Kingdom of Shadows ns-6

by Alan Furst

  “Sometimes.”

  “I do. Montrouchet drinks at night, then he sleeps like the dead.”

  They danced for a time.

  “You’re lucky to have Cara,” she said.

  “Mm.”

  “She must be, exciting, to you. I mean, she just is that way, I can feel it.”

  “Yes?”

  “Sometimes I think about the two of you, in your room.” She laughed. “I’m terrible, aren’t I?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, I don’t care if I am. You can even tell her what I said.”

  Later, in bed, Cara sat back against the wall, sweat glistening between her breasts and on her stomach. She took a puff of Morath’s Chesterfield and blew out a long stream of smoke. “You’re happy, Nicky?”

  “Can’t you tell?”

  “Truly?”

  “Yes, truly.”

  Outside, the fall of waves on the beach. A rush, a silence, then the crash.

  The moon was down, hazy gold, waning, in the lower corner of the window, but not for long. Cautiously, careful not to wake Cara, he reached for his watch on a chair by the bed. Three-fifty. Go to sleep. “That knits up the raveled sleeve of care.” Well, it would take some considerable knitting.

  Cara was on to him, but that was just too bad. He was doomed to live with a certain heaviness of soul, not despair, but the tiresome weight of pushing back against it. It had cost him a wife, long ago, an engagement that never quite led to marriage, and had ended more than one affair since then. If you made love to a woman it had better make you happy-or else.

  Maybe it was the war. He was not the same when he came back-he knew what people could do to each other. It would have been better not to know that, you lived a different life if you didn’t know that. He had read Remarque’s book, All Quiet on the Western Front, three or four times. And, certain passages, again and again. Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way anymore…. Let the months and the years come, they bring me nothing, they can bring me nothing. I am so alone and so without hope that I can confront them without fear.

  A German book. Morath had a pretty good idea what Hitler was mining in the hearts of the German veterans. But it was not only about Germany. They had all, British, French, Russian, German, Hungarian, and the rest, been poured into the grinding machine. Where some of them died, and some of them died inside themselves. Who, he wondered, survived?

  But who ever did? He didn’t know. The point was to get up in the morning. To see what might happen, good or bad, a red/black wager. But, even so, a friend of his used to say, it was probably a good idea that you couldn’t commit suicide by counting to ten and saying now.

  Very carefully, he slid out of bed, put on a pair of cotton pants, crept downstairs, opened the door, and stood in the doorway. A silver line of wave swelled, then rolled over and vanished. Somebody laughed on the beach, somebody drunk, who just didn’t care. He could see, barely, if he squinted, the glow of a dying fire and a few silhouettes in the gloom. A whispered shout, another laugh.

  Paris. 15 June.

  Otto Adler settled in a chair in the Jardin du Luxembourg, just across from the round pool where children came with their sailboats. He folded his hands behind his head and studied the clouds, white and towering, sharp against the clear sky. Maybe a thunderstorm by late afternoon, he thought. It was hot enough, unseasonal, and he would have looked forward to it but for the few centimes it would cost him to seek refuge in the cafe on the rue de Medecis. He couldn’t afford a few centimes.

  This would be his first full summer in France, it would find him poor and dreamy, passionate for dark, lovely corners-alleys and churches-full of schemes and opinions, in love with half the women he saw, depressed, amused, and impatient for lunch. In short, Parisian.

  Die Aussicht, like all political magazines, didn’t quite live and didn’t quite die. The January issue, out in March, had featured an article by Professor Bordeleone, of the University of Turin, “Some Notes on the Tradition of the Fascist Aesthetic.” It hadn’t quite the elevated depth his readers expected, but it did have the epic sweep-reaching back into imperial Rome and snaking forward past nineteenth-century architecture to d’Annunzio. A gentle, twinkling sort of man, Bordeleone, now professor emeritus of the University of Turin, after a night of interrogation and castor oil at the local police station. But, thank God, at least Signora Bordeleone was rich, and they would survive.

  For the winter issue, Adler had grand ambitions. He had received a letter from an old Konigsberg friend, Dr. Pfeffer, now an emigre in Switzerland. Dr. Pfeffer had attended a lecture in Basel, and at the coffee hour following the talk the lecturer had mentioned that Thomas Mann, himself an emigre since 1933, was considering the publication of a brief essay. For Mann, that could mean eighty pages, but Adler didn’t care. His printer, down in Saclay, was-to date, anyhow-an idealist in matters of credit and overdue bills, and, well, Thomas Mann. “I wondered aloud,” said Pfeffer in his letter, “ever so gently, whether there was any indication of a topic, but the fellow simply coughed and averted his eyes-would you ask Zeus what he had for breakfast?” Adler smiled, remembering the letter. Of course, the topic was completely beside the point. To have that name in Die Aussicht he would have published the man’s laundry bill.

  He unbuckled his briefcase and peered inside: a copy of Schnitzler’s collected plays, a tablet of cheap writing paper-the good stuff stayed in his desk back in Saint Germain-en-Laye-yesterday’s Le Figaro, gathered, he thought of it as rescued, on the little train that brought him to Paris, and a cheese sandwich wrapped in brown paper. “Ah, mais oui, monsieur, le fromage de campagne!” The lady who owned the local cremerie had quickly figured out that he had no money, but, French to the bone, had a small passion for seedy intellectuals and sold him what she called, with a curious mixture of pride and cruelty, cheese of the countryside. Nameless, yellow, plain, and cheap. But, Adler thought, bless her anyhow for keeping us alive.

  He took the tablet from his briefcase, hunted around until he found a pencil, and began to compose. “Mein Herr Doktor Mann.” Could he do better with the honorific? Should he try? He let that sit, and went on to strategy. “Mein Herr Doktor Mann: As I have a wife and four children to feed and holes in my underwear, I know you will want to publish an important essay in my little magazine.” Now, how to say that without saying it. “Perhaps not widely known but read in important circles?”

  Phooey. “The most substantive and thoughtful of the emigre political magazines?”

  Limp. “Makes Hitler shit!” Now, he thought, there he was on to something. What if, he thought, for one manic second, he actually came out and said such a thing?

  His gaze wandered up from the paper to the deep green of chestnut trees on the other side of the pool. No children this morning, of course, they would be suffering through a June day in a schoolroom.

  A stroller in the park came toward him. A young man, clearly not at work, perhaps, sadly, unemployed. Adler looked back down at his tablet until the man stood beside his chair. “Pardon, monsieur,” he said. “Can you tell me the time?”

  Adler reached inside his jacket and withdrew a silver pocket watch on a chain. The minute hand rested precisely on the four.

  “It is just …” he said.

  M. Coupin was an old man who lived on a railroad pension and went to the park to read the newspaper and look at the girls. He told his story to the flics standing just outside the Jardin du Luxembourg, then to the detectives at the prefecture, then to a reporter from the Paris-Soir, then to two men from the Interior Ministry, and, finally, to another reporter, who met him at his local cafe, bought him a pastis, then another, seemed to know more about the event than any of the others, and asked him a number of questions he couldn’t answer.

  He told them all the same story, more or less. The man sitting across from the sailboat pond, the man in the blue suit and the steel-rimmed spectacles who appr
oached him, and the shooting. A single shot and a coup de grace.

  He did not see the first shot, he heard it. “A sharp report, like a firecracker.” That drew his attention. “The man looking at his watch dropped it, then leapt to his feet, as though he had been insulted. He swayed for a moment, then toppled over, taking the chair with him. His foot moved once, after that he was still. The man in the blue suit leaned over him, aimed his pistol, and fired again. Then he walked away.”

  M. Coupin did not shout, or give chase, or anything else. He stayed where he was, motionless. Because, he explained, “I could not believe what I had seen.” And further doubted himself when the assassin “simply walked away. He did not run. He did not hurry. It was, it was as though he had done nothing at all.”

  There were other witnesses. One described a man in an overcoat, another said there were two men, a third reported a heated exchange between the assassin and the victim. But almost all of them were farther away from the shooting than M. Coupin. The exception was a couple, a man and a woman, strolling arm in arm on a gravel path. The detectives watched the park for several days but the couple did not reappear, and, despite a plea in the story that ran in the newspapers, did not contact the prefecture.

  “Extraordinary,” Count Polanyi said. He meant a soft waffle, folded into a conical shape so that a ball of vanilla ice cream rested on top. “One can eat it while walking.”

  Morath had met his uncle at the zoo, where a glacier by the restaurant offered the ice cream and waffle. It was very hot, Polanyi wore a silk suit and a straw hat. They strolled past a llama, then a lion, the zoo smell strong in the afternoon sun.

  “Do you see the papers, Nicholas, down there?”

  Morath said he did.

  “The Paris papers?”

  “Sometimes Figaro, when they have it.”

  Polanyi stopped for a moment and took a cautious taste of the ice cream, holding his pocket handkerchief under the small end of the waffle so that it didn’t drip on his shoes. “Plenty of politics, while you were away,” he said. “Mostly in Czechoslovakia.”

  “I read some of it.”

  “It felt like 1914-events overtaking politicians. What happened was this: Hitler moved ten divisions to the Czech border. At night. But they caught him at it. The Czechs mobilized-unlike the Austrians, who just sat there and waited for it to happen-and the French and British diplomats in Berlin went wild. This means war! In the end, he backed down.”

  “For the time being.”

  “That’s true, he won’t give it up, he hates the Czechs. Calls them ‘a miserable pygmy race without culture.’ So, he’ll find a way. And he’ll pull us in with him, if he can. And the Poles. The way he’s going to sell it, we’re simply three nations settling territorial issues with a fourth.”

  “Business as usual.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, down where I was, nobody had any doubts about the future. War is coming, we’re all going to die, there is only tonight …”

  Polanyi frowned. “It seems a great indulgence to me, that sort of thing.” He stopped to have some more ice cream. “By the way, have you had any luck, finding a companion for my friend?”

  “Not yet.”

  “As long as you’re at it, it occurs to me that the lovebirds will need a love nest. Very private, of course, and discreet.”

  Morath thought it over.

  “It will have to be in somebody’s name,” Polanyi said.

  “Mine?”

  “No. Why don’t you ask our friend Szubl?”

  “Szubl and Mitten.”

  Polanyi laughed. “Yes.” The two men had shared a room, and the hardships of emigre life, for as long as anyone could remember.

  “I’ll ask them,” Morath said.

  They walked for a time, through the Menagerie, into the gardens. They could hear train whistles from the Gare d’Austerlitz. Polanyi finished his ice cream. “I’ve been wondering,” Morath said, “what became of the man I brought to Paris.”

  Polanyi shrugged. “Myself, I make it a point not to know things like that.”

  It wasn’t hard to see Szubl and Mitten. Morath invited them to lunch. A Lyonnais restaurant, he decided, where a grand dejeuner would keep you going for weeks. They were famously poor, Szubl and Mitten. A few years earlier, there’d been a rumor that only one of them could go out at night, since they shared ownership of a single, ash-black suit.

  Morath got there early, Wolfi Szubl was waiting for him. A heavy man, fifty or so, with a long, lugubrious face and red-rimmed eyes and a back bent by years of carrying sample cases of ladies’ foundation garments to every town in Mitteleuropa. Szubl was a blend of nationalities-he never said exactly which ones they were. Herbert Mitten was a Transylvanian Jew, born in Cluj when it was still in Hungary. Their papers, and their lives, were like dead leaves of the old empire, for years blown aimlessly up and down the streets of a dozen cities. Until, in 1930, some good soul took pity on them and granted them Parisian residence permits.

  Morath ordered aperitifs, then chatted with Szubl until Mitten returned, the skin of his face ruddy and shining, from the WC. Good God, Morath thought, he hadn’t shaved in there, had he? “Ah, Morath,” Mitten said, offering a soft hand and a beaming theatrical smile. A professional actor, Mitten had performed in eight languages in the films of five nations and played always the same character-best defined by his most recent appearance as Mr. Pickwick in a Hungarian version of The Pickwick Papers. Mitten had the figure of a nineteenth-century cartoon, wide at the middle and tapering on either end, with hair that stood out from his head like a clown wig.

  They ordered. Copiously. It was a family restaurant-thick china bowls and heavy platters. Bearing sausage, some of it in oil, slices of white potato fried in butter, fat roasted chickens, salads with haricots blancs and salads with lardoons of bacon. Mont d’Or cheese. And strawberries. Morath could barely see the tablecloth. He spent money on the wine-the ‘26 burgundies-exciting the red-faced patron to smiles and bows.

  They walked afterward, down the dark streets that ran from the back of the 5th to the river. “An apartment,” Morath said, “for a clandestine love affair.”

  Szubl thought it over. “A lover who won’t rent his own apartment.”

  “Very romantic,” Mitten said.

  “Very clandestine, anyhow,” said Szubl.

  Mitten said, “What are they, prominent?”

  “Cautious,” Morath said. “And rich.”

  “Ah.”

  They waited. Morath said, “Two thousand a month for the love nest. Five hundred for you. One of you signs the lease. If they need a maid, you hire her. The concierge knows you, only you, the friend of the lovers.”

  Szubl laughed. “For the five hundred, do we have to believe this?”

  “For the five hundred, you know better.”

  “Nicholas,” Mitten said, “people like us don’t get away with spying.”

  “It isn’t spying.”

  “We get put against a wall.”

  Morath shook his head.

  “So, God willing, it’s only a bank robbery.”

  “Love affair,” Morath said.

  “Six hundred,” Mitten said.

  “All right. Six hundred. I’ll give you money for the furniture.”

  “Furniture!”

  “What kind of love affair is this?”

  They were, to Morath’s surprise, good at it. Quite good. Somehow, in a week’s time, they managed to unearth a selection of love nests. To start, they took him up to Mistress Row, the avenue Foch area, where gorgeous shop girls luxuriated on powder-puff sofas, behind windows draped in pink and gold. In the apartment they took him to, the most recent affaire had evidently ended abruptly, an open tin of caviar and a mossy lemon left in the little refrigerator.

  Next, they showed him a large room, formerly servant’s quarters, up in the eaves of an hotel particulier in the Fourth Arrondissement, where nobody ever went. “Six flights of stairs,” Mitten said.
>
  “But very private.”

  And for an actual love affair, Morath thought, not the worst choice. A quiet neighborhood, last popular in 1788, and deserted streets. Next, a taxi up to Saint Germain-des-Pres, to a painter’s atelier on the rue Guenegaud, with a pretty blue slice of the Seine in one of the windows. “He paints, she models,” Szubl said.

  “And then, one afternoon, Fragonard!”

  Morath was impressed. “It’s perfect.”

  “For a Parisian, I’m not so sure. But if the lovers are, perhaps, foreign, well, as you can see, it’s pure MGM.”

  “Tres chic,” Szubl said.

  “And the landlord’s in prison.”

  Their final choice was, obviously, a throwaway. Perhaps a favor for a friend-another Szubl, a different Mitten, penniless and awash in a Gallic sea. Two rooms, barely, at the foot of the Ninth Arrondissement, near the Chaussee d’Antin Metro stop, halfway down the side street-the rue Mogador-just behind the Galeries Lafayette department store. The streets were full of people, shopping at the Galeries or working there. At Christmas, children were brought here to see the mechanical pere Noel in the window.

  The apartment was on the third floor of a nineteenth-century tenement, the exterior dark with soot and grime. Inside, brown walls, a two-burner stove, toilet in the hall, limp net curtains, yellow with age, a table covered with green oilcloth, a couch, and a narrow bed with a page of an illustrated Hungarian calendar tacked to the wall above the pillow-Harvest in Esztergom.

  “Well, Morath, here it is!”

  “Gives you a stiff pencil just to see this bed, right?”

  “Ma biche, ma douce, that army blanket! That coat rolled up for a pillow! Now is our moment! Undress-if you dare!”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “Laszlo.”

  “Nice Hungarian name.”

  “Nice Hungarian man.”

  “Thank him for me-I’ll give you some money to take him to dinner.”

  “So then, it’s the first one, right? The pink boudoir?”