?”
“Mm. Likely we shot at each other. Then, fall of ’17, my regiment took a walk. Same again?”
“Please.”
The clear liquor came exactly to the rim.
“Will you join me?”
The barman poured himself a vodka and raised his glass. “To poor shooting, I guess.” He drank in the Russian manner—with grace, but all gone.
From the nightclub tables, rhythmic clapping, growing louder as the patrons grew bolder, some of them yelling “Hey!” on the beat. The male dancer, squatting on the stage with his arms folded across his chest, was kicking his legs out.
“Passports,” the barman said, suddenly gloomy. “You can get into real trouble, fooling with
that. They lock you up, here, if they catch you. It goes on, of course, mostly among the refugees, the Jews and the political exiles. Once you get run out of Germany, you aren’t legal anywhere, unless you’ve got a visa. That takes time, and money—you can’t afford to be in a hurry. But you are—with the Gestapo after you, you have to do whatever it takes. So you sneak out. Now, you’re a ‘Stateless Person.’ You slip into Czechoslovakia or Switzerland, hide out for a week if you know the right rooming house, then they catch you and send you across the Austrian border. After a week or two in jail, the customs officers walk you back across the frontier, at night, in the woods, and the whole thing starts again. Here it’s a little better. If you stay out of trouble, the flics don’t care that much, unless you try to work.” He shook his head slowly, in sorrow.
“How did you manage?”
“Nansen. We were lucky. Because we were the first wave, we got the League of Nations passports, we got the work permits, we got the jobs the French didn’t want. That was 1920 or so. Revolution over, civil war winding down, then the Cheka comes around—‘We hear you were a friend of Ivanov.’ So, time to run. Next, when Mussolini’s boys got to work, came the Italians. Their luck was pretty much the same as ours—you used to be a professor of theoretical physics, now you’re a real waiter. Now, thank God you’re a waiter. Because, starting in ’33, here come the Germans. They have passports, most of them, but no work permits. They peddle, sell needles and thread from little suitcases on the boulevards, work the tourists, starve, beg, sit in the offices of the refugee organizations. It’s the same for the Spaniards, running from Franco, and now we’re getting the Austrians. No papers, no work permits, no money.”
“This friend, Boris, has money.”
The barman had known that all along. After a time he said, “You’re a detective, right?”
“With my accent?”
“Well, maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. Either way, I’m not the man you want. You have to go where the refugees are, to the Café Madine, the Grosse Marie, places like that.”
“A question? Personal question?”
“I’m an open book.”
“Why did you run?”
“Because they were chasing me,” he said, laughing again.
Morath waited.
“I was a poet. Also, to be honest, a criminal. When they came after me, I was never really sure which one it was.”
The Café Madine was in the 11th Arrondissement, just off the place de la Republique, between a butcher that sold halal meat to Arabs and kosher meat to Jews, and a repair shop for musical instruments called Szczwerna. It was easy, maybe too easy, to make contact at Madine. He showed up in the late afternoon, stood at the counter, ordered a beer, stared out at the throbbing street life of the quarter. A man tried to sell him a ring, Morath looked it over—he was there to buy, let them see a buyer. A small, red stone set in gold, University of Heidelberg, 1922.
“How much?”
“Worth three hundred, more or less.”
“I’ll think about it. Actually, I’m here because a friend of mine in Paris lost his passport.”
“Go to préfecture.”
From Morath a look, if only one could. “Or?”
“Or nothing.”
Back the next day. Ten in the morning, deserted, silent. A shaft of sunlight, a sleeping cat, the patron wore his glasses down on his nose. He took his time with Morath’s café au lait, there was no skin on the boiled milk, the coffee was powerful and fresh, and he sent his little boy off to the bakery to get fresh bread for a tartine.
The contact was a tough old bird, once upon a time a timber merchant in the Ukraine, though Morath had no way of knowing that. He tipped his hat, asked Morath to join him at a table. “You’re the fellow with the passport difficulties?”
“Friend of mine.”
“Naturally.”
“What’s the market like, these days?”
“Seller’s market, obviously.”
“He needs the real thing.”
“The real thing.” Maybe in other times he would have found it funny enough to laugh at. Morath got it, he thought. Borders, papers, nations—made-up stuff, politicians’ lies.
“As much as possible.”
“A man who buys the best.”
Morath agreed.
“Twenty-five hundred francs. A figure like that scares you, perhaps.”
“No. For good value, you pay.”
“Very reasonable, this gentleman.” He spoke to an invisible friend.
Then he told Morath where to be, and when.
Two days later, now it was Friday. A busy afternoon at the Louvre. Morath had to work to find the right room—up the stairs here in order to go down the stairs there, past Napoleon’s swag from Egypt, past rooms of small, puzzling Roman things, around a corner and down an endless corridor of British schoolboys. At last, the room with the Ingres portrait. A luminous nude, seated at a table, her back curved and soft.
A man rose from a bench against the wall, smiled, and spread his hands in welcome. He knew who Morath was, had probably looked him over at the café. A handsome gentleman, portly, with a Vandyke beard and a tweed suit. Something like, Morath thought, the owner of a prosperous art gallery. He had, apparently, a colleague, standing on the other side of the room and staring at a painting, hands clasped behind his back. Morath saw them exchange a glance. White as chalk, this man, as though missing a lifelong beard, he wore a black homburg set square on a shaved head.
The man who looked like an art dealer sat next to Morath on the wooden bench. “I’m told that you are seeking a document of the finest quality,” he said. He spoke French like an educated German.
“I am.”
“That would be a corpse.”
“All right.”
“You are buying from the family of the deceased, naturally, and they will want twenty-five hundred francs. For our work, for the change of identity, it is another thousand francs. Can we agree?”
“Yes.”
The art dealer opened a newspaper, revealing a report of a polo match in the Bois de Boulogne and a passport in a cardboard folder. “The family wishes to sell immediately. The nationality of the passport is Roumanian, and has seventeen months to run.” The head in the identification photograph was of a man in middle years, formal, self-satisfied, his dark mustache carefully clipped and groomed. Below it, the name Andreas Panea.
“I will pay you now, if you like.”
“Half now. Half when we give you the finished product. Your photo goes in place of the deceased, the raised lettering on the photo is provided by the technician. The physical description is washed out and your own put in. The one thing that can’t be changed is the place of birth—that’s on the seal. So, the bearer of the document will be called this name, is of Roumanian nationality, and was born in Cluj.”
“What happened to him?”
The art dealer stared for a moment. Why are you concerned with that? Then he said, “Nothing dramatic.” And, a moment later, “He came to the end of caring. It is quite common.”
“Here’s the photograph,” Morath said.
The art dealer was mildly surprised. It wasn’t Morath. A man in his twenties, a hard, bony face made even more severe by steel-rimmed spectacles and hair cut back to a colorless inch and brushed flat. A student, perhaps. At best, that. Given a passing grade by his professors whether he attended the lectures or not. The art dealer turned the photo over. Stamped on the back was the name of the photography studio, in Serbo-Croatian, and the word Zagreb.
The art dealer signaled to his friend, who joined them on the bench, took the photograph, and studied it for a long minute, then said something in Yiddish. Morath, who spoke fluent German, would ordinarily have gotten the sense of it but this was argot of some kind, spoken rapidly, the tone sarcastic.
The art dealer nodded, almost smiled.
“Can the bearer work?” Morath asked.
“In Roumania. Not here. Here he could apply
to work, but . . .”
“And, if it should be checked with the Roumanian authority?”
“Why would it be checked?”
Morath didn’t answer.
The man wearing the homburg took a stub of pencil from his pocket and asked a question, again in Yiddish.
“He wants to know, how tall, how much does he weigh?”
Morath gave him the numbers—lean, shorter than average.
“Eyes?”
“Gray. The hair is blond.”
“Identifying marks?”
“None.”
“Profession?”
“Student.”
The photograph was put away. The art dealer turned a page of the newspaper to reveal an envelope. “Take this to the washroom down the hall. Put seventeen hundred and fifty francs in here, tuck the newspaper under your arm, and leave the museum. Use the exit on the rue Coligny. Stand on the top step and wait for a few minutes. Then, tomorrow at noon, go back there. You’ll see somebody you recognize, follow that person, and the exchange will be made someplace where you can have a good look at what you’re buying.”
Morath did as he was told—counted hundred-franc notes into the envelope, then waited at the entrance. Ten minutes later, a woman waved and came toward him, smiling, trotting up the museum steps. She was well dressed, wore pearl earrings and white gloves. She kissed him lightly on the cheek, slid the newspaper from beneath his arm, and left in a waiting taxi.
The night before the train.
It had become something of a tradition for Nicky and Cara, a Kama Sutra evening—farewell my love, something to remember. They sat around the bedroom in candlelight and drank a bottle of wine. Cara wore black underwear, Morath a dressing gown. Sometimes they played records—Morath owned two kinds, Ellington and Lee Wiley—or listened to “les beeg bands” on the radio. One night they’d journeyed up to Pigalle, where Cara waited in a taxi while Morath bought picture books. Then they’d hurried back to the avenue Bourdonnais and looked at the pictures. Sepia couples, trios, quartets, heavy women with wide hips and sweet smiles, the book printed in Sofia.
Cara teased him, sometimes, with Tales of the Convent School. She’d spent three years in such a place, on a grand estate outside Buenos Aires. “It was just as you would suppose, Nicky,” she’d say, a little breathless and wide-eyed. “All these girls, beauty of every type. Dark. Fair. Passionate, shy, some of them so naive they knew, nothing, not even what to touch. And all of them locked up together at night. Imagine!”
