Kingdom of Shadows

INTERMARIUM

10 MARCH 1939.

Amen. The world in chaos, half the armies in Europe mobilized, diplomats in constant motion, popping up here and there like tin monkeys in shooting galleries. Very much, Morath thought, like tin monkeys in shooting galleries.

Crossing the Pont Royal on his way to lunch, late, unhurried, he stopped and leaned on the stone parapet. The river ran full and heavy, its color like shining slate, its surface roughed up by the March wind and the spring currents. In the western sky, white scud blew in from the channel ports. The last days of Pisces, he thought, dreams and mysteries. When it rained in the middle of the night they woke up and made love.

He looked at his watch—Polanyi would be waiting for him—was there any way to avoid this? From here the Seine flowed north, to Rouen, to Normandy, to the sea. Escape.

No, lunch.

Thirty minutes later, the Brasserie Heininger. A white marble staircase climbed to a room of red plush banquettes, painted cupids, gold cords on the draperies. Waiters in muttonchop whiskers ran back and forth, carrying silver trays of pink langoustes. Morath was relieved. No more Prévert, “the beauty of sinister things,” the Count von Polanyi de Nemeszvar had apparently risen from the lower depths, tempted by sumptuous food and a wine list bound in leather.

Polanyi greeted him formally in Hungarian and stood to shake hands.

“I’m sorry to be late.”

A bottle of Echézeaux was open on the table, a waiter scurried over and poured Morath a glass. He took a sip and stared at the mirrored panel above the banquette. Polanyi followed his eyes.

“Don’t look now, but there’s a bullet hole in the mirror behind you,” Morath said.

“Yes. The infamous Table Fourteen, this place has a history.”

“Really?”

“Two years ago, I think. The headwaiter was assassinated while sitting on the toilet in the ladies’ bathroom.”

“Well he won’t do that again.”

“With a machine gun, it’s said. Something to do with Bulgarian politics.”

“Oh. And in his memory . . .”

“Yes. Also, the story goes, some kind of British spymistress used to hold court here.”

“At this very table.”

The waiter returned, Polanyi ordered mussels and a choucroute royale.

“What’s ‘royale’?” Morath asked.

“They cook the sauerkraut in champagne instead of beer.”

“You can taste the champagne? In sauerkraut?”

“An illusion. But one likes the idea of it.”

Morath ordered suprêmes de volaille, chicken breast in cream, the simplest dish he could find.

“Have you heard what’s happened at the French air ministry?” Polanyi said.

“Now what.”

“Well first of all, they let a contract for building fighter planes to a furniture manufacturer.”

“Somebody’s brother-in-law.”

“Probably. And then, they decided to store their secret papers at a testing facility just outside Paris. Stored them in a disused wind tunnel. Only they forgot to tell the technicians, who turned the thing on and blew the papers all over the neighborhood.”

Morath shook his head; there was a time when it would have been funny. “They’ll have Adolf in the Elysée Palace, if they don’t watch out.”

“Not in our lifetime,” Polanyi said, finishing off his wine and refilling the glass. “We think Adolf is about to make a mistake.”

“Which is?”

“Poland. Lately he’s been screaming about Danzig—‘is German, has always been German, will always be German.’ His radio station tells Germans in the city to ‘keep a list of your enemies, soon the German army will help you to punish them.’ So what must happen now is a pact, between the Poles, the Roumanians, and us—the Yugoslavs can join if they like. The Intermarium, so-called, the lands between the seas, the Baltic and the Adriatic. Together, we’re strong. Poland has the largest land army in Europe, and we can deny Hitler Roumanian wheat and oil. If we can make him back down, call his bluff, that will be the end of him.”

Polanyi saw that Morath was skeptical. “I know, I know,” he said. “Ancient hatreds and territorial disputes and all the rest of it. But, if we don’t do something, we’ll all go the way of the Czechs.”

The lunch arrived, the waiter announcing each dish as he set it down.

“And what does Horthy think about all this?”

“Supports it. Perhaps you know the background of political events in February, perhaps you don’t. Officially, Imredy resigned and Count Teleki became the prime minister. In fact, Horthy was told that a Budapest newspaper was about to publish proof, obtained in Czechoslovakia, that Dr. Bela Imredy, the rabid anti-Semite, was Jewish. Had, at least, a Jewish great-grandfather. So Imredy didn’t jump, he was pushed. And, when he resigned, Horthy chose to replace him with Teleki, an internationally prominent geographer and a liberal. Which means Horthy supports at least some resistance to German objectives as the best means of keeping Hungary out of another war.”

“With Great Britain and France. And, sooner or later, America. We’ll surely win that one.”

“You forgot Russia,” Polanyi said. “How’s your chicken?”

“Very good.”

Polanyi took a moment, using a knife to pile a small mound of sauerkraut atop a bite of frankfurter on his fork, then added a dab of mustard. “You don’t mind the Poles, do you, Nicholas?”

“Not at all.”

“Lovely countryside. And the mountains, the Tatra, sublime. Especially this time of year.”

“So it’s said.”

“Nicholas!”

“Yes?”

“Can it be possible that you’ve never been there? To the majestic Tatra?”

A memorandum on his desk at the Agence Courtmain requested that he have a look at the file on Betravix, a nerve tonic made of beets. And there he found a postcard of a wild-eyed Zeus, beard blown sideways by a thundercloud above his head, about to ravish an extraordinarily pink and naked Hera he’d got hold of by the foot. On the back of the card, a drawing, in red crayon, of a heart pierced by an exclamation point.

He sat through a meeting with Courtmain, then, back in his office, found a second message, this one scrawled on a slip of paper: Your friend Ilya called. M.

He walked down the hall to her office, a glassed-in cubicle by a window. “I liked your card,” he said. “Is this the sort of thing that goes on when you take Betravix?”

“I wouldn’t, if I were you.” The late afternoon sun slanted in on her hair. “Did you get your telephone message?”

“I did. Who’s Ilya?”

“A friend, he said. He wants you to meet him.” She thumbed through a stack of notes on her desk. “For a drink. At the café on rue Maubeuge, across from the Gare du Nord. At six-fifteen.”

Ilya? “You’re sure it was for me?”

She nodded. “He said, ‘Can you tell Nicholas.’ ”

“Is there another Nicholas?”

She thought about it. “Not in this office. He sounded nice enough, very calm. With a Russian accent.”

“Well, who knows.”

“You’ll go?”

He hesitated. Unknown Russians, meetings at station cafés. “Why did he call you?”

“I don’t know, my love.” She looked past him, to her doorway. “Is that it?”

He turned to see Léon with a sketch of a woman in a fur stole. “I can come back later, if you’re busy,” Léon said.

“No, we’re done,” Morath said.

For the rest of the day he thought about it. Couldn’t stop. Almost called Polanyi, then didn’t. Decided, finally, to stay away. He left the office at five-thirty, stood for a moment on the avenue Matignon, then waved at a taxi, intending to go back to his apartment.

“Monsieur?” the driver said.

“The Gare du Nord.” Je m’en fous, the hell with it.

He sat in the café, an unread newspaper beside his coffee, staring at people as they came through the door. Was it something to do with the diamond dealer in Antwerp? Somebody Balki knew? Or a friend of a friend—Call Morath when you get to Paris. Somebody who wanted to sell him insurance, maybe, or a stockbroker, or an émigré who needed a job. A Russian client? Who wanted to advertise his . . . shoe store?

Anything, really, but what he knew it was.

Morath waited until seven, then took a taxi to Mary Day’s apartment. They drank a glass of wine, made love, went out for steak-frites, walked home, curled up together under the blankets. But he woke up at three-thirty, and again at five.

And, when the phone rang in his office on Monday morning, waited three rings before he picked it up.

“My apology, Monsieur Morath. I hope you will forgive.” A soft voice, heavily accented.

“Who are you?”

“Just Ilya. I’ll be, tomorrow morning, at the open market at Maubert.”

“And this concerns—?”

“Thank you,” he said. In the background, somebody called out “Un café allongé.” There was a radio playing, a chair scraped a tile floor, then the phone was hung up.

A big market, at the place Maubert, on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Cod and red snapper on chipped ice. Cabbages, potatoes, turnips, leeks, onions. Dried rosemary and lavender. Walnuts and hazelnuts. A pair of bloody pork kidneys wrapped in a sheet of newspaper.

Morath saw him, waiting in a doorway. A spectre. Stared for a moment, got a nod in return.

They walked among the stalls, breaths steaming in the cold air.

“Do I know you?” Morath asked.

“No,” Ilya said. “But I know you.”

There was something subtly mismade about him, Morath thought, perhaps a trunk too long for the legs, or arms too short. A receding hairline, with hair sheared so close he seemed at first to have a high forehead. A placid face, waxy and pale, which made a thick black mustache even blacker. And in his bearing there was a hint of the doctor or the lawyer, the man who trained himself, for professional reasons, not to show emotion. He wore a sad old overcoat, olive green, perhaps a remnant of somebody’s army, somewhere, so soiled and frayed that its identity had long ago faded away.

“Did we meet, somewhere?” Morath asked him.

“Not quite. I know you from your dossier, in Moscow. The sort of record kept by the special services. It is, perhaps, more complete than you would expect. Who you know, what you earn. Political views, family—just the usual things. I had a choice of hundreds of people, in Paris. Various nationalities, circumstances. Eventually, I chose you.”

They walked in silence, for a time. “I am in flight, of course. I was due to be shot, in the purge of the Foreign Directorate. My friends had been arrested, had vanished, as is the normal course of things there. At the time, I was in—I can say, Europe. And when I was recalled to Moscow—to receive a medal, they said—I knew precisely what medal that was, nine grams, and I knew precisely what was in store for me before they got around to using the bullet. So, I ran away, and came to Paris to hide. For seven months I lived in a room. I believe I left the room three times in that period.”

“How did you live?”

Ilya shrugged. “The way one does. Using the little money I had, I bought a pot, a spirit stove, and a large sack of oats. With water, available down the hall from my room, I could boil the oats and make kasha. Add a little lard and you can live on that. I did.”

“And me? What do you want of me?”

“Help.”

A policeman walked past, his cape drawn around him for warmth. Morath avoided his glance.

“There are things that should be known,” Ilya said. “Perhaps you can help me to do this.”

“They are looking for you, of course.”

“High and low. And they will find me.”

“Should you be out on the street?”

“No.”

They passed a boulangerie. “A moment,” Morath said, entered the shop and emerged with a bâtard. He tore a piece off the end and handed the rest to Ilya.

Morath chewed on the bread for a long time. His mouth was very dry and it was hard to swallow.

“I’ve put you in danger, I know,” Ilya said. “And your woman friend. For that I must apologize.”

“You knew to call me through her, where she works?”

“I followed you, monsieur. It isn’t so very hard to do.”

“No, I suppose it isn’t.”

“You can walk away, of course. I would not bother you again.”

“Yes. I know.”

“But you do not.”

Morath didn’t answer.

Ilya smiled. “So,” he said.

Morath reached in his pocket and handed Ilya whatever money he had.

“For your kindness, I thank you,” Ilya said. “And, for anything more, if God wills, please keep in mind that I don’t have very much time.”

Morath took Mary Day to the movies that night, a gangster film, as luck would have it, detectives chasing a handsome bank robber down alleys in the rain. A noble savage, his dark soul redeemed by love in the previous reel, but the flics didn’t know that. The little scarf in his hand when he died in a puddle under a streetlamp—that belonged to dear, good, stunning, tight-sweatered Dany. No justice, in this world. A covert sniffle from Mary Day, that was all he got. When the newsreel came on—coal mine cave-in at Lille, Hitler shrieking in Regensburg—they left.

Back on the rue Guisarde, they lay in bed in the darkness. “Did you find your Russian?” she said.

“This morning. Over in the Maubert market.”

“And?”

“A fugitive.”

“Oh?”

She felt light in his arms, fragile.

“What did he want?” she said.

“Some kind of help.”

“Will you help him?”

For a moment he was silent, then said, “I might.”

He didn’t want to talk about it, slid his hand down her stomach to change the subject. “See what happens when I take my Betravix?”

She snickered. “Now that is something I did see. A week after I was hired, I think it was. You were off someplace—wherever it is you go—and this strange little man showed up with his tonic. ‘For the nerves,’ he said. ‘And to increase the vigor.’ Courtmain was anxious to take it on. We sat in his office, this green bottle on his desk, somewhere he’d found a spoon. I took the cap off and smelled it. Courtmain looked inquisitive, but I didn’t say anything—I’d only been there a few days and I was afraid to make a mistake. Well, nothing scares Courtmain, he poured himself a spoonful and slugged it down. Then he turned pale and went running down the hall.”

“Betravix—keeps you running.”

“The look on his face.” She snorted at the memory.

The Ides of March. On the fifteenth, German motorized infantry, motorcycles, half-tracks, and armored cars entered Prague in a heavy blizzard. The Czech army did not resist, the air force stayed on the ground. All day long, the Wehrmacht columns wound through the city, headed for the Slovakian border. The following morning, Hitler addressed a crowd of Volksdeutsch from the balcony of Hradcany Castle. Over the next few days, there were five thousand arrests in Czechoslovakia and hundreds of suicides.

Two weeks earlier, Hungary had joined the Anti-Comintern Pact—Germany, Italy, and Japan—while simultaneously initiating a severe repression of Fascist elements throughout the country. We will oppose the Bolsheviks, the action seemed to say, and we can sign any paper we like, but we will not be ruled by Nazi surrogates. In a certain light, a dark, tormented kind of light, it made sense. Even more sense when, on 14 March, the Honved, the Royal Hungarian army, marched across the border and occupied Ruthenia. Slowly, painfully, the old territories were coming back.

In Paris, the driving snow in Prague fell as rain. The news was alive on the streets. Under black, shining umbrellas, crowds gathered at the kiosks where the headlines were posted. BETRAYAL. Morath could feel it in the air. As though the beast, safely locked in the basement at the time of Munich, had kicked the door down and started smashing the china.

The receptionist at the agency answered the phone while dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. A subdued Courtmain showed Morath a list of younger men in the office who would likely be mobilized—how to get along without them? In the hallways, conversations in urgent whispers.

But, when Morath left the office at midday, nobody was whispering. In the streets, at the café and the bank and everywhere else, it was merde and merde again. And merdeux, un beau merdier, merdique, emmerdé, and emmerdeur. The Parisians had a lot of ways to say it and they used them all. Morath’s newspaper, violently pessimistic about the future, reminded its readers what Churchill had said in response to Chamberlain’s peace-with-honor speeches at the time of Munich: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”

On 28 March, Madrid fell to Franco’s armies, and the Spanish republic surrendered. Mary Day sat on the edge of the bed in her flannel nightshirt, listening to the voice on the radio. “You know I once had a friend,” she said, close to tears. “An Englishman. Tall and silly, blind as a bat—Edwin Pennington. Edwin Pennington, who wrote Annabelle Surprised, and Miss Lovett’s School. And then one day he went off and died in Andalusia.”

For Morath, at work that morning, a petit bleu, a telegram delivered via the pneumatic-tube system used by the Parisian post offices. A simple message: NOTRE DAME DE LORETTE. 1:30.

The church of Notre Dame de Lorette was out in the scruffy Ninth Arrondissement—the whores in the neighborhood known as Lorettes. In the streets around the church, Ilya would not seem especially noticeable. Morath’s best instincts told him not to go. He sat back in his chair, stared at the telegram, smoked a cigarette, and left the office at one.

It was dark and busy in the church, mostly older women, that time of day. War widows, he thought, dressed in black, early for the two o’clock Mass. He found the deepest shadow, toward the back, away from the stained-glass windows. Ilya appeared almost immediately. He was tense, the small bravado of the Maubert market was no more. He sat down, then took a deep breath and let it out, as though he’d been running. “Good,” he said, speaking softly. “You are here.

“You see what happens in Prague,” he said, “and next is Poland. You don’t need me to tell you that. But what is not known is that the directive is written, the war plan is made. It has a name, Fall Weiss, Case White, and it has a date, any time after the first of September.”

Morath repeated the name and the date.

“I can prove,” Ilya said, excited, losing his French. “With papers.” He paused a moment, then said, “This is good Chekist work, but it must go—up high. Otherwise, war. No way to stop it. Can you help?”

“I can try.”

Ilya stared into his eyes to see if he was telling the truth. “That is what I hope.” He had enormous presence, Morath thought. Power. Even battered and hungry and frightened, he had it.

“There’s somebody I can go to,” Morath said.

Ilya’s expression said If that’s what I can get, I’ll take it. “The Poles are in the middle of this thing,” he said. “And they are difficult, impossible. In the five-man junta that runs the country, only Beck and Rydz-Smigly matter—Beck for foreign policy, Rydz-Smigly for the army—but they are all Pilsudski’s children. When he died, in 1935, they inherited the country, and they have the same experience. They fought for independence in 1914, and got it. Then they beat the Russians, in 1920, before the gates of Warsaw, and now they want nothing to do with them. Too many wars, the last hundred years. Too much blood spilled. There’s a point where, between nations, it’s too late. That’s Russia and Poland.

“Now, they think they can beat Germany. Jozef Beck’s background is in clandestine service—he was expelled from France in 1923 when he served as Polish military attaché, suspected of spying for Germany. So what he knows of Russia and Germany he knows from the shadows, where the truth is usually to be found.

“What the Poles want is alliance with France and Britain. Logical, on the surface. But how can Britain help them? With ships? Like Gallipoli? It’s a joke. The only nation that can help Poland, today, is Russia—look at a map. And Stalin wants the same thing the Poles want, alliance with Britain, for the same reason, to keep Hitler’s wolves away from the door. But we are despised by the British, feared, hated, Godless communists and murderers. That’s true, but what is also true, even more true, is that we are the only nation that can form, with Poland, an eastern front against the Wehrmacht.

“Chamberlain and Halifax don’t like this idea, and there is more than a little evidence that what they do like is the idea of Hitler fighting Stalin. Do they think Stalin doesn’t know it? Do they? So here is the truth: If Stalin can’t make a pact with the British, he will make one with Germany. He will have no choice.”

Morath didn’t answer, trying to take it all in. The two o’clock Mass had begun, a young priest serving in the afternoon. Morath thought he would hear about bloody crimes: famines, purges. Ilya wasn’t the only defector from the Russian secret service—there was a GRU general, called Krivitsky, who’d written a bestseller in America. Ilya, he assumed, wanted protection, refuge, in return for evidence that Stalin meant to rule the world.

“You believe?” Ilya said.

“Yes.” More or less, from a certain angle.

“Your friend, can approach the British?”

“I would think he could. And the papers?”

“When he agrees, he’ll have them.”

“What are they?”

“From the Kremlin, notes of meetings. NKVD reports, copies of German memoranda.”

“Can I contact you?”

Ilya smiled and, slowly, shook his head. “How much time do you need?”

“A week, perhaps.”

“So be it.” Ilya stood. “I will go first, you can leave in a few minutes. Is safer, that way.”

Ilya headed for the door. Morath stayed where he was. He glanced at his watch, followed along with the priest’s Latin phrases. He’d grown up with it, then, when he came home from the war, stopped going.

Finally, he rose and walked slowly to the back of the church.

Ilya was standing just inside the door, staring out into the rain. Morath stood beside him. “You’re staying here?”

He nodded toward the street. “A car.”

In front of the church, a Renault with a man in the passenger seat.

“For me, maybe,” Ilya said.

“We’ll go together.”

“No.”

“Out the side door, then.”

Ilya looked at him. They’re waiting at only one door? He almost laughed. “Trapped,” he said.

“Go back where we were, I’ll come and get you. Just stay where people are.”

Ilya hesitated, then walked away.

Morath was furious. To die in the rain on Tuesday afternoon! Out in the street, he hunted for a taxi. Hurried along the rue Peletier, then rue Drouot. At the corner, an empty taxi pulled up in front of a small hotel. As Morath ran for it, he saw a portly gentleman with a woman on his arm come out of the lobby. Morath and the portly gentleman opened the rear doors at the same moment and stared at each other across the backseat. “Forgive me, my friend,” the man said, “but I telephoned for this taxi.” He offered the woman his hand and she climbed in.

Morath stood there, water running down his face.

“Monsieur!” the woman said, pointing across the street. “What luck!”

An empty taxi had stopped in traffic, Morath thanked the woman and waved at it. He got in and told the driver where to go. “I have a friend waiting,” he said.

At the church, Morath found Ilya and hurried him to the door. The taxi was idling at the foot of the steps, the Renault had disappeared. “Quickly,” Morath said.

Ilya hesitated.

“Let’s go,” Morath said, his voice urgent. Ilya didn’t move, he seemed frozen, hypnotized. “They’re not going to kill you here.”

“Oh yes.”

Morath looked at him. Realized it was something Ilya knew, had seen. Had, perhaps, done. From the taxi, an impatient bleat of the horn.

He took Ilya by the arm and said, “Now.” Fought the instinct to stay low and sprint, and they trotted down the steps together.

In the taxi, Ilya gave the driver an address and, as they drove away, turned around and stared out the back window.

“Was it somebody you recognized?” Morath said.

“Not this time. Once before, maybe. And once, certainly.”

For long minutes, the taxi crawled behind a bus, the rear platform crowded with passengers. Suddenly, Ilya called out, “Driver, stop here!” He leapt from the taxi and ran down the entry of a Métro station. Chaussée d’Antin, Morath saw, a busy correspondence where riders could transfer from one line to another.

The driver watched him go, then twisted an index finger against his temple, which meant crazy in taxi sign language. He turned and gave Morath a sour look. “And now?” he said.

“Avenue Matignon. Just off the boulevard.”

That was a long way from Chaussée d’Antin, especially in the rain. Taking people from one place to another was fundamentally an imposition—clearly that was the driver’s view. He sighed, rammed the gearshift home, and spun his tires as he took off. “What goes on with your friend?” he said.

“His wife is chasing him.”

“Woof!” Better him than me.

A few minutes later he said, “Seen the papers?”

“Not today.”

“Even old J’aime Berlin is giving it to Hitler now.” He used the Parisian pun on Chamberlain’s name with great relish.

“What’s happened?”

“A speech. ‘Maybe Adolf wants to rule the world.’ ”

“Maybe he does.”

The driver turned to look at Morath. “Just let him take his army up into Poland, and that’ll be the end of that.”

“I forbid you to see him again,” Polanyi said. They were at a café near the legation. “Anyhow, there’s a part of me wants to tell you that.”

Morath was amused. “You sound like a father in a play.”

“Yes, I suppose. Do you buy it, Nicholas?”

“Yes and no.”

“I have to admit that everything he says is true. But what troubles me is the possibility that someone on Dzerzhinsky Street sent him here. After all, anybody can buy an overcoat.”

“Does it matter?”

Polanyi acknowledged that it might not. If diplomats couldn’t persuade the British, maybe a defector could. “These games,” he said. “ ‘Hungarian diplomats in contact with a Soviet operative.’ ”

“He said he had papers to prove it.”

“Papers, yes. Like overcoats. Any way to get back in touch with him?”

“No.”

“No, of course not.” He thought for a moment. “All right, I’ll mention it to somebody. But if this blows up, in some way we can’t see from here, don’t blame me.”

“Why would I?”

“Next time he calls, if he calls, I’ll see him. For God’s sake don’t tell him that, just accept the meeting and leave the rest to me.”

Polanyi leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You see, whatever else happens now, we must not do anything that will compromise the prime minister. Teleki’s our only way out of this mess—that little man’s a knight, Nicholas, a hero. Don’t go telling anyone this, but last week he paid some boys in Budapest to rub garlic on the doors of the foreign office, with a note that said ‘German vampires keep out.’ ”

“Amen,” Morath said. “How could contact with a defector damage Teleki?”

“I won’t know until it’s too late, Nicholas—that’s the way things are done now. Sad, but true.”

Sad, but true for Morath was, on the last day of March, another letter from the préfecture. Once again, Room 24, and six days until the appointment to worry about it. The Roumanians, he guessed, would not go away, but it wasn’t a good guess.

They kept him waiting, outside the inspector’s office, for forty-five minutes. Calculated, he thought, but he felt it working on him anyhow. The inspector hadn’t changed: sitting at attention, square-faced and predatory, cold as ice. “You’ll forgive us for troubling you again,” he said. “A few things we’re trying to clarify.”

Morath waited patiently.

The inspector had all the time in the world. Slowly, he read over a page in the dossier. “Monsieur Morath. Have you, by chance, ever heard of a man called Andreas Panea?”

The name on the passport he’d obtained for Pavlo. He took a moment to steady himself. “Panea?”

“Yes, that’s right. A Roumanian name.”

Why this? Why now? “I don’t believe I know him,” he said.

The inspector made a note in the margin. “Please be certain, monsieur. Think it over, if you like.”

“Sorry,” he said. Graciously.

The inspector read further. Whatever was in there, it was substantial. “And Dr. Otto Adler? Is that name known to you?”

Able this time to tell the truth, Morath was relieved. “Once again,” he said, “someone I don’t know.”

The inspector noted his response. “Dr. Otto Adler was the editor of a political journal—a socialist journal. An émigré from Germany, he came to France in the spring of 1938 and set up an editorial office in his home, in Saint Germain-en-Laye. Then, in June, he was murdered. Shot to death in the Jardin du Luxembourg. A political assassination, no doubt, and these are always difficult to solve, but we pride ourselves on keeping at it. Murder is murder, Monsieur Morath, even in times of—political turmoil.”

The inspector saw it hit home—Morath thought he did. “Once again,” Morath said, regret in his voice, “I don’t believe I can help you.”

The inspector seemed to accept what he’d said. He closed the dossier. “Perhaps you’ll try to remember, monsieur. At your leisure. Something may come back to you.”

Something had.

“If that should be the case,” the inspector went on, “you can always get in touch with me here.”

He called Polanyi. He called Polanyi from the café just across the Seine—the first public telephone you came to when you left the préfecture. They made a living from their neighbor, Morath thought, pushing a jeton into the slot. The refugees were easy to spot—a couple celebrating with wine they couldn’t afford, a bearded man with his head in his hands.

“The count Polanyi is not available this afternoon,” said a voice at the legation. Morath hung up the phone, a woman was waiting to use it. Polanyi would never decline to talk to him, would he?

He went to the Agence Courtmain, but he couldn’t stay there. Saw Mary Day, for a moment. “Everything all right?” she said. He went to the WC and looked in the mirror—what had she seen? He was perhaps a little pale, nothing more. But the difference between Cara at twenty-six and Mary Day at forty, he thought, was that Mary Day understood what the world did to people. Sensed, apparently, that it had done something to Morath.

She didn’t mention it, that evening, but she was immensely good to him. He couldn’t say exactly how. Touched him more than usual, maybe that was it. He was sick at heart, she knew it, but didn’t ask him why. They went to bed, he fell asleep, eventually, woke long before dawn, slid out of bed as quietly as he could and stood at the window, watching the night go by. Nothing you can do, now.

He didn’t get to his apartment until noon of the following day, and the letter was waiting for him there. Hand-delivered, there was no stamp.

A clipping, from the 9 March edition of the newspaper that served the German community in Sofia. He supposed it was in the Bulgarian papers as well, some version of it, but the anonymous sender knew he could read German.

A certain Stefan Gujac, the story went, a Croat, had apparently hanged himself in his cell in a Sofia jail. This Gujac, using the false passport of a deceased Roumanian named Andreas Panea, was suspected by the security agencies of several Balkan countries of having taken part in more than a dozen political assassinations. Born in Zagreb, Gujac had joined the Fascist Ustachi organization and had been arrested several times in Croatia—for agitation and assault—and had served time in jail, three months, for robbing a bank in Trieste.

At the time of his arrest in Sofia, he had been sought for questioning by authorities in Salonika after a café bombing that killed seven people, including E. X. Patridas, an official in the interior ministry, and injured twenty others. In addition, police in Paris had wanted to question Gujac with regard to the killing of a German émigré, editor of a political journal.

Gujac’s arrest in Sofia resulted from the attempted murder, thwarted by an alert police sergeant, of a Turkish diplomat in residence at the Grand Hotel Bulgarie. He had been questioned by Bulgarian police, who suspected the plot against the diplomat had been organized by Zveno, the terrorist gang based in Macedonia.

Gujac, twenty-eight years old, had hanged himself by fashioning a noose from his underwear. Sofia authorities said the suicide remained under investigation.

Polanyi agreed to see him later that afternoon, in the café near the Hungarian legation. Polanyi read his face when he walked in and said, “Nicholas?” Morath wasted no time. Recounted his interrogation at the préfecture, then slid the newspaper clipping across the table.

“I didn’t know,” Polanyi said.

From Morath, a bitter smile.

“At the time it happened, I didn’t know. Whatever you want to believe, that’s the truth. I found out later, but by then the thing was done, and there was no point in telling you. Why? What good would it have done?”

“Not your fault, is that it?”

“Yes. That’s it. This was Von Schleben’s business. You don’t understand what goes on in Germany now—the way power works. They trade, Nicholas, trade in lives and money and favors. The honorable men are gone. Retired mostly, if not murdered or chased out of the country. Von Schleben abides, that’s his nature. He abides, and I deal with him. I must deal with somebody, so I deal with him. Then it’s my turn to trade.”

“A reciprocal arrangement.” Morath’s voice was cold.

“Yes. I assume an obligation, then I pay it off. I’m a banker, Nicholas, and if, at times, a sorrowful banker, so what?”

“So, reluctantly, but owing favors, you organized this killing.”

“No. Von Schleben did that. Maybe it was a favor, a debt he had to pay, I don’t know. Perhaps all he agreed to do was bring this, this thing, to Paris. I can’t say who gave him his instructions once he got here, I don’t know who paid him. Someone in the SS, start there, you’ll find the culprit. Though I suspect you know that long before you find him he’ll find you.”

Polanyi paused a moment, then said, “You see, some days Von Schleben is a king, some days a pawn. Like me, Nicholas. Like you.”

“And what I did in Czechoslovakia? Whose idea was that?”

“Again Von Schleben. On the other side, this time.”

A waiter brought them coffee, the two cups sat untouched. “I’m sorry, Nicholas, and more concerned with this préfecture business than who did what to who last year, but what’s done is done.”

“Done for the last time.”

“Then farewell and Godspeed. I would wish it for myself, Nicholas, but I can’t resign from my country, and that’s what this is all about. We can’t pick up the nation and paste it on Norway. We are where we are, and everything follows from that.”

“Who set the préfecture on me?”

“The same person who sent the clipping. Sombor, both times.”

“You know?”

“You never know. You assume.”

“To gain what?”

“You. And to damage me, who he sees as a rival. That’s true—he’s in the hands of the Arrow Cross, I most decidedly am not. What’s at play here is Hungarian politics.”

“Why send the clipping?”

“It’s not too late, he means. So far, the préfecture knows only this much. Do you want me to tell them the rest? That’s what he’s asking you.”

“I have to do something,” Morath said. “Go away, perhaps.”

“It may come to that. For the moment, you will leave it to me.”

“Why?”

“I owe you at least that much.”

“Why not have Von Schleben deal with it?”

“I could. But are you prepared to do what he asks in return?”

“You know he would?”

“Absolutely. After all, you are already in debt to him.”

“I am? How?”

“Lest you forget, when the Siguranza had you in Roumania, he saved your life.” Polanyi reached across the table and took his hand. “Forgive me, Nicholas. Forgive, forgive. Try and forgive the world for being what it is. Maybe next week Hitler drops dead and we all go out to dinner.”

“And you’ll pay.”

“And I’ll pay.”

In April, the grisaille, the grayness, settled down on Paris as it always did. Gray buildings, gray skies, rain and mist in the long evenings. The artist Shublin had told him, one night in Juan-les-Pins, that in the spring of the year the art-supply stores could not keep the color called Payne’s Gray in stock.

The city didn’t mind its gray—found all that bright and sunny business in late winter a little too cheerful for its comfort. For Morath, life settled into a kind of brooding peace, his fantasy of the ordinary life not so sweet a reality as he liked to imagine. Mary Day embarked on a new novel, Suzette and Suzette Goes Boating now to be followed by Suzette at Sea. A luxury liner, its compass sabotaged by an evil competitor, wandering lost in the tropics. There was to be a licentious captain, a handsome sailor named Jack, an American millionaire, and the oily leader of the ship’s orchestra, all of them scheming, one way or another, for a glimpse of Suzette’s succulent breasts and rosy bottom.

Mary Day wrote for an hour or two every night, on a clackety typewriter, wearing a vast, woolly sweater with its sleeves pushed up her slim wrists. Morath would look up from his book to see her face in odd contortions, lips pressed together in concentration, and schemed for his own glimpse, which was easy to come by when writing was done for the night.

The world on the radio drifted idly toward blood and fire. Britain and France announced they would defend Poland if she was attacked. Churchill stated that “there is no means of maintaining an eastern front against Nazi aggression without the active aid of Russia.” A speaker in the House of Commons said, “If we are going in without the help of Russia, we are walking into a trap.” Morath watched as people read their newspapers in the cafés. They shrugged and turned the page, and so did he. It all seemed to happen in a faraway land, distant and unreal, where ministers arrived at railroad stations and monsters walked by night. Somewhere in the city, he knew, Ilya hid in a tiny room, or, perhaps, he had already been beaten to death in the Lubianka.

The chestnut trees bloomed, white blossoms stuck to the wet streets, the captain peeked through Suzette’s keyhole as she brushed her long blond hair. Léon, the artist from the Agence Courtmain, went to Rome to see his fiancée and returned to Paris with a bruised face and a broken hand. Lucinda, the baroness Frei’s sweetest vizsla, gave birth to a litter of puppies and Morath and Mary Day went to the rue Villon to eat Sacher torte and observe the new arrivals in a wicker basket decorated with silver passementerie. Adolf Hitler celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Under German pressure, Hungary resigned from the League of Nations. Morath went to a shop on the rue de la Paix and bought Mary Day a silk scarf, golden loops and swirls on a background of Venetian red. Wolfi Szubl called, clearly in great distress, and Morath left work and journeyed out to a dark little apartment in the depths of the 14th Arrondissement, on a street where Lenin had once lived in exile.

The apartment smelled like boiled flour and was everywhere corsets. Violet and lime green, pale pink and rose, white and black. A large sample case lay open on the unmade bed.

“Forgive the mess,” Szubl said. “I’m taking inventory.”

“Is Mitten here?”

“Mitten! Mitten’s rich. He’s on location in Strasbourg.”

“Good for him.”

“Not bad. The Sins of Doktor Braunschweig.”

“Which were—”

“Murders. Herbert is stabbed to death in the first ten minutes, so it’s not a big part. With a knitting needle. Still, the money’s good.”

Szubl picked up a typed sheet of yellow paper and ran his finger down the page. “Nicholas, there’s a bustier on the radiator, can you see the name?”

“This?” It was silver, with buttons up the back and garter snaps on the bottom. As Morath looked for the label he thought he smelled lavender bath powder. “Marie Louise,” he said.

Szubl made a check mark on the list.

“Women try these on? The samples?”

“Now and then. Private fittings.” He began to count through a small mound of girdles on the edge of the bed. “I just heard they want to promote me,” he said.

“Congratulations.”

“Disaster.”

“Why?”

“The company is in Frankfurt, I’d have to live in Germany.”

“So turn it down.”

“It’s the son—the old man got old and the son took over. ‘A new day,’ he says. ‘New blood in the home office.’ Anyhow, him I can deal with. This is why I called.”

He took a folded paper from his pocket and handed it to Morath. A letter from the préfecture, summoning Szubl, Wolfgang to Room 24.

“Why this?” Szubl said.

“An investigation—but they don’t know anything. However, they will try to scare you.”

“They don’t have to try. What should I say?”

“Don’t know, wasn’t there, never met him. You aren’t going to make them like you, and don’t start talking to fill up the silence. Sit.”

Szubl frowned, a pink girdle in his hand. “I knew this would happen.”

“Courage, Wolfi.”

“I don’t want to break rocks.”

“You won’t. You’ll have to keep the appointment, this time, because they sent you the letter, it’s official. But it won’t go on. All right?”

Szubl nodded, unhappy and scared.

Morath called Polanyi and told him about it.

Count Janos Polanyi sat in his office in the Hungarian legation. It was quiet—sometimes a telephone, sometimes a typewriter, but the room had its own particular silence, the drapes drawn over the tall windows keeping the weather and the city outside. Polanyi stared down at a stack of cables on his desk, then pushed them aside. Nothing new, or, at least, nothing good.

He poured some apricot brandy in a little glass and drank it down. Closed his eyes for a moment and reminded himself who he was, where he came from. Riders in the high grass, campfires on the plain. Idle dreams, he thought, romantic nonsense, but it was still there, somewhere, rattling around inside him. At least he liked to think it was. In his mind? No, in his heart. Bad science, but good metaphysics. And that, he thought, was pretty much who he’d always been.

Count Janos Polanyi had two personal telephone books, bound in green leather. A big one, which stayed in his office, and a small one, which went wherever he did. It was the small one he opened now, and placed a telephone call to a woman he knew who lived, in very grand style, in an apartment in the Palais Royal. White and fine, was the way he thought of her, like snow.

As the phone rang he looked at his watch. 4:25. She answered, as she always did, after many rings—condescended to answer, from the tone of her voice. There followed an intricate conversation. Oblique, and pleasantly devious. It concerned certain friends she had, women, some a little younger, others more experienced. Some quite outgoing, others shy. Some ate well, while others were slim. So varied, people nowadays. Fair. And dark. From foreign lands, or the 16th Arrondissement. And each with her own definition of pleasure. Miraculous, this world of ours! One was stern, prone to temper. Another was playful, didn’t care what as long as there was a laugh in it.

Eventually, they came to an agreement. A time. And a price.

Business before pleasure. A vile saying. He sighed, stared up at the huge portraits on his wall, Arpad kings and their noble hounds, and had a little more brandy, then a little more. The Magyar chieftan prepares for battle. He mocked himself, an old habit, but then they all did that, an instinct of the national consciousness—irony, paradox, seeing the world inside out, amused by that which was not supposed to be amusing. Likely that was why the Germans didn’t much care for them, Polanyi had always believed. It was the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand who said of the Hungarians, “It was an act of bad taste on the part of these gentlemen ever to have come to Europe.” Well, here they were, whether the neighbors liked it or not.

Polanyi once again looked at his watch. For a few minutes yet he could postpone the inevitable. His evening pleasure was not to arrive until 6:00, he’d put it back an hour later than usual. And speaking of pleasure, business before it. He took a moment and swore merrily, various Hungarian anathemas. Really, why did he have to do this? Why did this Sombor creature have to come swooping down onto his life? But, here he was. Poor Nicholas, he didn’t deserve it. All he wanted was his artists and actors and poets, had thought, in 1918, that he’d done his fighting. And done it well, Polanyi knew, it was there in the regimental history. A hero, his nephew, and a good officer, a miser with the lives of his men.

He put the brandy bottle away in the bottom drawer. Stood, straightened his tie, and left the office, closing the door carefully behind him. He walked along the corridor, past a vase of fresh flowers on a hall table with a mirror behind it. Greeted Bolthos, who hurried past with a courier envelope under his arm, and climbed up a flight on the marble staircase.

The floor above was busier, noisier. The commercial attaché in the first office, then the economic man, then Sombor. Polanyi rapped twice and opened the door. Sombor looked up when he entered and said, “Your excellency.” He was busy writing—transferring jotted notes to a sheet of paper that would be retyped as a report.

“Colonel Sombor,” Polanyi said. “A word with you.”

“Yes, your excellency. In a moment.”

This was pure rudeness, and they both knew it. It was Sombor’s place to rise to his feet, offer a polite greeting, and attempt to satisfy the wishes of a superior. But, he as much as said, the business of state security took precedence. Now and forever. Polanyi could stand there and wait.

Which, for a time, he did.

Sombor’s gold fountain pen scratched across the paper. Like a field mouse in the granary. He made eternal notes, this man with his leather hair and sharp ears. Scratch, scratch. Now where did I put that pitchfork? But he did not have a pitchfork.

Sombor felt it. “I’m sure it must be important, your excellency. I mean to give it my full attention.”

“Please, sir,” Polanyi said, his voice barely under control. “I must tell you that certain confidential information, pertaining to my office, has been made available to the Paris préfecture.”

“Has it. You’re certain?”

“I am. It may have been done directly, or through the services of an informant.”

“Regrettable. My office will definitely take an interest in this, your excellency. Just as soon as we can.”

Polanyi lowered his voice. “Stop it,” he said.

“Well, I must certainly try to do that. I wonder if you would be prepared to address a report to me, on this matter.”

“A report.”

“Indeed.”

Polanyi stepped close to the edge of the desk. Sombor glanced up at him, then went back to writing. Polanyi took a small silver pistol out of his belt and shot him in the middle of the head.

Sombor sprang to his feet, furious, eyes hot with indignation, unaware that a big drop of blood had left his hairline and was trickling down his forehead. “Cur!” he shouted. Leapt into the air, clapped his hands to his head, spun around in a circle, and went crashing backward over his chair. Screamed, turned blue, and died.

Polanyi took the white handkerchief from his breast pocket, wiped off the grip of the pistol, and tossed it on the floor. In the hall, running footsteps.

The police arrived almost immediately, the detectives followed a half hour later. The senior detective questioned Polanyi in his office. Over fifty, Polanyi thought, short and thick, with a small mustache and dark eyes.

He sat across the desk from Polanyi and took notes on a pad. “Monsieur Sombor was, to your knowledge, despondent?”

“Not at all. But I saw him only on official business, and then only rarely.”

“Can you describe, monsieur, exactly what happened?”

“I came to his office to discuss legation business, nothing terribly urgent, in fact I was on my way to see the commercial attaché, and I decided to stop in. We spoke for a minute or two. Then, when I had turned to go, I heard a shot. I rushed to his assistance, but he was gone almost immediately.”

“Monsieur,” the detective said. Clearly he’d missed something. “The last words he spoke, would you happen to recall them?”

“He said good-bye. Before that, he’d asked for a written report on the matter we’d discussed.”

“Which was?”

“Pertained to, to an internal security matter.”

“I see. So, he spoke normally to you, you turned to leave the office, at which time the deceased extended his arm to its fullest length—I’m guessing here, pending a report from the coroner, but the nature of the wound implies, um, a certain distance. Extended his arm to its fullest length, as I said, and shot himself in the top of the head?”

He was on the verge of bursting into laughter, as was Polanyi.

“Apparently,” Polanyi said. He absolutely could not meet the detective’s eyes.

The detective cleared his throat. After a moment he said, “Why would he do that?” It wasn’t precisely a police question.

“God only knows.”

“Do you not consider it,” he searched for a word, “bizarre?”

“Bizarre,” Polanyi said. “Without a doubt.”

There were more questions, all according to form, back over the ground, and back again, but the remainder of the interview was desultory, with the truth in the air, but not articulated.

So then, take me to jail.

No, not for us to be involved in these kinds of politics. Très Balkan, as we say.

And the hell with it.

The inspector closed his notebook, put his pen away, walked to the door, and adjusted the brim of his hat. Standing in the open doorway he said, “He was, of course, the secret police.”

“He was.”

“Bad?”

“Bad enough.”

“My condolences,” the inspector said.

Polanyi arranged for Morath to know about it right away. A telephone call from the legation. “The colonel Sombor has tragically chosen to end his life. Would you care to donate to the fund for floral arrangements?”

The end of April. Late in the evening on the rue Guisarde, the lissome Suzette winding down for the night. Plans to stage a King Neptune ball had inspired the passengers, getting a little grumpy after days of being lost at sea. Even more inspired was Jack the handsome sailor, who’d been kind enough to steady the ladder while Suzette climbed to the top to tack up decorations in the ballroom.

“No underpants?” Morath said.

“She forgot.”

A knock at the door produced Moni. Looking very sorrowful and asking if she could spend the night on the couch.

Mary Day brought out the Portuguese wine and Moni cried a little. “All my fault,” she said. “I stomped out, in the middle of an argument, and Marlene locked the door and wouldn’t let me back in.”

“Well, you’re welcome to stay,” Mary Day said.

“Just for the night. Tomorrow, all will be forgiven.” She drank some wine and lit a Gauloise. “Jealousy,” she said. “Why do I do these things?”

They sent Morath out for more wine and when he returned Moni was on the telephone. “She offered to go to a hotel,” Mary Day told him quietly. “But I asked her to stay.”

“I don’t mind. But maybe she’d prefer it.”

“Money, Nicholas,” Mary Day said. “None of us has any. Really, most people don’t.”

Moni hung up the telephone. “Well, it’s the couch for me.”

The conversation drifted here and there—poor Cara in Buenos Aires, Montrouchet’s difficulties at the Théâtre des Catacombes, Juan-les-Pins—then settled on the war. “What will you do, Nicholas, if it happens?”

Morath shrugged. “I would have to go back to Hungary, I suppose. To the army.”

“What about Mary?”

“Camp follower,” Mary Day said. “He would fight, and I would cook, the stew.”

Moni smiled, but Mary Day met Morath’s eyes. “No, really,” Moni said. “Would you two run away?”

“I don’t know,” Morath said. “Paris would be bombed. Blown to pieces.”

“That’s what everybody says. We’re all going to Tangiers—that’s the plan. Otherwise, doom. Back to Montreal.”

Mary Day laughed. “Nicholas in a djellaba.”

They drank both bottles Morath had brought back and, long after midnight, Moni and Mary Day fell dead asleep lying across the bed and it was Morath who wound up on the couch. He lay there for a long time, in the smoky darkness, wondering what would happen to them. Could they run away somewhere? Where? Budapest, maybe, or New York. Lugano? No. Dead calm by a cold lake, a month and it was over. A Paris love affair, it won’t transplant. They couldn’t live anywhere else, not together they couldn’t. Stay in Paris, then. Another week, another month, whatever it turned out to be, and die in the war.

He had an awful headache the next morning. When he left the apartment, taking the rue Mabillon toward the river, Ilya emerged from a doorway and fell in step with him. He’d changed the green overcoat for a corduroy jacket, in more or less the same shape as the coat.

“Will your friend see me?” he said, his voice urgent.

“He will.”

“Everything has changed, tell him that. Litvinov is finished—it’s a signal to Hitler that Stalin wants to do business.” Litvinov was the Soviet foreign minister. “Do you understand it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Litvinov is a Jewish intellectual—an old-line Bolshevik. Now, for this negotiation, Stalin provides the Nazis with a more palatable partner. Which is perhaps Molotov.”

“If you want to see my friend, you’ll have to say where and when.”

“Tomorrow night. Ten-thirty. At the Parmentier Métro stop.”

A deserted station, out in the 11th Arrondissement. “What if he can’t come?” Morath meant won’t and he sensed Ilya knew it.

“Then he can’t. And I either contact you or I don’t.”

Moving quickly, he turned, walked away, disappeared.

For a time, Morath considered letting it die right there. Suddenly, Ilya knew things. How? This wasn’t hiding in a room with a sack of oats. Could he have been caught? Then made a deal with the NKVD? But Polanyi had said leave it to me. He was no fool, would not go unprotected to a meeting like this. You have to let him decide, Morath thought. Because if the information was real, it meant Hitler didn’t have to worry about three hundred Russian divisions, and that meant war in Poland. This time, the British and the French would have to fight, and that meant war in Europe.

When Morath reached the Agence Courtmain, he called the legation.

“A fraud,” Polanyi said. “We are being used—I don’t exactly understand why, but we are.”

They sat in the backseat of a shiny black Grosser Mercedes, Bolthos in front with the driver. On the sixth day of May, benign and bright under a windswept sky. They drove along the Seine, out of the city at the Porte de Bercy, headed south for the village of Thiais.

“You went alone?” Morath said.

Polanyi laughed. “A strange evening at the Parmentier Métro—heavyset men reading Hungarian newspapers.”

“And the documents?”

“Tonight. Then adieu to comrade Ilya.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter now.” Litvinov had resigned two days earlier.

“No, we must do something. Wake the British up—it’s not too late for the diplomats. I would say that Poland is an autumn project, after the harvest, before the rains.”

The car moved slowly through the village of Alfortville, where a row of dance halls stood side by side on the quai facing the river. Parisians came here on summer nights, to drink and dance until dawn. “Poor soul,” Polanyi said. “Perhaps he drank in these places.”

“Not many places he didn’t,” Bolthos said.

They were on their way to the funeral of the novelist Josef Roth, dead of delirium tremens at the age of forty-four. Sharing the backseat with Polanyi and Morath, a large, elaborate wreath, cream-colored roses and a black silk ribbon, from the Hungarian legation.

“So then,” Morath said, “this fugitive business is just a ruse.”

“Likely it is. Allows the people who sent him to deny his existence, maybe that’s it. Or perhaps just an exercise in the Soviet style—deceit hides deception and who knows what. One thing that does occur to me is that he is being operated by a faction in Moscow, people like Litvinov, who don’t want to do business with Hitler.”

“You will take care, when you see him again.”

“Oh yes. You can be sure that the Nazi secret service will want to keep any word of a Hitler/Stalin negotiation a secret from the British. They would not like us to be passing documents to English friends in Paris.” He paused, then said, “I’ll be glad when this is over, whichever way it goes.”

He seemed tired of it all, Morath thought. Sombor, the Russians, God only knew what else. Sitting close together, the scent of bay rum and brandy was strong in the air, suggesting power and rich, easy life. Polanyi looked at his watch. “It’s at two o’clock,” he said to the driver.

“We’ll be on time, your excellency.” To be polite, he sped up a little.

“Do you read the novels, Nicholas?”

“Radetzky March, more than once. Hotel Savoy. Flight Without End.”

“There, that says it. An epitaph.” Roth had fled from Germany in 1933, writing to a friend that “one must run from a burning house.”

“A Catholic burial?” Morath said.

“Yes. He was born in a Galician shtetl but he got tired of being a Jew. Loved the monarchy, Franz Josef, Austria-Hungary.” Polanyi shook his head. “Sad, sad, Nicholas. He hated the émigré life, drank himself to death when he saw the war coming.”

They arrived at Thiais twenty minutes later, and the driver parked on the street in front of the church. A small crowd, mostly émigrés, ragged and worn but brushed up as best they could. Just before the Mass began, two men wearing dark suits and decorations carried a wreath into the church. “Ah, the Legitimists,” Polanyi said. Across the wreath, a black-and-yellow sash, the colors of the Dual Monarchy, and the single word Otto—the head of the House of Habsburg and heir to a vanished empire. It occurred to Morath that he was witness to the final moment in the life of Austria-Hungary.

In the graveyard by the church, the priest spoke briefly, mentioned Roth’s wife, Friedl, in a mental institution in Vienna, his military service in Galicia during the war, his novels and journalism, and his love of the church and the monarchy. We all overestimated the world, Morath thought. The phrase, written to a friend after Roth fled to Paris, was from an obituary in the morning paper.

After the coffin was lowered into the grave, Morath took a handful of dirt and sprinkled it on top of the pinewood lid. “Rest in peace,” he said. The mourners stood silent while the gravediggers began to shovel earth into the grave. Some of the émigrés wept. The afternoon sun lit the tombstone, a square of white marble with an inscription:

Josef Roth

Austrian Poet

Died in Paris in Exile

On the morning of 9 May, Morath was at the Agence Courtmain when he was handed a telephone message. Please call Major Fekaj at the Hungarian legation. His heart sank a little—Polanyi had told him, on the way back from Thiais, that Fekaj now sat in Sombor’s office, his own replacement due from Budapest within the week.

Morath put the message in his pocket and went off to a meeting in Courtmain’s office. Another poster campaign—a parade, a pageant, the ministries preparing to celebrate, in July, the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the revolution of 1789. After the meeting, Courtmain and Morath treated a crowd from the agency to a raucous lunch in an upstairs room at Lapérouse, their own particular answer to the latest valley in the national morale.

By the time he got back to the avenue Matignon, Morath knew he had to call—either that or think about it for the rest of the day.

Fekaj’s voice was flat and cold. He was a colorless man, precise, formal, and reserved. “I called to inform you, sir, that we have serious concerns about the well-being of his excellency, Count Polanyi.”

“Yes?” Now what.

“He has not been seen at the legation for two days and does not answer his telephone at home. We want to know if you, by any chance, have been in contact with him.”

“No, not since the sixth.”

“Did he, to your knowledge, have plans to go abroad?”

“I don’t think he did. Perhaps he’s ill.”

“We have called the city hospitals. There is no record of admission.”

“Have you gone to the apartment?”

“This morning, the concierge let us in. Everything was in order, no indication of . . . anything wrong. The maid stated that his bed had not been slept in for two nights.” Fekaj cleared his throat. “Would you care to tell us, sir, if he sometimes spends the night elsewhere? With a woman?”

“If he does he doesn’t tell me about it, he keeps the details of his personal life to himself. Have you informed the police?”

“We have.”

Morath had to sit down at his desk. He lit a cigarette and said, “Major Fekaj, I don’t know how to help you.”

“We accept,” Fekaj hesitated, then continued. “We understand that certain aspects of Count Polanyi’s work had to remain—out of view. For reasons of state. But, should he make contact with you, we trust that you will at least let us know that he is, safe.”

Alive, you mean. “I will,” Morath said.

“Thank you. Of course you’ll be notified if we hear anything further.”

Morath held the receiver in his hand, oblivious to the silence on the line after Fekaj hung up.

Gone.

He called Bolthos at his office, but Bolthos didn’t want to speak on the legation telephone and met him, just after dark, in a busy café.

“I spoke to Fekaj,” Morath said. “But I had nothing to tell him.”

Bolthos looked haggard. “It’s been difficult,” he said. “Impossible. Because of our atrocious politics, we’re cursed with separate investigations. Officially, the nyilas are responsible, but any real work must be done by Polanyi’s friends. Fekaj and his allies won’t involve themselves.”

“Where do you think he is?”

A polite shrug. “Abducted.”

“Murdered?”

“In time.”

After a moment Bolthos said, “He wouldn’t jump off a bridge, would he?”

“Not him, no.”

“Nicholas,” Bolthos said. “You’re going to have to tell me what he was doing.”

Morath paused, but he had no choice. “On Tuesday, the sixth, he was supposed to meet a man who said he had defected from the Soviet special services, which Polanyi did not believe. He didn’t run, according to Polanyi, he was sent. But, even so, he came bearing information that Polanyi thought was important—Litvinov’s dismissal, a negotiation between Stalin and Hitler. So Polanyi met him and agreed to a second, a final meeting. Documents to be exchanged for money, I suspect.

“But, if you’re looking for enemies you can’t stop there—you have to consider Sombor’s colleagues, certainly suspicious of what went on at the legation, and capable of anything. And you can’t ignore the fact that Polanyi was in touch with the Germans—diplomats, spies, Wehrmacht staff officers. And he also had some kind of business with the Poles; maybe Roumanians and Serbs as well, a potential united front against Hitler.”

From Bolthos, a sour smile. “But no scorned mistress, you’re sure of that.”

They sat in silence while the café life swirled around them. A woman at the next table was reading with a lorgnette, her dachshund asleep under a chair.

“That was, of course, his work,” Bolthos said.

“Yes. It was.” Morath heard himself use the past tense. “You think he’s dead.”

“I hope he isn’t, but better that than some dungeon in Moscow or Berlin.” Bolthos took a small notebook from his pocket. “This meeting, will you tell me where it was supposed to take place?”

“I don’t know. The first meeting was at the Parmentier Métro station. But in my dealings with this man he was careful to change time and location. So, in a way, the second meeting would have been anywhere but there.”

“Unless Polanyi insisted.” Bolthos flipped back through the notebook. “I’ve been working with my own sources in the Paris police. On Tuesday, the sixth, a man was shot somewhere near the Parmentier Métro station. This was buried among all the robberies and domestic disturbances, but there was something about it that caught my attention. The victim was a French citizen, born in Slovakia. Served in the Foreign Legion, then discharged for political activity. He crawled into a doorway and died on the rue Saint-Maur, a minute or so away from the Métro.”

“A phantom,” Morath said. “Polanyi’s bodyguard—is that what you think? Or maybe his assassin. Or both, why not. Or, more likely, nobody, caught up in somebody’s politics on the wrong night, or killed for a ten-franc piece.”

Bolthos closed the notebook. “We have to try,” he said. He meant he’d done the best he could.

“Yes. I know,” Morath said.

Temetni Tudunk, a Magyar sentiment, complex and ironic: How to bury people, that is one thing we know. It was Wolfi Szubl who said the words, at a Hungarian nightclub in the cellar of a strange little hotel out in the 17th Arrondissement. Szubl and Mitten, the baroness Frei escorted by a French film producer, Bolthos and his wife and her cousin, Voyschinkowsky and Lady Angela Hope, the artist Szabo, the lovely Madame Kareny, various other strays and aristocrats who had floated through Janos Polanyi’s complicated life.

It wasn’t a funeral—there was no burial, thus Szubl’s ironic twist on the phrase, not even a memorial, only an evening to remember a friend. “A difficult friend”—Voyschinkowsky said that, an index finger wiping the corner of his eye. There was candlelight, a small Gypsy orchestra, platters of chicken with paprika and cream, wine and fruit brandy, and, yes, it was said more than once as the evening wore on, Polanyi would have liked to be there. During one of the particularly heartbreaking songs, a pale, willowy woman, supremely, utterly Parisienne and rumored to be a procuress who lived in the Palais Royal, stood in front of the orchestra and danced with a shawl. Morath sat beside Mary Day and translated, now and then, what was said in Hungarian.

They drank to Polanyi, wherever he is tonight, meaning heaven or hell. “Or maybe Palm Beach,” Herbert Mitten said. “I guess there’s nothing wrong in thinking that if you care to.”

The bill came to Morath at two in the morning, on a silver tray, with a grand bow from the patron. Voyschinkowsky, thwarted in his attempt to pay for the evening, insisted on taking Morath and Mary Day home in his chauffeur-driven Hispano-Suiza automobile.

We have to try, Bolthos had said it for both of them. Which meant, for Morath, one obvious but difficult strand, really the only one he knew, in what must have been a vast tangle of shadowy connections.

He went up to the Balalaika the following afternoon and drank vodka with Boris Balki.

“A shame,” Balki said, and drank “to his memory.”

“Looking back, maybe inevitable.”

“Yes, sooner or later. This type of man lives on borrowed time.”

“The people responsible,” Morath said, “are perhaps in Moscow.”

A certain delicacy prevented Balki from saying what he felt about that, but the reaction—Balki looked around to see who might be listening—was clear to Morath.

“I wouldn’t even try to talk to them, if I were you,” Balki said.

“Well, if I thought it would help.”

“Once they do it, it’s done,” Balki said. “Fated is fated, Slavs know all about that.”

“I was wondering,” Morath said. “What’s become of Silvana?”

“Living high.” Balki was clearly relieved to be off the subject of Moscow. “That’s what I hear.”

“I want to talk to Von Schleben.”

“Well . . .”

“Can you do it?”

“Silvana, yes. The rest is up to you.”

Then, the last week in May, Morath received a letter, on thick, creamy paper, from one Auguste Thien, summoning him to the Thien law offices in Geneva “to settle matters pertaining to the estate of Count Janos von Polanyi de Nemeszvar.”

Morath took the train down from Paris, staring out at the green and gold Burgundian countryside, staying at a silent Geneva hotel that night, and arriving at the office, which looked out over Lac Leman, the following morning.

The lawyer Thien, when Morath was ushered into his office by a junior member of the staff, turned out to be an ancient bag of bones held upright only by means of a stiff, iron-colored suit. He had a full head of wavy silver hair, parted in the middle, and skin like parchment. “Your excellency,” the lawyer said, offering his hand. “Will you take a coffee? Something stronger?”

Morath took the coffee, which produced the junior member carrying a Sèvres service, countless pieces of it, on an immense tray. Thien himself served the coffee, his breathing audible as he worked.

“There,” he said, when Morath at last had the cup in his hands.

On the desk, a metal box of the kind used in safe-deposit vaults. “These papers comprise a significant proportion of the Polanyi de Nemeszvar estate,” Thien said, “which, according to my instructions, now, in substance, pass to you. There are provisions made for Count Polanyi’s surviving family, very generous provisions, but the greatest part of the estate is, as of this date, yours. Including, of course, the title, which descends to the eldest surviving member of the male line—in this case the son of Count Polanyi’s sister, your mother. So, before we proceed to more technical matters, it is my privilege to greet you, even in a sad hour, as Nicholas, Count Morath.”

Slowly, he stood and came around the desk to shake Morath’s hand.

“Perhaps I’m ignorant of the law,” Morath said, when he’d sat back down, “but there is, to my knowledge, no death certificate.”

“No, there is not.” A cloud crossed Thien’s face. “But our instructions preclude the necessity for certification. You should be aware that certain individuals, in their determination of a final distribution of assets, may presuppose, well, any condition they choose. It is, at least in Switzerland, entirely at their discretion. We are in receipt of a letter from the Paris préfecture, an attestation, which certifies, to our satisfaction, that the legator has been officially declared a missing person. This unhappy eventuality was, in fact, foreseen. And this office, I will say, is known for the most scrupulous adherence to a client’s direction—no matter what it might entail. You have perhaps heard of Loulou the circus elephant? No? Well, she now lives in splendid retirement, on a farm near Coimbra, in compliance with the wishes of the late Senhor Alvares, former owner of the Circus Alvares. In his last will and testament, he did not forget this good-natured beast. And she will, one might say, never forget Senhor Alvares. And this law firm, Count Morath, will never forget Loulou.”

The lawyer Thien smiled with satisfaction, took from his drawer a substantial key, opened the metal box, and began to hand Morath various deeds and certificates.

He was, he learned, very rich. He’d known about it, in a general way—the Canadian railroad bonds, the estates in Slovakia, but here it was in reality. “In addition,” Thien said, “there are certain specified accounts held in banks in this city that will now come into your possession—my associate will guide you in completing the forms. You may elect to have these funds administered by any institution you choose, or they can remain where they are, in your name, with payment instructions according to your wishes.

“This is, Count Morath, a lot to absorb in a single meeting. Are there, at present, any points you would care to have clarified?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Then, with your permission, I will add this.”

He took from his drawer a sheet of stationery and read aloud. “ ‘A man’s departure from his familiar world may be inevitable, but his spirit lives on, in the deeds and actions of those who remain, in the memories of those left behind, his friends and family, whose lives may reflect the lessons they have learned from him, and that shall become his truest legacy.’ ”

After a pause, Thien said, “I believe you should find comfort in those words, your excellency.”

“Certainly I do,” Morath said.

Bastard. You’re alive.

On his return to Paris there was, of course, an ascension-to-the-title party, attended, as it happened, solely by the count and the countess presumptive. The latter provided, from the patisserie on the corner, a handsome cake, on top of which, in consultation with the baker’s wife and aided by a dictionary, a congratulatory phrase in Hungarian was rendered in blue icing. This turned out to be, when Morath read it, something like Good Feelings Mister Count, but, given the difficulty of the language, close enough. In addition—shades of Suzette!—Mary Day had pinned paper streamers to the wall of the apartment, though, unlike Jack the handsome sailor, Morath had not been there to steady the ladder. Still, he saw far more than Jack was ever going to and got to lick frosting off the countess’s nipples in the bargain.

There followed a night of adventure. At three, they stood at the window and saw the moon in a mist. Across the rue Guisarde, a man in an undershirt leaned on his windowsill and smoked a pipe. A spring wind, an hour later, and the scent of fields in the countryside. They decided they would go to the Closerie de Lilas at dawn and drink champagne, then she fell asleep, hair plastered to her forehead, mouth open, sleeping so peacefully he didn’t have the heart to wake her.

They went to the movies that night, at one of the fancy Gaumont theatres over by the Grand Hotel. The loveliest fluff, Morath thought. A French obsession—how passion played itself out into romantic intrigue, with everybody pretty and well dressed. His beloved Mary Day, hardheaded as could be in so many ways, caved in completely. He could feel it, sitting next to her, how her heart beat for a stolen embrace.

But in the lobby on the way out, all chandeliers and cherubs, he heard a young man say to his girlfriend, “Tout Paris can fuck itself blue in the face, it won’t stop Hitler for a minute.”

Thus the Parisian mood that June. Edgy but resilient, it fought to recover from the cataclysms—Austria, Munich, Prague—and tried to work its way back to normalcy. But the Nazis wouldn’t leave it alone. Now there was Danzig, with the Poles giving as good as they got. Every morning it lay waiting in the newspapers: customs officers shot, post offices burned, flags pulled down and stomped into the dirt.

And not all that much better in Hungary. Quieter, maybe. The parliament had passed new anti-Semitic laws in May, and when Morath was solicited by Voyschinkowsky for a subscription to a fund for Jews leaving the country, he wrote out a check that startled even “the Lion of the Bourse.” Voyschinkowsky raised his eyebrows when he saw the number. “Well, this is terribly generous of you, Nicholas. Are you sure you want to do all that much?”

He was. He’d had a letter from his sister. Life in Budapest, Teresa said, was “spoiled, ruined.” All the talk of war, suicides, an incident during a performance of Der Rosenkavalier. “Nicholas, even at the opera.” Duchazy was up to “God only knows what.” Plots, conspiracies. “Last Tuesday, the phone rang twice after midnight.”

He took Mary Day to afternoon tea at the baroness Frei’s house, the official celebration of summer’s arrival in the garden. The stars of the show were two roses that spread across the brick walls that enclosed the terrace: Madame Alfred Carrière, white flowers touched with pale pink—“a perfect noisette,” the baroness told Mary Day, “planted by the baron with his own hands in 1911”—and Gloire de Dijon, soft yellow with tones of apricot.

The baroness held court in an ironwork garden chair, scolding the vizslas as they agitated for forbidden morsels from the guests and beckoning her friends to her side. Seated next to her was an American woman called Blanche. She was the wife of the cellist Kolovitzky, a vivid blonde with black eyebrows, tanned skin from a life spent by Hollywood pools, and an imposing bosom on a body that should have been Rubenesque but was forced to live on grapefruit and toast.

“Darling Nicholas,” the baroness called out to him. “Come and talk to us.”

As he headed toward her, he saw Bolthos in the crowd and acknowledged his glance with a friendly nod. He was, for a moment, tempted to say something of his suspicions but immediately thought better of it. Silence, he told himself.

Morath kissed Lillian Frei on both cheeks. “Nicholas, have you met Blanche? Bela’s wife?”

“That’s Kolovitzky, not Lugosi,” the woman said with a laugh.

Morath laughed politely along with her as he took her hand. Why was this funny?

“At the Christmas party,” Morath said. “Is good to see you again.”

“She was at the Crillon,” Baroness Frei said. “But I made her come and stay with me.”

Kolovitzky’s wife started to talk to Morath in English, while Morath tried to follow along as best he could. The baroness saw that he was lost and began to translate into Hungarian, holding Blanche’s right hand tightly in her left and moving both hands up and down for emphasis as the conversation continued.

This was, Morath saw right away, a bad, potentially fatal, case of money madness. On the death of an aunt in Johannesburg, the cellist who scored Hollywood films had inherited two apartment houses in Vienna. “Nothing fancy, you know, but solid. Respectable.”

Kolovitzky’s friends, his lawyer, and his wife had all laughed at the absurdity of Kolovitzky going back to Austria to claim the inheritance. Kolovitzky laughed right along with them, then flew to Paris and took a train to Vienna.

“He was poor as a child,” Blanche said. “So money is never enough for him. He goes around the house and turns off the lights.”

She paused, found a handkerchief in her purse, and dabbed at her eyes. “Excuse me,” she said. “He went to Vienna three weeks ago, he’s still there. They won’t let him out.”

“Did someone encourage him to come?”

“See? He knows,” Blanche said to the baroness. “A scoundrel, a lawyer in Vienna. ‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ he said in his letter. ‘You’re an American, it won’t be a problem.’ ”

“He’s a citizen?”

“He’s got papers as a resident alien. I had a letter from him, at the Crillon, and the story was that once he gave them the buildings—that lawyer’s in cahoots with the Nazis, that’s what’s going on—he thought they’d let him go home. But maybe it isn’t so simple.”

The baroness stopped dead on cahoots, and Blanche said, “I mean, they’re all in it together.”

“Did he go to the American embassy?”

“He tried. But they don’t interest themselves in Jews. Come back in July, they told him.”

“Where is he, in Vienna.”

She opened her purse and brought out a much-folded letter on thin paper. “He says here,” she hunted for her glasses and put them on, “says here, the Schoenhof. Why I don’t know—he was at the Graben, which he always liked.” She read further and said, “Here. He says, ‘I have put the buildings, for tax purposes, in Herr Kreml’s name.’ That’s the lawyer. ‘But they tell me that further payments may be required.’ Then he says, ‘I can only hope it will be acceptable, but please speak with Mr. R. L. Stevenson at the bank and see what can be done.’ That too is odd, because there is no Mr. Stevenson, not that I know about.”

“They won’t let him out,” the baroness said.

“May I have the letter?” Morath said.

Blanche handed it to him, and he put it in his pocket.

“Should I send money?”

Morath thought it over. “Write and ask him how much he needs and when he’ll be coming home. Then say that you’re annoyed, or show it, with how he’s always getting into trouble. Why can’t he learn to respect the rules? The point is, you’ll bribe, but the bribe has to work, and you’ll say later that it was all his fault. They’re sensitive about America, the Nazis, they don’t want stories in the newspapers.”

“Nicholas,” the baroness said. “Can anything be done?”

Morath nodded. “Maybe. Let me think it over.”

The baroness Frei looked up at him, eyes blue as the autumn sky.

Blanche started to thank him, and had already said too much and was about to mention money when the baroness intervened.

“He knows, darling, he knows,” she said gently. “He has a good heart, Count Nicholas.”

*

Seen from a private box in the grandstand, the lawns of Longchamps racetrack glowed like green velvet. The jockeys’ silks were bright in the sunshine, scarlet and gold and royal blue. Silvana tapped the end of a pencil against a racing form. “Coup de Tonnerre?” she said. Thunderbolt. “Was that the gray one with the long tail? Horst? Do you remember?”

“I think it was,” Von Schleben said, peering at the program. “Pierre Lavard is riding, and they let him win once a day.” He read further. “Or maybe Bal Masqué. Who do you like, Morath?”

Silvana looked at him expectantly. She wore a print silk dress and pearls, her hair now expensively styled.

“Coup de Tonnerre,” Morath said. “He took a third place, the last time he ran. And the odds are attractive.”

Von Schleben handed Silvana a few hundred francs. “Take care of it for us, will you?” Morath also gave her money. “Let’s try Count Morath’s hunch.”

When she’d gone off to the betting windows, Von Schleben said, “Too bad about your uncle. We had good times together, but that’s life.”

“You didn’t hear anything, did you? After it happened?”

“No, no,” Von Schleben said. “Into thin air.”

As the horses were walked to the starting line, there were the usual difficulties, a starter’s assistant leaping out of the way to avoid being kicked.

“There’s a lawyer in Vienna I’d like to get in touch with,” Morath said. “Gerhard Kreml.”

“Kreml,” Von Schleben said. “I don’t think I know him. What is it that interests you?”

“Who he is. What kind of business he does. I think he has connections with the Austrian party.”

“I’ll see what I can do for you,” Von Schleben said. He handed Morath a card. “Call me, first part of next week, if you haven’t heard anything. Use the second number, there, on the bottom.”

The race began, the horses galloping in a tight pack. Von Schleben raised a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses to his eyes and followed the race. “Take the rail, idiot,” he said. The horses’ hooves drummed on the grass. At the halfway point, the jockeys began to use their whips. “Ach scheiss!” Von Schleben said, lowering the glasses.

“This Kreml,” Morath said. “He has a client in Vienna, a friend of a friend, who seems to be having tax problems. There’s a question of being allowed to leave the country.”

“A Jew?”

“Yes. A Hungarian musician, who lives in California.”

“If he pays the taxes there should be no problem. Of course, there are special situations. And if there are, irregularities, well, the Austrian tax authority can be infernally slow.”

“Shall I tell you who it is?”

“No, don’t bother. Let me find out first who you’re dealing with. Everything in Vienna is—a little more complicated.”

The winners of the race were announced. “Too bad,” Von Schleben said. “Maybe better luck next time.”

“I would hope.”

“By the way, there’s a man called Bolthos, at the legation. Friend of yours?”

“Yes. An acquaintance, anyhow.”

“I’ve been trying to get in touch with him, but he’s hard to get hold of. Very occupied, I suppose.”

“Why don’t I have him call you?”

“Could you?”

“I’ll ask him.”

“I’d certainly appreciate it. We have interests in common, here and there.”

Silvana returned. Morath could see she’d freshened her lipstick. “I’ll be on my way,” he said.

“Expect to hear from me,” Von Schleben said. “And again, I’m sorry about your uncle. We must hope for the best.”

Shoes off, sleeves rolled back, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine by his side, Morath stretched out on the brown velvet sofa and read and reread Kolovitzky’s letter.

Mary Day, wrapped in one towel with another around her head, came fresh from her bath, still warm, and sat by his side.

“Who is R. L. Stevenson?” Morath said.

“I give up, who is he?”

“It’s in this letter. From Kolovitzky, who played the violin at the baroness’s Christmas party. He managed to get himself trapped in Vienna, and they allowed him to write to his wife—just once, I think, there won’t be another, to see if they can get anything more out of him before they throw him in a canal.”

“Nicholas!”

“I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”

“The name is in the letter?”

“Code. Trying to tell his wife something.”

“Oh, well, then it’s the writer.”

“What writer?”

“Robert Louis Stevenson.”

“Who’s that?”

“He wrote adventure novels. Terrifically popular—my father had all the books, read them when he was growing up.”

“Such as?”

“Treasure Island.” She unwound the towel from her head and began drying her hair. “You’ve never heard of it?”

“No.”

“Long John Silver the pirate, with a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder. Avast there, maties! It’s about a cabin boy, and buried treasure.”

“I don’t know,” he mused. “What else?”

“The Master of Ballentrae?”

“What happens there?”

She shrugged. “Never read it. Oh, also Kidnapped.”

“That’s it.”

“He’s telling her he’s been kidnapped?”

“Held for ransom.”

8:30 P.M. The Balalaika was packed, smoky and loud, the Gypsy violins moaning, the customers laughing, and shouting in Russian, the man down the bar from Morath weeping silently as he drank. Balki glanced at him and shook his head. “Kabatskaya melankholia,” he said, mouth tight with disapproval.

“What’s that?”

“A Russian expression—tavern melancholy.”

Morath watched while Balki made up a diabolo, a generous portion of grenadine, then the glass filled with lemonade. Balki looked at his watch. “My relief should be here.”

A few minutes later, the man showed up, and Balki and Morath headed for a bar up in the place Clichy. Earlier, during a lull in business, Morath had laid out the details of Kolovitzky’s letter, and the two of them had discussed strategy, coming up with the plan that couldn’t go wrong and what to do once it did.

In the bar, Balki greeted the owner in Russian and asked him if they could use the telephone.

“Maybe we should go to the railroad station,” Morath said.

“Save yourself the trip. Half the White Russians in Paris use this phone. Mercenaries, bomb throwers, guys trying to put the czar back on the throne, they all come here.”

“The czar is dead, Boris.”

Balki laughed. “Sure he is. So?”

Morath asked for the international operator and got the call through to Vienna almost immediately. The phone rang for a long time, then a man said, “Hotel Schoenhof.”

“Good evening. Herr Kolovitzky, please.”

The line hissed for a moment, then the man said, “Hold on.”

Morath waited, then a different voice, sharp and suspicious, said, “Yes? What do you want with Kolovitzky?”

“I just want to talk to him for a minute.”

“He’s busy right now, can’t come to the phone. Who’s calling?”

“Mr. Stevenson. I’m in Paris at the moment, but I might come over to Vienna next week.”

“I’ll tell him you called,” the man said, and hung up.

He called Von Schleben from the Agence Courtmain. A secretary said he wasn’t available, but, a few minutes later, he called back. “I have the information you wanted,” he said. “Gerhard Kreml is a small-time lawyer, basically crooked. Barely made a living until the Anschluss, but he’s done very well since then.”

“Where is he located?”

“He has a one-room office in the Singerstrasse. But he’s not your problem, your problem is an Austrian SS, Sturmbannführer Zimmer. He and Kreml have a swindle going where they arrest Jews who still have something left to steal. I suspect your friend was lured back to Vienna, and I should also tell you that his chances of getting out are not good.”

“Is there anything you can do?”

“I don’t think they’ll give him up—maybe if it was Germany I could help. Do you want me to try? There would have to be a quid pro quo, of course, and even then there’s no guarantee.”

“What if we pay?”

“That’s what I would do. You have to understand, in dealing with Zimmer you’re dealing with a warlord. He isn’t going to let somebody come into his territory and just take away what belongs to him.”

Morath thanked him and hung up.

“Liebchen.”

Wolfi Szubl said it tenderly, gratefully. Frau Trudi turned at the wall, gave him a luscious smile, and walked across the room, her immense behind and heavy thighs wobbled as she swung her hips. When she reached the end of the room, she turned again, leaned toward him, shook her shoulders, and said, “So, what do you see?”

“Paradise,” Wolfi said.

“And my discount?”

“Big discount, liebchen.”

“Yes?” Now her face beamed with pleasure. Even her hair is fat, he thought. A curly auburn mop, she’d brushed it out after wriggling into the corset, and it bounced up and down, with all the glorious rest of her, as she walked for him.

“I take all you have, Wolfi. The Madame Pompadour. My ladies will swoon.”

“Not just your ladies. What is that I see? Did you drop something, over there?”

“Did I? Oh dear.” Hands on hips, she walked like a model on the runway, a shoulder thrust forward with every step, chin high, mouth set in a stylish pout. “Two dozen? Sixty percent off?”

“You read my mind.”

At the wall, she bent over and held the pose. “I don’t see anything.”

Szubl rose from his chair, came up behind her and began to unsnap the tiny buttons. When he was done, she ran to the bed with baby steps and lay on her stomach with her chin propped on her hands.

Szubl began to undo his tie.

“Wolfi,” she said softly. “Not a day goes by I don’t think about you.”

Szubl took off his underpants and twirled them around his finger.

The apartment was above her shop, also Frau Trudi, on the Prinzstrasse, next to a bakery, and the smell of cookies in the oven drifted up through the open window. A warmish day in Vienna, the beastly Föhn not blowing for a change, Frau Trudi’s canary twittering in its cage, everything peaceful and at rest. By now it was twilight, and they could hear the bell on the door of the shop below them as the customers went in and out.

Frau Trudi, damp and pink after lovemaking, nestled against him. “You like it here, Wolfi? With me?”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“You could stay for a while, if you liked.”

Wolfi sighed. If only he could. “I wonder,” he said, “if you know anybody who needs to make a little money. Maybe one of your ladies has a husband who’s out of work.”

“What would he have to do?”

“Not much. Lend his passport to a friend of mine for a week or so.”

She propped herself on her elbow and looked down at him. “Wolfi, are you in trouble?”

“Not me. The friend pays five hundred American dollars for the loan. So I thought, well, maybe Trudi knows somebody.”

He watched her. Fancied he could hear the ring of a cash-register drawer as she converted the dollars into schilling. “Maybe,” she said. “A woman I know, her husband could use it.”

“How old?”

“The husband?” She shrugged. “Forty-five, maybe. Always problems—she comes to me for a loan, sometimes.”

“Is it possible tonight?”

“I suppose.”

“I’ll give you the money now, Liebchen, and I’ll stop by tomorrow night for the passport.”

28 June. A fine day with bright sunshine, but not a ray of it reached the hunting lodge. Three stories, thirty rooms, a grand hall, all sunk in dark, musty gloom. Morath and Balki had hired a car in Bratislava and driven up into the wooded hills north of the Danube. They were in historical Slovakia—Hungarian territory since 1938—and only a few miles from the Austrian border.

Balki looked around him in a kind of dispirited awe—trophy heads on every wall, their glass eyes glittering in the forest light. Tentatively, he settled himself on the leather cushion of a huge wooden chair with hunting scenes carved into the high back.

“Where giants sat,” he said.

“That’s the idea.”

The old empire lived on, Morath thought. One of the baroness’s pet aristocrats had agreed to loan him the hunting lodge. “So very private,” he’d said with a wink. It was that. In the Little Carpathians, thick with pines, by a rushing brook that wound past the window and a picturesque waterfall that foamed white over a dark outcropping.

Balki wandered about, gazing up at the terrible paintings. Sicilian maidens caught as they filled amphorae from little streams, Gypsy girls with tambourines, a dyspeptic Napoleon with his hand on a cannon. At the far end of the room, between the stuffed heads of a bear and a tusky wild boar, he stood before a gun cabinet and tapped his fingers on the oiled stock of a rifle. “We’re not going to play with these, are we?”

“We are not.”

“No cowboys and Indians?”

Emphatically, Morath shook his head.

There was even a telephone. Of a sort—easy to imagine Archduke Franz Ferdinand calling his taxidermist: a wooden box on the kitchen wall, with the earpiece on a cord and a black horn in the center into which one could speak. Or shout, more likely. Morath lifted the earpiece from the cradle, heard static, put it back, looked at his watch.

Balki took off his workman’s cap and hung it on an antler. “I’ll come along if you like, Morath.”

That was pure bravery—a Russian going into Austria. “Guard the castle,” Morath said. “Enough that you took vacation days for this, you don’t have to get arrested in the bargain.”

Once again, Morath looked at his watch. “Well, let’s try it,” he said. He lit a cigarette, put the telephone receiver to his ear and tapped the cradle. From the static, an operator speaking Hungarian.

“I’d like to book a call to Austria,” Morath said.

“I can get through right away, sir.”

“In Vienna, 4025.”

Morath heard the phone, a two-ring signal. Then: “Herr Kreml’s office.”

“Is Herr Kreml in?”

“May I say who’s calling?”

“Mr. Stevenson.”

“Hold the line, please.”

Kreml was on right away. A smooth, confident, oily voice. Saying that it was good of him to call. Morath asked after Kolovitzky’s health.

“In excellent spirits!” Well, perhaps a little, how to say, oppressed, what with his various tax difficulties, but that could soon be put right.

“I’m in contact with Madame Kolovitzky, here in Paris,” Morath said. “If the paperwork can be resolved, a bank draft will be sent immediately.”

Kreml went on a little, lawyer’s talk, then mentioned a figure. “In terms of your American currency, Herr Stevenson, I think it would be in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars.”

“The Kolovitzkys are prepared to meet that obligation, Herr Kreml.”

“I’m so pleased,” Kreml said. “And then, in a month or so, once the draft has been processed by our banks, Herr Kolovitzky will be able to leave Austria with a clear conscience.”

“A month, Herr Kreml?”

“Oh, at least that, the way things are here.” The only way to expedite matters, Kreml said, would be to use a rather obscure provision of the tax code, for payments in cash. “That would clear things up immediately, you see.”

Morath saw. “Perhaps the best way,” he said.

Well, that was up to the Kolovitzkys, wasn’t it. “Herr Stevenson, I do want to compliment you on your excellent German. For an American . . .”

“Actually, Herr Kreml, I was born in Budapest, as Istvanagy. So, after I emigrated to California, I changed it to Stevenson.”

Ah! Of course!

“I will speak with Madame Kolovitzky, Herr Kreml, but please be assured that a cash payment will reach you within the week.”

Kreml was very pleased to hear that. They chattered on for a time. The weather, California, Vienna, then started to say good-bye.

“Oh yes,” Morath said, “there is one more thing. I would very much like to have a word with Herr Kolovitzky.”

“Naturally. Do you have the number of the Hotel Schoenhof?”

“I called there—he seems always to be unavailable.”

“Really? Well, you know, that doesn’t surprise me. An amiable man, Herr Kolovitzky, makes friends everywhere he goes. So, I would suppose he’s in and out, being entertained, sitting in the pastry shops. Have you left a message?”

“Yes.”

“Then what’s the problem? He’ll call you back, the minute he gets a chance. Then too, Herr Stevenson, the telephone lines between here and Paris—it can be difficult.”

“Likely that’s it.”

“I must say good-bye, Herr Stevenson, but I look forward to hearing from you.”

“Be certain that you will.”

“Good-bye, Herr Stevenson.”

“Good-bye, Herr Kreml.”

They drove to Bratislava the next morning, where Morath meant to take the train to Vienna, but it was not to be. Chaos at Central Station, crowds of stranded travelers, all the benches taken, people out on Jaskovy Avenue, sitting on their suitcases. “It’s the Zilina line,” the man at the ticket window explained. All passenger trains had been canceled to make way for flatbed cars carrying Wehrmacht tanks and artillery, moving east in a steady stream. Morath and Balki stood on the platform and stared, in the midst of a silent crowd. Two locomotives pulled forty flatbeds, the long snouts of the guns thrust out from beneath canvas tarpaulins. Twenty minutes later, a trainload of horses in cattle cars, then a troop train, soldiers waving as they went by, a message chalked beneath the coach windows—We’re going to Poland to beat up the Jews.

The town of Zilina lay ten miles from the Polish frontier. It would have a hospital, a hotel for the general staff, a telephone system. Morath’s heart sank as he watched the trains—this was hope slipping away. It could be intimidation, he thought, a feint, but he knew better. Here was the first stage of an invasion—these were the divisions that would attack from Slovakia, breaking through the Carpathian passes into southern Poland.

Morath and Balki walked around Bratislava, drank beer at a café, and waited. The city reminded Morath of Vienna in ’38—Jewish shop windows smashed, Jew Get Out! painted on building walls. The Slovakian politicians hated the Czechs, invited Hitler to protect them, then discovered that they didn’t like being protected. But it was too late. Here and there somebody had written pro tento krat on the telephone poles, for the time being, but that was braggadocio and fooled nobody.

Back in the station restaurant, Morath sat with his valise between his feet, ten thousand dollars in Austrian schilling packed inside. He asked a waiter if the Danube bridge was open—in case he decided to drive across, but the man looked gloomy and shook his head. “No, you cannot use it,” he said, “they’ve been crossing for days.”

“Any way into Austria?”

“Maybe at five they let a train through, but you have to be on the platform, and it will be—very crowded. You understand?”

Morath said he did.

When the waiter left, Balki said, “Will you be able to get back out?”

“Probably.”

Balki nodded. “Morath?”

“Yes?”

“You’re not going to get yourself killed, are you?”

“I don’t think so,” Morath said.

The train wasn’t due for another two hours, so he used a telephone in the station to place a call to Paris. He had to wait twenty minutes, then the call went through to the Agence Courtmain. The receptionist, after several tries, found Mary Day at a meeting in Courtmain’s office.

“Nicholas!” she said, “Where are you?” She wasn’t exactly sure what he was doing. “Some family business,” he’d told her, but she knew it was more than that.

“I’m in Bratislava,” he said.

“Bratislava. How’s the weather?”

“Sunny. I wanted to tell you that I miss you.”

After a moment she said, “Me too, Nicholas. When are you coming back?”

“Soon, a few days, if all goes well.”

“It will, won’t it? Go well?”

“I think so, you don’t have to worry. I thought I’d call, to say I love you.”

“I know,” she said.

“I guess I have to go, there are people waiting to use the phone.”

“All right. Good-bye.”

“A few days.”

“The weekend.”

“Oh yes, by then.”

“Well, I’ll see you then.”

“Good-bye, Mary.”

The waiter had been right about the passenger train. It pulled in slowly, after six-thirty, people jammed in everywhere. Morath forced his way on, using his strength, smiling and apologizing, making a small space for himself on the platform of the last car, hanging on to a metal stanchion all the way to Vienna.

He called Szubl at his hotel, and they met in a coffeehouse, the patrons smoking and reading the papers and conversing in polite tones. A city where everyone was sad and everyone smiled and nothing could be done—it had always seemed that way to Morath and it was worse than ever that summer night in 1939.

Szubl handed him an envelope, and Morath used the edge of the table for cover and looked at the passport photo. An angry little man glared up at him, mustache, glasses, nothing ever goes right.

“Can you fix it?” Szubl said.

“Yes. More or less. I took a photo from some document his wife had with her, I can paste it in. But, with any luck at all, I won’t need it.”

“Did they look at your bag, at the border?”

“Yes. I told them what the money was for, then they went through everything else. But it was just the usual customs inspectors, not SS or anything.”

“I took out the stays out of a corset. You still want them?”

“Yes.”

Szubl handed him an envelope, hotel stationery. Morath put it in his pocket. “When are getting out of here?”

“Tomorrow. By noon.”

“Make sure of that, Wolfi.”

“I will. What about the passport?”

“Tell her your friend lost it. More money for Herr X, and he can just go and get another.”

Szubl nodded, then stood up. “I’ll see you back in Paris, then.”

They shook hands, and Morath watched him leave, heavy and slow, even without the sample case, a folded newspaper under one arm.

“Would you go once around the Mauerplatz?”

“If you like.” The taxi driver was an old man with a cavalry mustache, his war medals pinned to the sun visor.

“A sentimental journey,” Morath explained.

“Ah, of course.”

A small, cobbled square, people strolling on a warm evening, old linden trees casting leafy shadows in the light of the streetlamps. Morath rolled the window down and the driver took a slow tour around the square.

“A lady and I stayed here, a few years ago.”

“At the Schoenhof?”

“Yes. Still the same old place?”

“I would think. Care to get out and take a look? I don’t mind.”

“No, I just wanted to see it again.”

“So, now to the Landstrasse?”

“Yes. The Imperial.”

“Come to Vienna often?”

“Now and again.”

“Different, this past year.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. Quiet, thank God. Earlier we had nothing but trouble.”

8:15. He would try one last time, he decided, and made the call from a phone in the hotel lobby.

“Hotel Schoenhof.”

“Good evening. This is Doktor Heber, please connect me with Herr Kolovitzky’s room.”

“Sorry. Herr Kolovitzky is not available.”

“Not in his room?”

“No. Good night, Herr Doktor.”

“This is urgent, and you will give him a message. He took some tests, at my clinic here in Währing, and he must return, as soon as possible.”

“All right, I’ll let him know about it.”

“Thank you. Now, would you be so kind as to call the manager to the phone?”

“I’m the manager.”

“And you are?”

“The manager. Good night, Herr Doktor.”

The next morning, Morath bought a briefcase, put the money and his passport inside, explained to the desk clerk that he would be away for a week, paid for his room until the following Thursday, and had the briefcase put in the hotel safe. From the art dealer in Paris he had a new passport—French, this time. He returned to his room, gave his valise a last and very thorough search, and found nothing out of the ordinary. Then he took a taxi to the Nordbahnhof, had a cup of coffee in the station buffet, then went outside and hailed a taxi.

“The Hotel Schoenhof,” he told the driver.

In the lobby, only men.

Something faintly awkward in the way they were dressed, he thought, as though they were used to military uniform. SS in civilian clothing. Nobody saluted or clicked his heels, but he could sense it—the way their hair was cut, the way they stood, the way they looked at him.

The man behind the desk was not one of them. The owner, Morath guessed. In his fifties, soft and frightened. He met Morath’s eyes for a moment longer than he needed to. Go away, you don’t belong here.

“A room, please,” Morath said.

One of the young men in the lobby strolled over and leaned on the desk. When Morath looked at him, he got a friendly little nod in return. Not at all unpleasant, he was just there to find out who Morath was and what he wanted. No hard feelings.

“Single or double?” the owner said.

“A single. On the square, if you have it.”

The owner made a show of looking at his registration book. “Very well. For how long, please?”

“Two nights.”

“Your name?”

“Lebrun.” Morath handed over the passport.

“Will you be taking the demi-pension?”

“Yes, please.”

“Dinner is served in the dining room. At seven promptly.”

The owner took a key from a numbered hook on a board behind him. Something odd about the board. The top row of hooks, he saw, had no keys. “403,” the owner said. “Would you like the porter to take your valise up?” His hand hovered over a bell.

“I can manage,” Morath said.

He walked up four flights of stairs, the carpet old and frayed. Just a commercial hotel, he thought. Like hundreds in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, anywhere one went. He found 403 and unlocked the door. An edelweiss pattern on the limp curtains and the coverlet on the narrow bed. Pale green walls, hushed, still air. Very quiet in this hotel.

He decided to take a walk, let them have a look at his valise. He handed the key to the owner at the desk and went out onto the Mauerplatz. At a newsstand he glanced at the headlines. POLAND THREATENS BOMBARDMENT OF DANZIG! Then bought a sport magazine, youths playing volleyball on the cover. A genteel neighborhood, he thought. Sturdy, brick apartments, women with baby carriages, a trolley line, a school where he could hear children singing, a smiling grocer in the doorway of his store, a little man who looked like a weasel sitting at the wheel of a battered Opel. Back at the Schoenhof, Morath retrieved his key and walked upstairs, past the fourth floor, up to the fifth. In the corridor, a heavy man with a red face sat on a chair tipped back against the wall. He stood when he saw Morath.

“What do you want up here?”

“I’m in room 403.”

“Then you’re on the wrong floor.”

“Oh. What’s up here?”

“Reserved,” the man said, “get moving.”

Morath apologized and hurried away. Very close, he thought. Ten rooms on the fifth floor, Kolovitzky was a prisoner in one of them.

Three in the morning. Morath lay on the bed in the dark room, sometimes a breeze from the Mauerplatz moved the curtains. Otherwise, silence. After dinner there’d been a street musician on the square, playing an accordion and singing. Then he’d listened to the radio on the night table, Liszt and Schubert, until midnight, when the national radio station went off the air. Not completely off the air—they played the ticking of a metronome until dawn. To reassure people, it was said.

Morath gazed at the ceiling. He’d been lying there for three hours with nothing to do but wait, had thought about almost everything he could think of. His life. Mary Day. The war. Uncle Janos. He missed Polanyi, it surprised him how much. Echézeaux and bay rum. The amiable contempt he felt for the world he had to live in. And his final trick. Here, you try it.

He wondered about the other guests in the hotel—the real ones, not the SS. They’d been easy enough to spot in the dining room, trying to eat the awful dinner. He’d mostly pushed noodles from one side of his plate to the other, kept an eye on the waiter, and figured out how the downstairs worked. As for the guests, he believed they would survive. Hoped they would.

From a church, somewhere in the neighborhood, the single chime for the half hour. Morath sighed and swung his legs off the bed. Put on his jacket, pulled his tie up. Then he took the stays from the envelope Szubl had given him. Celluloid. Made of soluble guncotton and camphor.

He took a deep breath and slowly turned the knob on his door, listened for twenty seconds, and stepped out into the hallway. He descended the staircase one slow step at a time. Somebody coughing on the third floor, a light under a door on the second.

A few steps from the bottom—the reception area—he stared out into the gloom. There had to be a guard. Where? Finally, he made out part of a silhouette above the back of a couch and heard the shallow breathing that meant light sleep. Morath moved cautiously around the newel post at the foot of the staircase, entered the dining room, then the hallway where the waiter had appeared and disappeared during dinner.

Finally, the kitchen. He lit a match, looked around, then blew it out. There was a streetlamp in the alley, not far from the windows, enough light for Morath to see what he was doing. He found the sinks—big, heavy tubs made of gray zinc—knelt on the floor below them and ran his fingertips over the cement. Found the grease trap, realized he’d have trouble prying up the lid, and abandoned the idea.

Next he tried the stove, and here he found what he needed. In a cabinet next to the oven door, a large metal can that had once contained lard was now used to store the grease poured from cooking pans. It was surprisingly heavy, maybe twenty pounds of yellow, rancid fat, mostly congealed, with an inch or so of oil floating on top. Sausages, butter, bacon, he thought. Roast goose.

He looked around, saw an iron ring above the stove where implements were hung, carefully removed a giant ladle, and served up a heaping scoop of thick fat. Took a handful, and smeared it on the wooden countertop. Worked it onto the walls and the window frames and the doors of the cabinets. Then he laid the can on its side in one corner, sunk the corset stays halfway into the fat, lit a match, and tossed it in.

The celluloid caught immediately; a hot, white flash, then the fat sputtered to life and a little river of liquid fire ran across the floor and began to burn its way up the wall. A few moments later, he saw the ceiling start to turn black.

Now he had to wait. He found a broom closet by the entrance to the kitchen, stepped inside, and closed the door. Barely room for him in there, he discovered. He counted eleven brooms. What the hell were they doing with so many brooms?

He told himself to stay calm, but the crackling sound from the kitchen and the smell of fire made his pulse race. Tried to count to a hundred and twenty, as he’d planned, but he never got there. He did not mean to die in a Viennese broom closet. He threw the door open and hurried down the hallway through a haze of oily smoke.

He heard a shout from the guard in the lobby, then another. Christ, there’d been two of them in there. “Fire!” he yelled as he ran up the stairs. He could hear doors opening, running footsteps.

Second floor. Third floor. Now he had to trust that the Austrian SS guards changed shifts like everybody else. Halfway up the stairs to the fifth floor he started yelling, “Police! Police!”

A bullet-headed man in his shirtsleeves came charging down the corridor, a Luger in his hand. “What’s happening?”

“Open these doors. The hotel’s on fire.”

“What?” The man backed up a step. Open the doors?

“Hurry up. You have the keys? Give them to me. Go, now, run, for God’s sake!”

“I have to—”

Morath the policeman had no time for him. Grabbed him by the shirt and ran him down the hall. “Go wake up your officers. Now. We don’t have time for monkey business.”

That, for whatever reason, did it. The man shoved the Luger into a shoulder holster and went bounding down the steps, shouting “Fire!” as he went.

Morath started opening doors—the room numbers, thank God, were on the keys. The first room was empty. In the second, one of the SS men, who sat up in bed and stared at Morath in terror. “What? What is it?”

“The hotel’s on fire. You better get out.”

“Oh.”

Relieved that it was only the hotel on fire. What had he thought?

There was smoke in the hallway. The SS man trotted past, wearing candy-striped pajamas and carrying a machine pistol by its strap. Morath found another empty room, then, next door, Kolovitzky, struggling to open the window.

“Not like that,” Morath said. “Come with me.”

Kolovitzky turned toward him. He wasn’t the same man who’d played the violin at the baroness’s party, this man was old and tired and frightened, wearing suspenders and a soiled shirt. He studied Morath’s face—was this some new trick, one they hadn’t tried on him yet?

“I came here for you,” Morath said. “I burned down this hotel for you.”

Kolovitzky understood. “Blanche,” he said.

“Are they holding anyone else up here?”

“There were two others, but they left yesterday.”

Now they heard sirens and they ran, coughing, hands over mouths, down the stairs through the rising smoke.

The street in front of the Schoenhof was utter confusion. Fire engines, firemen hauling hoses into the hotel, policemen, crowds of onlookers, a man wearing only a blanket, two women in bathrobes. Morath guided Kolovitzky across the Mauerplatz, then a little way down a side street. As they approached, the driver of a battered Opel started his car. Kolovitzky got in the backseat, Morath in front.

“Hello, Rashkow,” Morath said.

“Who is he?” Kolovitzky asked, later that morning, while Rashkow watered a tree by the roadside.

“He’s from Odessa,” Morath said. Poor little Rashkow, Balki had called him, who’d sold Russian railroad bonds and Tolstoy’s unfinished novel and wound up in a Hungarian prison. Morath had gone to Sombor to get him out of jail. “He used to sell Russian bonds.”

“The way he looks,” Kolovitzky said. “He should come to Hollywood.”

Rashkow drove on farm roads through the Austrian countryside. A day in July, the beets and potatoes sprouting bright green in the rolling fields. It was only forty miles to the Hungarian border at Bratislava. Or Pressburg, if you liked, or Pozsony. In the backseat, Kolovitzky stared at the Austrian passport with his photo in it. “Do you think they’re looking for me?”

“Of course they are.”

They stopped well short of the Danube bridge, in Petrzalka, once a Czech border point, now in the Slovakian Protectorate. Abandoned the car. Went to a rented room above a café, where all three changed into dark suits. When they came downstairs, a Grosser Mercedes with Hungarian diplomatic registration was waiting for them, driven by the chauffeur of one of Bolthos’s diplomatic colleagues in Budapest.

There was a swarm of Austrian SS gathered at the border crossing, smoking, laughing, strutting about in their high, polished boots. But the chauffeur ignored them. Rolled to a smooth stop at the customs building, handed four passports out the window. The border guard put a finger to the visor of his cap, glanced briefly into the car, then handed them back.

“Welcome home,” the chauffeur said to Kolovitzky, as they crossed to the Hungarian side of the river.

Kolovitzky wept.

A midnight supper on the rue Guisarde.

Mary Day knew the trains were late, crossing Germany, so she’d planned for it. She set out a plate of sliced ham, a vegetable salad, and a baguette. “And this was delivered yesterday,” she said, taking a bottle of wine from the cupboard and a corkscrew from the kitchen drawer. “You must have ordered it by telephone,” she said. “Very thoughtful of you, in the middle of—whatever it was, to think of us.”

A 1922 Echézeaux.

“It’s what you wanted?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling.

“You are really very good, Nicholas,” she said. “Really, you are.”