Kingdom of Shadows

by Alan Furst

  “He doesn’t trust the French?”

  Dr. Lapp’s laugh was dry, and delicate, and very brief.

  It was almost dark, they sat in silence for a long time. Finally, Dr. Lapp stood. “There is something I want you to look at,” he said. “I’ll send it along tomorrow, if you don’t mind.”

  He closed the door silently behind him. Morath left the room in darkness. He went into the bathroom and turned on the water. There was a bright green mineral stain below the spout. Good for the health. If you believed in it, he thought. The water ran slow, just then, and Morath waited patiently and listened to the distant thunder.

  He booked a call to Paris early the next morning, the hotel operator rang his room an hour later. “So much traffic, sir,” she apologized. “Not usual for August.”

  In Paris, a very elegant voice: “Good morning, this is Cartier.”

  Polanyi liked to say that the great fault in poets was that they never sang of the power of money in affairs between men and women. “So for that we are left to the mercy of cynics—bartenders, novelists, or lubricious aunts.” Amusing when he said it but not so amusing in real life. Morath didn’t like himself for making this telephone call, but he could think of nothing else. The other possibility was flowers, and flowers weren’t enough.

  He found himself telling the saleswoman almost everything. “I understand,” she said. She thought a moment, then added, “We have just completed a new design, a bracelet, which might be exactly right for Madame. A little exotic—emeralds set in silver and black onyx—but very personal. And not at all the usual thing. Do you think she would like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “She would be the first in Paris to have it—it’s a new style for us. Would she like that?”

  He knew she would. The saleswoman explained that the size was easily adjusted—so the bracelet could be sent by Cartier messenger to the residence. “And finally, monsieur”—now there was a different note in her voice, she was, for a moment, speaking from the heart—“the card.”

  “Just say, ‘Love, Nicky.’ ”

  Later on, he was able to get through to an officer at the Crédit Lyonnais. A bank draft would be sent over to Cartier that afternoon.

  Novotny showed up at eleven and they worked most of the day, spending much of the time in the car, driving east on the northern borders of Moravia and Bohemia. More fortifications, more barbed wire, more artillery pointed toward Germany. “What happens to all this,” he asked, “if the Sudetenland is granted independence?”

  Novotny laughed. “Then it all belongs to Hitler,” he said. “With good, flat roads running straight to Prague. A hundred kilometers, more or less, about two hours.”

  By nightfall they had turned back to the west, headed for the Kreslice barracks and a regimental dinner—a farewell dinner—with the general in attendance. “There may be a speech,” Novotny said.

  He paused a moment, peering into the darkness to find his way. They rattled over the crest of a mountain, then Novotny rode the brakes down the steep grade on the other side. “Decin,” he said—a cluster of lights in the trees. This was, Morath thought, one last demonstration: that Czech forces could move east and west without returning to the roads in the valleys. They’d improved the old village paths, used mostly for cows and goats. In the beams of the headlights he could see where holes had been filled with small stones and packed down flat.

  “And then, after the speech . . .” Novotny said.

  “Yes?” Oh no, he would refuse.

  “Perhaps you would consider . . .”

  Morath was blinded. An explosion of yellow light, then blackness, with the dazzling afterimage of a fiery star. He pressed his hands against his eyes but it wouldn’t fade. Something had burnt the air in front of his face then gone whizzing away into the trees. Novotny yelled—apparently in Czech, Morath didn’t understand. He shoved the door open, then reached for Novotny, who seemed frozen in place. As he grabbed hold of a sleeve there were two pings, metal on metal, and another tracer bullet, this one on the other side of the windshield. Morath could hear the machine gun, firing disciplined, five-round bursts. When he smelled gasoline he pulled with all his strength, dragging Novotny across the seat and out the passenger door.

  Lying flat on the ground, he rubbed his eyes as the star began to fade.

  “Can you see?” Novotny was now back in German.

  “Not much.”

  From the front of the car, a loud bang as a round hit the engine block, followed by the sharp smell of steam from the radiator. “Christ,” Morath said. He began to crawl away from the road, pulling Novotny with him. He fought his way into a tangle of vines and branches, a thorn raked him across the forehead. He could now see gray shapes resolving into trees and forest. He took a deep breath—a burned retina meant blindness for life and Morath knew it.

  “What about you?” he said.

  “Better.” Novotny probed his hairline with an index finger. “The thing actually burned me,” he said.

  The machine gunner wouldn’t leave the car alone. He stitched frosted holes in the window glass, then blew out the tires on the traverse. Morath could hear gunfire in the distance, and an orange light flickered on a cloud above the town.

  “Is it the invasion?” Morath said.

  Novotny snorted with contempt. “It’s the oppressed Sudeten Germans,” he said. “Crying out for justice and equality.”

  Morath got to his knees. “We’ll be better off in Decin.”

  “I can’t,” Novotny said, “without the stick.”

  Morath crawled back to the car, opened the back door, lay flat on the seat, and retrieved the walking stick and the holstered pistol. Novotny was glad to have both. He staggered to his feet, held the butt of the pistol, unsnapped the holster with his teeth, and swept the belt over his shoulder as the pistol slid free. “Now let them come,” he said, laughing at himself and the whole stupid business.

  They walked through the woods, Novotny limping along and breathing hard but keeping up with Morath. As it turned out, they were fortunate he was in uniform—a sixteen-year-old militiaman with a machine pistol almost cut them down as they reached Decin.

  Headed for the police station, they kept to the alleys, the walls pocked and chipped from small-arms fire. “I knew there was trouble here,” Morath said. “Marching and rioting, you see it in the newsreels. But nothing like this.”

  From Novotny, a sour smile. “These are commando units, armed and trained by the SS. You won’t see that in the newsreels.”

  The alley ended at a side street, Morath and Novotny crouched at the edge of a stucco wall. To their left, on the other side of a broad avenue, the town school was on fire, bursts of red sparks blown up into the night sky. There were two bodies lit by the firelight, their faces pressed into the angle between the street and the sidewalk. One of them had a bare foot.

  “Go ahead,” Morath said. There was some small nobility in this—first across the road was a sacred axiom under fire. The enemy gunners saw the first, shot the second.

  “Thanks just the same,” Novotny said. “We’ll go together.”

  Even so, Morath took the side toward the gunfire, ran out of bravado midway across, grabbed Novotny around the waist and the two of them galloped to cover—a three-legged race—laughing like madmen as bullets sang past them.

  It took them twenty minutes to reach the police station, where a shredded Czech flag hung limp above the barred windows. “Poor fucking thing,” said the Decin chief of police. “These fucking people keep shooting it.”

  A strange scene at the station house. Policemen, some off duty when the attack came—one of them firing a rifle out the window with a forgotten napkin tucked in his belt—a few soldiers, local citizens. In the corner, lying flat on a desk, holding a compress to a bloody head wound, was a tall, spare man in a high collar and cutaway coat, one of the lenses in his eyeglasses was cracked in half.

  “Our Latin teacher,” the police chief explained. “They
beat him up. Forced their way into the school, started throwing Czech schoolbooks out in the street, set them on fire, started singing, you know, and set the school on fire. Then they marched around the neighborhood chanting Teach our children in German while a little man filmed from the roof of a car.

  “We did—nothing. We’re under orders up here: don’t let them provoke you. So we smiled and bowed, unprovoked, got the nurse over here to paste the Latin teacher back together, and everything was just perfectly lovely.

  “But, of course, they were under orders to provoke us or else, so they went and took a shot at a policeman. He shot back, everyone ran away, and now we have this.”

  “You radioed the army?” Novotny said.

  The policeman nodded. “They’re coming. In armored cars. But they’ve got four or five of these things to deal with, so it might not be right away.”

  “You have weapons for us,” Morath said. It wasn’t a question.

  Before the police chief could answer, Novotny spoke to him in rapid Czech. Then, later on, he explained as they moved toward the safe end of town. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But they’d kill me if I let anything happen to you.”

  But the safe end of town wasn’t all that safe. At the bottom of a winding street, they found the milkman’s horse and cart, the milkman himself lying facedown on the cobblestones, the back of his jacket flung up over his head. The blinkered horse, standing patiently with his wagonload of milk cans, turned and stared at them as they went past.

  The chief of police had directed them to a three-story brick monstrosity, perhaps the grandest house in Decin, on a broad boulevard shadowed by linden trees. The building was guarded by two policemen wearing French-style helmets and armed with rifles. They followed one of them to an overstuffed parlor on the top floor, the walls crowded with oil portraits of very fat people in very expensive clothing. As Morath and Novotny settled in, a local functionary came puffing up the stairs carrying two ledgers, a clerk and a secretary close behind him with two more. Still wheezing, he stopped dead, bowed politely, then spun on his heel and hurried off.

  “His honor the mayor,” said the policeman. “The Germans keep trying to burn the town hall, so he brings the tax records up here.”

  “Keep trying?”

  The policeman nodded grimly. “Third time since March.”

  From the parlor window, Morath looked out over Decin. According to the policeman, the German units held several buildings—garages and small workshops on the north side of the town—and the railroad station. Morath saw them once or twice as they changed positions; shapeless forms in peaked caps and jackets, bent low, running close to the walls. Once he got a clear view of a machine gunner and his helper, caught for an instant in the glow of a streetlamp, one carrying a Maxim gun, the other its tripod and belts. Then they scurried away into the darkness, disappearing between the deserted office buildings on the other side of the boulevard.

  Midnight. The crackle of small-arms fire intensified. Then the town lights went out, and, a few minutes later, a call came on the radio, and Novotny and the senior policeman returned to the station. The other policeman came upstairs, took his helmet off, and sat on a sofa. He was young, Morath saw, not much more than twenty. “The armored cars should come soon,” he said.

  Morath stared out into the street. It was hard to see, the warm, misty night darkened by smoke from the burning buildings. The distant firing slowed, then stopped, replaced by heavy silence. Morath looked at his watch. Two-twenty. Cara likely asleep, by now, on the avenue Bourdonnais, unless she’d gone out somewhere. The bracelet would have arrived that afternoon. Strange how far away that seemed. Not so far. He remembered the bars on the Mediterranean beach, the crash of the waves, people saying “half past eight in Juan-les-Pins, half past nine in Prague.”

  A low, distant rumble, resolving, as Morath listened, to the throb of heavy engines. The policeman leaped to his feet. He was openly relieved—Morath hadn’t realized how frightened he’d been. “Now we’ll see,” he said, running his hand over a cowlick of wheat-colored hair. “Now we’ll see.”

  Two of the armored cars crept up the boulevard, going no more than ten miles an hour. One of them broke off and headed for the north side of the town; the other stood in the middle of the street, its turret turning slowly as the gunner looked for a target. Somebody—somebody not very bright, Morath thought—shot at it. The response was a blast of the turret cannon, a yellow flare and a ragged boom that rolled over the empty streets.

  “Idiot.”

  “A sniper,” the policeman said. “He tries to fire into the aiming port of the turret.”

  They both stood at the window. As the armored car moved forward, there was a second shot.

  “Did you see it?”

  Morath shook his head.

  “Sometimes you can.” Now, quite excited, he spoke in a loud whisper. He knelt in front of the window, rested the rifle on the sill, and sighted down the barrel.

  The armored car disappeared. From the other end of town, a serious engagement—cannon and machine-gun fire. Morath, leaning out the window, thought he could see flickers of light from the muzzle flashes. Something exploded, an armored car sped past, headed in the direction of the fighting. And something was on fire. Very slowly, the outlines of the buildings sharpened, touched with orange light. Downstairs, in the kitchen, an angry burst of static from the radio. The policeman swore softly, under his breath, as he ran off to answer it.

  Four in the morning. The policeman was snoring away on the couch while Morath kept watch. The policeman had apologized for being so tired. “We spent two days in the street,” he said. “Fighting them with batons and shields.” Morath smoked to stay awake, making sure to keep well away from the window when he lit a match, cloaking the end of the cigarette with his hand. At one point, to his amazement, a freight train came through the town. He could hear it from a long way off. It didn’t stop, the slow chuffing of the locomotive moved from east to west, and he listened to it until the sound faded away into the distance.

  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?”