by Alan Furst
“Move, dumb ox!” The words in German, the Slavic accent so thick it took Morath a moment to understand. The man gripped his arm like a steel claw. A hook nose, dark face, an unlit cigarette in his lips. “To the truck, yes?” he said. “Yes?”
Morath walked as fast as he could. Behind him, from the train, a cry in Hungarian. A woman, cursing, enraged, screaming, telling them all, brutes, devils, to cease this fouling of the world and go and burn in hell. The man at Morath’s side lost all patience—the rise and fall of distant sirens coming nearer—and dragged Morath toward the truck. The driver reached over and helped him and he sprawled across the passenger seat, then fought his way upright.
The driver was an old man with a beard and a scar that cut across his lips. He pressed the gas pedal, gingerly, the engine raced, then died back. “Very good,” he said.
“Hungarian?”
The man shook his head. “I learn in war.”
He pressed the clutch pedal to the floor as the man in the soft hat ran toward the truck and violently waved his shotgun. Go. Move. “Yes, yes,” the driver said, this time in Russian. He shoved the gear lever forward, and, after a moment, it engaged. He gave Morath an inquisitive look. Morath nodded.
They drove away slowly, into the street behind the station. A police car was idling at the corner, both doors open. Morath could hear the train moving out of the station—the engineer at last come to his senses. A black sedan came flying past and, tires squealing, cut in front of them, then slowed down. A hand came out of the driver’s window and beckoned them forward. The sedan accelerated and, at the next street, turned sharply and sped away.
They were quickly out of Bistrita, the road narrowed, turned to dirt, wound past a few dilapidated farms and villages, then climbed into the Transylvanian forest. At sunset, despite the cold iron on his wrists and ankles, Morath slept. Then woke in darkness. Out the window, a field painted in frost and moonlight. The old man was bent over the wheel, squinting to see the road.
“Where are we?” Morath said.
From the old man, an eloquent shrug. He took a scrap of brown paper from atop the dashboard and handed it to Morath. A crosshatch of lines, drawn in blunt pencil, with notes in Cyrillic script scrawled along the margin. “So, where we are?”
Morath had to laugh.
The old man joined him. Maybe they would find their way, maybe not, so life went.
The truck worked its way up a long hill, the wheels slipping in the frozen ruts, the old man restlessly shifting gears. “Like tractor,” he said. In the distance, Morath saw a dull glow that appeared and disappeared through the trees. This turned out to be, a few minutes later, a low stone building at the junction of two ancient roads, its windows lit by oil lamps. An inn, a wooden sign hung on chains above the door.
The old man smiled in triumph, let the truck roll to a stop in the cobblestone yard, and honked the horn. This produced two barking mastiffs, galloping back and forth in the headlights, and an innkeeper wearing a leather apron, a blazing pitch-pine torch held high in one hand. “You are welcome in this house,” he said, in formal Hungarian.
A deliberate man, round and genial. He took Morath to the stable, set the torch in a bracket, and, with hammer and chisel, broke the shackles and took them off. As he worked, his face grew sorrowful. “So my grandfather,” he explained, repositioning the chain atop an anvil. “And his.”
When he was done he led Morath to the kitchen, sat him in front of the fire, and served him a large glass of beer and a thick slice of fried cornmeal. When Morath had eaten, he was shown to a room off the kitchen, where he fell dead asleep.
When he woke, the truck was gone. The innkeeper gave him an old jacket and a peaked cap, and, later that morning, he sat next to a farmer on a wagon and entered Hungarian territory by crossing a hayfield.
Morath had always liked the Novembers of Paris. It rained, but the bistros were warm, the Seine dark, the lamps gold, the season’s love affairs new and exciting. The 1938 November began well enough, tout Paris ecstatic that it wouldn’t have to go to war. But then, Kristallnacht, on the night of 9 November, and in the shimmering tons of shattered Jewish glass could be read, more clearly than anybody liked, what was coming. Still, it wasn’t coming here. Let Hitler and Stalin rip each other’s throats out, went that week’s thinking, we’ll go up to Normandy for the weekend.
Morath arranged to meet his uncle at some cuisine grand-mère hole-in-the-wall out in Clichy. He’d spent ten days in Budapest, collecting money, listening to poor Szubl’s misadventures with the red-headed chorus girl he’d met at the nightclub. Then the two of them had hidden the cash in a cello and taken the night express back to Paris. For the moment, Morath was a man with well over two million pengo in his closet.
It was obvious to Morath that Count Polanyi had gotten an early start on lunch. Trying to sit down, he lurched into the neighboring table, very nearly causing a soup accident and drawing a sharp glance from the grand-mère. “It seems the gods are after me today,” he said, in a gust of cognac fumes.
It wasn’t the gods. The pouches beneath his eyes had grown alarmingly and darkened.
Polanyi peered at the chalked menu on the blackboard. “Andouillette,” he said.
“I hear you’ve been away,” Morath said.
“Yes, once again I’m a man with a house in the country, what’s left of it.” On 2 November, the Vienna Commission—Hitler—had awarded Hungary, in return for supporting Germany during the Sudeten crisis, the Magyar districts of southern Czechoslovakia. Twelve thousand square miles, a million people, the new border running from Pozsony/Bratislava all the way east to Ruthenia.
The waiter arrived with a carafe of wine and a plate of snails.
“Uncle Janos?”
“Yes?”
“How much do you know about what happened to me in Roumania?”
From Polanyi’s expression it was clear he didn’t want to talk about it. “You had difficulties. It was seen to.”
“And that’s that.”
“Nicholas, don’t be cross with me. Basically, you were lucky. Had I left the country two weeks earlier you might have been gone for good.”
“But, somehow, you heard about it.”
Polanyi shrugged.
“Did you hear that Sombor appeared? At the Bistrita police station?”
His uncle raised an eyebrow, speared a snail on the third try and ate it, dripping garlic butter on the table. “Mmm? What’d he want?”
“Me.”
“Did he get you?”
“No.”
“So where’s the problem?”
“Perhaps Sombor is a problem.”
“Sombor is Sombor.”
“He acted like he owned the world.”
“He does.”
“Was he responsible for what happened to me?”
“Now that’s an interesting idea. What would you do if he was?”
“What would you suggest?”
“Kill him.”
“Are you serious?”
“Kill him, Nicholas, or don’t ruin my lunch. Choose one.”
Morath poured himself a glass of wine and lit a Chesterfield. “And the people who rescued me?”
“Très cher, Nicholas.”
“Who shall I thank for it?”
“Somebody owed me a favor. Now I owe him one.”
“Russian? German?”
“Eskimo! My dear nephew, if you’re going to be inquisitive and difficult about this . . .”
“Forgive me. Of course I’m grateful.”
“Can I have the last snail? That grateful?”
“At least that.”
Polanyi jammed the tiny fork into the snail and frowned as he worked it free of its shell. Then, for a moment, he looked very sad. “I’m just an old, fat Hungarian man, Nicholas. I can’t save the world. I’d like to, but I can’t.”
The last days of November, Morath pulled his overcoat tight and hurried through the streets of the Marais to the Café Mad
ine. It was, Morath thought, frozen in time. Empty, as before, in the cold morning light, a cat asleep on the counter, the patron with his spectacles down on his nose.
The patron, Morath suspected, remembered him. Morath ordered a café au lait and, when it came, warmed his hands on the bowl. “I was here, once before,” he said to the patron. “Last March, I think it was.”
The patron gave him a look. Really?
“I met an old man. I can’t recall his name, I don’t think he mentioned it. At the time, a friend of mine had difficulties with a passport.”
The owner nodded. Yes, that sort of thing did happen, now and then. “It’s possible. Somebody like that used to come here, once in a while.”
“But not anymore.”
“Deported,” the owner said. “In the summer. He had a little problem with the police. But for him, the little problem became a big problem, and they sent him back to Vienna. After that, I can’t say.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Morath said.
“He is also sorry, no doubt.”
Morath looked down, felt the height of the wall between him and the patron, and understood there was nothing more to be said. “He had a friend. A man with a Vandyke beard. Quite educated, I thought. We met at the Louvre.”
“The Louvre.”
“Yes.”
The patron began drying a glass with a cloth, held it up to the light, and put it back on the shelf. “Cold, today,” he said.
“Perhaps a little snow.”
“You think so?”
“You can feel it in the air.”
“Maybe you’re right.” He began wiping the bar with the cloth, lifting Morath’s bowl, scooping up the cat and setting it gently on the floor. “You must let me clean, Sascha,” he said.
Morath waited, drinking his coffee. A woman with a baby in a blanket went past in the street.
“It’s quiet here,” Morath said. “Very pleasant.”
“You should come more often, then.” The patron gave him a tart smile.
“I will. Perhaps tomorrow.”
“We’ll be here. God willing.”
It took a half hour, the following morning. Then a woman—the woman who had picked up the money and, Morath remembered, kissed him on the steps of the Louvre, appeared at the café. “He’ll see you,” she told Morath. “Try at four-fifteen tomorrow, in the Jussieu Métro station. If he can’t get there, try the next day, at three-fifteen. If that doesn’t work, you’ll have to find another way.”
He wasn’t there on the first try. The station was crowded, late in the day, and if somebody was taking a look at him, making sure there were no detectives around, Morath never saw it. On the second day, he waited forty-five minutes, then gave up. As he climbed the stairs to the street, the man fell in step with him.
Not as portly as Morath remembered him, he still wore the Vandyke beard and the tweed suit, and something about him suggested affinity with the world of commercial culture. The art dealer. He was accompanied, as before, by a man with a white, bony face who wore a hat set square on a shaven head.
“Let’s take a taxi,” the art dealer said. “It’s too cold to walk.”
The three of them got in the back of a taxi that was idling at the curb. “Take us to the Ritz, driver,” said the art dealer.
The driver laughed. He drove slowly down the rue Jussieu and turned into the rue Cuvier.
“So,” the art dealer said. “Your friends still have problems with their papers.”
“Not this time,” Morath said.
“Oh? Then what?”
“I would like to meet somebody in the diamond business.”
“You’re selling?”
“Buying.”
“A little something for the sweetheart.”
“Absolutely. In a velvet box.”
The driver turned up the hill on the rue Monge. From the low sky, a few drops of rain, people on the street opened their umbrellas. “A substantial purchase,” Morath said. “Best would be somebody in the business a long time.”
“And discreet.”
“Very. But please understand, there’s no crime, nothing like that. We just want to be quiet.”
The art dealer nodded. “Not the neighborhood jeweler.”
“No.”
“Has to be in Paris?”
Morath thought it over. “Western Europe.”
“Then it’s easy. Now, for us, it’s a taxi ride and, maybe tomorrow, a train ride. So, we’ll say, five thousand francs?”
Morath reached into his inside pocket, counted out the money in hundred-franc notes, and put the rest away.
“One thing I should tell you. The market in refugee diamonds is not good. If you bought in Amsterdam a year ago and went to sell in Costa Rica tomorrow, you’d be badly disappointed. If you think a thousand carats of value is a thousand carats of value, like currency in a normal country somewhere, and all you’ll have to do is carve up the heel in your shoe, you’re wrong. People think it’s like that but it isn’t. Since Hitler, the gem market is a good place to lose your shirt. F’shtai?”
“Understood,” Morath said.
“Say, want to buy a Vermeer?”
Morath started to laugh.
“No? A Hals then, a little one. Fits in a suitcase. Good, too. I’ll vouch for it. You don’t know who I am, and I’d rather you never did, but I know what I’m talking about.”
“You need somebody rich.”
“Not this week, I don’t.”
Morath smiled regret.
The chalk-white man took off his hat and ran his hand over his head. Then said, in German, “Stop. He’s moral.”
“Is that it?” the art dealer said. “You don’t want to take advantage of a man who’s a fugitive?”
The driver laughed.
“Well, if you ever, God forbid, have to run for your life, then you’ll understand. It’s beyond value, by then. What you’ll be saying is ‘take the picture, give the money, thank you, good-bye.’ Once you only plan to live till the afternoon, you’ll understand.”
For a time, there was silence in the cab. The art dealer patted Morath on the knee. “Forgive me. What you need today is a name. That’s going to be Shabet. It’s a Hasidic family, in Antwerp, in the diamond district. There’s brothers, sons, all sorts, but do business with one and you’re doing business with all of them.”
“They can be trusted?”
“With your life. I trusted them with mine, and here I am.” The art dealer spelled the name, then said, “Of course I need to certify you to them. What should I call you?”
“André.”
“So be it. Give me ten days, because I have to send somebody up there. This is not business for the telephone. And, just in case, you and I need a confirmation signal. Go to the Madine, ten days from now. If you see the woman, it’s all settled.”
Morath thanked him. They shook hands. The chalk-white man tipped his hat. “Good luck to you, sir,” he said in German. The driver pulled over to the curb, in front of a charcuterie with a life-size tin statue of a pig by its doorway, inviting customers inside with a sweep of his trotter. “Voilà le Ritz!” the driver called out.
Emile Courtmain sat back in his swivel chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared out at the avenue Matignon. “When you first think about it, it should be easy. But then you start to work, and it turns out to be very difficult.”
There were forty wash drawings set out around the office—pinned to the walls, propped up on chairs. French life. Peasant couples in the fields, or in the doorways of farmhouses, or sitting on wagons. Like Millet, perhaps, a benign, optimistic sort of Millet. Then there were Parisian papas and mamans out for a Sunday stroll, by a carousel, at the Arc de Triomphe. A pair of lovers on a bridge over the Seine, holding hands, she with bouquet, he in courting suit—facing the future. A soldier, home from the front, seated at the kitchen table, his good wife setting a tureen in front of him. This one wasn’t so bad, Morath thought.
�
��Too gentle,” Courtmain said. “The ministry will want something with a little more clenched fist in it.”
“Any text?”
“A word or two—Mary’s going to join us in a minute. Something like, ‘In a dangerous world, France remains strong.’ It’s meant to dispel defeatism, especially after what happened at Munich.”
“Exhibited where?”
“The usual places. Métro, street kiosk, post office.”
“Hard to dispel defeatism in a French post office.”
Morath sat down in a chair across from Courtmain. Mary Day knocked lightly on the frame of the open door. “Hello, Nicholas,” she said. She pulled up a chair, lit a Gitane, and handed Courtmain a sheet of paper.
“ ‘France will win,’ ” he read. Then, to Morath, “That’s not poor Mary’s line.” From Courtmain, an affectionate grin. Mary Day had the smart person’s horror of the fatuous phrase.
“It’s the little man at the interior ministry,” she explained. “He, had an idea.”
“I hope they’re paying.”
Courtmain made a face. Not much. “Advertising goes to war—you can’t say no to them.”
Mary Day took the paper back from Courtmain. “ ‘France forever.’ ”
“Bon Dieu,” Courtmain said.
“ ‘Our France.’ ”
Morath said, “Why not just ‘La France’?”
“Yes,” Mary Day said. “The Vive understood. That was my first try. They didn’t care for it.”
“Too subtle,” Courtmain said. He looked at his watch. “I have to be at RCA at five.” He stood, opened his briefcase and made sure he had what he needed, then adjusted the knot of his tie. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” he said to Morath.
“About ten,” Morath said.
“Good,” Courtmain said. He liked having Morath around and wanted him to know it. He said good-bye to each of them and went out the door.
Which left Morath alone in the room with Mary Day.
He pretended to look at the drawings and tried to think of something clever to say. She glanced at him, read over her notes. She was the daughter of an Irish officer in the Royal Navy and the French artist Marie d’Aumonville—an extraordinary combination, if you asked Morath, or anybody. A light sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of the nose; long, loose brown hair; and pleading brown eyes. She was flat-chested, amused, impish, absentminded, awkward. “Mary’s a certain type,” Courtmain had once told him. When she was sixteen, he suspected, all the boys wanted to die for her, but they were afraid to ask her to go to the movies.
