by Alan Furst
He seemed tired of it all, Morath thought. Sombor, the Russians, God only knew what else. Sitting close together, the scent of bay rum and brandy was strong in the air, suggesting power and rich, easy life. Polanyi looked at his watch. “It’s at two o’clock,” he said to the driver.
“We’ll be on time, your excellency.” To be polite, he sped up a little.
“Do you read the novels, Nicholas?”
“Radetzky March, more than once. Hotel Savoy. Flight Without End.”
“There, that says it. An epitaph.” Roth had fled from Germany in 1933, writing to a friend that “one must run from a burning house.”
“A Catholic burial?” Morath said.
“Yes. He was born in a Galician shtetl but he got tired of being a Jew. Loved the monarchy, Franz Josef, Austria-Hungary.” Polanyi shook his head. “Sad, sad, Nicholas. He hated the émigré life, drank himself to death when he saw the war coming.”
They arrived at Thiais twenty minutes later, and the driver parked on the street in front of the church. A small crowd, mostly émigrés, ragged and worn but brushed up as best they could. Just before the Mass began, two men wearing dark suits and decorations carried a wreath into the church. “Ah, the Legitimists,” Polanyi said. Across the wreath, a black-and-yellow sash, the colors of the Dual Monarchy, and the single word Otto—the head of the House of Habsburg and heir to a vanished empire. It occurred to Morath that he was witness to the final moment in the life of Austria-Hungary.
In the graveyard by the church, the priest spoke briefly, mentioned Roth’s wife, Friedl, in a mental institution in Vienna, his military service in Galicia during the war, his novels and journalism, and his love of the church and the monarchy. We all overestimated the world, Morath thought. The phrase, written to a friend after Roth fled to Paris, was from an obituary in the morning paper.
After the coffin was lowered into the grave, Morath took a handful of dirt and sprinkled it on top of the pinewood lid. “Rest in peace,” he said. The mourners stood silent while the gravediggers began to shovel earth into the grave. Some of the émigrés wept. The afternoon sun lit the tombstone, a square of white marble with an inscription:
Josef Roth
Austrian Poet
Died in Paris in Exile
On the morning of 9 May, Morath was at the Agence Courtmain when he was handed a telephone message. Please call Major Fekaj at the Hungarian legation. His heart sank a little—Polanyi had told him, on the way back from Thiais, that Fekaj now sat in Sombor’s office, his own replacement due from Budapest within the week.
Morath put the message in his pocket and went off to a meeting in Courtmain’s office. Another poster campaign—a parade, a pageant, the ministries preparing to celebrate, in July, the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the revolution of 1789. After the meeting, Courtmain and Morath treated a crowd from the agency to a raucous lunch in an upstairs room at Lapérouse, their own particular answer to the latest valley in the national morale.
By the time he got back to the avenue Matignon, Morath knew he had to call—either that or think about it for the rest of the day.
Fekaj’s voice was flat and cold. He was a colorless man, precise, formal, and reserved. “I called to inform you, sir, that we have serious concerns about the well-being of his excellency, Count Polanyi.”
“Yes?” Now what.
“He has not been seen at the legation for two days and does not answer his telephone at home. We want to know if you, by any chance, have been in contact with him.”
“No, not since the sixth.”
“Did he, to your knowledge, have plans to go abroad?”
“I don’t think he did. Perhaps he’s ill.”
“We have called the city hospitals. There is no record of admission.”
“Have you gone to the apartment?”
“This morning, the concierge let us in. Everything was in order, no indication of . . . anything wrong. The maid stated that his bed had not been slept in for two nights.” Fekaj cleared his throat. “Would you care to tell us, sir, if he sometimes spends the night elsewhere? With a woman?”
“If he does he doesn’t tell me about it, he keeps the details of his personal life to himself. Have you informed the police?”
“We have.”
Morath had to sit down at his desk. He lit a cigarette and said, “Major Fekaj, I don’t know how to help you.”
“We accept,” Fekaj hesitated, then continued. “We understand that certain aspects of Count Polanyi’s work had to remain—out of view. For reasons of state. But, should he make contact with you, we trust that you will at least let us know that he is, safe.”
Alive, you mean. “I will,” Morath said.
“Thank you. Of course you’ll be notified if we hear anything further.”
Morath held the receiver in his hand, oblivious to the silence on the line after Fekaj hung up.
Gone.
He called Bolthos at his office, but Bolthos didn’t want to speak on the legation telephone and met him, just after dark, in a busy café.
“I spoke to Fekaj,” Morath said. “But I had nothing to tell him.”
Bolthos looked haggard. “It’s been difficult,” he said. “Impossible. Because of our atrocious politics, we’re cursed with separate investigations. Officially, the nyilas are responsible, but any real work must be done by Polanyi’s friends. Fekaj and his allies won’t involve themselves.”
“Where do you think he is?”
A polite shrug. “Abducted.”
“Murdered?”
“In time.”
After a moment Bolthos said, “He wouldn’t jump off a bridge, would he?”
“Not him, no.”
“Nicholas,” Bolthos said. “You’re going to have to tell me what he was doing.”
Morath paused, but he had no choice. “On Tuesday, the sixth, he was supposed to meet a man who said he had defected from the Soviet special services, which Polanyi did not believe. He didn’t run, according to Polanyi, he was sent. But, even so, he came bearing information that Polanyi thought was important—Litvinov’s dismissal, a negotiation between Stalin and Hitler. So Polanyi met him and agreed to a second, a final meeting. Documents to be exchanged for money, I suspect.
“But, if you’re looking for enemies you can’t stop there—you have to consider Sombor’s colleagues, certainly suspicious of what went on at the legation, and capable of anything. And you can’t ignore the fact that Polanyi was in touch with the Germans—diplomats, spies, Wehrmacht staff officers. And he also had some kind of business with the Poles; maybe Roumanians and Serbs as well, a potential united front against Hitler.”
From Bolthos, a sour smile. “But no scorned mistress, you’re sure of that.”
They sat in silence while the café life swirled around them. A woman at the next table was reading with a lorgnette, her dachshund asleep under a chair.
“That was, of course, his work,” Bolthos said.
“Yes. It was.” Morath heard himself use the past tense. “You think he’s dead.”
“I hope he isn’t, but better that than some dungeon in Moscow or Berlin.” Bolthos took a small notebook from his pocket. “This meeting, will you tell me where it was supposed to take place?”
“I don’t know. The first meeting was at the Parmentier Métro station. But in my dealings with this man he was careful to change time and location. So, in a way, the second meeting would have been anywhere but there.”
“Unless Polanyi insisted.” Bolthos flipped back through the notebook. “I’ve been working with my own sources in the Paris police. On Tuesday, the sixth, a man was shot somewhere near the Parmentier Métro station. This was buried among all the robberies and domestic disturbances, but there was something about it that caught my attention. The victim was a French citizen, born in Slovakia. Served in the Foreign Legion, then discharged for political activity. He crawled into a doorway and died on the rue Saint-Maur, a minute or so away from the Métro.”
“A phantom,” Morath said. “Polanyi’s bodyguard—is that what you think? Or maybe his assassin. Or both, why not. Or, more likely, nobody, caught up in somebody’s politics on the wrong night, or killed for a ten-franc piece.”
Bolthos closed the notebook. “We have to try,” he said. He meant he’d done the best he could.
“Yes. I know,” Morath said.
Temetni Tudunk, a Magyar sentiment, complex and ironic: How to bury people, that is one thing we know. It was Wolfi Szubl who said the words, at a Hungarian nightclub in the cellar of a strange little hotel out in the 17th Arrondissement. Szubl and Mitten, the baroness Frei escorted by a French film producer, Bolthos and his wife and her cousin, Voyschinkowsky and Lady Angela Hope, the artist Szabo, the lovely Madame Kareny, various other strays and aristocrats who had floated through Janos Polanyi’s complicated life.
It wasn’t a funeral—there was no burial, thus Szubl’s ironic twist on the phrase, not even a memorial, only an evening to remember a friend. “A difficult friend”—Voyschinkowsky said that, an index finger wiping the corner of his eye. There was candlelight, a small Gypsy orchestra, platters of chicken with paprika and cream, wine and fruit brandy, and, yes, it was said more than once as the evening wore on, Polanyi would have liked to be there. During one of the particularly heartbreaking songs, a pale, willowy woman, supremely, utterly Parisienne and rumored to be a procuress who lived in the Palais Royal, stood in front of the orchestra and danced with a shawl. Morath sat beside Mary Day and translated, now and then, what was said in Hungarian.
They drank to Polanyi, wherever he is tonight, meaning heaven or hell. “Or maybe Palm Beach,” Herbert Mitten said. “I guess there’s nothing wrong in thinking that if you care to.”
The bill came to Morath at two in the morning, on a silver tray, with a grand bow from the patron. Voyschinkowsky, thwarted in his attempt to pay for the evening, insisted on taking Morath and Mary Day home in his chauffeur-driven Hispano-Suiza automobile.
We have to try, Bolthos had said it for both of them. Which meant, for Morath, one obvious but difficult strand, really the only one he knew, in what must have been a vast tangle of shadowy connections.
He went up to the Balalaika the following afternoon and drank vodka with Boris Balki.
“A shame,” Balki said, and drank “to his memory.”
“Looking back, maybe inevitable.”
“Yes, sooner or later. This type of man lives on borrowed time.”
“The people responsible,” Morath said, “are perhaps in Moscow.”
A certain delicacy prevented Balki from saying what he felt about that, but the reaction—Balki looked around to see who might be listening—was clear to Morath.
“I wouldn’t even try to talk to them, if I were you,” Balki said.
“Well, if I thought it would help.”
“Once they do it, it’s done,” Balki said. “Fated is fated, Slavs know all about that.”
“I was wondering,” Morath said. “What’s become of Silvana?”
“Living high.” Balki was clearly relieved to be off the subject of Moscow. “That’s what I hear.”
“I want to talk to Von Schleben.”
“Well . . .”
“Can you do it?”
“Silvana, yes. The rest is up to you.”
Then, the last week in May, Morath received a letter, on thick, creamy paper, from one Auguste Thien, summoning him to the Thien law offices in Geneva “to settle matters pertaining to the estate of Count Janos von Polanyi de Nemeszvar.”
Morath took the train down from Paris, staring out at the green and gold Burgundian countryside, staying at a silent Geneva hotel that night, and arriving at the office, which looked out over Lac Leman, the following morning.
The lawyer Thien, when Morath was ushered into his office by a junior member of the staff, turned out to be an ancient bag of bones held upright only by means of a stiff, iron-colored suit. He had a full head of wavy silver hair, parted in the middle, and skin like parchment. “Your excellency,” the lawyer said, offering his hand. “Will you take a coffee? Something stronger?”
Morath took the coffee, which produced the junior member carrying a Sèvres service, countless pieces of it, on an immense tray. Thien himself served the coffee, his breathing audible as he worked.
“There,” he said, when Morath at last had the cup in his hands.
On the desk, a metal box of the kind used in safe-deposit vaults. “These papers comprise a significant proportion of the Polanyi de Nemeszvar estate,” Thien said, “which, according to my instructions, now, in substance, pass to you. There are provisions made for Count Polanyi’s surviving family, very generous provisions, but the greatest part of the estate is, as of this date, yours. Including, of course, the title, which descends to the eldest surviving member of the male line—in this case the son of Count Polanyi’s sister, your mother. So, before we proceed to more technical matters, it is my privilege to greet you, even in a sad hour, as Nicholas, Count Morath.”
Slowly, he stood and came around the desk to shake Morath’s hand.
“Perhaps I’m ignorant of the law,” Morath said, when he’d sat back down, “but there is, to my knowledge, no death certificate.”
“No, there is not.” A cloud crossed Thien’s face. “But our instructions preclude the necessity for certification. You should be aware that certain individuals, in their determination of a final distribution of assets, may presuppose, well, any condition they choose. It is, at least in Switzerland, entirely at their discretion. We are in receipt of a letter from the Paris préfecture, an attestation, which certifies, to our satisfaction, that the legator has been officially declared a missing person. This unhappy eventuality was, in fact, foreseen. And this office, I will say, is known for the most scrupulous adherence to a client’s direction—no matter what it might entail. You have perhaps heard of Loulou the circus elephant? No? Well, she now lives in splendid retirement, on a farm near Coimbra, in compliance with the wishes of the late Senhor Alvares, former owner of the Circus Alvares. In his last will and testament, he did not forget this good-natured beast. And she will, one might say, never forget Senhor Alvares. And this law firm, Count Morath, will never forget Loulou.”
The lawyer Thien smiled with satisfaction, took from his drawer a substantial key, opened the metal box, and began to hand Morath various deeds and certificates.
He was, he learned, very rich. He’d known about it, in a general way—the Canadian railroad bonds, the estates in Slovakia, but here it was in reality. “In addition,” Thien said, “there are certain specified accounts held in banks in this city that will now come into your possession—my associate will guide you in completing the forms. You may elect to have these funds administered by any institution you choose, or they can remain where they are, in your name, with payment instructions according to your wishes.
“This is, Count Morath, a lot to absorb in a single meeting. Are there, at present, any points you would care to have clarified?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“Then, with your permission, I will add this.”
He took from his drawer a sheet of stationery and read aloud. “ ‘A man’s departure from his familiar world may be inevitable, but his spirit lives on, in the deeds and actions of those who remain, in the memories of those left behind, his friends and family, whose lives may reflect the lessons they have learned from him, and that shall become his truest legacy.’ ”
After a pause, Thien said, “I believe you should find comfort in those words, your excellency.”
“Certainly I do,” Morath said.
Bastard. You’re alive.
On his return to Paris there was, of course, an ascension-to-the-title party, attended, as it happened, solely by the count and the countess presumptive. The latter provided, from the patisserie on the corner, a handsome cake, on top of which, in consultation with the baker’s wife and aided by a dictionary, a congratulatory phrase in
Hungarian was rendered in blue icing. This turned out to be, when Morath read it, something like Good Feelings Mister Count, but, given the difficulty of the language, close enough. In addition—shades of Suzette!—Mary Day had pinned paper streamers to the wall of the apartment, though, unlike Jack the handsome sailor, Morath had not been there to steady the ladder. Still, he saw far more than Jack was ever going to and got to lick frosting off the countess’s nipples in the bargain.
There followed a night of adventure. At three, they stood at the window and saw the moon in a mist. Across the rue Guisarde, a man in an undershirt leaned on his windowsill and smoked a pipe. A spring wind, an hour later, and the scent of fields in the countryside. They decided they would go to the Closerie de Lilas at dawn and drink champagne, then she fell asleep, hair plastered to her forehead, mouth open, sleeping so peacefully he didn’t have the heart to wake her.
They went to the movies that night, at one of the fancy Gaumont theatres over by the Grand Hotel. The loveliest fluff, Morath thought. A French obsession—how passion played itself out into romantic intrigue, with everybody pretty and well dressed. His beloved Mary Day, hardheaded as could be in so many ways, caved in completely. He could feel it, sitting next to her, how her heart beat for a stolen embrace.
But in the lobby on the way out, all chandeliers and cherubs, he heard a young man say to his girlfriend, “Tout Paris can fuck itself blue in the face, it won’t stop Hitler for a minute.”
Thus the Parisian mood that June. Edgy but resilient, it fought to recover from the cataclysms—Austria, Munich, Prague—and tried to work its way back to normalcy. But the Nazis wouldn’t leave it alone. Now there was Danzig, with the Poles giving as good as they got. Every morning it lay waiting in the newspapers: customs officers shot, post offices burned, flags pulled down and stomped into the dirt.
And not all that much better in Hungary. Quieter, maybe. The parliament had passed new anti-Semitic laws in May, and when Morath was solicited by Voyschinkowsky for a subscription to a fund for Jews leaving the country, he wrote out a check that startled even “the Lion of the Bourse.” Voyschinkowsky raised his eyebrows when he saw the number. “Well, this is terribly generous of you, Nicholas. Are you sure you want to do all that much?”
