by Alan Furst
“How old?”
“The husband?” She shrugged. “Forty-five, maybe. Always problems—she comes to me for a loan, sometimes.”
“Is it possible tonight?”
“I suppose.”
“I’ll give you the money now, Liebchen, and I’ll stop by tomorrow night for the passport.”
28 June. A fine day with bright sunshine, but not a ray of it reached the hunting lodge. Three stories, thirty rooms, a grand hall, all sunk in dark, musty gloom. Morath and Balki had hired a car in Bratislava and driven up into the wooded hills north of the Danube. They were in historical Slovakia—Hungarian territory since 1938—and only a few miles from the Austrian border.
Balki looked around him in a kind of dispirited awe—trophy heads on every wall, their glass eyes glittering in the forest light. Tentatively, he settled himself on the leather cushion of a huge wooden chair with hunting scenes carved into the high back.
“Where giants sat,” he said.
“That’s the idea.”
The old empire lived on, Morath thought. One of the baroness’s pet aristocrats had agreed to loan him the hunting lodge. “So very private,” he’d said with a wink. It was that. In the Little Carpathians, thick with pines, by a rushing brook that wound past the window and a picturesque waterfall that foamed white over a dark outcropping.
Balki wandered about, gazing up at the terrible paintings. Sicilian maidens caught as they filled amphorae from little streams, Gypsy girls with tambourines, a dyspeptic Napoleon with his hand on a cannon. At the far end of the room, between the stuffed heads of a bear and a tusky wild boar, he stood before a gun cabinet and tapped his fingers on the oiled stock of a rifle. “We’re not going to play with these, are we?”
“We are not.”
“No cowboys and Indians?”
Emphatically, Morath shook his head.
There was even a telephone. Of a sort—easy to imagine Archduke Franz Ferdinand calling his taxidermist: a wooden box on the kitchen wall, with the earpiece on a cord and a black horn in the center into which one could speak. Or shout, more likely. Morath lifted the earpiece from the cradle, heard static, put it back, looked at his watch.
Balki took off his workman’s cap and hung it on an antler. “I’ll come along if you like, Morath.”
That was pure bravery—a Russian going into Austria. “Guard the castle,” Morath said. “Enough that you took vacation days for this, you don’t have to get arrested in the bargain.”
Once again, Morath looked at his watch. “Well, let’s try it,” he said. He lit a cigarette, put the telephone receiver to his ear and tapped the cradle. From the static, an operator speaking Hungarian.
“I’d like to book a call to Austria,” Morath said.
“I can get through right away, sir.”
“In Vienna, 4025.”
Morath heard the phone, a two-ring signal. Then: “Herr Kreml’s office.”
“Is Herr Kreml in?”
“May I say who’s calling?”
“Mr. Stevenson.”
“Hold the line, please.”
Kreml was on right away. A smooth, confident, oily voice. Saying that it was good of him to call. Morath asked after Kolovitzky’s health.
“In excellent spirits!” Well, perhaps a little, how to say, oppressed, what with his various tax difficulties, but that could soon be put right.
“I’m in contact with Madame Kolovitzky, here in Paris,” Morath said. “If the paperwork can be resolved, a bank draft will be sent immediately.”
Kreml went on a little, lawyer’s talk, then mentioned a figure. “In terms of your American currency, Herr Stevenson, I think it would be in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars.”
“The Kolovitzkys are prepared to meet that obligation, Herr Kreml.”
“I’m so pleased,” Kreml said. “And then, in a month or so, once the draft has been processed by our banks, Herr Kolovitzky will be able to leave Austria with a clear conscience.”
“A month, Herr Kreml?”
“Oh, at least that, the way things are here.” The only way to expedite matters, Kreml said, would be to use a rather obscure provision of the tax code, for payments in cash. “That would clear things up immediately, you see.”
Morath saw. “Perhaps the best way,” he said.
Well, that was up to the Kolovitzkys, wasn’t it. “Herr Stevenson, I do want to compliment you on your excellent German. For an American . . .”
“Actually, Herr Kreml, I was born in Budapest, as Istvanagy. So, after I emigrated to California, I changed it to Stevenson.”
Ah! Of course!
“I will speak with Madame Kolovitzky, Herr Kreml, but please be assured that a cash payment will reach you within the week.”
Kreml was very pleased to hear that. They chattered on for a time. The weather, California, Vienna, then started to say good-bye.
“Oh yes,” Morath said, “there is one more thing. I would very much like to have a word with Herr Kolovitzky.”
“Naturally. Do you have the number of the Hotel Schoenhof?”
“I called there—he seems always to be unavailable.”
“Really? Well, you know, that doesn’t surprise me. An amiable man, Herr Kolovitzky, makes friends everywhere he goes. So, I would suppose he’s in and out, being entertained, sitting in the pastry shops. Have you left a message?”
“Yes.”
“Then what’s the problem? He’ll call you back, the minute he gets a chance. Then too, Herr Stevenson, the telephone lines between here and Paris—it can be difficult.”
“Likely that’s it.”
“I must say good-bye, Herr Stevenson, but I look forward to hearing from you.”
“Be certain that you will.”
“Good-bye, Herr Stevenson.”
“Good-bye, Herr Kreml.”
They drove to Bratislava the next morning, where Morath meant to take the train to Vienna, but it was not to be. Chaos at Central Station, crowds of stranded travelers, all the benches taken, people out on Jaskovy Avenue, sitting on their suitcases. “It’s the Zilina line,” the man at the ticket window explained. All passenger trains had been canceled to make way for flatbed cars carrying Wehrmacht tanks and artillery, moving east in a steady stream. Morath and Balki stood on the platform and stared, in the midst of a silent crowd. Two locomotives pulled forty flatbeds, the long snouts of the guns thrust out from beneath canvas tarpaulins. Twenty minutes later, a trainload of horses in cattle cars, then a troop train, soldiers waving as they went by, a message chalked beneath the coach windows—We’re going to Poland to beat up the Jews.
The town of Zilina lay ten miles from the Polish frontier. It would have a hospital, a hotel for the general staff, a telephone system. Morath’s heart sank as he watched the trains—this was hope slipping away. It could be intimidation, he thought, a feint, but he knew better. Here was the first stage of an invasion—these were the divisions that would attack from Slovakia, breaking through the Carpathian passes into southern Poland.
Morath and Balki walked around Bratislava, drank beer at a café, and waited. The city reminded Morath of Vienna in ’38—Jewish shop windows smashed, Jew Get Out! painted on building walls. The Slovakian politicians hated the Czechs, invited Hitler to protect them, then discovered that they didn’t like being protected. But it was too late. Here and there somebody had written pro tento krat on the telephone poles, for the time being, but that was braggadocio and fooled nobody.
Back in the station restaurant, Morath sat with his valise between his feet, ten thousand dollars in Austrian schilling packed inside. He asked a waiter if the Danube bridge was open—in case he decided to drive across, but the man looked gloomy and shook his head. “No, you cannot use it,” he said, “they’ve been crossing for days.”
“Any way into Austria?”
“Maybe at five they let a train through, but you have to be on the platform, and it will be—very crowded. You understand?”
Morat
h said he did.
When the waiter left, Balki said, “Will you be able to get back out?”
“Probably.”
Balki nodded. “Morath?”
“Yes?”
“You’re not going to get yourself killed, are you?”
“I don’t think so,” Morath said.
The train wasn’t due for another two hours, so he used a telephone in the station to place a call to Paris. He had to wait twenty minutes, then the call went through to the Agence Courtmain. The receptionist, after several tries, found Mary Day at a meeting in Courtmain’s office.
“Nicholas!” she said, “Where are you?” She wasn’t exactly sure what he was doing. “Some family business,” he’d told her, but she knew it was more than that.
“I’m in Bratislava,” he said.
“Bratislava. How’s the weather?”
“Sunny. I wanted to tell you that I miss you.”
After a moment she said, “Me too, Nicholas. When are you coming back?”
“Soon, a few days, if all goes well.”
“It will, won’t it? Go well?”
“I think so, you don’t have to worry. I thought I’d call, to say I love you.”
“I know,” she said.
“I guess I have to go, there are people waiting to use the phone.”
“All right. Good-bye.”
“A few days.”
“The weekend.”
“Oh yes, by then.”
“Well, I’ll see you then.”
“Good-bye, Mary.”
The waiter had been right about the passenger train. It pulled in slowly, after six-thirty, people jammed in everywhere. Morath forced his way on, using his strength, smiling and apologizing, making a small space for himself on the platform of the last car, hanging on to a metal stanchion all the way to Vienna.
He called Szubl at his hotel, and they met in a coffeehouse, the patrons smoking and reading the papers and conversing in polite tones. A city where everyone was sad and everyone smiled and nothing could be done—it had always seemed that way to Morath and it was worse than ever that summer night in 1939.
Szubl handed him an envelope, and Morath used the edge of the table for cover and looked at the passport photo. An angry little man glared up at him, mustache, glasses, nothing ever goes right.
“Can you fix it?” Szubl said.
“Yes. More or less. I took a photo from some document his wife had with her, I can paste it in. But, with any luck at all, I won’t need it.”
“Did they look at your bag, at the border?”
“Yes. I told them what the money was for, then they went through everything else. But it was just the usual customs inspectors, not SS or anything.”
“I took out the stays out of a corset. You still want them?”
“Yes.”
Szubl handed him an envelope, hotel stationery. Morath put it in his pocket. “When are getting out of here?”
“Tomorrow. By noon.”
“Make sure of that, Wolfi.”
“I will. What about the passport?”
“Tell her your friend lost it. More money for Herr X, and he can just go and get another.”
Szubl nodded, then stood up. “I’ll see you back in Paris, then.”
They shook hands, and Morath watched him leave, heavy and slow, even without the sample case, a folded newspaper under one arm.
“Would you go once around the Mauerplatz?”
“If you like.” The taxi driver was an old man with a cavalry mustache, his war medals pinned to the sun visor.
“A sentimental journey,” Morath explained.
“Ah, of course.”
A small, cobbled square, people strolling on a warm evening, old linden trees casting leafy shadows in the light of the streetlamps. Morath rolled the window down and the driver took a slow tour around the square.
“A lady and I stayed here, a few years ago.”
“At the Schoenhof?”
“Yes. Still the same old place?”
“I would think. Care to get out and take a look? I don’t mind.”
“No, I just wanted to see it again.”
“So, now to the Landstrasse?”
“Yes. The Imperial.”
“Come to Vienna often?”
“Now and again.”
“Different, this past year.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. Quiet, thank God. Earlier we had nothing but trouble.”
8:15. He would try one last time, he decided, and made the call from a phone in the hotel lobby.
“Hotel Schoenhof.”
“Good evening. This is Doktor Heber, please connect me with Herr Kolovitzky’s room.”
“Sorry. Herr Kolovitzky is not available.”
“Not in his room?”
“No. Good night, Herr Doktor.”
“This is urgent, and you will give him a message. He took some tests, at my clinic here in Währing, and he must return, as soon as possible.”
“All right, I’ll let him know about it.”
“Thank you. Now, would you be so kind as to call the manager to the phone?”
“I’m the manager.”
“And you are?”
“The manager. Good night, Herr Doktor.”
The next morning, Morath bought a briefcase, put the money and his passport inside, explained to the desk clerk that he would be away for a week, paid for his room until the following Thursday, and had the briefcase put in the hotel safe. From the art dealer in Paris he had a new passport—French, this time. He returned to his room, gave his valise a last and very thorough search, and found nothing out of the ordinary. Then he took a taxi to the Nordbahnhof, had a cup of coffee in the station buffet, then went outside and hailed a taxi.
“The Hotel Schoenhof,” he told the driver.
In the lobby, only men.
Something faintly awkward in the way they were dressed, he thought, as though they were used to military uniform. SS in civilian clothing. Nobody saluted or clicked his heels, but he could sense it—the way their hair was cut, the way they stood, the way they looked at him.
The man behind the desk was not one of them. The owner, Morath guessed. In his fifties, soft and frightened. He met Morath’s eyes for a moment longer than he needed to. Go away, you don’t belong here.
“A room, please,” Morath said.
One of the young men in the lobby strolled over and leaned on the desk. When Morath looked at him, he got a friendly little nod in return. Not at all unpleasant, he was just there to find out who Morath was and what he wanted. No hard feelings.
“Single or double?” the owner said.
“A single. On the square, if you have it.”
The owner made a show of looking at his registration book. “Very well. For how long, please?”
“Two nights.”
“Your name?”
“Lebrun.” Morath handed over the passport.
“Will you be taking the demi-pension?”
“Yes, please.”
“Dinner is served in the dining room. At seven promptly.”
The owner took a key from a numbered hook on a board behind him. Something odd about the board. The top row of hooks, he saw, had no keys. “403,” the owner said. “Would you like the porter to take your valise up?” His hand hovered over a bell.
“I can manage,” Morath said.
He walked up four flights of stairs, the carpet old and frayed. Just a commercial hotel, he thought. Like hundreds in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, anywhere one went. He found 403 and unlocked the door. An edelweiss pattern on the limp curtains and the coverlet on the narrow bed. Pale green walls, hushed, still air. Very quiet in this hotel.
He decided to take a walk, let them have a look at his valise. He handed the key to the owner at the desk and went out onto the Mauerplatz. At a newsstand he glanced at the headlines. POLAND THREATENS BOMBARDMENT OF DANZIG! Then bought a sport magazine, youths playing volleyball on the cover. A gent
eel neighborhood, he thought. Sturdy, brick apartments, women with baby carriages, a trolley line, a school where he could hear children singing, a smiling grocer in the doorway of his store, a little man who looked like a weasel sitting at the wheel of a battered Opel. Back at the Schoenhof, Morath retrieved his key and walked upstairs, past the fourth floor, up to the fifth. In the corridor, a heavy man with a red face sat on a chair tipped back against the wall. He stood when he saw Morath.
“What do you want up here?”
“I’m in room 403.”
“Then you’re on the wrong floor.”
“Oh. What’s up here?”
“Reserved,” the man said, “get moving.”
Morath apologized and hurried away. Very close, he thought. Ten rooms on the fifth floor, Kolovitzky was a prisoner in one of them.
Three in the morning. Morath lay on the bed in the dark room, sometimes a breeze from the Mauerplatz moved the curtains. Otherwise, silence. After dinner there’d been a street musician on the square, playing an accordion and singing. Then he’d listened to the radio on the night table, Liszt and Schubert, until midnight, when the national radio station went off the air. Not completely off the air—they played the ticking of a metronome until dawn. To reassure people, it was said.
Morath gazed at the ceiling. He’d been lying there for three hours with nothing to do but wait, had thought about almost everything he could think of. His life. Mary Day. The war. Uncle Janos. He missed Polanyi, it surprised him how much. Echézeaux and bay rum. The amiable contempt he felt for the world he had to live in. And his final trick. Here, you try it.
He wondered about the other guests in the hotel—the real ones, not the SS. They’d been easy enough to spot in the dining room, trying to eat the awful dinner. He’d mostly pushed noodles from one side of his plate to the other, kept an eye on the waiter, and figured out how the downstairs worked. As for the guests, he believed they would survive. Hoped they would.
From a church, somewhere in the neighborhood, the single chime for the half hour. Morath sighed and swung his legs off the bed. Put on his jacket, pulled his tie up. Then he took the stays from the envelope Szubl had given him. Celluloid. Made of soluble guncotton and camphor.
