Kingdom of Shadows

IN THE GARDEN OF THE BARONESS FREI

ON THE TENTH OF MARCH 1938, THE NIGHT TRAIN FROM BUDAPEST pulled into the Gare du Nord a little after four in the morning. There were storms in the Ruhr Valley and down through Picardy and the sides of the wagon-lits glistened with rain. In the station at Vienna, a brick had been thrown at the window of a first-class compartment, leaving a frosted star in the glass. And later that day there’d been difficulties at the frontiers for some of the passengers, so in the end the train was late getting into Paris.

Nicholas Morath, traveling on a Hungarian diplomatic passport, hurried down the platform and headed for the taxi rank outside the station. The first driver in line watched him for a moment, then briskly folded his Paris-Midi and sat up straight behind the wheel. Morath tossed his bag on the floor in the back and climbed in after it. “L’avenue Bourdonnais,” he said. “Number eight.”

Foreign, the driver thought. Aristocrat. He started his cab and sped along the quai toward the Seventh Arrondissement. Morath cranked the window down and let the sharp city air blow in his face.

8, avenue de la Bourdonnais. A cold, haut bourgeois fortress of biscuit-colored stone block, flanked by the legations of small countries. Clearly, the people who lived there were people who could live anywhere, which was why they lived there. Morath opened the gate with a big key, walked across the courtyard, used a second key for the building entry. “Bonsoir, Séléne,” he said. The black Belgian shepherd belonged to the concierge and guarded the door at night. A shadow in the darkness, she came to his hand for a pat, then sighed as she stretched back out on the tile. Séléne, he thought, goddess of the moon.

Cara’s apartment was the top floor. He let himself in. His footsteps echoed on the parquet in the long hallway. The bedroom door was open, by the glow of a streetlamp he could see a bottle of champagne and two glasses on the dressing table, a candle on the rosewood chest had burned down to a puddle of golden wax.

“Nicky?”

“Yes.”

“What time is it?”

“Four-thirty.”

“Your wire said midnight.” She sat up, kicked free of the quilts. She had fallen asleep in her lovemaking costume, what she called her “petite chemisette,” silky and black and very short, a dainty filigree of lace on top. She leaned forward and pulled it over her head, there was a red line across her breast where she’d slept on the seam.

She shook her hair back and smiled at him. “Well?” When he didn’t respond she said, “We are going to have champagne, aren’t we?”

Oh no. But he didn’t say it. She was twenty-six, he was forty-four. He retrieved the champagne from the dressing table, held the cork, and twisted the bottle slowly until the air hissed out. He filled a glass, gave it to her, poured one for himself.

“To you and me, Nicky,” she said.

It was awful, thin and sweet, as he knew it would be, the caviste in the rue Saint-Dominique cheated her horribly. He set his glass on the carpet, went to the closet, began to undress.

“Was it very bad?”

Morath shrugged. He’d traveled to a family estate in Slovakia where his uncle’s coachman lay dying. After two days, he died. “Austria was a nightmare,” he said.

“Yes, it’s on the radio.”

He hung his suit on a hanger, bundled up his shirt and underwear and put it in the hamper. “Nazis in the streets of Vienna,” he said. “Truckloads of them, screaming and waving flags, beating up Jews.”

“Like Germany.”

“Worse.” He took a fresh towel off a shelf in the closet.

“They were always so nice.”

He headed for the bathroom.

“Nicky?”

“Yes?”

“Come sit with me a minute, then you can bathe.”

He sat on the edge of the bed. Cara turned on her side, pulled her knees up to her chin, took a deep breath and let it out very slowly, pleased to have him home at last, waiting patiently for what she was showing him to take effect.

Oh well. Caridad Valentina Maria Westendorf (the grandmother) de Parra (the mother) y Dionello. All five feet, two inches of her. From one of the wealthiest families in Buenos Aires. On the wall above the bed, a charcoal nude of her, drawn by Pablo Picasso in 1934 at an atelier in the Montmartre, in a shimmering frame, eight inches of gold leaf.

Outside, the streetlamp had gone out. Through a sheer curtain, he could see the ecstatic gray light of a rainy Parisian morning.

Morath lay back in the cooling water of the bathtub, smoking a Chesterfield and tapping it, from time to time, into a mother-of-pearl soap dish. Cara my love. Small, perfect, wicked, slippery. “A long, long night,” she’d told him. Dozing, sometimes waking suddenly at the sound of a car. “Like blue movies, Nicky, my fantasies, good and bad, but it was you in every one of them. I thought, he isn’t coming, I will pleasure myself and fall dead asleep.” But she didn’t, said she didn’t. Bad fantasies? About him? He’d asked her but she only laughed. Slavemaster? Was that it? Or naughty old Uncle Gaston, leering away in his curious chair? Perhaps something from de Sade—and now you will be taken to the abbot’s private chambers.

Or, conversely, what? The “good” fantasies were even harder to imagine. The Melancholy King? Until tonight, I had no reason to live. Errol Flynn? Cary Grant? The Hungarian Hussar?

He laughed at that, because he had been one, but it was no operetta. A lieutenant of cavalry in the Austro-Hungarian army, he’d fought Brusilov’s cossacks in the marshes of Polesia, in 1916 on the eastern front. Outside Lutsk, outside Kovel and Tarnopol. He could still smell the burning barns.

Morath rested his foot on the gold-colored spigot, staring down at the puckered pink-and-white skin that ran from ankle to knee. Shrapnel had done that—a random artillery round that blew a fountain of mud from the street of a nameless village. He had, before passing out, managed to shoot his horse. Then he woke in an aid station, looking up at two surgeons, an Austrian and a Pole, in blood-spattered leather aprons. “The legs come off,” said one. “I cannot agree,” said the other. They stood on either side of a plank table in a farmhouse kitchen, arguing while Morath watched the gray blanket turn brown.

The storm that had followed him across Europe had reached Paris, he could hear rain drumming on the roof. Cara came plodding into the bathroom, tested the water with her finger and frowned. “How can you stand it?” she said. She climbed in and sat facing him, rested her back against the porcelain, and turned the hot water on full blast. He handed her the Chesterfield and she took an elaborate puff—she didn’t actually smoke—blowing out a dramatic stream of smoke as though she were Marlene Dietrich. “I woke up,” she said. “Couldn’t go back to sleep.”

“What’s wrong?”

She shook her head.

They’d certainly played long and hard—it was what they did best—night love and morning love tumbled up together, and when he’d left the bedroom she’d been out cold, mouth open, breathing sonorous and hoarse. Not snoring, because, according to her, she never snored.

In the light of the white bathroom he could see that her eyes were shining, lips pressed tight—portrait of a woman not crying. What was it? Sometimes women just felt sad. Or maybe it was something he’d said, or done, or not done. The world was going to hell, maybe it was that. Christ he hoped it wasn’t that. He stroked the skin of Cara’s legs where they wrapped around his, there wasn’t anything to say and Morath knew better than to try and say it.

The rain slackened, that afternoon, Paris a little triste in its afternoon drizzle but accustomed to weather in the spring season and looking forward to the adventures of the evening. Count Janos Polanyi—properly von Polanyi de Nemeszvar but beyond place cards at diplomatic dinners it hardly ever appeared that way—no longer waited for evening to have his adventures. He was well into his sixties now, and the cinq-à-sept affaire suited the rhythm of his desire. He was a large, heavy man with thick white hair, almost yellow in lamplight, who wore blue suits cut by London tailors and smelled like bay rum, used liberally several times a day, cigar smoke, and the burgundy he drank with lunch.

He sat in his office in the Hungarian legation, crumpled up a cable and tossed it in the wastebasket. Now, he thought, it was actually going to happen. A leap into hell. The real thing, death and fire. He glanced at his watch, left the desk, and settled in a leather chair, dwarfed by immense portraits hanging high on the walls: a pair of Arpad kings, Geza II and Bela IV, the heroic general Hunyadi hung beside his son Matthias Corvinus, with customary raven. All of them dripping furs and bound in polished iron, with long swords and drooping mustaches, attended by noble dogs of breeds long vanished. The portraits continued in the hall outside his office, and there would have been more yet if they’d had room on the walls. A long and bloody history, and no end of painters.

5:20. She was, as always, subtly late, enough to stir anticipation. With the drapes drawn the room was almost dark, lit only by a single small lamp and firelight. Did the fire need another log? No, it would do, and he didn’t want to wait while the porter climbed three flights of stairs.

Just as his eyes began to close, a delicate knock at the door, followed by the appearance of Mimi Moux—the chanteuse Mimi Moux as the gossip writers of the newspapers had it. Ageless, twittering like a canary, with vast eyes and carmine lipstick—a theatrical face—she bustled into his office, kissed him on both cheeks, and touched him, somehow, damned if he knew how she did it, in sixteen places at once. Talking and laughing without pause—you could enter the conversation or not, it didn’t matter—she hung her afternoon Chanel in a closet and fluttered around the room in expensive and pleasantly exhilarating underwear.

“Put on the Mendelssohn, my dear, would you?”

Arms crossed over her breasts—a mock play on modesty—she twitched her way over to an escritoire with a Victrola atop it and, still talking—“you can imagine, there we were, all dressed for the opera, it was simply insupportable, no? Of course it was, one couldn’t do such a thing in ignorance, or, at least, so we thought. Nonetheless”—put the First Violin Concerto on the turntable and set the needle down, returned to the leather chair, and curled herself up in Count Polanyi’s commodious lap.

Eventually, just at the moment—of their several underappreciated virtues, he mused, the French possessed the purest sense of timing in all Europe—she settled on her knees in front of his chair, unbuttoned his fly with one hand and, at last, stopped talking. Polanyi watched her, the concerto came to an end, the needle hissed back and forth in an empty groove. He had spent his life, he thought, giving pleasure to women, now he had reached a point where they would give pleasure to him.

Later, when Mimi Moux had gone, the legation cook knocked lightly on his door and carried in a steaming tray. “A little something, your excellency,” she said. A soup made from two chickens, with tiny dumplings and cream, and a bottle of 1924 Echézeaux. When he was done, he sat back in his chair and breathed a sigh of great contentment. Now, he noted, his fly was closed but his belt and pants button were undone. Really just as good, he thought. Better?

*

The Café Le Caprice lurked in the eternal shadows of the rue Beaujolais, more alley than street, hidden between the gardens of the Palais Royal and the Bibliothèque Nationale. His uncle, Morath had realized long ago, almost never invited him to the legation, preferring to meet in unlikely cafés or, sometimes, at the houses of friends. “Indulge me, Nicholas,” he would say, “it frees me from my life for an hour.” Morath liked the Le Caprice, cramped and grimy and warm. The walls had been painted yellow in the nineteenth century, then cured to a rich amber by a hundred years of cigarette smoke.

Just after three in the afternoon, the lunch crowd began to leave and the regulars drifted back in to take their tables. The mad scholars, Morath thought, who spent their lives in the Bibliothèque. They were triumphantly seedy. Ancient sweaters and shapeless jackets had replaced the spotted gowns and conical hats of the medieval alchemists, but they were the same people. Morath could never come here without recalling what the waiter, Hyacinthe, had once said about his clientele: “God forbid they should actually ever find it.” Morath was puzzled—“Find what?” Hyacinthe looked startled, almost offended. “Why, it, monsieur,” he said.

Morath took a table vacated by a party of stockbrokers who’d walked over from the Bourse, lit a cigarette, ordered a gentiane, and settled in to wait for his uncle. Suddenly, the men at the neighboring table stopped arguing, went dead silent, and stared out at the street.

A very grand Opel Admiral had pulled up in front of Le Caprice, the driver held the back door open, and a tall man in black SS uniform emerged, followed by a man in a raincoat, followed by Uncle Janos. Who talked and gesticulated as the others listened avidly, expectant half-smiles on their faces. Count Polanyi pointed his finger and scowled theatrically as he delivered what was obviously a punch line. All three burst into laughter, just faintly audible inside the café, and the SS man clapped Polanyi on the back—that was a good one!

They said good-bye, shook hands, and the civilian and the SS man returned to the Opel. Here’s something new, Morath thought, you rarely saw SS men in uniform in Paris. They were everywhere in Germany, of course, and very much in the newsreels; marching, saluting, throwing books into bonfires.

Morath’s uncle entered the café and took a moment to find him. Somebody at the next table made a remark, one of his friends snickered. Morath stood, embraced his uncle, and they greeted each other—as usual, they spoke French together in public. Count Polanyi took off his hat, gloves, scarf, and coat and piled them up on the empty chair. “Hmm, that went over well,” he said. “The two Roumanian businessmen?”

“I haven’t heard it.”

“They run into each other on the street in Bucharest, Gheorgiu is carrying a suitcase. ‘Where are you off to?’ Petrescu asks. ‘Cernauti,’ his friend says. ‘Liar!’ Petrescu shouts. ‘You tell me you’re going to Cernauti to make me think you’re going to Iasi, but I’ve bribed your office boy, and I know you’re going to Cernauti!’ ”

Morath laughed.

“You know Von Schleben?”

“Which one was he?”

“Wearing a raincoat.”

Hyacinthe appeared. Polanyi ordered a Ricon.

“I don’t think so,” Morath said. He wasn’t completely sure. The man was tall, with pale, fading hair a little longer than it should be, and something about the face was impish; he had the sly grin of the practical joker. Quite handsome, he could have played the suitor—not the one who wins, the one who loses—in an English drawing-room comedy. Morath was sure he’d seen him somewhere. “Who is he?”

“He works in the diplomatic area. Not a bad sort, when all is said and done, I’ll introduce you sometime.”

The Ricon arrived, and Morath ordered another gentiane. “I never did get lunch,” his uncle said. “Not really. Hyacinthe?”

“Monsieur?”

“What’s for lunch today?”

“Tête de veau.”

“How is it?”

“Not too bad.”

“I think I’ll have some. Nicholas?”

Morath shook his head. He placed a small packet on the table. The size of a hand, it was wrapped in very old, yellowed muslin, perhaps a piece cut from a curtain a long time ago. He unfolded the fabric, revealing a silver cross on a faded ribbon, black and gold, the colors of Austria-Hungary. “This he sent to you.”

Polanyi sighed. “Sandor,” he said, as though the coachman could hear him. He picked up the medal, let it lie flat on his open hand. “A Silver Cross of Valor. You know, Nicholas, I’m honored, but this is worth something.”

Morath nodded. “I offered it to the daughter, with your kindest sympathies, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”

“No. Of course not.”

“When is it from?”

Polanyi thought for a time. “The late eighties, as near as I can work it out. A Serbian rising, down in the Banat. Sandor was a sergeant, in the regiment raised in Pozsony. It was Pressburg then.”

“Bratislava, now.”

“The same place, before they gave it to the Slovaks. Anyhow, he used to talk about it, now and then. The Serbs gave them a hard time, they had snipers up in the caves, on the hillsides. Sandor’s company spent a week dealing with that—some villages had to be burnt down—and he got the cross.”

“He wanted you to have it.”

Polanyi nodded that he understood. “Is anything left, up there?”

“Not much. They stripped the house, after the border moved. Doorknobs, windows, the good floors, fireplace brick, chimneys, whatever pipe they could get out of the walls. The livestock’s long gone, of course. Some of the vineyard remains. The older fruit trees.”

“Nem, nem, soha,” Polanyi said. No, no, never—the Hungarian rejection of Trianon, the treaty that took away two thirds of its land and people after the Austro-Hungarian army was defeated in the Great War. There was more than a touch of irony in Polanyi’s voice when he said it, a shrug, all we can do is whine, but that wasn’t all. In some sense, complex, possibly obscure, he meant it.

“One day, perhaps, it comes back.”

The group at the next table had been attentive. One pugnacious little man, balding, nostrils flared, the reek of his mildewed room floating over their aperitifs, said “Revanchiste.” He didn’t say it to them, quite, or to his friends, perhaps he meant it for the world at large.

They looked at him. Revanchist, irredentist Hungarian fascists, he meant, seething with Red Front indignation. But Morath and Polanyi were not that, they were of the Hungarian Nation, as the nobility was called, Magyars with family histories that went back a thousand years, and they were quite prepared, with chair leg and wine bottle, to throw the whole crowd out into the rue Beaujolais.

When the group at the next table had returned, ostentatiously, to minding its own business, Polanyi carefully folded the medal back into its wrapping and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

“He spent a long time dying,” Morath said. “Not in pain, and he wasn’t sad—he just had a hardheaded soul, it didn’t want to go.”

From Polanyi, a tender little snort of pleasure as he tasted the veal.

“Also,” Morath went on, “he wanted me to tell you something.”

Polanyi raised his eyebrows.

“It had to do with the death of his grandfather, who was ninety-five, he thought, and who had died in the same bed. The family knew the time had come, they were all gathered around. Suddenly, the old man became agitated and started to talk. Sandor had to lean close in order to hear him. ‘Remember,’ he whispered, ‘life is like licking honey . . .’ He said it three or four times, and Sandor could tell there was more. At last, he managed—‘licking honey off a thorn.’ ”

Polanyi smiled, acknowledging the story. “It’s been twenty years,” he said, “since I saw him. When it was no longer Hungary, I didn’t want anything to do with it, I knew it would be destroyed.” He took a sip of the wine, then more. “You want some, Nicholas? I’ll have them bring a glass.”

“No, thank you.”

“I wouldn’t go up there,” Polanyi said. “That was weak. And I knew it.” He shrugged, forgiving himself.

“He didn’t hold it against you.”

“No, he understood. His family was there?”

“All sorts. Daughters, a son, nieces and nephews, his brother.”

“Ferenc.”

“Yes, Ferenc. They had all the mirrors turned around. One old lady—immense, she cried, she laughed, she cooked me an egg—couldn’t stop talking about it. When the soul leaves, it mustn’t ever be allowed to see itself in the mirror. Because, she said, if it did, it might like looking at itself, and then it would be back, again and again.”

“I don’t think mine would. Did they put out the tub of water?”

“By the door. For death to wash his scythe. Otherwise, he would have to go all the way down to the creek, and somebody else in the house would die within the year.”

Polanyi daintily ate a chunk of bread he’d soaked in the sauce. When he looked up, the waiter was just passing by. “Hyacinthe, s’il vous plaît, a glass for my nephew here. And, while you’re at it, another carafe.”

They walked in the Palais Royal gardens after lunch. A dark afternoon, perpetual dusk, Polanyi and Morath like two ghosts in overcoats, moving slowly past the gray branches of the winter parterre.

Polanyi wanted to hear about Austria—he knew that Wehrmacht units were poised on the borders, ready to march in to suppress the “riots” organized by the Austrian Nazis. “If Hitler gets his Anschluss, there will be war in Europe,” he said.

“The trip was a nightmare,” Morath said. A nightmare that began with an absurdity—a fistfight in the corridor of the first-class car between two German harmonica salesmen. “Imagine, two stout men, both with mustaches, screaming insults at each other and flailing away with their little white fists. By the time we got them separated, they were bright red. We made them sit down, gave them water. We were afraid one of them would drop dead, and the conductor would have to stop the train and call for the police. Nobody, nobody in the car wanted that.”

“It started in Bucharest, no doubt,” Polanyi said. Roumania, he explained, had been forced to sell its wheat harvest to Germany, and the Reich finance ministry refused to pay in marks. They would only barter. For, exclusively, aspirin, Leica cameras, or harmonicas.

“Well, that was just the beginning,” Morath said. “We were still in western Hungary.” While the train stood in the station in Vienna, a man approximately Morath’s age, pale, trembling, had taken the seat across from him. When the family that occupied the rest of the compartment went off to the dining car, they had started to talk.

The man was a Viennese Jew, an obstetrician. He told Morath that the Jewish communities of Austria had been destroyed in a day and a night. It was, he said, sudden, chaotic, not like Berlin. By which he meant, Morath knew, a certain style of persecution—the slow, meticulous grinding of civil servants. Schreibtischtäter, he called them, “desk-murderers.”

The mobs had run wild in the city, led by Austrian SS and SA, hauling Jews out of their apartments—identified by the building custodians—and forcing them to scrub the walls free of slogans for Schuschnigg, the elected chancellor, in the plebiscite that Hitler refused to allow. In the wealthy Jewish suburb of Währing, they made the women put on their fur coats and forced them to clean the streets on their hands and knees, then stood over them and urinated on their heads.

Morath grew worried, the man was coming apart before his eyes. Would he care for a cigarette? No, he didn’t smoke. Perhaps a brandy. Morath offered to go to the dining car and bring it back. The man shook his head—what was the point? “We are finished,” he said. Eight hundred years of Jewish life, ended in one night. At the hospital, an hour before he’d made a run for it, a woman with a newborn child had taken it in her arms and jumped out a window on the top floor. Other patients crawled from their beds and fled into the streets. A young intern said he’d seen a man standing at a bar, the night before, who took a razor from his pocket and cut his throat.

“Was there no warning?” Morath said.

“Anti-Semites in political office,” the man said. “But you don’t sell your house because of that. A month ago, more or less, a few people left the country.” Of course there were some, he added, who’d gotten out in 1933, when Hitler came to power. He’d said, in Mein Kampf, that he meant to unite Austria with Germany. Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Führer! But reading the political future was like reading Nostradamus. His wife and children he’d put on a Danube steamer to Budapest, thank God, the last week in February. “It was her brother who did that. He came to the house, said we should leave, insisted. There was an argument, my wife in tears, bad feelings. In the end, I was so angry I let him have his way.”

“But, you stayed on,” Morath said.

“I had patients.”

They were silent for a moment. Outside, boys with swastika flags were running down the platform, screaming some kind of rhymed chant, their faces wild with excitement.

Polanyi and Morath sat on a bench in the gardens. It seemed very quiet there. A few sparrows working at the crumbs of a baguette, a little girl in a coat with a velvet collar, trying to play with a hoop and a stick while a nursemaid watched her.

“In the town of Amstetten,” Morath said, “just outside the station, they were waiting at a road crossing so they could throw rocks at the trains. We could see the police, standing around with their arms folded, they’d come to watch. They were laughing, it was a certain kind of joke. The whole thing had, more than anything, a terrible strangeness to it. I remember thinking, they’ve wanted this for a long time. Under all the sentiment and Schlag, was this.”

“Their cherished Wut,” Polanyi said. “You know the word.”

“Rage.”

“Of a particular kind, yes. The sudden burst of anger that rises from despair. The Germans believe it lies deep within their character; they suffer in silence, and then they explode. Listen to Hitler speak—it’s always, ‘How much longer must we endure . . . ,’ whatever it is. He can’t leave it alone.” Polanyi paused for a moment. “And now, with Anschluss, we will have the pleasure of their company on our border.”

“Will anything happen?”

“To us?”

“Yes.”

“I doubt it. Horthy will be summoned to meet with Hitler, he’ll bow and scrape, agree to anything. As you know, he has beautiful manners. Of course, what we actually do will not be quite what we’ve agreed to, but, even so, when it’s all over, we won’t keep our innocence. It can’t be done. And we will pay for that.”

For a time, they watched the people walking along the gravel paths, then Polanyi said, “These gardens will be lovely, in the spring. The whole city.”

“Soon, I hope.”

Polanyi nodded. “You know,” he said, “they fight wars, the French, but their country, their Paris, is never destroyed. Do you ever wonder how they do that?”

“They are clever.”

“Yes, they are. They are also brave. Foolish, even. But that’s not, in the end, how they save what they love. That they do by crawling.”

The eleventh of March, Morath thought. Too cold to sit in a garden, the air damp in a certain way, sharp, as though chilled in wet earth. When it began to sprinkle rain, Morath and Polanyi rose and walked in the covered arcade, past a famous milliner, a store that sold expensive dolls, a dealer in rare coins.

“And the Viennese doctor?” Polanyi said.

“Reached Paris, long after midnight. Although he did have trouble at the German border. They tried to send him back to Vienna, something not quite right with his papers. A date. I stood next to him throughout the whole filthy business. In the end, I couldn’t keep out of it.”

“What did you do, Nicholas?”

Morath shrugged. “Looked at them a certain way. Spoke to them a certain way.”

“And it worked.”

“This time.”

4 April 1938.

Théâtre des Catacombes. 9:20 P.M.

“Know him? Yes, I know him. His wife makes love to my wife every Thursday afternoon.”

“Really? Where?”

“In the maid’s room.”

Lines not spoken from the stage—would that they had been, Morath thought—but overheard in the lobby during intermission. As Morath and Cara worked their way through the crowd, they were noticed, the glances polite, covert. A dramatic couple. Cara’s face was not her best feature—it was soft and plain, hard to remember. Her best feature was long, honey-gold hair, beautiful scarves, and the ways she found to make people want her. For an evening of avant-garde theatre she had added a Gypsy skirt, with appropriate hoop earrings, and soft leather boots with the tops folded over.

Morath seemed taller than he was. He had black hair, thick, heavy, combed back from the forehead, a certain tightness around the eyes, “green” on his passport but very close to black, and all that darkness made him seem pale, a fin-de-siècle decadent. He’d once met a film producer, introduced by a mutual friend at Fouquet. “I usually make gangster films,” the man told him with a smile. “Or, you know, intrigue.” But, at the moment, a costume epic was soon to go into production. A large cast, a new version of Taras Bulba. Had Morath ever acted? He could play, possibly, “a chieftain.” The producer’s friend, a scrawny little man who looked like Trotsky, added, “A khan, maybe.”

But they were wrong. Morath had been eighteen years in Paris and the émigré life, with its appetizing privacy, and immersion in the city, all passion, pleasure, and bad philosophy, had changed the way he looked. It meant that women liked him more, meant that people didn’t mind asking him for directions in the street. Still, what the producer had seen remained, somewhere, just below the surface. Years earlier, toward the end of a brief love affair, a French woman said to him, “Why, you’re not at all cruel.” She had sounded, he thought, slightly disappointed.

Act II. A Room in Purgatory—The Following Day.

Morath shifted his weight, a pointless effort to get comfortable in the diabolical chair. Crossed his legs, leaned the other way. Cara clutched his arm—stop it. The row of seats, fixed on a wooden frame, went twelve across. Where did Montrouchet get them, he wondered. From some long-dead institution, no doubt. A prison? A school for horrible children?

On stage, the Seven Deadly Sins were harassing a gloomy Everyman. Poor soul, seated on a stool, wearing a gray shroud. “Ahh, but you slept through her funeral.” This well-meaning woman, no longer young, was probably Sloth—though Morath had been wrong two or three times when he’d actually tried watching the play. They had soft edges, the Sins. Either the playwright’s fault or Satan’s—Morath wasn’t sure. Pride was greedy, it seemed to him, and Greed upstaged Envy every chance he got. But then, Greed.

On the other hand, Gluttony wasn’t so bad. A plump young man, come to Paris from the provinces, trying for a career in theatre or the movies. Trouble was, the playwright hadn’t given him much to do. What could he say to poor, dead Everyman? You ate too much! Well, he made the best of what had been given him. Perhaps a prominent director or producer would come to watch the play, one never knew.

But one did know. Morath looked down at the program in his lap, the only permissible distraction to the white fog that rolled in from the stage. The back cover was given over to promotion—the critic from Flambeau Rouge, red torch, had found the play “Provocative!” Below that, a quote from Lamont Higson of The Paris Herald. “The Théâtre des Catacombes is the only Parisian theatre in recent memory to present plays of both Racine and Corneille in the nude.” There followed a list of sponsors, including one Mlle. Cara Dionello. Well, he thought, why not. At least a few of those poor beasts in Argentina, trudging down the ramp to the abattoir, added more to life than roast beef.

The theatre lay deep in the heart of the Fifth Arrondissement. Originally, there’d been a plan for Montrouchet to stage his performances at the catacombs themselves, but the municipal authority had been mysteriously cool to the possibility of actors capering about in the dank bone-rooms beneath the Denfert Rochereau Métro stop. In the end, he had had to make do with a mural in the lobby: piles of clown-white skulls and femurs sharply picked out in black.

“What? You forgot? That night by the river?” Morath returned from dreamland to find Lust, typecast, maybe seventeen, whispering her line as she slithered on her belly across the stage. Cara took his arm again, gentle this time.

Morath did not sleep at the avenue Bourdonnais that night, he returned to his apartment in the rue Richelieu, then left early the following morning to catch the Nord Express up to Antwerp. This was a no-nonsense train, the conductors brisk and serious, the seats filled with soldiers of commerce on the march along the ancient trade route. Besides the rhythm of the wheels on the track, the only sound in Morath’s compartment was the rustle of newsprint as a turned-over page of Le Figaro was snapped into place.

In Vienna, he read, the Anschluss was to be formalized by a plebiscite—the Austrian voter now prone to say Ja in order not to get his nose broken. This was, Hitler explained in a speech on 9 April, God’s work.

There is a higher ordering, and we are all nothing else than its agents. When on 9 March Herr Schuschnigg broke his agreement then in that second I felt that now the call of Providence had come to me. And that which then took place in three days was only conceivable as the fulfillment of the wish and will of Providence. I would now give thanks to Him who let me return to my homeland in order that I might now lead it into the German Reich! Tomorrow may every German recognize the hour and measure its import and bow in humility before the Almighty, who in a few weeks has wrought a miracle upon us.

So, Austria ceased to exist.

And the Almighty, not quite satisfied with His work, had determined that the fuddled Doktor Schuschnigg should be locked up, guarded by the Gestapo, in a small room on the fifth floor of the Hotel Metropole.

For the moment, Morath couldn’t stand any more. He put the paper down and stared out the window at tilled Flemish earth. The reflection in the glass was Morath the executive—very good dark suit, sober tie, perfect shirt. He was traveling north for a meeting with Monsieur Antoine Hooryckx, better known, in business circles, as Hooryckx, the Soap King of Antwerp.

In 1928, Nicholas Morath had become half-owner of the Agence Courtmain, a small and reasonably prosperous advertising agency. This was a sudden, extraordinary gift from Uncle Janos. Morath had been summoned to lunch on one of the restaurant-boats and, while cruising slowly beneath the bridges of the Seine, informed of his elevated status. “You get it all eventually,” Uncle Janos said, “so you may as well have the use of it now.” Polanyi’s wife and children would be provided for, Morath knew, but the real money, the thousand kilometers of wheat field in the Puszta with villages and peasants, the small bauxite mine, and the large portfolio of Canadian railroad stock, would come to him, along with the title, when his uncle died.

But Morath was in no hurry, none of that race you up the stairs, grampa stuff for him. Polanyi would live a long time, that was fine with his nephew. The convenient part was that, with steady income assured, if Count Polanyi needed Nicholas to help him out, he was available. Meanwhile, Morath’s share of the profits kept him in aperitifs and mistresses and a slightly shabby apartment at a reasonably bonne adresse.

The Agence Courtmain had a very bonne adresse indeed but, as an advertising agency, it had first of all to advertise its own success. Which it did, along with various lawyers, stock brokerages, and Lebanese bankers, by renting an absurdly expensive suite of offices in a building on the avenue Matignon. More than likely owned, Courtmain theorized—the title of the société anonyme gave no indication—“by an Auvergnat peasant with goatshit in his hat.”

Sitting across from Morath, Courtmain lowered his newspaper and glanced at his watch.

“On time?” Morath said.

Courtmain nodded. He was, like Morath, very well dressed. Emile Courtmain was not much over forty. He had white hair, thin lips, gray eyes, and a cold, distant personality found magnetic by virtually everybody. He smiled rarely, stared openly, said little. He was either brilliant or stupid, nobody knew, and it didn’t seem terribly important. What sort of life he may have had after seven in the evening was completely unknown—one of the copywriters claimed that after everybody left the office, Courtmain hung himself up in the closet and waited for daylight.

“We aren’t going to the plant, are we?” Morath said.

“No.”

Morath was grateful. The Soap King had taken them to his plant, a year earlier, just making sure they didn’t forget who they were, who he was, and what made the world go ’round. They didn’t forget. Huge, bubbling vats of animal fat, moldering piles of bones, kettles of lye boiling gently over a low flame. The last ride for most of the cart and carriage horses in northern Belgium. “Just give your behind a good wash with that!” Hooryckx cried out, emerging like an industrial devil from a cloud of yellow steam.

They arrived in Antwerp on time and climbed into a cab outside the station. Courtmain gave the driver complicated instructions—Hooryckx’s office was down a crooked street at the edge of the dockside neighborhood, a few rooms in a genteel but crumbling building. “The world tells me I’m a rich man,” Hooryckx would say. “Then it snatches everything I have.”

In the back of the cab, Courtmain rummaged in his briefcase and produced a bottle of toilet water called Zouave, a soldier with fierce mustaches stared imperiously from the label. This was also a Hooryckx product, though not nearly so popular as the soap. Courtmain unscrewed the cap, splashed some in his hand, and gave the bottle to Morath. They rubbed it on their faces and reeked like country boys in the city on Saturday night. “Ahh,” said Courtmain, as the heavy fragrance filled the air, “the finest peg-house in Istanbul.”

Hooryckx was delighted to see them. “The boys from Paris!” He had a vast belly and a hairstyle like a cartoon character that sticks his finger in a light socket. Courtmain took a colored drawing from his briefcase. Hooryckx, with a wink, told his secretary to go get his advertising manager. “My daughter’s husband,” he said. The man showed up a few minutes later, Courtmain laid the drawing on a table, and they all gathered around it.

In a royal-blue sky, two white swans flew above the legend Deux Cygnes . . . This was something new. In 1937, their magazine advertising had presented an attractive mother, wearing an apron, showing a bar of Deux Cygnes to her little girl.

“Well,” said Hooryckx. “What do the dots mean?”

“Two swans . . .” Courtmain said, letting his voice trail away. “No words can describe the delicacy, the loveliness of the moment.”

“Shouldn’t they be swimming?” Hooryckx said.

Courtmain reached into his briefcase and brought out the swimming version. His copy chief had warned him this would happen. Now the swans made ripples in a pond as they floated past a clump of reeds.

Hooryckx compressed his lips.

“I like them flying,” the son-in-law said. “More chic, no?”

“How about it?” Hooryckx said to Morath.

“It’s sold to women,” Morath said.

“So?”

“It’s what they feel when they use it.”

Hooryckx stared, back and forth, from one image to the other. “Of course,” he said, “swans sometimes fly.”

After a moment, Morath nodded. Of course.

Courtmain brought forth another version. Swans flying, this time in a sky turned aquamarine.

“Phoo,” Hooryckx said.

Courtmain whipped it away.

The son-in-law suggested a cloud, a subtle one, no more than a wash in the blue field. Courtmain thought it over. “Very expensive,” he said.

“But an excellent idea, Louis,” Hooryckx said. “I can see it.”

Hooryckx tapped his fingers on the desk. “It’s good when they fly, but I miss that curve in the neck.”

“We can try it,” Courtmain said.

Hooryckx stared for a few seconds. “No, better this way.”

After lunch, Courtmain went off to see a prospective client, and Morath headed for the central commercial district—to a shop called Homme du Monde, man about town, its window occupied by suave mannequins in tuxedos. Much too warm inside, where a clerk was on her knees with a mouthful of pins, fitting a customer for a pair of evening trousers.

“Madame Golsztahn?” Morath said.

“A moment, monsieur.”

A curtain at the rear of the shop was moved aside, and Madame Golsztahn appeared. “Yes?”

“I came up from Paris this morning.”

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Come in back.”

Behind the curtain, a man was pressing pants, working a foot pedal that produced a loud hiss and a puff of steam. Madame Golsztahn led Morath down a long rack of tuxedos and tailcoats to a battered desk, its cubbyholes packed with receipts. They had never met before, but Morath knew who she was. She’d been famous for love affairs, in her younger days in Budapest, the subject of poems in little journals, the cause of two or three scandals and a rumored suicide from the Elizabeth Bridge. He felt it, standing next to her. Like the current in a river. A ruined face and stark, brick-red hair above a dancer’s body in a tight black sweater and skirt. She gave him a tart smile, read him like a book, wouldn’t have minded, then swept the hair back off her forehead. There was a radio playing, Schumann maybe, violins, something exceptionally gooey, and, every few seconds, a loud hiss from the steam press. “So then,” she said, before anything actually happened.

“Should we go to a café?”

“Here would be best.”

They sat side by side at the desk, she lit a cigarette and held it between her lips, squinting as the smoke drifted into her eyes. She found one of the receipts, turned it over, and smoothed it flat with her hands. Morath could see a few letters and numbers, some circled. “Mnemonics,” she said. “Now all I have to do is remember how it works.”

“All right,” she said at last, “here is your uncle’s friend in Budapest, to be known as ‘a senior police official.’ He states that ‘as of 10 March, evidence points to intense activity among all sectors of the nyilas community.’ ” Neelosh—her voice was determinedly neutral. It meant the Arrow Cross, pure Hitlerite fascists; the E.M.E., which specialized in bomb attacks against Jewish women; the Kereszteny Kurzus, Chritian Course, which meant so much more than “Christian”; and various others, great and small.

“On the fifth of March,” she said, “a fire in a shed in the Eighth District, Csikago”—Chicago, as in factories and gangsters—“police inspectors were called when rifles and pistols were found to have been stored there.”

She coughed, covering her mouth with the back of her hand, and rested the cigarette among a line of brown scars on the edge of the desk. “An Arrow Cross member, by trade a cabinetmaker, detained for defacing public property, was found in possession of the home telephone number of the German economic attaché. A police informer in Szeged, murdered on the sixth of March. Eight young men, members of the Turul student association, observed carrying out a surveillance of the army barracks at Arad. A furniture-mover’s truck, parked in an alley by the south railroad station, was searched by police on information received from the estranged wife of the driver. A Berthier heavy machine gun was found, with eighty-five belts of ammunition.”

“I’m going to have to make notes,” Morath said.

Golsztahn’s eyes met his. “You aren’t going anywhere, are you?” She paused. “East?”

Morath shook his head. “Just to Paris. Tonight.”

She handed him an unused rental receipt. “Use the back. The police official notes that a report of these events has been routed, in the customary way, to the office of Colonel Sombor in the Hungarian legation in Paris.”

“A minute,” Morath said. He was almost caught up. Sombor had something to do with security at the legation—the same name as the head of the secret police, taken from a town in the south of Hungary. This usually meant Hungarians of German, Saxon, ancestry.

When he looked up, she continued. “An Arrow Cross informant reports that several of his colleagues are preparing to send their families out of the city the first week in May. And . . .” She peered closely at the top of the receipt. “What?” she said, then, “Oh. Two known agents of the German intelligence service, the SD, had in their room at the Hotel Gellert photographs of the architectural blueprints of the Water District police station and the Palace of Justice. The police official states finally that there are further instances of this kind of activity, some three dozen, that point to a political action in the near future.”

It was quiet on the evening train to Paris. Courtmain worked, jotting notes on a tablet, and Morath read the newspaper. The leading stories continued to focus on Austria and the Anschluss. The British politician Churchill, a member of the Tory opposition, was quoted by a political columnist on the editorial page, from a speech given in parliament at the end of February: “Austria has now been laid in thrall, and we do not know whether Czechoslovakia will suffer a similar fate.”

Well, somebody will.

Morath touched the receipt in his pocket. Golsztahn had burned hers in a coffee cup, then poked the ashes apart with the end of a pencil.

Of all the cities, Otto Adler loved Paris the most. He had arrived in the winter of 1937, installed his life—a wife, four children, two cats, and an editorial office—in a big, drafty old house in Saint Germain-en-Laye, where, from a window in his study, he could look out over miles of Parisian rooftops. Paris—the best idea mankind ever had.

“Third time lucky!” was the way his wife put it. Otto Adler had grown up in Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, in the Baltic German community. After university in Berlin, he came home a Marxist, then spent the decade of his thirties becoming a Social Democrat, a journalist, and a pauper. “When you are that poor,” he’d say, “the only thing left for you is to start a little magazine.” So, Die Aussicht, The Outlook, was born. Not so popular, it turned out, in the tight, Volksdeutsch world of Königsberg. “This failed postcard painter from Linz will destroy German culture,” he said of Hitler in 1933. Two broken windows, for that, his wife cursed in the butcher shop, and, soon enough, a big, drafty old apartment in Vienna.

Otto Adler fitted in much better there. “Otto, darling, I think you were born to be Viennese,” his wife said. He had a round, hairless, rosy face, a beaming smile, he wished the world well—one of those bighearted people who can be benign and angry at once and laugh at himself in the bargain. Somehow, he kept publishing the magazine. “We should probably call it The Ox, it plods along in all weathers.” And in time, a little Viennese money—from progressive bankers, Jewish businessmen, union leaders—began to come his way. As Die Aussicht gained credibility, he managed to obtain an article by one of the gods of German literary culture, Karl Kraus, the savage, brilliant satirist whose disciples—his readers, his students—were known as Krausianer.

In 1937, Die Aussicht published a brief reportage by an Italian journalist, the wife of a diplomat, who’d been present at one of Hermann Goering’s infamous dinners at Schorfheide, his hunting lodge. The usual Nazi merriment, with the soup and the fish, but before the main course arrived Goering left the table and returned wearing a rawhide shirt, with a bearskin thrown over his shoulders—a warrior costume from the old Teutonic tribes. Not nearly, of course, enough. Goering was armed with a spear and led a pair of hairy bison, harnessed in chains, around and around the room while the guests roared. Still, not enough. The entertainment concluded with the mating of the bison. “A party to remember,” it said in Die Aussicht. Adler’s children were expelled from school, a swastika chalked on his door, the maid quit, the neighbors ceased to say “Gruss Gott.”

It was a big, drafty old house they found in Geneva. But nobody was very happy there. What the Volksdeutsch and the Austrians did with party operatives, the Swiss did with clerks. Nobody actually said anything about the magazine—he could, apparently, publish whatever he wanted in Democratic Switzerland, but life was a spiderweb of rules and regulations that controlled mailing permits, alien residence, and, it seemed to Adler, the very air they breathed.

It was a little quiet around the dinner table when Adler informed the family they had to move. “A necessary adventure,” he said, beaming away. Under the table, his wife put her hand on his knee. So, December of ’37, Paris. Saint Germain-en-Laye was a classic of the exile’s geography, it turned out, a time-honored refuge for princes unwelcome in many lands. There was a grand Promenade Anglais where one could walk for hours, just right for a bittersweet contemplation of the lost crown, castle, or homeland. Adler found a sympathetic printer, made contacts in the community of liberal German émigrés, and went back to work hammering the fascists and the Bolsheviks. Such was the destiny of the Social Democrat, and who was that man in the raincoat by the newspaper kiosk.

Meanwhile, Adler fell in love with the public gardens of Paris. “What sort of lunatic takes a train to go to the park?” The kind who filled his briefcase with books; Schnitzler, Weininger, Mann, maybe von Hoffmansthal, two pens, and a cheese sandwich, then sat in the Jardin du Luxembourg and watched the dappled light of the plane trees playing on the gravel path. A few centimes to the old dragon who kept watch on the chairs, and one could spend the afternoon in a painting.

At first he went in nice weather, later in light rain. It became his habit. As time went by, as the spring of 1938 worked its way toward whatever summer had in store, Otto Adler, fountain pen scratching out a new editorial or, for a moment, just snoozing, was almost always to be found in the park.

The note from the baroness Frei invited My dearest Nicholas to call at her house at five in the afternoon on the sixteenth of April. Morath took a taxi to the Sèvres-Babylone Métro stop and from there walked to the rue de Villon.

Buried deep in a maze of narrow lanes that crisscrossed the border between the Sixth and Seventh Arrondissements, it was, like paradise everywhere, damned hard to find. Taxi drivers thumbed through their city directories, then sped off to the rue François-Villon, named for the medieval robber poet, in a distant neighborhood where, on arrival, it was immediately clear to both driver and patron that this was not the right street at all.

The one true rue de Villon could be entered only through a vaulted alley—the impasse Villon—a tunnel of perpetual dusk that dared the courageous automobiliste to try his luck. It could sometimes be done, depending on the model and year of the machine, and was always a matter of centimeters, but it did not look like it could be done. The alley gave no indication of what lay beyond it, the casual passerby tended to do exactly that, while the truly self-confident tourist peered defiantly down the tunnel and then went away.

On the other side, however, light from heaven poured down on a row of seventeenth-century houses, protected by wrought-iron palings, that dead-ended at a garden wall: 3, rue de Villon, to 9, rue de Villon, in a sequence whose logic was known only to God and the postman. In the evening, the tiny street was lit by Victorian gas lamps, which made soft shadows of a vine that twisted its way along the top of the garden wall. The garden belonged to number three—a faint impression of the number could be found on a rusty metal door, the width of a carriage—which was owned by the baroness Lillian Frei. She did not know her neighbors. They did not know her.

A maid answered the door and led Morath to the garden. Sitting at the garden table, the baroness put her cheek up to be kissed. “Dearest love,” she said. “I am so happy to see you.” Morath’s heart warmed, he smiled like a five-year-old and kissed her with pleasure.

The baroness Frei was possibly sixty. She was bent over in a lifelong crouch, and one side of her back humped far above her shoulder. She had shimmering blue eyes and soft, snow-white hair and a radiance like the sun. She was, at the moment, as always, surrounded by a pack of vizsla dogs—not one of which could Morath distinguish from another but which, as the baroness liked to tell her guests, belonged to a vast, capricious, bumptious family who lived out an unending romantic epic in the house and garden. Korto, bred to Fina, loved Malya, his daughter by the gallant and long-departed Moselda. Of course, for the integrity of the line, they could never “be together,” so, in heat, the exquisite Malya was sent to live in the kitchen whilst poor Korto lay about on the garden gravel with his chin slumped atop his forepaws or stood on his hind legs, peered myopically through the windows, and barked until the maid threw a rag at him.

Now they stormed around Morath’s legs and he bent to run his hands along the satin skin of their sides.

“Yes,” said the baroness, “here’s your friend Nicholas.”

The vizslas were fast, Morath got a wet kiss on the eye and never saw it coming.

“Korto!”

“No, no. I’m flattered.”

The dog smacked his forepaws against the ground.

“What, Korto, you want to hunt?”

Morath roughed him up a little and he mewed with pleasure.

“Go to the forest?”

Korto danced sideways—chase me.

“A bear? That would be best?”

“He would not run away,” the baroness said. Then, to the dog, “Would you?”

Korto wagged his tail, Morath stood up, then joined the baroness at the table.

“Pure courage,” she said. “And the last five minutes of his life would be the best.” The maid approached, pushing a glass-topped cart with a squeaky wheel. She set a tray of pastries on the table, poured a cup of tea and set it down by Morath. Silver tongs in hand, the baroness looked over the pastries. “Let’s see . . .”

A doughy roll, folded over itself, with walnuts and raisins. The lightly sugared crust was still warm from the oven.

“And so?”

“Like the Café Ruszwurm. Better.”

For that lie, a gracious nod from the baroness. Below the table, many dogs. “You must wait, darlings,” the baroness said. Her smile was tolerant, infinitely kind. Morath had once visited at midmorning and counted twenty pieces of buttered toast on the baroness’s breakfast tray.

“I was in Budapest last week,” she said.

“How was it?”

“Tense, I should say. Underneath all the usual commotion. I saw your mother and sister.”

“How are they?”

“In good health. Teresa’s oldest girl may go to school in Switzerland.”

“Maybe for the best.”

“Maybe. They send you their love. You will write to them.”

“I will.”

“Your mother told me that Eva Zameny has left her husband.” She and Morath had, long ago, been engaged to marry.

“I am sorry.”

The baroness’s expression indicated she wasn’t. “For the best. Her husband was a hound. And he gambled terribly.”

A bell—the kind worked by pulling a cord—rang in the house. “That will be your uncle.”

There were other guests. The women in hats with veils, bolero jackets, and the black and white polka-dot dresses that were popular in springtime. Former citizens of the Dual Monarchy, the guests spoke the Austrian dialect with High German flourishes, Hungarian, and French, shifting effortlessly between languages when only a very particular expression would say what they meant. The men were well barbered and used good cologne. Two of them wore decorations, one a black and gold ribbon beneath a medal marked K.u.K.—Kaiser und Königlich, meaning “Imperial and Regal,” the Dual Monarchy; the other awarded for service in the Russo-Polish war of 1920. A refined group, very courteous, it was hard to tell who was rich and who wasn’t.

Morath and Polanyi stood by a large boxwood at a corner of the garden wall, holding their cups and saucers.

“Christ, I’d like a drink,” Polanyi said.

“We can go somewhere, after this.”

“I’m afraid I can’t. I have cocktails with the Finns, dinner with the Venezuelan foreign minister, Flores, up in the sixteenth.”

Morath nodded, sympathetic.

“No, not Flores.” Polanyi compressed his lips, annoyed at the lapse. “Montemayor, I should’ve said. Flores is, pfft.”

“Any news of home?”

“It’s what you passed along to me, when you came back from Antwerp. And worse.”

“Another Austria?”

“Not the same way, certainly. We are not ‘Ein volk,’ one people. But the pressure is growing—be our allies, or else.” He sighed, shook his head. “Now comes the real nightmare, Nicholas, the one where you see the monster but you can’t run away, you’re frozen in place. I think, more and more, that these people, this German aggression, will finish us, sooner or later. The Austrians pulled us into war in 1914—perhaps some day somebody will tell me precisely why we had to do all that. And now, it begins again. In the next day or so, the newspapers will announce that Hungary has come out in favor of the Anschluss. In return, Hitler will guarantee our borders. Quid pro quo, very tidy.”

“You believe it?”

“No.” He took a sip of tea. “I’ll amend that. To ‘maybe.’ Hitler is intimidated by Horthy, because Horthy is everything Hitler always wanted to be. Old nobility, aide-de-camp to Franz Josef, war hero, polo player, married into the cream of society. And they both paint. In fact, Horthy has now lasted longer than any other leader in Europe. That has to count for something, Nicholas, right?”

Polanyi’s face showed exactly what it counted for.

“So the current unrest . . . will be dealt with?”

“Not easily, and maybe not at all. We’re facing insurrection. Conservatives out, fascists in, liberals au poteau.” The phrase from 1789—to the guillotine.

Morath was surprised. In Budapest, when the Arrow Cross men dressed up in their uniforms and strutted about the city, the police forced them to strip and sent them home in their underwear. “What about the police? The army?”

“Uncertain.”

“Then what?”

“If Daranyi means to stay in as premier, he’ll have to give them something. Or there will be blood in the streets. So, at the moment, we find ourselves negotiating. And we will be forced, among other things, to do favors.”

“For who?”

“Important people.”

Morath felt it coming. Polanyi, no doubt, meant him to feel it. He set his cup and saucer on a table, reached in his pocket, took a cigarette from a tortoiseshell case and lit it with a silver lighter.

*

The last nights of April, but no sign of spring. The weather blew hard across the Métro staircase, wind and rain and fog with a taste of factory smoke. Morath held his overcoat closed and walked next to the buildings. Down a dark street, down another, then a sharp left and a blinking blue neon sign, Balalaika. The Cossack doorman, with sheepskin vest and fierce mustache, peered out from the shelter of the doorway, in his hand a black umbrella in the final hours of life on a windy night.

The doorman growled good evening, Russian accent thick and melodramatic. “Welcome, sir, to Balalaika, the show is now just starting.”

Inside, thick air; cigarettes glowed in the darkness. Red plush walls and a stunning hatcheck girl. Morath gave her a generous tip and kept his coat. Here, too, they wore their decorations. The maitre d’, six and a half feet tall with a sash and high boots, had a bronze medal pinned to his blouse, earned in service as mercenary and palace guardsman to King Zog of Albania.

Morath went to the bar and sat at the far end. From there he caught a glimpse of the stage. The Gypsy trio was sawing away in sentimental agonies, a dancer in sheer pantaloons and halter showed, in the blue klieg lights, just exactly what her faithless lover was giving up, while her partner stood to one side, hands clasped in fruitless longing, a red lightbulb in his pants going on and off in time to the music.

The barman came over, Morath ordered a Polish vodka, and, when it arrived, offered the barman a cigarette and lit it for him. He was a short, compact man with narrow eyes deeply lined at the corners, from laughing, maybe, or squinting into the distance. Beneath his red jacket he wore a shirt washed so often it was the pastel of an unknown color.

“Are you Boris?” Morath said.

“Now and then.”

“Well, Boris, I have a friend . . .” A little cloud of irony hung over the phrase and the barman smiled appreciatively. “He was in trouble, he came to you for help.”

“When was that?”

“Last year, around this time. His girlfriend needed a doctor.”

The barman shrugged. A thousand customers, a thousand stories. “I can’t say I remember.”

Morath understood, a bad memory was a good idea. “Now, it’s another friend. A different kind of problem.”

“Yes?”

“A passport problem.”

The barman used his rag to wipe down the zinc surface, then paused, and had a good look at Morath. “Where are you from, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“Budapest.”

“Emigré?”

“Not really. I came here after the war. I’m in business here.”

“You were in the war?”

“Yes.”

“Where was that?”

“Galicia. Up into Volhynia for a time . . .”

“Then back to Galicia.” The barman was laughing as he finished Morath’s sentence. “Oh yes,” he said, “that shithouse.”

“You were there?”

“Mm. Likely we shot at each other. Then, fall of ’17, my regiment took a walk. Same again?”

“Please.”

The clear liquor came exactly to the rim.

“Will you join me?”

The barman poured himself a vodka and raised his glass. “To poor shooting, I guess.” He drank in the Russian manner—with grace, but all gone.

From the nightclub tables, rhythmic clapping, growing louder as the patrons grew bolder, some of them yelling “Hey!” on the beat. The male dancer, squatting on the stage with his arms folded across his chest, was kicking his legs out.

“Passports,” the barman said, suddenly gloomy. “You can get into real trouble, fooling with that. They lock you up, here, if they catch you. It goes on, of course, mostly among the refugees, the Jews and the political exiles. Once you get run out of Germany, you aren’t legal anywhere, unless you’ve got a visa. That takes time, and money—you can’t afford to be in a hurry. But you are—with the Gestapo after you, you have to do whatever it takes. So you sneak out. Now, you’re a ‘Stateless Person.’ You slip into Czechoslovakia or Switzerland, hide out for a week if you know the right rooming house, then they catch you and send you across the Austrian border. After a week or two in jail, the customs officers walk you back across the frontier, at night, in the woods, and the whole thing starts again. Here it’s a little better. If you stay out of trouble, the flics don’t care that much, unless you try to work.” He shook his head slowly, in sorrow.

“How did you manage?”

“Nansen. We were lucky. Because we were the first wave, we got the League of Nations passports, we got the work permits, we got the jobs the French didn’t want. That was 1920 or so. Revolution over, civil war winding down, then the Cheka comes around—‘We hear you were a friend of Ivanov.’ So, time to run. Next, when Mussolini’s boys got to work, came the Italians. Their luck was pretty much the same as ours—you used to be a professor of theoretical physics, now you’re a real waiter. Now, thank God you’re a waiter. Because, starting in ’33, here come the Germans. They have passports, most of them, but no work permits. They peddle, sell needles and thread from little suitcases on the boulevards, work the tourists, starve, beg, sit in the offices of the refugee organizations. It’s the same for the Spaniards, running from Franco, and now we’re getting the Austrians. No papers, no work permits, no money.”

“This friend, Boris, has money.”

The barman had known that all along. After a time he said, “You’re a detective, right?”

“With my accent?”

“Well, maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. Either way, I’m not the man you want. You have to go where the refugees are, to the Café Madine, the Grosse Marie, places like that.”

“A question? Personal question?”

“I’m an open book.”

“Why did you run?”

“Because they were chasing me,” he said, laughing again.

Morath waited.

“I was a poet. Also, to be honest, a criminal. When they came after me, I was never really sure which one it was.”

The Café Madine was in the 11th Arrondissement, just off the place de la Republique, between a butcher that sold halal meat to Arabs and kosher meat to Jews, and a repair shop for musical instruments called Szczwerna. It was easy, maybe too easy, to make contact at Madine. He showed up in the late afternoon, stood at the counter, ordered a beer, stared out at the throbbing street life of the quarter. A man tried to sell him a ring, Morath looked it over—he was there to buy, let them see a buyer. A small, red stone set in gold, University of Heidelberg, 1922.

“How much?”

“Worth three hundred, more or less.”

“I’ll think about it. Actually, I’m here because a friend of mine in Paris lost his passport.”

“Go to préfecture.”

From Morath a look, if only one could. “Or?”

“Or nothing.”

Back the next day. Ten in the morning, deserted, silent. A shaft of sunlight, a sleeping cat, the patron wore his glasses down on his nose. He took his time with Morath’s café au lait, there was no skin on the boiled milk, the coffee was powerful and fresh, and he sent his little boy off to the bakery to get fresh bread for a tartine.

The contact was a tough old bird, once upon a time a timber merchant in the Ukraine, though Morath had no way of knowing that. He tipped his hat, asked Morath to join him at a table. “You’re the fellow with the passport difficulties?”

“Friend of mine.”

“Naturally.”

“What’s the market like, these days?”

“Seller’s market, obviously.”

“He needs the real thing.”

“The real thing.” Maybe in other times he would have found it funny enough to laugh at. Morath got it, he thought. Borders, papers, nations—made-up stuff, politicians’ lies.

“As much as possible.”

“A man who buys the best.”

Morath agreed.

“Twenty-five hundred francs. A figure like that scares you, perhaps.”

“No. For good value, you pay.”

“Very reasonable, this gentleman.” He spoke to an invisible friend.

Then he told Morath where to be, and when.

Two days later, now it was Friday. A busy afternoon at the Louvre. Morath had to work to find the right room—up the stairs here in order to go down the stairs there, past Napoleon’s swag from Egypt, past rooms of small, puzzling Roman things, around a corner and down an endless corridor of British schoolboys. At last, the room with the Ingres portrait. A luminous nude, seated at a table, her back curved and soft.

A man rose from a bench against the wall, smiled, and spread his hands in welcome. He knew who Morath was, had probably looked him over at the café. A handsome gentleman, portly, with a Vandyke beard and a tweed suit. Something like, Morath thought, the owner of a prosperous art gallery. He had, apparently, a colleague, standing on the other side of the room and staring at a painting, hands clasped behind his back. Morath saw them exchange a glance. White as chalk, this man, as though missing a lifelong beard, he wore a black homburg set square on a shaved head.

The man who looked like an art dealer sat next to Morath on the wooden bench. “I’m told that you are seeking a document of the finest quality,” he said. He spoke French like an educated German.

“I am.”

“That would be a corpse.”

“All right.”

“You are buying from the family of the deceased, naturally, and they will want twenty-five hundred francs. For our work, for the change of identity, it is another thousand francs. Can we agree?”

“Yes.”

The art dealer opened a newspaper, revealing a report of a polo match in the Bois de Boulogne and a passport in a cardboard folder. “The family wishes to sell immediately. The nationality of the passport is Roumanian, and has seventeen months to run.” The head in the identification photograph was of a man in middle years, formal, self-satisfied, his dark mustache carefully clipped and groomed. Below it, the name Andreas Panea.

“I will pay you now, if you like.”

“Half now. Half when we give you the finished product. Your photo goes in place of the deceased, the raised lettering on the photo is provided by the technician. The physical description is washed out and your own put in. The one thing that can’t be changed is the place of birth—that’s on the seal. So, the bearer of the document will be called this name, is of Roumanian nationality, and was born in Cluj.”

“What happened to him?”

The art dealer stared for a moment. Why are you concerned with that? Then he said, “Nothing dramatic.” And, a moment later, “He came to the end of caring. It is quite common.”

“Here’s the photograph,” Morath said.

The art dealer was mildly surprised. It wasn’t Morath. A man in his twenties, a hard, bony face made even more severe by steel-rimmed spectacles and hair cut back to a colorless inch and brushed flat. A student, perhaps. At best, that. Given a passing grade by his professors whether he attended the lectures or not. The art dealer turned the photo over. Stamped on the back was the name of the photography studio, in Serbo-Croatian, and the word Zagreb.

The art dealer signaled to his friend, who joined them on the bench, took the photograph, and studied it for a long minute, then said something in Yiddish. Morath, who spoke fluent German, would ordinarily have gotten the sense of it but this was argot of some kind, spoken rapidly, the tone sarcastic.

The art dealer nodded, almost smiled.

“Can the bearer work?” Morath asked.

“In Roumania. Not here. Here he could apply to work, but . . .”

“And, if it should be checked with the Roumanian authority?”

“Why would it be checked?”

Morath didn’t answer.

The man wearing the homburg took a stub of pencil from his pocket and asked a question, again in Yiddish.

“He wants to know, how tall, how much does he weigh?”

Morath gave him the numbers—lean, shorter than average.

“Eyes?”

“Gray. The hair is blond.”

“Identifying marks?”

“None.”

“Profession?”

“Student.”

The photograph was put away. The art dealer turned a page of the newspaper to reveal an envelope. “Take this to the washroom down the hall. Put seventeen hundred and fifty francs in here, tuck the newspaper under your arm, and leave the museum. Use the exit on the rue Coligny. Stand on the top step and wait for a few minutes. Then, tomorrow at noon, go back there. You’ll see somebody you recognize, follow that person, and the exchange will be made someplace where you can have a good look at what you’re buying.”

Morath did as he was told—counted hundred-franc notes into the envelope, then waited at the entrance. Ten minutes later, a woman waved and came toward him, smiling, trotting up the museum steps. She was well dressed, wore pearl earrings and white gloves. She kissed him lightly on the cheek, slid the newspaper from beneath his arm, and left in a waiting taxi.

The night before the train.

It had become something of a tradition for Nicky and Cara, a Kama Sutra evening—farewell my love, something to remember. They sat around the bedroom in candlelight and drank a bottle of wine. Cara wore black underwear, Morath a dressing gown. Sometimes they played records—Morath owned two kinds, Ellington and Lee Wiley—or listened to “les beeg bands” on the radio. One night they’d journeyed up to Pigalle, where Cara waited in a taxi while Morath bought picture books. Then they’d hurried back to the avenue Bourdonnais and looked at the pictures. Sepia couples, trios, quartets, heavy women with wide hips and sweet smiles, the book printed in Sofia.

Cara teased him, sometimes, with Tales of the Convent School. She’d spent three years in such a place, on a grand estate outside Buenos Aires. “It was just as you would suppose, Nicky,” she’d say, a little breathless and wide-eyed. “All these girls, beauty of every type. Dark. Fair. Passionate, shy, some of them so naive they knew, nothing, not even what to touch. And all of them locked up together at night. Imagine!”

He did.

But, closer to the truth, he suspected, were the daylight recollections of “cold hands and smelly feet” and the diabolical nuns who forced them to learn, among other things, French. It was the only language she and Morath had in common, but Cara couldn’t forgive. “God, how they terrified us,” she’d say. Would clap her hands—as the teaching nun apparently did—and sing out, “Traduction, les jeunes filles!” Next they would be confronted by some unfathomable horror, a grammar monster, and allowed only five minutes for translation.

“I remember once,” Cara told him, “who was it? Sister Modeste. She wrote on the board: What if they should never have united themselves in that, over there?” Cara had started to laugh, remembering the moment. “Panic! Se joindre, a homicidal verb. It’s much simpler in Spanish. And then my friend Francesca, after the sister wrote out the answer, leaned across the aisle and whispered, ‘Well, I’m certainly glad I know how to say that!’ ”

Morath poured out the last of the wine, Cara finished hers, put the glass on the floor and wound herself around him. He kissed her, reached over and undid her bra, she shrugged her shoulders, he tossed it on a chair. Some time later, he hooked a finger in the waistband of her panties and slid them down her legs, slow and easy, until she pointed her feet so he could get them off. He could feel her breath on the side of his face, it always changed at that moment.

Then, for a time, they lay still. She took his hand and held it against her breast—she wouldn’t let him move—as though this was sufficient, no need to go further. He wondered what might be nice to do, his mind wandering idly through the repertoire. Was she thinking about that? Or something else? He loves me? Morath opened his eyes and saw that she was smiling.

All very good to think about, in the morning, cast adrift in the cold world. She didn’t wake up when he left, sleeping with her mouth open, a hand trapped under the pillow. Somehow he could look at her and know she’d made love the night before. He almost dozed, as the train left the empty streets and moved through the countryside. Her tits, her ass, looking up at her, looking down, fucking. She whispered sometimes, talking to herself. He could never actually hear what she was saying.

It was a very slow train, that left at dawn. Going east, it crawled, as if it really didn’t want to get there. It would go through Metz and Saarbrucken, then on to Würzburg, where passengers could change for the train to Prague, with connections to Brno, to Kosice, and to Uzhorod.

Eastern France, a lost season, not winter, not spring. The sky low and heavy, the wind colder than it should have been, the train crawling through dead, weedy fields.

A pleasant countryside, once upon a time, small farms and villages. Then 1914 came along and war turned it into gray mud. It would never really heal, people said. A few years earlier, when the snow melted, a farmer had come upon what had, evidently, once been a trench, where a squad of French soldiers, heading into battle, had been suddenly buried by the explosion of an enormous artillery shell. Then, with that spring’s thaw, the farmer saw a dozen bayonet points thrust out of the earth, still in marching order.

Morath lit a cigarette and went back to reading—Nicholas Bartha’s Land of the Kazars, published in Hungarian in 1901.

The sovereign stag should not be disturbed in its family affairs. What is a Ruthenian compared with it? Only a peasant. The hunting period lasts two weeks. For this pastime, 70,000 Ruthenians must be doomed to starvation by the army of the officials. The deer and the wild boar destroy the corn, the potatoes and the clover of the Ruthenians (the whole harvest of his tiny lot of half an acre). Their whole yearly work is destroyed. The people sow and the deer of the estate harvest. It is easy to say the peasant should complain. But where and to whom? Those who have the power he sees always together. The village chief, the deputy sheriff, the sheriff, the district judge, the tax-officer, the forester, the steward and the manager, all are men of the same education, of the same social pleasures, and of the same standard. From whom could he hope for justice?

When he’d learned he’d be going up into Ruthenia, he’d borrowed the book from the baroness Frei’s enormous library—purchased by the Baron from universities that fell, after 1918, within the borders of other nations. “Saved from the fire,” he’d say. Morath smiled at the memory of him. A short, fat man with muttonchops who never knew himself just how much money he made with his “schemes.” For Morath’s sixteenth birthday, the Baron had taken him on an “educational ramble” to the casino at Monte Carlo, bought him a pair of diamond cuff links and a cadaverous blonde.

He’d sat by the baron’s side at the chemin de fer table and watched him write, at four in the morning, a check with an alarming number of zeros. Pale but smiling, the baron stood, lit a cigar, winked at Morath, and headed off toward the marble staircase. Ten minutes later, a black-suited fonctionnaire floated to his side, cleared his throat, and said, “The baron Frei has gone into the garden.” Morath hesitated, then stood and went quickly into the casino garden, where the baron was discovered urinating on a rosebush. He would die, ten years later, of a tropical disease contracted in the jungles of Brazil, where he’d gone to buy industrial diamonds.

Morath glanced up at the luggage rack above the seat, making sure of his leather satchel. Inside, a passport he’d received at the Louvre, now sewn into the lining of a wool jacket. Pavlo, Polanyi called the man, a man he said he’d never met. The student. Who had gotten himself into the town of Uzhorod and couldn’t get out. “A favor for a friend,” Polanyi said.

In midafternoon, the train slowed for the Moselle bridges and the station at Metz, the buildings dark with soot from the mills. Most of Morath’s fellow passengers got off—not many people traveling into Germany just then. Morath took a walk on the platform and bought a newspaper. At twilight, the train halted for the French border control. No problem for Morath, officially a résident of France.

Two hours later, the train crossed the frontier at Saarbrucken. No problem there either. The officer who knocked on the door of Morath’s compartment was pleased to see the Hungarian passport. “Welcome to the Reich,” he said. “I know you will enjoy your stay.”

Morath thanked him graciously and tried to settle down for the night. The border station was floodlit a brilliant white; wire strung on stanchions, officials, sentries, machine guns, dogs. This is for you, it said, and Morath didn’t like it. It recalled a certain Hungarian saying: “One should never voluntarily enter a room or a country the door of which cannot be opened from the inside.”

Somewhere down the line, he was joined by a pair of SS officers and spent the night drinking cognac and discussing the old Europe, the new Germany, and how to lay Hungarian women. The two young officers—political intellectuals who’d gone to university together in Ulm—had a fine time. They talked and laughed, polished their spectacles, got drunk, and fell asleep. Morath was relieved to arrive in Würzburg, where he slept overnight at the railroad hotel and left the next morning on the train to Prague.

The Czech border police weren’t quite so happy to see him. Hungary ran espionage networks in several cities and the Czechs knew it.

“How long,” the border guard asked him, “do you plan to stay in Czechoslovakia?”

“A few days.”

“Your business here, sir?”

“To buy woodland, if possible, on behalf of a group of investors in Paris.”

“Woodland.”

“In Ruthenia, sir.”

“Ah. Of course. You are traveling to . . . ?”

“Uzhorod.”

The guard nodded and tapped Morath’s passport with the end of a pencil. “I will stamp a one-week visa for you. Please apply at the Uzhorod prefecture if you need to extend that.”

He ate a ghastly blutwurst in the dining car, finished Bartha, managed to buy a copy of Est, the evening edition brought in from Budapest, at the station buffet in Brno. Clearly, political life was heating up. Two members of parliament had come to blows. At a workers’ march in the Tenth District, bricks thrown, people arrested. To the Editor. Sir: How can we let these liberal pansies run our lives? An editorial called for “strength, firmness, singleness of purpose. The world is changing, Hungary must change with it.” A coffeehouse by the university had burned down. TENS OF THOUSANDS CHEER HITLER SPEECH IN REGENSBURG. With photograph, on page one. Here they come, Morath thought.

Outside the window, a strange countryside. Low hills, pine forest. Sudden rivers at spring flood, the sound of the locomotive sharpening as it passed through an open gorge. At the station in the Slovakian town of Zvolen, the train stood between Warsaw to the north and Budapest to the south. Next stop, Kosšice, a border town before 1918. On the platform, women holding straw baskets, their heads covered with black kerchiefs. The train climbed through snow-patched meadows, came to a village with domed churches painted lime green. In the late afternoon haze, Morath could see the Carpathians on the far horizon. An hour later he got off in Uzhorod.

The stationmaster told him there was a place he could stay in Krolevska Street. It turned out to be a yellow brick building with a sign that said hotel. The proprietor had a white eye, wore a greasy silk vest and a knitted yarmulke. “Our finest room,” he said. “The finest.” Morath sat on the straw mattress, picked the stitching from the lining of his wool jacket, and extracted the passport. Andreas Panea.

Late in the afternoon, he walked to the post office. The Czech postal clerks wore blue uniforms. On an envelope he had written Malko, Poste Restante, Uzhorod. Inside, a meaningless note—a sister had been ill, now she was better. The actual message was the address: the same as “Malko’s”, with a different name.

Now, to wait.

Morath lay on the bed and stared out the cloudy window. The finest room was bent at a strange angle; a low ceiling of wooden boards, whitewashed long ago, went in one direction, then another. When he stood up, it was only a few inches above his head. In the street, the steady sound of horses’ hooves on cobblestone. Ruthenia. Or, affectionately, Little Russia. Or, technically, Sub-Carpathian Ukraine. A Slavic nibble taken by the medieval kings of Hungary, and ever since a lost land in the northeast corner of the nation. Then, after the world war, on a rare day when American idealism went hand in hand with French diplomacy—what Count Polanyi called “a frightening convergence”—they stuck it onto Slovakia and handed it to the Czechs. Somewhere, Morath speculated, in a little room in a ministry of culture, a Moravian bureaucrat was hard at work on a little song. “Merry old Ruthenia / Land we love so well.”

At dinner, the proprietor and his wife served him jellied calf’s foot, buckwheat groats with mushrooms, white cheese with scallions, and thin pancakes with red-current jam. A bottle of cherry brandy stood on the plank table. The proprietor nervously rubbed his hands.

“Very good,” Morath said, pretending to wipe his mouth with the napkin—it had certainly been a napkin, once—and pushed his chair away from the table. He’d meant the compliment, however, and the proprietor could see that.

“Another blini, sir? Uhh, Pfannkuchen? Crêpe? Blintz?”

“Thank you, but no.”

Morath paid for the dinner and returned to his room. Lying there in the darkness, he could sense the countryside. There was a stable attached to the hotel, and sometimes the horses whickered and moved around in their stalls. The aroma, manure and rotted straw, drifted up to Morath’s room. Still cold, at the end of April. He wrapped himself up in the thin blanket and tried to sleep. Out on Krolevska Street, somebody got drunk in a tavern. Singing at first, then the argument, then the fight. Then the police, then the woman, crying and pleading, as her man was taken away.

Two days later, a letter at the post office, an address on the edge of Uzhorod, he had to take a droshky. Down streets of packed dirt lined with one-story log houses, each with a single window and a thatched roof. A woman answered his knock on the door. She was dark, with black, curly hair, wore crimson lipstick and a tight, thin dress. Perhaps Roumanian, he thought, or Gypsy. She asked him a question in a language he didn’t recognize.

He tried her in German. “Is Pavlo here?”

She’d expected him, he could sense that; now he’d arrived and she was curious, looked him over carefully. Morath heard a door slam in the house, then a man’s voice. The woman stood aside and Pavlo came to the door. He was one of those people who look very much like their photograph. “Are you the man from Paris?” The question was asked in German. Not good, but serviceable.

“Yes.”

“They took their time, getting you here.”

“Yes? Well, now I’m here.”

Pavlo’s eyes swept the street. “Maybe you’d better come inside.”

The room was crowded with furniture, heavy chairs and couches covered in various patterns and fabrics, much of it red, some of the fabric very good, some not. Morath counted five mirrors on the walls. The woman spoke quietly to Pavlo, glanced over at Morath, then left the room and closed the door.

“She is packing her suitcase,” Pavlo said.

“She’s coming with us?”

“She thinks she is.”

Morath did not show a reaction.

Pavlo took that for disapproval. “Try it sometime,” he said, his voice a little sharp, “life without a passport.” He paused, then, “Have you money for me?”

Morath hesitated—maybe somebody was supposed to give Pavlo money, but it wasn’t him. “I can let you have some,” he said, “until we get to Paris.”

This wasn’t the answer Pavlo wanted, but he was in no position to argue. He was perhaps a few years older than Morath had thought, in his late twenties. He had on a stained blue suit, colorful tie, and scuffed, hard-worn shoes.

Morath counted out a thousand francs. “This should tide you over,” he said.

It was much more than that, but Pavlo didn’t seem to notice. He put eight hundred francs in his pocket and looked around the room. Under a shimmering aquamarine vase with a bouquet of satin tulips in it was a paper doily. Pavlo slid two hundred-franc notes beneath the doily so the edges of the bills were just visible.

“Here’s the passport,” Morath said.

Pavlo looked it over carefully, held it up to the light, squinted at the photograph, and ran a finger over the raised lettering on the edge. Then he shrugged. “It will do,” he said. “Why Roumanian?”

“That’s what I could get.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t speak it. I’m Croatian.”

“That won’t be a problem. We’re going across the Hungarian border. At Michal’an. Are you carrying another passport? I don’t think we have to worry about it, but still . . .”

“No. I had to rid of it.”

He left the room. Morath could hear him, talking to the woman. When he reappeared, he was carrying a briefcase. Walking behind him, the woman held a cheap valise in both hands. She’d put on a hat, and a coat with a ragged fur collar. Pavlo whispered something to her and kissed her on the forehead. She looked at Morath, her eyes suspicious but hopeful, and sat on a couch, the valise between her feet.

“We’re going out for an hour or so,” Pavlo said to the woman. “Then we’ll be back.”

Morath wanted no part of it.

Pavlo closed the door. Out in the street, he grinned and cast his eyes to heaven.

They walked for a long time before they found a droshky. Morath directed the driver back to the hotel, then Pavlo waited in the room while Morath went to see the proprietor in a tiny office behind the kitchen where he was laboring over a bookkeeper’s ledger. As Morath counted out Czech koruny to pay the bill, he said, “Do you know a driver with a car? As soon as possible—I’ll make it worthwhile.”

The proprietor thought it over. “Are you going,” he said delicately, “some distance away from here?”

He meant, borders.

“Some.”

“We are, as you know, blessed with many neighbors.”

Morath nodded. Hungary, Poland, Roumania.

“We are going to Hungary.”

The proprietor thought it over. “Actually, I do know somebody. He’s a Pole, a quiet fellow. Just what you want, eh?”

“As soon as possible,” Morath said. “We’ll wait in the room, if that’s all right with you.” He didn’t know who was looking for Pavlo, or why, but railroad stations were always watched. Better, a quiet exit from Uzhorod.

The driver appeared in the late afternoon, introduced himself as Mierczak, and offered Morath a hand like tempered steel. Morath sensed a powerful domesticity. “I’m a mechanic at the flour mill,” he said. “But I also do this and that. You know how it is.” He was ageless, with a receding hairline and a genial smile and a British shooting jacket, in houndstooth check, that had somehow wandered into this region in an earlier age.

Morath was actually startled by the car. If you closed one eye it didn’t look so different from the European Fords of the 1930s, but a second look told you it wasn’t anything like a Ford, while a third told you it wasn’t anything. It had lost, for example, all its color. What remained was a shadowy tone of iron, maybe, that faded or darkened depending on what part of the car you looked at.

Mierczak laughed, jiggling the passenger-side door until it opened. “Some car,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“No,” Morath said. He settled down on the horse blanket that had, a long time ago, replaced the upholstery. Pavlo got in the back. The car started easily and drove away from the hotel.

“Actually,” Mierczak said, “it’s not mine. Well, it’s partly mine. Mostly it is to be found with my wife’s cousin. It’s the Mukachevo taxi, and, when he’s not working at the store, he drives it.”

“What is it?”

“What is it,” Mierczak said. “Well, some of it is a Tatra, built in Nesseldorf. After the war, when it became Czechoslovakia. The Type II, they called it. Some name, hey? But that’s that company. Then it burned. The car, I mean. Though, now that I think about it, the factory also burned, but that was later. So, after that, it became a Wartburg. We had a machine shop in Mukachevo, back then, and somebody had left a Wartburg in a ditch, during the war, and it came back to life in the Tatra. But—we didn’t really think about it at the time—it was an old Wartburg. We couldn’t get parts. They didn’t make them or they wouldn’t send them or whatever it was. So, it became then a Skoda.” He pressed the clutch pedal to the floor and revved the engine. “See? Skoda! Just like the machine gun.”

The car had used up the cobblestone part of Uzhorod and was now on packed dirt. “Gentlemen,” Mierczak said. “We’re going to Hungary, according to the innkeeper. But, I must ask if you have a particular place in mind. Or maybe it’s just ‘Hungary.’ If that’s how it is, I perfectly understand, believe me.”

“Could we go to Michal’an?”

“We could. It’s nice and quiet there, as a rule.”

Morath waited. “But . . . ?”

“But even quieter in Zahony.”

“Zahony, then.”

Mierczak nodded. A few minutes later, he turned a sharp corner onto a farm road and shifted down to second gear. It sounded like he’d swung an iron bar against a bathtub. They bumped along the road for a time, twenty miles an hour, maybe, until they had to slow down and work their way around a horse cart.

“What’s it like there?”

“Zahony?”

“Yes.”

“The usual. Small customs post. A guard, if he’s awake. Not any traffic, to speak of. These days, most people stay where they are.”

“I imagine we can pick up a train there. For Debrecen, I guess, where we can catch the express.”

Pavlo kicked the back of the seat. At first, Morath couldn’t believe he’d done it. He almost turned around and said something, then didn’t.

“I’m sure there’s a train from Zahony,” Mierczak said.

They drove south in the last of the daylight, the afternoon fading away to a long, languid dusk. Staring out the window, Morath had a sudden sense of home, of knowing where he was. The sky was filled with torn cloud, tinted red by the sunset over the Carpathian foothills, empty fields stretched away from the little road, boundary lines marked by groves of birch and poplar. The land turned to wild meadow, where the winter grass hissed and swayed in the evening wind. It was very beautiful, very lost. These blissful, bloodsoaked valleys, he thought.

A tiny village, then another. It was dark now, cloud covered the moon, and spring mist rose from the rivers. Midway through a long, slow curve, they caught sight of the bridge over the Tisza and the Zahony border station. Pavlo shouted, “Stop.” Mierczak stamped on the brake as Pavlo hung over the top of the seat and punched the button that turned off the lights. “The bitch,” he said, his voice ragged with fury. He was breathing hard, Morath could hear him.

In the distance they could see two khaki-colored trucks, river fog drifting through the beams of their lights, and a number of silhouettes, possibly soldiers, moving about. In the car it was very quiet, the idling engine a low rumble, the smell of gasoline strong in the air.

“How can you be sure it was her?” Morath asked.

Pavlo didn’t answer.

“Maybe they are just there,” Mierczak said.

“No,” Pavlo said. For a time, they watched the trucks and the soldiers. “It’s my fault. I knew what to do, I just didn’t do it.”

Morath thought the best thing would be to drive south to Berezhovo, find a rooming house for a day or two, and take a train into Hungary. Or, maybe better, drive west into the Slovakian part of the country—away from Ruthenia, land of too many borders—and then take the train.

“You think they saw our lights?” Mierczak said. He swallowed once, then again.

“Just turn around and get out of here,” Pavlo said.

Mierczak hesitated. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but if he ran away, that changed.

“Now,” Pavlo said.

Reluctantly, Mierczak yanked the gearshift into reverse and got the car turned around. He drove a little way in the darkness, then turned the lights back on. Pavlo watched through the rear window until the border post disappeared around the curve. “They’re staying put,” he said.

“How far is it to Berezhovo?” Morath said. “Maybe the best thing now is to take the train.”

“An hour. A little more at night.”

“I’m not getting on a train,” Pavlo said. “If your papers don’t work, you’re trapped.”

Stay here, then.

“Is there another way across?” Pavlo said.

Mierczak thought it over. “There’s a footbridge, outside the village of Vezlovo. It’s used at night, sometimes.”

“By who?”

“Certain families—for avoiding the import duties. A trade in cigarettes, mostly, or vodka.”

Pavlo stared, couldn’t believe what he’d heard. “So why didn’t you take us there in the first place?”

“We didn’t ask him to do that,” Morath said. Even in the cool night air, Pavlo was sweating. Morath could smell it.

“You have to go through a forest,” Mierczak said.

Morath sighed, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. “At least we can take a look,” he said. Maybe the trucks just happened to be there. He was wearing a sweater, a tweed jacket, and flannels—dressed for a country hotel and a train. Now he was going to have to crawl around in the woods.

They drove for an hour, the moon rose. There were no other cars on the road. The land, field and meadow, was dark, empty. At last they came upon a village—a dozen log houses at the edge of the road, windows lit by oil lamps. A few sheds and barns. The dogs barked at them as they went past. “It’s not far from here,” Mierczak said, squinting as he tried to peer into the night. The car’s headlights gave off a dull amber glow. Just as the countryside turned to forest, Mierczak stopped the car, got out, and walked up the road. A minute later, he returned. He was grinning again. “Believe in miracles,” he said. “I found it.”

They left the car, Morath carrying a satchel, Pavlo with his briefcase, and the three of them started walking. The silence was immense, there was only the wind and the sound of their footsteps on the dirt road.

“It’s right there,” Mierczak said.

Morath stared, then saw a path in the underbrush between two towering beech trees.

“About a kilometer or so,” Mierczak said. “You’ll hear the river.”

Morath opened his wallet and began to count out hundred-koruna notes.

“That’s very generous of you,” Mierczak said.

“Would you agree to wait here?” Morath asked him. “Maybe forty minutes. Just in case.”

Mierczak nodded. “Good luck, gentlemen,” he said, clearly relieved. He hadn’t realized what he was getting himself into—the cash in his pocket proved that he’d been right to be scared. He waved as they walked into the forest, glad to see them go.

*

Mierczak was right, Morath thought. Almost from the moment they entered the forest they could hear the river, hidden, but not far away. Water dripped from the bare branches of the trees, the earth was soft and spongy underfoot. They walked for what seemed like a long time, then got their first view of the Tisza. About a hundred yards wide and running at spring flood, heavy and gray in the darkness, with plumes of white foam where the water surged around a rock or a snag.

“And where is this bridge?” Pavlo said. This supposed bridge.

Morath nodded his head—just up the path. They walked for another ten minutes, then he saw a dry root at the foot of a tree, sat down, gave Pavlo a cigarette and lit one for himself. Balto, they were called, he’d bought them in Uzhorod.

“Lived in Paris a long time?” Pavlo asked.

“A long time.”

“I can see that.”

Morath smoked his cigarette.

“You seem to forget how life goes, over here.”

“Take it easy,” Morath said. “We’ll be in Hungary soon enough. Find a tavern, have something to eat.”

Pavlo laughed. “You don’t believe the Pole is going to wait for us, do you?”

Morath looked at his watch. “He’s there.”

Pavlo gave Morath a sorrowful look. “Not for long. He’ll be going home to his wife any minute now. And on the way he’ll stop and have a word with the police.”

“Calm down,” Morath said.

“Over here, it’s about one thing, and one thing only. And that is money.”

Morath shrugged.

Pavlo stood. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“A few minutes,” he said, over his shoulder.

Christ! Morath heard him for a minute or so, heading back the way they’d come, then it was quiet. Maybe he’d gone, really gone. Or he was going back to check on Mierczak, which made no sense at all. Well, he must have value to somebody. When Morath was growing up, his mother went to Mass every day. She often told him that all people were good, it was just that some of them had lost their way.

Morath stared up at the tops of the trees. The moon was in and out, a pale slice among the clouds. A long time since he’d been in a forest. This was an old one, probably part of a huge estate. Prince Esterhazy had three hundred thousand acres in Hungary, with eleven thousand people in seventeen villages. Not so unusual, in this part of the world. The nobleman who owned this property no doubt intended his grandchildren to cut the slow-growing hardwood, mostly oak and beech.

It occurred to Morath that, when all was said and done, he hadn’t actually lied to the Czech customs officer. He’d said he was going to look at woodland; well, here he was, looking at it. In the distance, two pops, and, a moment later, a third.

When Pavlo returned, he said only, “Well, we should be getting on our way.” What needed to be done was done, why talk about it. The two of them walked in silence, and, a few minutes later, they saw the bridge. A narrow, rickety old thing, the water sucked into deep eddies around the wooden poles that held it up, the surface maybe ten feet below the walkway. As Morath watched the bridge, it moved. The far end was sharp against the sky—a broken shard of railing thrust out toward the Hungarian side of the river. And, by moonlight, he could just make out the blackened char pattern on the wood, where the part that had been set on fire—or dynamited, or whatever it was—had fallen into the water.

Morath was already so sickened inside at what Pavlo had done that he hardly cared. He’d seen it in the war, a dozen times, maybe more, and it brought always the same words, never spoken aloud. Pointless was the important one, the rest never mattered that much. Pointless, pointless. As though anything in the world might happen as long as somebody, somewhere, could see the point of it. A rather black joke, he’d thought at the time. The columns riding through the smoking villages of Galicia, a cavalry officer saying pointless to himself.

“They’ll have a way to get across,” Pavlo said.

“What?”

“The people who go back and forth across the border at night. Will have a way to do it.”

He was probably right, Morath thought. A boat, another bridge, something. They worked their way toward the bank of the river, were within a few meters of it when they heard the voice. A command. In Russian, or maybe Ukrainian. Morath didn’t speak the language but, even so, the intention was clear and he started to stand up. Pavlo grabbed him by the shoulder and forced him down, into the high reeds along the riverbank. “Don’t do it,” Pavlo whispered.

Again the voice, mock polite, wheedling. We wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Pavlo tapped his lips with his forefinger.

Morath pointed behind them, at the relative safety of the forest. Pavlo thought it over, and nodded. When they started to crawl backward, somebody shot at them. A yellow spark in the woods, a report that flattened out over the water. Then a shout in Russian, followed, rather thoughtfully, by a version in Hungarian, fuck you, stand up being the general idea, followed by a snicker.

Pavlo picked up a stone and threw it at them. At least two guns responded. Then a silence, then the sound of somebody lurching through the underbrush, a crash, an oath, and a raucous bellow that passed for laughter.

Morath never saw where it came from—the briefcase?—but a heavy, steel-colored revolver appeared in Pavlo’s hand and he squeezed off a round in the general direction of the noise.

That wasn’t funny. That was unconscionably rude. Somebody screamed at them, and Morath and Pavlo went flat as a fusillade whizzed over the reeds. Morath made a hand sign, stay still. Pavlo nodded, he agreed. From the darkness, a challenge—come out and fight, you cowards. Followed by shouted dialogue between two, then three voices. All of them drunk, mean, and very angry.

But that was it. Pavlo’s single shot had made an eloquent statement, had altered the social contract: sorry, no free killing tonight. It took a long time, thirty minutes, of yelling, shooting, and what Morath guessed were meant to be intolerable insults. Still, Pavlo and Morath managed to tolerate them, and, when the gang went away, knew enough to wait the requisite fifteen minutes for the final shot, when they sent somebody back to ruin the victory celebration.

*

4:40 A.M. The light pearl gray. The best moment to see and not to be easily seen. Morath, wet and cold, could hear birds singing on the Hungarian side of the river. He and Pavlo had walked upstream for a half hour, soaked by the heavy mist, looking for a boat or another way across, found nothing, and returned to the bridge.

“Whatever they use, they’ve hidden it,” Pavlo said.

Morath agreed. And this was not the morning for two strangers to walk into an isolated village. The Czech police would be interested in the murder of a Polish taxi driver, the Ukrainian gang more than curious to know who’d been shooting at them the night before. “Can you swim?” Morath said.

Very slowly, Pavlo shook his head.

Morath was a strong swimmer, and this would not be the first time he’d been in a fast river. He’d done it in his teens, with daring friends. Jumped into spring current holding a piece of log, floated downstream until he could fight his way to the far shore. But, this time of year, you had only fifteen minutes. He’d seen that too, during the war, in the Bzura and the Dniester. First an agonized grimace at the cold, next a silly smile, then death.

Morath would take his chances; the problem was what to do with Pavlo. It didn’t matter what he felt—he had to get him across. Strange, though, a lot of folklore on this issue. Endless foxes and roosters and frogs and tigers and priests and rabbis. A river to be crossed—why was it always the cunning one that couldn’t swim?

And there weren’t any logs. Maybe they could break off a piece of the burnt railing, but they’d know that only when they got to the far end of the bridge. Morath decided to abandon his satchel. He was sorry to lose the copy of Bartha, he would find a way to replace it. For the rest, razor and socks and shirt, good-bye. The Ukrainians could have it. As for Pavlo, he unbuckled his belt and looped it through the handle of the briefcase. “Put your passport in your mouth,” Morath said.

“And money?”

“Money dries.”

Flat on his belly, Morath worked his way across the bridge. He could hear the water as it rushed past, ten feet below, could feel it—the damp, chill air that rose from heavy current. He did not look back, Pavlo would either find the nerve to do this or he wouldn’t. Crawling over the weathered planks, he realized that a lot more of it had burned than was evident from the shore. It smelled like old fire, and his lamb’s-wool sweater from a shop on the rue de la Paix—“Not that green, Nicky, this green”—already caked with mud, was now smeared with charcoal.

Long before he reached the end, he stopped. The support poles had burned, part of the way anyhow, leaving black sticks to hold up the bridge. Morath realized he would be going into the river a little earlier than he’d planned. The bridge trembled and swayed each time he moved, so he signaled back to Pavlo to stay where he was and went ahead on his own.

He reached a bad place, hung on, felt himself start to sweat in the cold air. Would it be better to dive in here? No, it was a long way to the other shore. He waited for the bridge to stop wobbling, then curled his fingers around the edge of the next board and slid forward. Waited, reached out, pulled, and slid. Resting his face against the wood, he saw a pair of white egrets flying toward him, just above the water, then heard the beating of their wings as they passed above him.

By the time he reached the end—or as close as he could get to it, beyond a certain point the wood was so burned away it wouldn’t hold a cat—he had to take a minute to catch his breath. He motioned for Pavlo to come along. As he waited, he heard voices over the water. He turned, saw two women, black skirts held above their knees, standing in the river shallows and staring at him.

When Pavlo arrived, they studied the far bank—a good forty yards away. In the growing daylight, the water was brown with earth swept down from the mountain streams. Lying next to him, Pavlo was the color of chalk.

“Take off your tie,” Morath said.

Pavlo hesitated, then, reluctantly, pulled the knot apart.

“I’m going into the water, you follow. You hold on to one end of the tie, I’ll swim across and pull you with me. You do the best you can—kick your feet, paddle with your free arm. We’ll manage.”

Pavlo nodded.

Morath looked down at the water, ten feet below him, dark and swirling. The far shore seemed a long distance away, but at least the bank was low.

“Wait a minute,” Pavlo said.

“Yes?”

But there was nothing to say, he just didn’t want to go into the water.

“We’ll be fine,” Morath said. He decided to try for the next pole, something he could hang on to while he coaxed Pavlo to jump in after him. He pulled himself along, felt the planks beneath him quiver, then shift. He swore, heard a beam snap, was turned on his side and dropped. He fought the air, then landed with a shock that knocked him senseless. It wasn’t the icy jolt of the water, he was waiting for that. It was the rock. Smooth and dark, about two feet below the surface. Morath found himself on his hands and knees, no pain yet but he could feel it coming, the river churning around him. Hidden causeway. The oldest trick in the world.

Pavlo came crawling toward him, tie held in his hand, passport clenched in his teeth, steel spectacles askew, and laughing.

They walked to Zahony. Following first the river, then a cart track through the woods that turned into a road. It took all morning but they didn’t care. Pavlo was pleased not to be drowned, and his money wasn’t all that wet—he peeled the bills apart, Austrian, Czech, French, blew gently on the various kings and saints, then put it away in his briefcase.

Morath had hurt his wrist and knee, but not as badly as he’d feared, and had a bruise by his left eye. A plank, most likely, he never felt it happen. In time, the sun came out and light sparkled on the river. They passed a woodcutter, a tramp, and two boys fishing for the small sturgeon that ran in the Tisza. Morath spoke to the boys in Hungarian: “Any luck?” A little, yes, not too bad. They seemed not very surprised when two men in muddy clothes walked out of the forest. That’s what came from living on a frontier, Morath thought.

They found a little restaurant in Zahony, ate cabbage stuffed with sausage and a plate of fried eggs, and got on a train that afternoon. Pavlo fell asleep, Morath stared out the window at the Hungarian plain.

Well, he’d kept his word. Promised Polanyi he would bring this, this whatever-he-was to Paris. Pavlo. Certainly an alias—nom de guerre, code name, impersonation. Something. He claimed he was a Croat and that, Morath thought, just might be true. Perhaps a Croatian Ustachi. Which meant terrorist in some neighborhoods and patriot in others.

Croatia, a province of Hungary for centuries and her access to the sea—which was how Miklos Horthy came to be Admiral Horthy—had stewed up quite a bit of political history since becoming part of a manufactured kingdom, Yugoslavia, in 1918. The founder of the Ustachi, Ante Pavelic, had found celebrity by turning to a political opponent in the Croatian Chamber of Deputies and shooting him in the heart. Six months later, Pavelic returned from hiding, walked into the lobby of the chamber carrying a shotgun, and killed two more.

Under Mussolini’s protection, Pavelic moved to a villa in Turin, where he kept a guiding hand on the political philosophy of his organization: over forty train wrecks in ten years, numberless public buildings bombed, hand grenades thrown into soldiers’ cafés, and five thousand Croatian and Serbian officials murdered. The money came from Mussolini, the assassins from IMRO, Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, with headquarters in Bulgaria. It had been IMRO operatives who assassinated King Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1934, in Marseilles. They had been trained in camps in Hungary which, in service of an alliance with Italy, also provided military instructors and false papers. Papers issued, quite often, in the name of Edouard Benes, the hated president of Czechoslovakia. A certain sense of humor at work there, Morath thought.

“Balkan, Balkan,” they said in France of a pimp slapping a whore or three kids beating up a fourth—anything barbarous or brutal. In the seat across from Morath, Pavlo slumbered away, arms crossed protectively over his briefcase.

The passport formalities at the Austrian border were, mercifully, not too drawn out. For Andreas Panea, the Roumanian, that particular masked rudeness of central Europe—you practically had to be Austrian to know you’d been insulted. For everybody else, it took a day or two, and by then you’d left the country.

A long time on the train, Morath thought, anxious to be back in the life he’d made in Paris. Hungarian plain, Austrian valley, German forest, and, at last, French fields, and the sun came out in Morath’s heart. By evening, the train chugged through the Ile-de-France, wheatfields and not much else, then the conductor—who was all French train conductors, broad and stocky with a black mustache—announced the final stop, just the edge of a song in his voice. Pavlo grew attentive, peering out the window as the train slowed for the villages outside the city.

“You’ve been to Paris?”

“No.”

On the tenth of May 1938, the night train from Budapest pulled into the Gare du Nord a little after 9:20 P.M. It was, on the whole, a quiet evening in Europe, cloudy and warm for the season, rain expected toward dawn. Nicholas Morath, traveling on a Hungarian diplomatic passport, stepped slowly from the first-class car and headed for the taxi rank outside the station. Just as he left the platform he turned, as though he was about to say something to a companion, but, on looking back, he discovered that whoever he’d been with had disappeared into the crowd.