by Alan Furst
The chestnut trees bloomed, white blossoms stuck to the wet streets, the captain peeked through Suzette’s keyhole as she brushed her long blond hair. Léon, the artist from the Agence Courtmain, went to Rome to see his fiancée and returned to Paris with a bruised face and a broken hand. Lucinda, the baroness Frei’s sweetest vizsla, gave birth to a litter of puppies and Morath and Mary Day went to the rue Villon to eat Sacher torte and observe the new arrivals in a wicker basket decorated with silver passementerie. Adolf Hitler celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Under German pressure, Hungary resigned from the League of Nations. Morath went to a shop on the rue de la Paix and bought Mary Day a silk scarf, golden loops and swirls on a background of Venetian red. Wolfi Szubl called, clearly in great distress, and Morath left work and journeyed out to a dark little apartment in the depths of the 14th Arrondissement, on a street where Lenin had once lived in exile.
The apartment smelled like boiled flour and was everywhere corsets. Violet and lime green, pale pink and rose, white and black. A large sample case lay open on the unmade bed.
“Forgive the mess,” Szubl said. “I’m taking inventory.”
“Is Mitten here?”
“Mitten! Mitten’s rich. He’s on location in Strasbourg.”
“Good for him.”
“Not bad. The Sins of Doktor Braunschweig.”
“Which were—”
“Murders. Herbert is stabbed to death in the first ten minutes, so it’s not a big part. With a knitting needle. Still, the money’s good.”
Szubl picked up a typed sheet of yellow paper and ran his finger down the page. “Nicholas, there’s a bustier on the radiator, can you see the name?”
“This?” It was silver, with buttons up the back and garter snaps on the bottom. As Morath looked for the label he thought he smelled lavender bath powder. “Marie Louise,” he said.
Szubl made a check mark on the list.
“Women try these on? The samples?”
“Now and then. Private fittings.” He began to count through a small mound of girdles on the edge of the bed. “I just heard they want to promote me,” he said.
“Congratulations.”
“Disaster.”
“Why?”
“The company is in Frankfurt, I’d have to live in Germany.”
“So turn it down.”
“It’s the son—the old man got old and the son took over. ‘A new day,’ he says. ‘New blood in the home office.’ Anyhow, him I can deal with. This is why I called.”
He took a folded paper from his pocket and handed it to Morath. A letter from the préfecture, summoning Szubl, Wolfgang to Room 24.
“Why this?” Szubl said.
“An investigation—but they don’t know anything. However, they will try to scare you.”
“They don’t have to try. What should I say?”
“Don’t know, wasn’t there, never met him. You aren’t going to make them like you, and don’t start talking to fill up the silence. Sit.”
Szubl frowned, a pink girdle in his hand. “I knew this would happen.”
“Courage, Wolfi.”
“I don’t want to break rocks.”
“You won’t. You’ll have to keep the appointment, this time, because they sent you the letter, it’s official. But it won’t go on. All right?”
Szubl nodded, unhappy and scared.
Morath called Polanyi and told him about it.
Count Janos Polanyi sat in his office in the Hungarian legation. It was quiet—sometimes a telephone, sometimes a typewriter, but the room had its own particular silence, the drapes drawn over the tall windows keeping the weather and the city outside. Polanyi stared down at a stack of cables on his desk, then pushed them aside. Nothing new, or, at least, nothing good.
He poured some apricot brandy in a little glass and drank it down. Closed his eyes for a moment and reminded himself who he was, where he came from. Riders in the high grass, campfires on the plain. Idle dreams, he thought, romantic nonsense, but it was still there, somewhere, rattling around inside him. At least he liked to think it was. In his mind? No, in his heart. Bad science, but good metaphysics. And that, he thought, was pretty much who he’d always been.
Count Janos Polanyi had two personal telephone books, bound in green leather. A big one, which stayed in his office, and a small one, which went wherever he did. It was the small one he opened now, and placed a telephone call to a woman he knew who lived, in very grand style, in an apartment in the Palais Royal. White and fine, was the way he thought of her, like snow.
As the phone rang he looked at his watch. 4:25. She answered, as she always did, after many rings—condescended to answer, from the tone of her voice. There followed an intricate conversation. Oblique, and pleasantly devious. It concerned certain friends she had, women, some a little younger, others more experienced. Some quite outgoing, others shy. Some ate well, while others were slim. So varied, people nowadays. Fair. And dark. From foreign lands, or the 16th Arrondissement. And each with her own definition of pleasure. Miraculous, this world of ours! One was stern, prone to temper. Another was playful, didn’t care what as long as there was a laugh in it.
Eventually, they came to an agreement. A time. And a price.
Business before pleasure. A vile saying. He sighed, stared up at the huge portraits on his wall, Arpad kings and their noble hounds, and had a little more brandy, then a little more. The Magyar chieftan prepares for battle. He mocked himself, an old habit, but then they all did that, an instinct of the national consciousness—irony, paradox, seeing the world inside out, amused by that which was not supposed to be amusing. Likely that was why the Germans didn’t much care for them, Polanyi had always believed. It was the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand who said of the Hungarians, “It was an act of bad taste on the part of these gentlemen ever to have come to Europe.” Well, here they were, whether the neighbors liked it or not.
Polanyi once again looked at his watch. For a few minutes yet he could postpone the inevitable. His evening pleasure was not to arrive until 6:00, he’d put it back an hour later than usual. And speaking of pleasure, business before it. He took a moment and swore merrily, various Hungarian anathemas. Really, why did he have to do this? Why did this Sombor creature have to come swooping down onto his life? But, here he was. Poor Nicholas, he didn’t deserve it. All he wanted was his artists and actors and poets, had thought, in 1918, that he’d done his fighting. And done it well, Polanyi knew, it was there in the regimental history. A hero, his nephew, and a good officer, a miser with the lives of his men.
He put the brandy bottle away in the bottom drawer. Stood, straightened his tie, and left the office, closing the door carefully behind him. He walked along the corridor, past a vase of fresh flowers on a hall table with a mirror behind it. Greeted Bolthos, who hurried past with a courier envelope under his arm, and climbed up a flight on the marble staircase.
The floor above was busier, noisier. The commercial attaché in the first office, then the economic man, then Sombor. Polanyi rapped twice and opened the door. Sombor looked up when he entered and said, “Your excellency.” He was busy writing—transferring jotted notes to a sheet of paper that would be retyped as a report.
“Colonel Sombor,” Polanyi said. “A word with you.”
“Yes, your excellency. In a moment.”
This was pure rudeness, and they both knew it. It was Sombor’s place to rise to his feet, offer a polite greeting, and attempt to satisfy the wishes of a superior. But, he as much as said, the business of state security took precedence. Now and forever. Polanyi could stand there and wait.
Which, for a time, he did.
Sombor’s gold fountain pen scratched across the paper. Like a field mouse in the granary. He made eternal notes, this man with his leather hair and sharp ears. Scratch, scratch. Now where did I put that pitchfork? But he did not have a pitchfork.
Sombor felt it. “I’m sure it must be important, your excellency. I mean to give it my full
attention.”
“Please, sir,” Polanyi said, his voice barely under control. “I must tell you that certain confidential information, pertaining to my office, has been made available to the Paris préfecture.”
“Has it. You’re certain?”
“I am. It may have been done directly, or through the services of an informant.”
“Regrettable. My office will definitely take an interest in this, your excellency. Just as soon as we can.”
Polanyi lowered his voice. “Stop it,” he said.
“Well, I must certainly try to do that. I wonder if you would be prepared to address a report to me, on this matter.”
“A report.”
“Indeed.”
Polanyi stepped close to the edge of the desk. Sombor glanced up at him, then went back to writing. Polanyi took a small silver pistol out of his belt and shot him in the middle of the head.
Sombor sprang to his feet, furious, eyes hot with indignation, unaware that a big drop of blood had left his hairline and was trickling down his forehead. “Cur!” he shouted. Leapt into the air, clapped his hands to his head, spun around in a circle, and went crashing backward over his chair. Screamed, turned blue, and died.
Polanyi took the white handkerchief from his breast pocket, wiped off the grip of the pistol, and tossed it on the floor. In the hall, running footsteps.
The police arrived almost immediately, the detectives followed a half hour later. The senior detective questioned Polanyi in his office. Over fifty, Polanyi thought, short and thick, with a small mustache and dark eyes.
He sat across the desk from Polanyi and took notes on a pad. “Monsieur Sombor was, to your knowledge, despondent?”
“Not at all. But I saw him only on official business, and then only rarely.”
“Can you describe, monsieur, exactly what happened?”
“I came to his office to discuss legation business, nothing terribly urgent, in fact I was on my way to see the commercial attaché, and I decided to stop in. We spoke for a minute or two. Then, when I had turned to go, I heard a shot. I rushed to his assistance, but he was gone almost immediately.”
“Monsieur,” the detective said. Clearly he’d missed something. “The last words he spoke, would you happen to recall them?”
“He said good-bye. Before that, he’d asked for a written report on the matter we’d discussed.”
“Which was?”
“Pertained to, to an internal security matter.”
“I see. So, he spoke normally to you, you turned to leave the office, at which time the deceased extended his arm to its fullest length—I’m guessing here, pending a report from the coroner, but the nature of the wound implies, um, a certain distance. Extended his arm to its fullest length, as I said, and shot himself in the top of the head?”
He was on the verge of bursting into laughter, as was Polanyi.
“Apparently,” Polanyi said. He absolutely could not meet the detective’s eyes.
The detective cleared his throat. After a moment he said, “Why would he do that?” It wasn’t precisely a police question.
“God only knows.”
“Do you not consider it,” he searched for a word, “bizarre?”
“Bizarre,” Polanyi said. “Without a doubt.”
There were more questions, all according to form, back over the ground, and back again, but the remainder of the interview was desultory, with the truth in the air, but not articulated.
So then, take me to jail.
No, not for us to be involved in these kinds of politics. Très Balkan, as we say.
And the hell with it.
The inspector closed his notebook, put his pen away, walked to the door, and adjusted the brim of his hat. Standing in the open doorway he said, “He was, of course, the secret police.”
“He was.”
“Bad?”
“Bad enough.”
“My condolences,” the inspector said.
Polanyi arranged for Morath to know about it right away. A telephone call from the legation. “The colonel Sombor has tragically chosen to end his life. Would you care to donate to the fund for floral arrangements?”
The end of April. Late in the evening on the rue Guisarde, the lissome Suzette winding down for the night. Plans to stage a King Neptune ball had inspired the passengers, getting a little grumpy after days of being lost at sea. Even more inspired was Jack the handsome sailor, who’d been kind enough to steady the ladder while Suzette climbed to the top to tack up decorations in the ballroom.
“No underpants?” Morath said.
“She forgot.”
A knock at the door produced Moni. Looking very sorrowful and asking if she could spend the night on the couch.
Mary Day brought out the Portuguese wine and Moni cried a little. “All my fault,” she said. “I stomped out, in the middle of an argument, and Marlene locked the door and wouldn’t let me back in.”
“Well, you’re welcome to stay,” Mary Day said.
“Just for the night. Tomorrow, all will be forgiven.” She drank some wine and lit a Gauloise. “Jealousy,” she said. “Why do I do these things?”
They sent Morath out for more wine and when he returned Moni was on the telephone. “She offered to go to a hotel,” Mary Day told him quietly. “But I asked her to stay.”
“I don’t mind. But maybe she’d prefer it.”
“Money, Nicholas,” Mary Day said. “None of us has any. Really, most people don’t.”
Moni hung up the telephone. “Well, it’s the couch for me.”
The conversation drifted here and there—poor Cara in Buenos Aires, Montrouchet’s difficulties at the Théâtre des Catacombes, Juan-les-Pins—then settled on the war. “What will you do, Nicholas, if it happens?”
Morath shrugged. “I would have to go back to Hungary, I suppose. To the army.”
“What about Mary?”
“Camp follower,” Mary Day said. “He would fight, and I would cook, the stew.”
Moni smiled, but Mary Day met Morath’s eyes. “No, really,” Moni said. “Would you two run away?”
“I don’t know,” Morath said. “Paris would be bombed. Blown to pieces.”
“That’s what everybody says. We’re all going to Tangiers—that’s the plan. Otherwise, doom. Back to Montreal.”
Mary Day laughed. “Nicholas in a djellaba.”
They drank both bottles Morath had brought back and, long after midnight, Moni and Mary Day fell dead asleep lying across the bed and it was Morath who wound up on the couch. He lay there for a long time, in the smoky darkness, wondering what would happen to them. Could they run away somewhere? Where? Budapest, maybe, or New York. Lugano? No. Dead calm by a cold lake, a month and it was over. A Paris love affair, it won’t transplant. They couldn’t live anywhere else, not together they couldn’t. Stay in Paris, then. Another week, another month, whatever it turned out to be, and die in the war.
He had an awful headache the next morning. When he left the apartment, taking the rue Mabillon toward the river, Ilya emerged from a doorway and fell in step with him. He’d changed the green overcoat for a corduroy jacket, in more or less the same shape as the coat.
“Will your friend see me?” he said, his voice urgent.
“He will.”
“Everything has changed, tell him that. Litvinov is finished—it’s a signal to Hitler that Stalin wants to do business.” Litvinov was the Soviet foreign minister. “Do you understand it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Litvinov is a Jewish intellectual—an old-line Bolshevik. Now, for this negotiation, Stalin provides the Nazis with a more palatable partner. Which is perhaps Molotov.”
“If you want to see my friend, you’ll have to say where and when.”
“Tomorrow night. Ten-thirty. At the Parmentier Métro stop.”
A deserted station, out in the 11th Arrondissement. “What if he can’t come?” Morath meant won’t and he sensed Ilya knew it.
“Then he can’t. An
d I either contact you or I don’t.”
Moving quickly, he turned, walked away, disappeared.
For a time, Morath considered letting it die right there. Suddenly, Ilya knew things. How? This wasn’t hiding in a room with a sack of oats. Could he have been caught? Then made a deal with the NKVD? But Polanyi had said leave it to me. He was no fool, would not go unprotected to a meeting like this. You have to let him decide, Morath thought. Because if the information was real, it meant Hitler didn’t have to worry about three hundred Russian divisions, and that meant war in Poland. This time, the British and the French would have to fight, and that meant war in Europe.
When Morath reached the Agence Courtmain, he called the legation.
“A fraud,” Polanyi said. “We are being used—I don’t exactly understand why, but we are.”
They sat in the backseat of a shiny black Grosser Mercedes, Bolthos in front with the driver. On the sixth day of May, benign and bright under a windswept sky. They drove along the Seine, out of the city at the Porte de Bercy, headed south for the village of Thiais.
“You went alone?” Morath said.
Polanyi laughed. “A strange evening at the Parmentier Métro—heavyset men reading Hungarian newspapers.”
“And the documents?”
“Tonight. Then adieu to comrade Ilya.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter now.” Litvinov had resigned two days earlier.
“No, we must do something. Wake the British up—it’s not too late for the diplomats. I would say that Poland is an autumn project, after the harvest, before the rains.”
The car moved slowly through the village of Alfortville, where a row of dance halls stood side by side on the quai facing the river. Parisians came here on summer nights, to drink and dance until dawn. “Poor soul,” Polanyi said. “Perhaps he drank in these places.”
