by Alan Furst
Morath was furious. To die in the rain on Tuesday afternoon! Out in the street, he hunted for a taxi. Hurried along the rue Peletier, then rue Drouot. At the corner, an empty taxi pulled up in front of a small hotel. As Morath ran for it, he saw a portly gentleman with a woman on his arm come out of the lobby. Morath and the portly gentleman opened the rear doors at the same moment and stared at each other across the backseat. “Forgive me, my friend,” the man said, “but I telephoned for this taxi.” He offered the woman his hand and she climbed in.
Morath stood there, water running down his face.
“Monsieur!” the woman said, pointing across the street. “What luck!”
An empty taxi had stopped in traffic, Morath thanked the woman and waved at it. He got in and told the driver where to go. “I have a friend waiting,” he said.
At the church, Morath found Ilya and hurried him to the door. The taxi was idling at the foot of the steps, the Renault had disappeared. “Quickly,” Morath said.
Ilya hesitated.
“Let’s go,” Morath said, his voice urgent. Ilya didn’t move, he seemed frozen, hypnotized. “They’re not going to kill you here.”
“Oh yes.”
Morath looked at him. Realized it was something Ilya knew, had seen. Had, perhaps, done. From the taxi, an impatient bleat of the horn.
He took Ilya by the arm and said, “Now.” Fought the instinct to stay low and sprint, and they trotted down the steps together.
In the taxi, Ilya gave the driver an address and, as they drove away, turned around and stared out the back window.
“Was it somebody you recognized?” Morath said.
“Not this time. Once before, maybe. And once, certainly.”
For long minutes, the taxi crawled behind a bus, the rear platform crowded with passengers. Suddenly, Ilya called out, “Driver, stop here!” He leapt from the taxi and ran down the entry of a Metro station. Chaussee d’Antin, Morath saw, a busy correspondence where riders could transfer from one line to another.
The driver watched him go, then twisted an index finger against his temple, which meant crazy in taxi sign language. He turned and gave Morath a sour look. “And now?” he said.
“Avenue Matignon. Just off the boulevard.”
That was a long way from Chaussee d’Antin, especially in the rain. Taking people from one place to another was fundamentally an imposition-clearly that was the driver’s view. He sighed, rammed the gearshift home, and spun his tires as he took off. “What goes on with your friend?” he said.
“His wife is chasing him.”
“Woof!” Better him than me.
A few minutes later he said, “Seen the papers?”
“Not today.”
“Even old J’aime Berlin is giving it to Hitler now.” He used the Parisian pun on Chamberlain’s name with great relish.
“What’s happened?”
“A speech. ‘Maybe Adolf wants to rule the world.’ “
“Maybe he does.”
The driver turned to look at Morath. “Just let him take his army up into Poland, and that’ll be the end of that.”
“I forbid you to see him again,” Polanyi said. They were at a cafe near the legation. “Anyhow, there’s a part of me wants to tell you that.”
Morath was amused. “You sound like a father in a play.”
“Yes, I suppose. Do you buy it, Nicholas?”
“Yes and no.”
“I have to admit that everything he says is true. But what troubles me is the possibility that someone on Dzerzhinsky Street sent him here. After all, anybody can buy an overcoat.”
“Does it matter?”
Polanyi acknowledged that it might not. If diplomats couldn’t persuade the British, maybe a defector could. “These games,” he said. ” ‘Hungarian diplomats in contact with a Soviet operative.’ “
“He said he had papers to prove it.”
“Papers, yes. Like overcoats. Any way to get back in touch with him?”
“No.”
“No, of course not.” He thought for a moment. “All right, I’ll mention it to somebody. But if this blows up, in some way we can’t see from here, don’t blame me.”
“Why would I?”
“Next time he calls, if he calls, I’ll see him. For God’s sake don’t tell him that, just accept the meeting and leave the rest to me.”
Polanyi leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You see, whatever else happens now, we must not do anything that will compromise the prime minister. Teleki’s our only way out of this mess-that little man’s a knight, Nicholas, a hero. Don’t go telling anyone this, but last week he paid some boys in Budapest to rub garlic on the doors of the foreign office, with a note that said ‘German vampires keep out.’ “
“Amen,” Morath said. “How could contact with a defector damage Teleki?”
“I won’t know until it’s too late, Nicholas-that’s the way things are done now. Sad, but true.”
Sad, but true for Morath was, on the last day of March, another letter from the prefecture. Once again, Room 24, and six days until the appointment to worry about it. The Roumanians, he guessed, would not go away, but it wasn’t a good guess.
They kept him waiting, outside the inspector’s office, for forty-five minutes. Calculated, he thought, but he felt it working on him anyhow. The inspector hadn’t changed: sitting at attention, square-faced and predatory, cold as ice. “You’ll forgive us for troubling you again,” he said. “A few things we’re trying to clarify.”
Morath waited patiently.
The inspector had all the time in the world. Slowly, he read over a page in the dossier. “Monsieur Morath. Have you, by chance, ever heard of a man called Andreas Panea?”
The name on the passport he’d obtained for Pavlo. He took a moment to steady himself. “Panea?”
“Yes, that’s right. A Roumanian name.”
Why this? Why now? “I don’t believe I know him,” he said.
The inspector made a note in the margin. “Please be certain, monsieur. Think it over, if you like.”
“Sorry,” he said. Graciously.
The inspector read further. Whatever was in there, it was substantial. “And Dr. Otto Adler? Is that name known to you?”
Able this time to tell the truth, Morath was relieved. “Once again,” he said, “someone I don’t know.”
The inspector noted his response. “Dr. Otto Adler was the editor of a political journal-a socialist journal. An emigre from Germany, he came to France in the spring of 1938 and set up an editorial office in his home, in Saint Germain-en-Laye. Then, in June, he was murdered. Shot to death in the Jardin du Luxembourg. A political assassination, no doubt, and these are always difficult to solve, but we pride ourselves on keeping at it. Murder is murder, Monsieur Morath, even in times of-political turmoil.”
The inspector saw it hit home-Morath thought he did. “Once again,” Morath said, regret in his voice, “I don’t believe I can help you.”
The inspector seemed to accept what he’d said. He closed the dossier. “Perhaps you’ll try to remember, monsieur. At your leisure. Something may come back to you.”
Something had.
“If that should be the case,” the inspector went on, “you can always get in touch with me here.”
He called Polanyi. He called Polanyi from the cafe just across the Seine-the first public telephone you came to when you left the prefecture. They made a living from their neighbor, Morath thought, pushing a jeton into the slot. The refugees were easy to spot-a couple celebrating with wine they couldn’t afford, a bearded man with his head in his hands.
“The count Polanyi is not available this afternoon,” said a voice at the legation. Morath hung up the phone, a woman was waiting to use it. Polanyi would never decline to talk to him, would he?
He went to the Agence Courtmain, but he couldn’t stay there. Saw Mary Day, for a moment. “Everything all right?” she said. He went to the WC and looked in the mirror-what had she s
een? He was perhaps a little pale, nothing more. But the difference between Cara at twenty-six and Mary Day at forty, he thought, was that Mary Day understood what the world did to people. Sensed, apparently, that it had done something to Morath.
She didn’t mention it, that evening, but she was immensely good to him. He couldn’t say exactly how. Touched him more than usual, maybe that was it. He was sick at heart, she knew it, but didn’t ask him why. They went to bed, he fell asleep, eventually, woke long before dawn, slid out of bed as quietly as he could and stood at the window, watching the night go by. Nothing you can do, now.
He didn’t get to his apartment until noon of the following day, and the letter was waiting for him there. Hand-delivered, there was no stamp.
A clipping, from the 9 March edition of the newspaper that served the German community in Sofia. He supposed it was in the Bulgarian papers as well, some version of it, but the anonymous sender knew he could read German.
A certain Stefan Gujac, the story went, a Croat, had apparently hanged himself in his cell in a Sofia jail. This Gujac, using the false passport of a deceased Roumanian named Andreas Panea, was suspected by the security agencies of several Balkan countries of having taken part in more than a dozen political assassinations. Born in Zagreb, Gujac had joined the Fascist Ustachi organization and had been arrested several times in Croatia-for agitation and assault-and had served time in jail, three months, for robbing a bank in Trieste.
At the time of his arrest in Sofia, he had been sought for questioning by authorities in Salonika after a cafe bombing that killed seven people, including E. X. Patridas, an official in the interior ministry, and injured twenty others. In addition, police in Paris had wanted to question Gujac with regard to the killing of a German emigre, editor of a political journal.
Gujac’s arrest in Sofia resulted from the attempted murder, thwarted by an alert police sergeant, of a Turkish diplomat in residence at the Grand Hotel Bulgarie. He had been questioned by Bulgarian police, who suspected the plot against the diplomat had been organized by Zveno, the terrorist gang based in Macedonia.
Gujac, twenty-eight years old, had hanged himself by fashioning a noose from his underwear. Sofia authorities said the suicide remained under investigation.
Polanyi agreed to see him later that afternoon, in the cafe near the Hungarian legation. Polanyi read his face when he walked in and said, “Nicholas?” Morath wasted no time. Recounted his interrogation at the prefecture, then slid the newspaper clipping across the table.
“I didn’t know,” Polanyi said.
From Morath, a bitter smile.
“At the time it happened, I didn’t know. Whatever you want to believe, that’s the truth. I found out later, but by then the thing was done, and there was no point in telling you. Why? What good would it have done?”
“Not your fault, is that it?”
“Yes. That’s it. This was Von Schleben’s business. You don’t understand what goes on in Germany now-the way power works. They trade, Nicholas, trade in lives and money and favors. The honorable men are gone. Retired mostly, if not murdered or chased out of the country. Von Schleben abides, that’s his nature. He abides, and I deal with him. I must deal with somebody, so I deal with him. Then it’s my turn to trade.”
“A reciprocal arrangement.” Morath’s voice was cold.
“Yes. I assume an obligation, then I pay it off. I’m a banker, Nicholas, and if, at times, a sorrowful banker, so what?”
“So, reluctantly, but owing favors, you organized this killing.”
“No. Von Schleben did that. Maybe it was a favor, a debt he had to pay, I don’t know. Perhaps all he agreed to do was bring this, this thing, to Paris. I can’t say who gave him his instructions once he got here, I don’t know who paid him. Someone in the SS, start there, you’ll find the culprit. Though I suspect you know that long before you find him he’ll find you.”
Polanyi paused a moment, then said, “You see, some days Von Schleben is a king, some days a pawn. Like me, Nicholas. Like you.”
“And what I did in Czechoslovakia? Whose idea was that?”
“Again Von Schleben. On the other side, this time.”
A waiter brought them coffee, the two cups sat untouched. “I’m sorry, Nicholas, and more concerned with this prefecture business than who did what to who last year, but what’s done is done.”
“Done for the last time.”
“Then farewell and Godspeed. I would wish it for myself, Nicholas, but I can’t resign from my country, and that’s what this is all about. We can’t pick up the nation and paste it on Norway. We are where we are, and everything follows from that.”
“Who set the prefecture on me?”
“The same person who sent the clipping. Sombor, both times.”
“You know?”
“You never know. You assume.”
“To gain what?”
“You. And to damage me, who he sees as a rival. That’s true-he’s in the hands of the Arrow Cross, I most decidedly am not. What’s at play here is Hungarian politics.”
“Why send the clipping?”
“It’s not too late, he means. So far, the prefecture knows only this much. Do you want me to tell them the rest? That’s what he’s asking you.”
“I have to do something,” Morath said. “Go away, perhaps.”
“It may come to that. For the moment, you will leave it to me.”
“Why?”
“I owe you at least that much.”
“Why not have Von Schleben deal with it?”
“I could. But are you prepared to do what he asks in return?”
“You know he would?”
“Absolutely. After all, you are already in debt to him.”
“I am? How?”
“Lest you forget, when the Siguranza had you in Roumania, he saved your life.” Polanyi reached across the table and took his hand. “Forgive me, Nicholas. Forgive, forgive. Try and forgive the world for being what it is. Maybe next week Hitler drops dead and we all go out to dinner.”
“And you’ll pay.”
“And I’ll pay.”
In April, the grisaille, the grayness, settled down on Paris as it always did. Gray buildings, gray skies, rain and mist in the long evenings. The artist Shublin had told him, one night in Juan-les-Pins, that in the spring of the year the art-supply stores could not keep the color called Payne’s Gray in stock.
The city didn’t mind its gray-found all that bright and sunny business in late winter a little too cheerful for its comfort. For Morath, life settled into a kind of brooding peace, his fantasy of the ordinary life not so sweet a reality as he liked to imagine. Mary Day embarked on a new novel, Suzette and Suzette Goes Boating now to be followed by Suzette at Sea. A luxury liner, its compass sabotaged by an evil competitor, wandering lost in the tropics. There was to be a licentious captain, a handsome sailor named Jack, an American millionaire, and the oily leader of the ship’s orchestra, all of them scheming, one way or another, for a glimpse of Suzette’s succulent breasts and rosy bottom.
Mary Day wrote for an hour or two every night, on a clackety typewriter, wearing a vast, woolly sweater with its sleeves pushed up her slim wrists. Morath would look up from his book to see her face in odd contortions, lips pressed together in concentration, and schemed for his own glimpse, which was easy to come by when writing was done for the night.
The world on the radio drifted idly toward blood and fire. Britain and France announced they would defend Poland if she was attacked. Churchill stated that “there is no means of maintaining an eastern front against Nazi aggression without the active aid of Russia.” A speaker in the House of Commons said, “If we are going in without the help of Russia, we are walking into a trap.” Morath watched as people read their newspapers in the cafes. They shrugged and turned the page, and so did he. It all seemed to happen in a faraway land, distant and unreal, where ministers arrived at railroad stations and monsters walked by night. Somewhere in the city, he k
new, Ilya hid in a tiny room, or, perhaps, he had already been beaten to death in the Lubianka.
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. Leon, the artist from the Agence Courtmain, went to Rome to see his fiancee 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.
