Kingdom of Shadows

VON SCHLEBEN’S WHORE

The Bar of the Balalaika,a little after three, the dusty, tired air of a nightclub on a spring afternoon. On the stage were two women and a man, dancers, in tight black clothing, harassed by a tiny Russian wearing a pince-nez, hands on hips, stricken with all the hopelessness in the world. He closed his eyes and pressed his lips together, a man who’d been right about everything since birth. “To leap like a Gypsy,” he explained, “is to leap like a Gypsy.” Silence. All stared. He showed them what he meant, shouting “Hah!” and throwing his arms into the air. He thrust his face toward them. “You, love, life!”

Boris Balki was leaning on his elbows, the stub of a blunt pencil stuck behind his ear, a half-completed crossword puzzle in a French newspaper spread out on the bar. He looked up at Morath and said, “Ca va?”

Morath sat on a stool. “Not too bad.”

“What can I get for you?”

“A beer.”

“Pelforth all right?”

Morath said it was. “Have one with me?”

Balki’s eyebrow raised a fraction as he got the bottles from beneath the counter. He opened one and poured the beer into a tilted glass.

Morath drank. Balki filled his own glass, looked down at his puzzle, flipped the page, took a look at the headlines. “Why I keep buying this rag I don’t know.”

Morath read the name upside down. It was one of the friskier Parisian weeklies: sexy gossip, risque cartoons, photos of lurid chorus girls, pages of racing news from Auteuil and Longchamps. His name had once, to his shame and horror, appeared in it. Just before he met Cara he’d been going around with a second-rank movie star, and they’d called him “the Hungarian playboy Nicky Morath.” There’d been neither a duel nor a lawsuit but he’d considered both.

Balki laughed. “Where do they get this stuff? ‘There are currently twenty-seven Hitlers locked up in Berlin insane asylums.’ “

“And one to go.”

Balki flipped the page, took a sip of his beer, read for a few moments. “Tell me, you’re Hungarian, right?”

“Yes.”

“So, it says here, now you have a law against the Jews.”

The last week in May, the Hungarian parliament had passed a law restricting Jewish employment in private companies to twenty percent of the workforce.

“Shameful,” Morath said. “But the government had to do something, something symbolic, or the Hungarian Nazis would have staged a coup d’etat.”

Balki read further. “Who is Count Bethlen?”

“A conservative. Against the radical right.” Morath didn’t mention Bethlen’s well-known definition of the anti-Semite as “one who detests the Jews more than necessary.”

“His party fought the law,” Balki said. “Alongside the liberal conservatives and the Social Democrats. ‘The Shadow Front,’ they call it here.”

“The law is a token,” Morath said. “Nothing more. Horthy brought in a new prime minister, Imredy, to get a law passed and quiet the lunatics, otherwise-”

From the stage, a record of Gypsy violins. One of the woman dancers, a ginger blonde, raised her head to a haughty angle, held a hand high, and snapped her fingers. “Yes,” the tiny Russian cried out. “That’s good, Rivka, that’s Tzigane!” He made his voice husky and dramatic and said, “What man will dare to take me.” Morath, watching the dancer, could see how hard she was trying.

“And the Jews?” Balki said, raising his voice above the music. “What do they think?”

“They don’t like it. But they see what’s going on in Europe, and they can look at a map. Somehow the country has to find a way to survive.”

Disgusted, Balki flipped back to the crossword and took the pencil from behind his ear. “Politics,” he said. Then, “a wild berry?”

Morath thought it over. “Maybe fraise des bois?”

Balki counted the spaces. “Too long,” he said.

Morath shrugged.

“And you? What do you think?” Balki said. He was back to the new law.

“Of course I’m against it. But one thing we all know is that if the Arrow Cross ever takes power, then it will be like Germany. There will be another White Terror, like 1919. They’ll hang the liberals, the traditional right, and the Jews. Believe me, it will be like Vienna, only worse.” He paused a moment. “Are you Jewish, Boris?”

“I sometimes wonder,” Balki said.

It wasn’t an answer Morath expected.

“I grew up in an orphanage, in Odessa. They found me with the name ‘Boris’ pinned to a blanket. ‘Balki’ means ditch-that’s the name they gave me. Of course, Odessa, almost everybody’s something. Maybe a Jew or a Greek or a Tartar. The Ukrainians think it’s in the Ukraine, but people in Odessa know better.”

Morath smiled, the city was famously eccentric. In 1920, when French, Greek, and Ukrainian troops occupied Odessa during the civil war, the borders of the zones of occupation were marked by lines of kitchen chairs.

“I basically grew up in the gangs,” Balki said. “I was a Zakovitsa. Age eleven, a member of the Zakovits gang. We controlled the chicken markets in the Moldavanka. That was mostly a Jewish gang. We all had knives, and we did what we had to do. But, for the first time in my life, I had enough to eat.”

“And then?”

“Well, eventually the Cheka showed up. Then they were the only gang in town. I tried going straight, but, you know how it is. Zakovits saved my life. Got me out of bed one night, took me down to the dock, and put me on a Black Sea freighter.” He sighed. “I miss it sometimes, bad as it was.”

They drank their beer, Balki working on the puzzle, Morath watching the dance rehearsal.

“It’s a hard world,” Morath said. “Take, for instance, the case of a friend of mine.”

Balki looked up. “Always in difficulties, your friends.”

“Well, that’s true. But you have to try and help them out, if you can.”

Balki waited.

“This one friend of mine, he has to do business with the Germans.”

“Forget it.”

“If you knew the whole story, you’d be sympathetic, believe me.” He paused, but Balki was silent. “You lost your country, Boris. You know what that feels like. We’re trying not to lose ours. So it’s what you just said, we’re doing what we have to do. I’m not going to be a conard and offer you money, but there is money in this, for somebody. I can’t believe you won’t put them in the way of it. At least, find out what the offer is.”

Balki softened. Everybody he knew needed money. There were women, out in Boulogne where the Russian emigres lived, going blind from doing contract embroidery for the fashion houses. He gestured with his hands, helpless. Je m’en fous-I’m fucked no matter what happens.

“Old story. German officer in Paris, needs girlfriend.”

Balki was offended. “Someone told you I was a pimp?”

Morath shook his head. It’s not like that.

“Tell me,” Balki said. “Who are you?” He meant, what are you?

“Nicholas Morath. I’m in the advertising business. You can look me up in the telephone book.”

Balki finished his beer. “Oh, all right.” He gave in, more to some fate he thought he had than to Morath. “What’s the rest of it.”

“Pretty much as I said.”

“Monsieur Morath-Nicholas, if you don’t mind-this is Paris. If you want to fuck a camel, all it takes is a small bribe to the zookeeper. Whatever you want to do, any hole you can think of and some you can’t, it’s up in Pigalle, out in Clichy. For money, anything.”

“Yes, I know. But, remember what happened to Blomberg and Fritsch”-two generals Hitler had gotten rid of, one accused of a homosexual affair, the other married to a woman rumored to have been a prostitute. “This officer can’t be seen to have a mistress. Boris, I don’t know the man, but my friend tells me he has a jealous wife. They both come from stodgy old Catholic families in Bavaria. He can be ruined. Still, here he is in Paris, it’s everywhere, it’s all around him, in every cafe, on every street. So he’s desperate to arrange something, a liaison. But it must be discreet. For the woman, for the woman who, tells absolutely nobody and understands what’s at stake without being told too much and makes him happy in the bargain, there’s a monthly arrangement. Five thousand francs a month. And, if everybody’s satisfied, more over time.”

That was a lot of money. A schoolteacher earned twenty-five hundred francs a month. Balki’s face changed, Morath saw it. No more Boris the bartender. Balki the Zakovitsa.

“I don’t handle the money.”

“No.”

“Then maybe,” Balki said. “Let me think it over.”

Juan-les-Pins, 11 June.

Her breasts, pale in the moonlight.

Late at night, Cara and her friend Francesca, holding hands, laughing, rising naked from the sea, shining with water. Morath sat on the sand, his pants rolled to midcalf, feet bare. Next to him, Simon something, a British lawyer, said, “My God,” awed at the Lord’s work running up the beach toward them.

They came down here every year, around this time, before the people showed up. To what they called “Juan.” Where they lived by the sea in a tall, apricot-colored house with green shutters. In the little village where you could buy a Saint-Pierre from the fishermen when the boats returned at midday.

Cara’s crowd. Montrouchet from the Theatre des Catacombes, accompanied by Sloth. A handsome woman, ingeniously desirable. Montrouchet called her by her proper name, but to Morath she was Sloth and always would be. They stayed at the Pension Helga, up in the pine forest above the village. Francesca was from Buenos Aires, from the Italian community in Argentina, the same as Cara, and lived in London. Then there was Mona, known as Moni, a Canadian sculptor with an apartment in Paris, and the woman she lived with, Marlene, who made jewelry. Shublin, a Polish Jew who painted fire, Ilsa, who wrote small novels, and Bernhard, who wrote poems about Spain. And others, a shifting crowd, friends of friends or mysterious strangers, who rented little cabins in the pines or took cheap rooms at the Hotel de la Mer or slept under the stars.

Morath loved the Cara of Juan-les-Pins, where the warm air heated her excessively. “We will be up very late tonight,” she would say, “so we will have to rest this afternoon.” A wash in the sulphurous, tepid water that trickled into the rust-stained tub, then sweaty, inspired love on the coarse sheet. Half asleep, they lay beneath the open window, breathing the pine resin on the afternoon wind. At dusk, the cicadas started, and went on until dawn. Sometimes they would take a taxi up to the restaurant on the moyenne corniche above Villefranche, where they brought you bowls of garlicky tapenade and pancakes made of chickpea flour and then, finding you at peace with the world and unable to eat another bite, dinner.

Too proud and Magyar for beach sandals, Morath ran to the sea at noon, burning his feet on the hot pebbles, then treading water and staring out at the flat horizon. He would stay there a long time, numb as a stone, as happy as he ever got, while Cara and Francesca and their friends stretched out on their towels and glistened with coconut oil and talked.

“Half past eight in Juan-les-Pins, half past nine in Prague.” You heard that at the Bar Basque, where people went in the late afternoon to drink white rum. So the shadow was there, darker on some days, lighter on others, and if you didn’t care to take measurements for yourself, the newspapers would do it for you. Going to the little store for a Nice Matin and a Figaro, Morath joined the other addicts, then went to a cafe. The sun was fierce by nine in the morning, the shade of the cafe umbrella cool and secret. “According to Herr Hitler,” he read, ” ‘The Czechs are like bicycle racers-they bow from the waist but down below they never stop kicking.’ ” In June, that was the new, the fashionable, place for the war to start, Czechoslovakia. The Volksdeutsch of the old Austrian provinces, Bohemia and Moravia-the Sudetenland-demanded unification with the Reich. And the incidents, the fires, the assassinations, the marches, were well under way.

Morath turned the page.

Spain was almost finished now-you had to go to page three. The Falange would win, it was only a matter of time. Off the coast, British freighters, supplying Republican ports, were being sunk by Italian fighter planes flying from bases in Majorca. Le Figaro had reproduced a British editorial cartoon: Colonel Blimp says, “Gad sir, it is time we told Franco that if he sinks another 100 British ships, we shall retire from the Mediterranean altogether.”

Morath looked out to sea, a white sail in the distance. The fighting was heavy seventy kilometers north of Valencia, less than a day’s drive from the cafe where he drank his coffee.

Shublin had gone to Spain to fight, but the NKVD kicked him out. “The times we live in,” he said at the Bar Basque one evening. “The rule of the invertebrates.” He was in his thirties, with curly blond hair, a broken nose, and tobacco-stained fingers with oil paint under the nails. “And King Adolf will sit on the throne of Europe.”

“The French will smash him.” Bernhard was German. He had marched in a Communist demonstration in Paris and now he couldn’t go home.

“Still,” said Simon the lawyer. The others looked at him, but he wasn’t going to make a speech. A sad smile, that was it.

The table was at the edge of the dance floor, which was liberally dusted with sand and pine needles brought in by the wind. It blew hard off the sea, smelled like a jetty at low tide, and fluttered the tablecloths. The little band finished playing “Le Tango du Chat” and started up on “Begin the Beguine.”

Bernhard turned to Moni. “You have danced this ‘Beguine’?”

“Oh yes.”

“You have?” Marlene said.

“Yes.”

“When was that?”

“When you weren’t there to see.”

“Oh yes? And when was that?”

“Dance with me, Nicky,” Sloth said and took him by the arm. They did something not unlike a fox-trot, and the band-Los Tres Hermanos was printed in script on the bass drum-slowed down to accomodate them. She leaned against him, heavy and soft. “Do you stay up late, when you’re here?”

“Sometimes.”

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

They danced for a time.

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

“Mm.”

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

“Yes?”

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

“Not really.”

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

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

“Can’t you tell?”

“Truly?”

“Yes, truly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paris. 15 June.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is just …” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morath said he did.

“The Paris papers?”

“Sometimes Figaro, when they have it.”

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

“I read some of it.”

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

“For the time being.”

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

“Business as usual.”

“Yes.”

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

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

“Not yet.”

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

Morath thought it over.

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

“Mine?”

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

“Szubl and Mitten.”

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

“I’ll ask them,” Morath said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Very romantic,” Mitten said.

“Very clandestine, anyhow,” said Szubl.

Mitten said, “What are they, prominent?”

“Cautious,” Morath said. “And rich.”

“Ah.”

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

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

“For the five hundred, you know better.”

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

“It isn’t spying.”

“We get put against a wall.”

Morath shook his head.

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

“Love affair,” Morath said.

“Six hundred,” Mitten said.

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

“Furniture!”

“What kind of love affair is this?”

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

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

“But very private.”

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

“And then, one afternoon, Fragonard!”

Morath was impressed. “It’s perfect.”

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

“Tres chic,” Szubl said.

“And the landlord’s in prison.”

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

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

“Well, Morath, here it is!”

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

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

“Who’s your friend?”

“Laszlo.”

“Nice Hungarian name.”

“Nice Hungarian man.”

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

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

“Or the atelier. I have to think it over.”

They left the apartment and walked downstairs. Morath headed toward the street door but Mitten took his elbow. “Let’s go the other way.”

Morath followed, through a door at the opposite end of the hallway, across a narrow courtyard in perpetual shadow, then through another door and down a corridor where several men and women were talking and smoking cigarettes.

“Where the hell are we?”

“The Galeries. But not the part the public sees. It’s where the clerks go for a cigarette. Sometimes it’s used for deliveries.”

They came to another door, Szubl opened it and they were on the street floor of the department store, amid crowds of well-dressed people carrying packages.

“Need anything?” Szubl said.

“Maybe a tie?”

“Salauds!” Morath was smiling.

“Laszlo wants twenty-five hundred.”

Balki called him a week later.

“Perhaps you’d like to meet a friend of mine.”

Morath said he would.

“So tomorrow. At the big cafe on the rue de Rivoli, by the Palais Royal Metro. Around four. She’ll be wearing flowers-you’ll know who she is.”

“Four o’clock.”

“Her name is Silvana.”

“Thank you, Boris,” Morath said.

“Sure,” Balki said, his voice hard. “Any time.”

The cafe was exceptionally neutral ground; tourists, poets, thieves, anybody at all could go there. On a steaming day in July, Silvana wore a dark suit with a tiny corsage pinned to the lapel. Back straight, knees together, legs angled off to one side, face set in stone.

Morath had very good manners-not once in his life had he remained seated when a woman came to a table. And a very good heart, people tended to know that about him right away. Even so, it did not go easily between them. He was pleased to meet her, he said, and went on a little, his voice quiet and cool and far more communicative than whatever words it happened to be saying. I know how hard life can be. We all do the best we can. There is nothing to fear.

She was not unattractive-that was the phrase that occurred to him when he first saw her. Thirty-five or so, with brass-colored hair that hung limp around her face, an upturned nose, generous lips, and olive, slightly oily skin. Not glamorous particularly, but sulky, that kind of looks. Prominent breasts, very pert in a tight sweater, narrow waist, hips not too wide. From somewhere around the Mediterranean, he guessed. Was she Marseillaise? Maybe Greek, or Italian. But cold, he thought. Would Von Schleben actually make love to her? For himself, he wouldn’t, but it was impossible to know what other people liked in bed.

“Well then,” he said. “An aperitif? A Cinzano-would that be good? With glacons-we’ll drink like Americans.”

She shook a stubby Gauloise Bleue loose from its packet and tapped the end on her thumbnail. He lit a match for her, she cupped the back of his hand with hers, then blew out the flame. “Thank you,” she said. She inhaled eagerly, then coughed.

The drinks came-there was no ice. Looking over Silvana’s shoulder, he happened to notice that a little man seated at a corner table was watching her. He had thin hair combed flat and wore a bow tie, which made him look like-Morath had to search for it-the American comedian Buster Keaton. He met Morath’s eyes for a moment, then went back to reading his magazine.

“My friend is German,” Morath said. “A gentleman. From the nobility.”

She nodded. “Yes, Balki told me.”

“He would like you to join him for dinner, tomorrow night, at the Pre Catalan. At 8:30. Of course he’ll send his car for you.”

“All right. I stay at a hotel on the rue Georgette, in Montparnasse.” She paused. “It’s just the two of us?”

“No. A large dinner party, I believe.”

“And where did you say?”

“Pre Catalan. In the Bois de Boulogne. It’s very fin-de-siecle. Champagne, dancing till dawn.”

Silvana was amused. “Oh,” she said.

Morath explained about Szubl and Mitten, the apartment, the money. Silvana seemed a little detached, watching the smoke rise from the end of her cigarette. They had another Cinzano. Silvana told him she was Roumanian, from Sinaia. She’d come to Paris in the winter of ‘36 with “a man who made a living playing cards.” He’d gotten into some sort of trouble, then disappeared. “I expect he’s dead,” she said, then smiled. “Of course, with him you never know.” A friend found her a job in a shop, selling candy in a confiserie, but it didn’t last. Then, down on her luck, she’d been hired as the hatcheck girl at the Balalaika. She shook her head ruefully. “Quelle catastrophe.” She laughed, exhaling Gauloise smoke. “I couldn’t do it at all, and poor Boris got the blame.”

It was the end of the afternoon, cool and dark beneath the arches that covered the rue de Rivoli. The cafe was jammed with people and very loud. A street musician showed up and started to play the concertina. “I think I’ll go home,” Silvana said. They stood and shook hands, then she unchained a bicycle from the lamppost on the corner, climbed on, waved to Morath, and pedaled away into traffic.

Morath ordered a scotch.

An old woman came around, selling newspapers. Morath bought a Paris-Soir to see what was at the movies. He was going to spend the evening by himself. The headlines were thick and black: GOVERNMENT DECLARES COMMITMENT TO DEFEND CZECHOSLOVAKIA “INDISPUTABLE AND SACRED.”

The little man who looked like Buster Keaton left the cafe, giving Morath a glance as he went. Morath thought, for a moment, that he’d nodded. But, if it happened at all, it was very subtle, or, more likely, it was just his imagination.

Juillet, Juillet. The sun hammered down on the city and the smell of the butcher shops hung like smoke in the dead air.

Morath retreated to the Agence Courtmain, not the first time he’d sought refuge there. On the run from summer, on the run from Uncle Janos and his politics, on the run from Cara, lately consumed by vacation manias. The sacred mois d’Aout approached-one either went to the countryside or hid in one’s apartment and didn’t answer the phone. What troubled Cara was, should they go to the baroness Frei up in Normandy? Or to her friend Francesca and her boyfriend, in Sussex? It wasn’t the same, not at all, and one had to shop.

At Agence Courtmain they had big black fans that blew the heat around, and sometimes a breeze from the river worked its way up avenue Matignon and leaked in the window. Morath sat with Courtmain and his copy chief in her office, staring at a tin of cocoa.

“They have plantations in Africa, at the southern border of the Gold Coast,” the copy chief said. Her name was Mary Day-a French mother and an Irish father. She was close to Morath’s age and had never married. One line of gossip had it that she was religious, formerly a nun, while another speculated that she made extra income by writing naughty novels under a pen name.

Morath asked about the owner.

“It’s a big provincial family, from around Bordeaux. We deal with the general manager.”

“A Parisian?”

“Colonial,” Courtmain said. “Pied-noir, with barbered whiskers.”

The tin had a red label with CASTEGNAC printed in black across the top. Down below it said CACAO FIN. Morath pried up the metal cap, touched a finger to the powder and licked it. Bitter, but not unpleasant. He did it again.

“It’s supposedly very pure,” Mary Day said. “Sold to chocolatiers, here and in Turin and Vienna.”

“What do they want us to do?”

“Sell cocoa,” Courtmain said.

“Well, new art,” Mary Day said. “Posters for bakeries and grocery stores. And he told us that now, with the war winding down, they want to sell in Spain.”

“Do Spaniards like chocolate?”

She leaned forward to say of course, then realized she didn’t know.

“Can’t get enough,” Courtmain said. They do in this agency.

Morath held the tin up to the window. Outside, the sky was white, and there were pigeons cooing on a ledge. “The label’s not so bad.” There was a decorative strand of intertwined ivy leaves around the border, nothing else.

Courtmain laughed. “It’s perfection,” he said. “We’ll sell it back to them in ten years.”

Mary Day took several sheets of art paper from a folder and pinned them up on the wall. “We’re going to give them Cassandre,” she said. A. M. Cassandre had done the artwork for the popular Dubo/Dubon/Dubonnet image in three panels.

“In-house Cassandre,” Courtmain said.

The art was sumptuous, suggesting the tropics. Backgrounds in renaissance ochres and chrome yellows, with figures-mostly tigers and palm trees-in a span of Venetian reds.

“Handsome,” Morath said, impressed.

Courtmain agreed. “Too bad about the name,” he said. He made a label in the air with his thumb and index finger. “Palmier,” he suggested, meaning palm tree. “Cacao fin!”

“Tigre?” Morath said.

Mary Day had a very impish smile. “Tigresse,” she said.

Courtmain nodded. He took an artist’s chalk from a cup on the desk and stood to one side of the drawings. “That’s the name,” he said. “With this tree,” it curved gently, with three fronds on top, “and this tiger.” A front view. The animal sat on its haunches, revealing a broad expanse of white chest.

Morath was excited. “Do you think they’ll do it?”

“Not in a thousand years.”

He was at Cara’s when the telephone rang, three-thirty in the morning. He rolled out of bed, managed to fumble the receiver free of the cradle. “Yes?”

“It’s Wolfi.” Szubl was almost whispering.

“What is it?”

“You better go to the apartment. There’s big trouble.”

“I’ll be there,” Morath said, and hung up the phone.

What to wear?

“Nicky?”

He’d already put on a shirt and was trying to knot his tie. “I have to go out.”

“Now?”

“Yes?”

“What’s going on?”

“A friend in trouble.”

After a silence, “Oh.”

He buttoned his pants, shrugged a jacket on, forced his feet into his shoes while smoothing his hair back with his hands.

“What friend?” Now the note was in her voice.

“A Hungarian man, Cara. Nobody you know.”

Then he was out the door.

The streets were deserted. He walked quickly toward the Metro at Pont d’ Alma. The trains had stopped running two hours earlier, but there was a taxi parked by the entrance. “Rue Mogador,” Morath told the driver. “Just around the corner from the Galeries.”

The street door had been left open. Morath stood at the foot of the staircase and peered up into the gloom. Thirty seconds, nothing happened, then, just as he started up the stairs, he heard the click of a closing door, somewhere above him. Trying not to make a noise. Again he waited, then started to climb.

On the first floor landing, he stopped again. “Szubl?” He said it in a low voice-not a whisper, just barely loud enough to be heard on the floor above.

No answer.

He held his breath. He thought he could hear light snoring, a creak, then another. Normal for a building at four in the morning. Again he climbed, slowly, standing for a moment on every step. Halfway up, he touched something sticky on the wall. What was that? Too dark to see, he swore and rubbed his fingers against his trousers.

On the third floor, he went to the end of the hall and stood in front of the door. The smell was not at all strong-not yet-but Morath had fought in the war and knew exactly what it was. The woman. His heart sank. He had known this would happen. Somehow, mysteriously, he’d known it. And he would settle with whoever had done it. Von Schleben, somebody else, it didn’t matter. His blood was racing, he told himself to calm down.

Or, maybe, Szubl. No, why would anyone bother.

He put his index finger on the door and pushed. It swung open. He could see the couch, the bed, a dresser he didn’t remember. He smelled paint, along with the other smell, stronger now, and the burnt, bittersweet odor of a weapon fired in a small room.

He stepped inside. Now he could see the tiny stove and the table covered with oilcloth. At one end, a man was sitting in a chair, his legs spread wide, his head hanging, almost upside down, over the back, his arms dangling at his sides.

Morath lit a match. Boots and trousers of a German officer’s uniform. The man was wearing a white shirt and suspenders, his jacket hung carefully on the chair and now pinned in place by his head. A gray face, well puffed up, one eye open, one eye shut. The expression-and he had seen this before-one of sorrow mixed with petty irritation. The hole in the temple was small, the blood had dried to brown on the face and down the arm. Morath knelt, the Walther sidearm had dropped to the floor beneath the hand. On the table, the wallet. A note? No, not that he could see.

The match started to burn his fingers. Morath shook it out and lit another. He opened the wallet: a photograph of a wife and grown children, various Wehrmacht identity papers. Here was Oberst-Colonel-Albert Stieffen, attached to the German general staff at the Stahlheim barracks, who’d come to Paris and shot himself in the kitchen of Von Schleben’s love nest.

A soft tap at the door. Morath glanced at the pistol, then let it lay there. “Yes?”

Szubl came into the room. He was sweating, red-faced. “Christ,” he said.

“Where were you?”

“Over at the Gare Saint-Lazare. I used the phone, then I stood across the street and watched you come inside.”

“What happened?”

Szubl spread his hands apart, God only knows. “A man called, about two-thirty in the morning. Told me to come over here and take care of things.”

” ‘Take care of things.’ “

“Yes. A German, speaking German.”

“Meaning, it happened here, so it’s our problem.” Morath looked at his watch, it was almost five.

“Something like that.”

They were silent for a time. Szubl shook his head, slow and ponderous. Morath exhaled, a sound of exasperation, ran his fingers through his hair, swore in Hungarian-mostly to do with fate, shitting pigs, saints’ blood-and lit a cigarette. “All right,” he said, more to himself than to Szubl. “So now it disappears.”

Szubl looked glum. “It will cost plenty, that kind of thing.”

Morath laughed and waved the problem away. “Don’t worry about that,” he said.

“Really? Well, then you’re in luck. I have a friend.”

“Flic? Undertaker?”

“Better. A desk man at the Grand Hotel.”

“Who is he?”

“One of us. From Debrecen, a long time ago. He was in a French prisoner-of-war camp in 1917, somehow managed to get himself to the local hospital. Long story short, he married the nurse. Then, after the war, he settled in Paris and worked in the hotels. So, about a year ago, he tells me a story. Seems there was a symphony conductor, a celebrity, staying in the luxury suite. One night, maybe two in the morning, the phone at the desk rings. It’s the maestro, he’s frantic. My friend rushes upstairs-the guy had a sailor in the room, the sailor died.”

“Awkward.”

“Yes, very. Anyhow, it was taken care of.”

Morath thought it over. “Go back to Saint-Lazare,” he said. “Call your friend.”

Szubl turned to leave.

“I’m sorry to put you through this, Wolfi. It’s Polanyi, and his …”

Szubl shrugged, adjusted his hat. “Don’t blame your uncle for intrigue, Nicholas. It’s like blaming a fox for killing a chicken.”

From Morath, a sour smile, Szubl wasn’t wrong. Although, he thought, “blaming” isn’t what’s usually done to a fox. The stairs creaked as Szubl went down, then Morath watched him through the window. The dawn was gray and humid, Szubl trudged along, head down, shoulders hunched.

The desk man was tall and handsome, dashing, with a cavalry mustache. He arrived at 6:30, wearing a red uniform with gold buttons. “Feeling better?” he said to the corpse.

“Two thousand francs,” Morath said. “All right?”

“Could be a little more, by the time it’s done, but I trust Wolfi for it.” For a moment, he stared at the dead officer. “Our friend here is drunk,” he said to Morath. “We’re going to get his arms around our shoulders and carry him downstairs. I’d ask you to sing, but something tells me you won’t. Anyhow, there’s a taxi at the door, the driver is in on it. We’ll put our friend here in the backseat, I’ll get in with the driver, and that’s that. The jacket, the gun, the wallet, you find a way to get rid of those. If it was me, I’d burn the papers.”

Eventually, Morath and the desk man had to carry Stieffen downstairs-the pantomime played out only from the street door to the taxi, and they barely made it that far.

A blue car-later he thought it was a big Peugeot-pulled to the curb in front of him. Slowly, the back window was lowered and the little man in the bow tie stared out at him. “Thank you,” he said. The window was rolled back up as the car pulled away, following the taxi.

Morath watched as they drove off, then returned to the apartment where Szubl, stripped to his underwear, was scrubbing the floor and whistling a Mozart aria.

Polanyi outdid himself, Morath thought, when he chose a place to meet. A nameless little bar in the quarter known as the grande truanderie, the thieves’ palace, buried in the maze of streets around Montorgueil. It reminded Morath of something Emile Courtmain had once told him: “The truth of lunch is in the choice of the restaurant. All that other business, eating, drinking, talking, that doesn’t mean very much.”

Polanyi sat there, looking very sorrowful and abused by the gods. “I’m not going to apologize,” he said.

“Do you know who he was? Colonel Stieffen?”

“No idea. And no idea why it happened. To do with honor, Nicholas-if I had to bet, I’d bet on that. He puts his wallet on the table, meaning this was who I was, and does it in a secret apartment, meaning this is where I failed.”

“Failed at what?”

Polanyi shook his head.

They were sitting at one of the three tables in the room. The fat woman at the bar called out, “Say, boys, let me know when you’re ready for another.”

“We will,” Polanyi said.

“Who’s the little man with the bow tie?”

“He is called Dr. Lapp.”

“Dr. Lapp.”

“A name. Certainly there are others. He is an officer in the Abwehr.”

“Oh well, that explains it then. I’ve become a German spy. Should we stay for lunch?”

Polanyi took a sip of wine. He was like, Morath thought, a man going to work. “They’re going to get rid of him, Nicholas. It’s dangerous for me to tell you that, and dangerous for you to know it, but this Colonel Stieffen has opened a door and now I have, against my better judgment, believe me, to let you inside.”

“To get rid of who?”

“Hitler.”

No answer to that.

“If they fail, we will have war, and it will make the last one look like a tea party. The fact is, if you hadn’t called me, I was going to call you. I believe it’s time for you to think seriously about how to get your mother and your sister out of Hungary.”

It had a life of its own, the war, like an immense rumor, that wound its way through the newspapers, the cafes, and the markets. But somehow, in Polanyi’s voice, it was fact, and Morath, for the first time, believed it.

Polanyi leaned forward, his voice confidential. “Hitler is going to settle, as he puts it, with the Czechs. The Wehrmacht will invade, probably in the fall-the traditional time, when the harvest is in and the men from the countryside become soldiers. Russia is pledged to defend Czechoslovakia if France does. The Russians will march through Poland, with or without the Poles’ permission, but she’ll invade us. You know what that means-Mongolian cavalry and the Cheka and all the rest of it. France and England will invade Germany through Belgium-this is no different than 1914. Given the structure of treaties in Europe, the alliances, that is exactly what is going to happen. Germany will bomb the cities, fifty thousand casualties every night. Unless they use phosgene gas, then it’s more. Britain will blockade the ports, central Europe will starve. The burning and the starving will go on until the Red Army crosses the German border and destroys the Reich. Will they stop there? ‘God lives in France,’ as the Germans like to say-perhaps Stalin will want to go and see Him.”

Morath looked for contradictions. He couldn’t find them.

“This is what worries me, this is what ought to worry you, but this means very little to the OKW, the Oberkommando Wehrmacht, the army’s general staff. Those people-the map people, the logistics people, the intelligence people-have always been accused, by operational commanders, of thinking more than is good for them, but this time they’ve got it right. If Hitler attacks Czechoslovakia-which is easy for Germany because, since the Anschluss, they surround the Czechs on three sides-England, France, and Russia will come into the war. Germany will be destroyed. But, more important to the OKW, the army will be destroyed. Everything they’ve worked for, since the ink dried on the treaties in 1918, will be torn to pieces. Everything. They can’t let that happen. And they know, with Hitler protected by the SS, that only the army has the strength to remove him.”

Morath thought for a time. “In a way,” he said, “this is the best thing that could happen.”

“If it happens, yes.”

“What can go wrong?”

“Russia fights only if France does. France and England will fight only if Germany invades and the Czechs resist. Hitler can be removed only for starting a war he can’t win.”

“Will the Czechs fight?”

“They have thirty-five divisions, about 350,000 men, and a defensive line of forts that runs along the Sudetenland border. Said to be good-as good as the Maginot Line. And, of course, Bohemia and Moravia are bordered by mountains, the Shumava. For the German tanks, the passes, especially if they are defended, will be difficult. So, certain people in the OKW are making contact with the British and the French, urging them to stand firm. Don’t give Hitler what he wants, make him fight for it. Then, when he fights, the OKW will deal with him.”

“Making contact, you said.”

Polanyi smiled. “You know how it’s done, Nicholas, it’s not a lone hero, crawling through the desert, trying to save the world. It’s various people, various approaches, various methods. Connections. Relationships. And when the OKW people need a quiet place to talk, away from Berlin, away from the Gestapo, they have an apartment in the rue Mogador-where that rogue Von Schleben sees his Roumanian girlfriend. Who knows, it might even be a place to meet a foreign colleague, over from London for the day.”

“A setting provided by their Hungarian friends.”

“Yes, why not?”

“And, similarly, the man we brought into Paris.”

“Also for Von Schleben. He has many interests, many projects.”

“Such as …”

Polanyi shrugged. “He didn’t explain, Nicholas. I didn’t insist.”

“And Colonel Stieffen?” Now they’d ridden the merry-go-round back to where they’d started. Morath might have gotten the brass ring, he wasn’t sure.

“Ask Dr. Lapp,” Polanyi said. “If you feel you have to know.”

Morath, puzzled, stared at his uncle.

“If you should happen to see him, I meant to say.”

On Saturday mornings, Cara and Nicky went riding in the Bois de Boulogne, on the Chemin des Vieux Chenes, or around the Lac Inferieur. They rode big chestnut geldings, the sweat white and foamy above the horses’ hocks in the midsummer heat. They rode very well; they both came from countries where horseback riding was part of life, like marriage or religion. Sometimes Morath found the bridle paths boring, too sedate-he had galloped into machine-gun positions and jumped horses over barbed wire-but the feel of it brought him a peace he could find no other way.

They nodded to the other couples, everyone smart in their jodhpurs and handmade boots, and trotted along at a good, stiff pace in the shade of the oak trees.

“I have a letter from Francesca,” Cara told him. “She says the house in Sussex is lovely, but small.”

“If you’d prefer something grand, we’ll go up to the baroness’s place.”

“That’s what you’d like, right, Nicky?”

“Well,” Morath said. He really didn’t care but pretended in order to please Cara. “Maybe Normandy’s better. Cool at night, and I like to swim in the sea.”

“Good. I’ll write this afternoon. We can see Francesca when she comes in the fall. For the clothes.”

Boris Balki telephoned and asked him to come to the nightclub. The Balalaika was closed for the August vacation, the tables covered with old bedsheets. There was no beer to drink, so Balki opened a bottle of wine. “They won’t miss it,” he said. Then, “So, you must be leaving soon.”

“A few days. The great migration.”

“Where do you go?”

“Normandy. Just outside Deauville.”

“That must be nice.”

“It’s all right.”

“I like the time off,” Balki said. “We have to paint, fix the place up, but at least I don’t have to make jokes.” He reached in a pocket, unfolded a page of cheap writing paper covered with small Cyrillic characters. “It’s from a friend of mine, in Budapest. He writes from Matyas Street.”

“Not much there. The prison.”

From Balki, a grim smile.

“Oh.”

“He’s an old friend, from Odessa. I thought, maybe, if somebody knew somebody …”

“Matyas is the worst-in Budapest, anyhow.”

“He says that, as much as he can get it past the censor.”

“Is he in for a long time?”

“Forty months.”

“Long enough. What’d he do?”

“Bonds.”

“Hungarian?”

“Russian. Railroad bonds. The 1916 kind.”

“Somebody buys that?”

Balki nodded, then, despite himself, started laughing. “Poor Rashkow. He’s tiny. ‘Look at me,’ he used to say. ‘If I tried to hold somebody up they’d stuff me in a drawer.’ So he sells things. Sometimes jewelry, sometimes paintings, even manuscripts. Tolstoy! His unfinished novel! But, lately, it’s railroad bonds.”

They both laughed.

“You see why I love him,” Balki said.

“They’re not actually worth anything, are they?”

“Well, Rashkow would say, not now. But think of the future. ‘I sell hope,’ he used to say. ‘Hope for tomorrow. Think how important that is, hope for tomorrow.’ “

“Boris,” Morath said, “I’m not sure I can help.”

“Well, anyhow, you’ll try.” The after all, I tried for you was unspoken but not difficult to hear.

“Of course.”

“Before you go away?”

“Even if I can’t do that, I won’t wait for September. They have telephones in Deauville.”

“Semyon Rashkow.” Balki held the letter up to the light and squinted. Morath realized he needed glasses. “Number 3352-18.”

“Just out of curiosity, who wrote Tolstoy’s unfinished novel?”

Balki grinned. “Wasn’t bad, Morath. Really. It wasn’t.”

The last place he wanted to be, in Colonel Sombor’s office on the top floor of the Hungarian legation. Sombor sat erect at his desk, reading a dossier, using the end of a pencil to guide his eyes along a type-written line. Morath stared out the open window. Down below, in the garden, a porter, an old man in a gray uniform and a gray peaked cap, was raking the gravel. The sound was sharp in the silent courtyard.

He had to help; he felt he had to help. Balki wasn’t an affable barman, Balki was him, Morath, just in the wrong country, in the wrong year, forced to live the wrong life. A man who hated having to be grateful for a job he hated.

Morath had tried his uncle first, was told he was not in Paris, then reached Sombor at his office. “Of course, come tomorrow morning.” Sombor was the man who could help, so Morath went to see him, knowing it was a mistake every step of the way. Sombor had a title, something innocuous, but he worked for the secret police, and everybody knew it. There was an official spy at the legation, Major Fekaj, the military attache, and there was Sombor.

“I don’t see you enough,” he complained to Morath, closing the dossier. Morath found it hard to look at him. He was one of those people whose hair looks like a hat-a polished, glossy black hat-and with his sharp, slanted eyebrows, he suggested a tenor made up to play the devil in a comic opera.

“My uncle keeps me busy.”

Sombor acknowledged Polanyi’s position with a gracious nod. Morath certainly wanted it to be gracious.

“Yes, I can believe it,” Somber said. “Also, I’m sure, this wonderful city. And its opportunities.”

“That too.”

Sombor touched his lips with his tongue, leaned forward, lowered his voice. “We’re grateful, of course.”

From a man who’d been forced, in 1937, to remove a portrait of Julius Gombos from his wall-Gombos was widely credited with having invented the philosophies of Adolf Hitler-not necessarily what Morath wanted to hear. “Good of you to say it.” Grateful for what?

“Not the kind of thing you can allow,” Sombor said.

Morath nodded. What in hell’s name had Polanyi told this man? And why? For his own good? Morath’s? Some other reason? What he did know was that this conversation was not, not if he could help it, going to turn frank and open.

“Someone who has done a favor for me, for us”-Morath smiled, so did Sombor-“needs a favor in return.”

“Favors …”

“Well, what is one to do.”

“Quite.”

A contest of silence. Sombor ended it. “So, exactly what sort of favor are we talking about?”

“An old friend. Locked up in Matyas.”

“For?”

“Selling worthless bonds.”

“Beszivargo?” Infiltrator. Which meant, for Sombor and others, Jew.

Morath thought it over. Rashkow? “I don’t think so,” he said. “Not from the name.”

“Which is?”

“Rashkow.”

Sombor took a tablet of white paper and unscrewed the cap of his pen and carefully wrote the name down on the paper.

The month in the country gathered momentum, preparation on the avenue Bourdonnais proceeded at a fever pitch. The baroness had been written, then telephoned, then telephoned again. Cara’s MG had been washed, waxed, and filled with water, oil, and gasoline, the seats rubbed with saddle soap, the walnut dashboard polished to a soft glow. The picnic hamper was ordered from Pantagruel, then Delbard, then Fauchon. Did Morath like sliced beef tongue in aspic? No? Why not? The tiny folding table purchased, taken back to the store, replaced with a green horse blanket, then a fine wool blanket, brown with a gray stripe, which could also be used on the beach. Cara brought home a bathing suit this little, then this little, and then this little; the last one springing a seam as Morath whipped it off. And she should be damned glad, he thought, that there weren’t toothmarks in it-take that back to Mademoiselle Ninette on the rue Saint-Honore.

Saturday morning, Morath had a long list of errands, carefully saved up as a pretext to escape from Cara’s packing. He stopped at Courtmain, at the bank, at the tabac, at the bookstore, where he bought Freya Stark’s The Valleys of the Assassins and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, both in French translation. He already had a Gyula Krudy novel. Krudy was in essence the Hungarian Proust-“Autumn and Budapest were born of the same mother”-and Morath had always liked him. In fact, the baroness’s houses were stacked to the ceilings with books, and Morath knew he would fall in love with some exotic lost masterpiece and never turn a page of whatever he’d brought with him.

When he got back to the avenue Bourdonnais, he discovered there’d been a blizzard of underwear and shoes and crinkly pink paper. On the kitchen table was a vase with a dozen yellow roses. “These are not from you, Nicky, are they?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“Is there a card?”

“Yes, but it’s in Hungarian. I can’t read it.”

Morath could read it. A single word written in black ink on a florist’s card. Regrets.

Three-thirty when Cara’s phone rang and a man’s voice asked him, very politely, if it would be altogether too much trouble to walk to the newspaper kiosk by the Pont D’Alma Metro.

“I’m going to get the paper,” he said to Cara.

“What? Now? For God’s sake, Nicky, I-”

“Back in a minute.”

Dr. Lapp was in a black Mercedes. His suit was blue, his bow tie green, his face as sad as Buster Keaton’s. There was really nothing to discuss, he said.

This was a privilege, not a sacrifice.

Still, Morath felt terrible. Perhaps if he’d been able to say something, to explain, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad.

“Messieurs et mesdames.”

The conductor had opened the door of the compartment and the rhythmic hammering of the wheels on the track grew suddenly louder. Morath rested the Freya Stark book on his knee.

The conductor held the first-class passenger list in his hand. “‘Sieurs et ‘dames, the dining car will open in thirty minutes, you may reserve for the first or second seating.”

He went around the compartment: businessman, middle-aged woman, mother and little boy-possibly English, then Morath. “Second, please,” Morath said.

“And that would be?”

“Monsieur Morath.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Can you tell me, what time we expect to be in Prague?”

“The timetable says four-thirty, monsieur, but, of course, these days …”

2 August 1938. Marienbad, Czechoslovakia.

Six-twenty in the evening, Morath came down the marble staircase and walked across the lobby. Grand hotels in spa towns were all of a type and the Europa was no different-miles of corridors, chandeliers, everywhere mahogany. Frayed carpets, frayed respectability, the former much rewoven, the latter a faint but detectable presence in the air, like the smell of the kitchen.

Two women in leather chairs smiled at him, widow and unmarried daughter, he guessed, come husband-hunting in Marienbad. Morath had been at the Europa for only a night and a day and they had flirted with him twice. They were handsome and well fleshed. Good appetites, he thought, of all sorts. Not unusual in that part of the world. The Czechs felt life owed them a little pleasure; they happily embraced the Protestant virtues but just as happily embraced each other. If a proposal of marriage was not forthcoming then, mother or daughter, rolling around in a creaky hotel bed might not be the worst thing in the world.

Morath walked out the entrance, into a genteel lane lit with gas lamps. There were mountains in the distance, dark shapes in the failing light. He walked for a long time, glancing at his watch every few minutes. He had once, dragged off to Evian-les-Bains by Cara’s predecessor, actually tried the treatment-packed in mud by laughing girls, then hosed down by a stern woman wearing a hair net. Victorian medicine. Victorian eroticism? Victorian something.

He reached the edge of the town, a black, dense forest of pine rolling up a hillside above the street. Down below, the gas lamps twinkled. There were several orchestras at work and he could hear, when the wind was right, the violins. It was very romantic. Through the trees, a glimpse of the toy train that puffed its way up the mountain to the station called Marianske Lazne. Marienbad, in the Austro-Hungarian days. Hard to think of it any other way. The wind shifted, the distant violins floated up to him. Along with a faint smell of gunnery.

Now it was 7:10. There were candles on the tables of the tearoom in Otava Street. Morath studied the menu, mounted in a brass frame on a stand by the door. Inside, a Czech army officer watched him for a moment, then rose from his chair, leaving an uneaten pastry on his plate. To get to his feet, the officer used a stick, a good one, Morath saw, with a brass tip and an ivory head. He was not far from Morath’s age, with a soldier’s face and a neatly trimmed beard, blond and gray and red.

They shook hands in the street. “Colonel Novotny,” the officer said, with a motion of the head somewhere between a nod and a bow.

“Morath.”

An exchange of pleasantries. We are like, Morath thought, two provincial officials, meeting in the sleepy days of the old empire.

Novotny had a military car: the least expensive Opel, something like a Parisian taxicab, painted olive green. “We are going up toward Kreslice,” he said. “About forty kilometers from here.”

Morath opened the passenger door. On the seat was a holstered automatic pistol in a leather belt. “Oh, just put that on the floor,” Novotny said. “We’re in the Sudetenland here-it’s wiser to have something in the car.”

They drove on mountain roads, darker as they climbed, the beams of the headlights alive with moths. Novotny squinted through the windshield, the narrow dirt path twisted and turned and disappeared into the night. Twice they had to put branches under the wheels, and when they crossed bridges over mountain streams-built for wagons and oxen-Morath got out and walked ahead of the car with a flashlight. They passed one house only, a woodcutter’s hut. Up on the crest, something ran away from them; they could hear it, crashing through the underbrush.

“I brought my dog along once,” Novotny said, “coming up here. She went crazy. Ran around and around the car, scratching the windows with her paws.”

“What do you have?”

“Pointer bitch.”

“I’ve had them-couldn’t wait to go to work.”

“That’s her. She was crying because I wouldn’t let her out of the car. I’ve seen bear up here, and stag. Wild boar. The peasants say there’s lynx-kills their animals.”

Novotny slowed to a crawl, worked the car carefully around a hairpin curve. Morath could hear a stream a long way below them. “A shame, really,” Novotny said. “When we start fighting here, well, you know what happens to the game.”

“I know. I was in the Carpathians, in ‘15.”

“This is, of course, where we want them.”

“In the mountains.”

“Yes. We watched them mobilize, back in May. Very educational. Tanks, trucks, cars, motorcycles. Big gasoline tankers. It’s not a secret, what they mean to do-read Guderian’s book, and Rommel’s. Everything’s motorized, that’s the sharp edge of the ax. After the first wave, of course, it’s all horses and artillery limbers, like everyone else. So, the logic goes, run them up the mountains, or make them go through the valleys.”

“Enfilade.”

“Yes. With registered mortars. And machine guns on the hillsides.”

“When will it start?”

“In the fall. We hold them two months, it starts to snow.” Up ahead, the road was cut into wagon ruts. Then it grew steeper, and Novotny shifted into a whining first gear. “What did you do, last time?”

“Hussars. The Sixteenth Corps, in the Second Army.”

“Magyar.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I was in the Seventh. First under Pflanzer, then Baltin.”

“Down in Moldavia.”

“To start with. Eventually-I’m an artillery officer-they sent me up to Russian Poland. Lemberg and Przemysl.”

“The forts.”

“Twenty-eight months,” Novotny said. “Lost them, got them back.”

Morath had never fought alongside the Czechs. The Austrian army spoke ten languages-Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Serbian, Slovene, Ruthenian, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, and German-and was normally divided into regiments based on nationality. But the history of the soldiers who defended the forts was well known. Twice they’d been surrounded and cut off, but the hundred and fifty thousand men in the blockhouses and bunkers had held out for months, while Russian dead piled up beneath their guns.

It was well after nine when they reached the Kreslice barracks-a set of long, low buildings in the imperial style, built of the honey-colored sandstone so loved by Franz Josef’s architects. “We can probably get something for dinner,” Novotny said, sounding hopeful. But there was a feast laid on for Morath in the officers’ mess. Roast goose, red cabbage with vinegar, beer from a small brewery in Pilsen, and a lieutenant general at the head of the table.

“To friendship between our nations!”

“To friendship!”

Many of the officers were bearded, the style among artillerymen, and many had served on the eastern front in 1914-Morath saw all the medals. Most decorated of all, the general: short and thick and angry. And fairly drunk, Morath thought, with a flushed face and a loud voice. “It gets harder and harder to read the goddamn newspapers,” he said. “Back in the winter, they couldn’t love us enough, especially the French. Czechoslovakia-new hope! Liberal democracy-example for Europe! Masaryk and Benes-statesmen for the ages! Then something happened. Back in July, I think it was, there was Halifax, in the House of Lords, talking about ‘impractical devotion to high purpose.’ Oh shit, we said, now look what’s happened.”

“And it continues,” Novotny said. “The little minuet.”

The general took a long drink of beer and wiped his mouth with an olive-green napkin. “It encourages him, of course. The Reichsfuhrer. The army’s the only thing he ever liked, now he’s gotten tired of watching it march. Now he wants to see it fight. But he’s coming to the wrong neighborhood.”

“Because you’ll fight back.”

“We’ll give him a good Czech boot up his Austrian ass, is what we’ll do. This Wehrmacht, we have films of their maneuvers; they’re built to roll across the plains of Europe. It’s the Poles who ought to worry, and the Russians. Down here, we’ll fight in the mountains. Like the Swiss, like the Spaniards. He can beat us-he’s bigger than we are, no way to change that-but it will take everything he has. When he does that, he leaves the Siegfried Line wide open, and the French can march in with a battalion of cafe waiters.”

“If they dare.” There was laughter at the table.

The general’s eyes glowed. Like Novotny’s pointer bitch, he couldn’t wait to get at the game. “Yes, if they dare-something’s gone wrong with them.” He paused for a moment, then leaned toward Morath. “And what about Hungary? It’s all plains, just like Poland. You don’t even have a river.”

“God only knows,” Morath said. “We barely have an army. For the moment, we depend on being smarter than they are.”

“Smarter,” the general said. He thought it over: it didn’t seem like much. “Than all of them?”

“Hitler killed off the really smart ones, or chased them out of the country. So, for the moment, that’s what we have.”

“Well then, may God watch over you,” the general said.

They gave him a room of his own-above the stables, the horses restless down below-a hard bed, and a bottle of plum brandy. At least, he thought, they didn’t send along “the stableman’s daughter.” He drank some of the brandy, but still he couldn’t sleep. It was thunder that kept him awake, from a storm that never rained yet never moved away. He looked out the window now and then, but the sky was all stars. Then he realized that the Czechs were working at night. He could feel it in the floor. Not thunder, dynamite, the explosions rolling back and forth across the valleys. It was the engineers who kept him awake, blowing the faces off their mountains, building fortifications.

2:30. 3:00. Instead of sleeping, he smoked. He had felt, since he came to the barracks, a certain, familiar undercurrent. Together we live, together we die, and nobody cares which way it goes. He hadn’t felt it for a long time. It wasn’t that he liked it, but thinking about it kept him awake.

*

Just after dawn they were back on the mountain roads, this time in an armored car, accompanied by the general and a pale, soft civilian in a black suit, quite sinister, with tinted eyeglasses and very little to say. A spy, Morath thought. At least, a spy in a movie.

The road was newly made, ripped out of the forest with bulldozers and explosives then surfaced with sawn tree trunks at the low spots. It would break your back but it wouldn’t stall your car. To make matters worse, the armored car rode as though it were sprung with steel bars. “Better keep your mouth closed,” Novotny said. Then added, “No offense meant.”

Morath never saw the fort until they were almost on top of it-cement walls, broken by firing slits, built into the mountainside, and independent blockhouses hidden in the natural sweep of the terrain. The general, clearly proud of the work, said, “Now you see it, now you don’t.”

Morath was impressed and showed it.

The spy smiled, pleased with the reaction.

Inside, the raw smell of new cement and damp earth. As they went down endless flights of stairs, Novotny said, “They have elevators in the Maginot Line. For people, elevators. But here, only the ammunition gets to ride.” A shaft had been carved out of the rock, Morath could see, with a steel platform on cables that could be operated electrically or cranked by hand.

The spy’s German was atrocious. “So many forts are blown up from their own magazines. It need not happen.”

Novotny was joined by a group of officers who manned the fort. As they moved down a long corridor, the general put out a hand so that Morath stayed back from the group. “How do you like my engineer?”

“Who is he?”

“A fortification expert-artist is a better word. From the Savoy. They’ve been building these things since the renaissance-tradition of Leonardo, all that.”

“He’s Italian?”

The general spread his hands. “French by passport, Italian by culture, though he would say Savoyard, and a Jew by birth.” The Savoy, a mountain country between France and Italy, had managed to keep its independence until 1860. “They’ve always permitted Jews to serve as officers,” the general said. “This one was a major. Now he works for me.”

At the end of a cement chamber, under a six-foot ceiling, an embrasure opened out above a forest valley. The Czech officers stood apart, hands clasped behind their backs, as the general and the spy and Morath approached the opening.

“Find a river,” the spy said.

This took time. A pale summer sky, then a ridge top dense with trees, then a green mountainside and a narrow valley that led to the upward slope where the fort had been built. Finally, Morath caught sight of a blue ribbon that wound through the pine trees.

“You have it?”

“Yes.”

“Here. Take.”

He handed Morath a fist-sized wad of cotton. Two soldiers rolled a 105-millimeter mountain gun up to the opening and ran a shell into the breech. Morath tore pieces of cotton from the wad and stuffed his ears, then covered them with his hands. Everyone in the room did the same. Finally, the general mouthed the word ready? Morath nodded and the floor trembled as a tongue of flame leapt from the barrel of the cannon. Even with the cotton, the report was deafening.

Downrange, a flash and a drift of dirty gray smoke. In the river, Morath thought, though he didn’t actually see it happen. Other guns began firing, some from the floor below them, some from the blockhouses, and puffs of smoke floated over the mountainside. The general handed Morath a pair of binoculars. Now he could see fountains of dirt blown forty feet in the air, trees torn from the ground or sheared in two. There was, in fact, a small road that led down to the river. As he watched, a cloud of orange tracers floated past his vision and churned up a storm of dirt spouts on the road.

The spy pointed to his ears. Morath took the cotton out, the room still rang with concussion. “Do you see?” the spy said.

“Yes.”

“All the firing lines intersect, and the forts cover each other, so an attempt to storm will be very costly.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a few sheets of paper and a sharpened pencil. “Please,” he said. “Do best you can.”

The general said, “I can’t give you blueprints, of course, but we don’t mind if you sketch.”

The spy smiled. “My father always wanted to teach the espionage drawing. ‘So terrible,’ he would say.”

They left him to work, only Novotny stayed behind. “Well, now you’ve met our expert.”

“He seems a little-odd, maybe.”

“Yes. He is very odd. But a genius. An architect, a mathematician, a gunnery expert. Also he knows geology and mining science.” Novotny shook his head. “Likely there’s more, we just haven’t found out about it.”

Morath sketched, he wasn’t very good. He concentrated on showing how the fort and its independent firing points were fitted tight into the mountainside. They would be hard to bomb, he realized. Even a Stuka would have to fly directly at them, with machine guns tracking it the minute it appeared over the crest of the mountain.

“Draw the room,” Novotny said. “Don’t forget the elevator for the shells.”

His day had barely begun. They drove him to other forts. At one of them, overlooking a paved road that ran south from Dresden, the spy took a stick and drew semicircles in the dirt to show overlapping fields of fire. Morath crawled into two-man pillboxes, sighted along machine guns aimed down mown strips of cornfield, saw tank traps to fall in and tank traps made of cement posts, “dragon’s teeth,” wound in generous tangles of barbed wire. He squinted through Swiss sniperscopes fitted to Steyr rifles and fired a ZGB 33, the Czech machine gun made in Brno-used as the model for the British Bren, Brno/Enfield-assassinating eight feather pillows gathering for an attack at the far end of a wheatfield. “Good shooting,” Novotny said.

After Morath reloaded, the curved-box magazine locked in place with a loud metallic snap.

“When you talk about your trip to the mountains,” Novotny said, “don’t forget to mention that Europe would be better off if Adolf did not have control of the Czech machine shops.”

Morath agreed. “Of course,” he said, “if it should come to that, I imagine the workers here would be-prone to error.”

But his conspiratorial smile was not returned. “Just between us,” Novotny said, “if it should happen that we are betrayed by those who claim to be our friends, we may not be so quick to give our lives in their service. That sort of business is bloody, Morath. There is always interrogation, always reprisal-you can only create a resistance movement when people don’t care about their lives.”

Novotny drove him back to the Europa that evening. A fine summer dusk, flights of swallows swooping and climbing in the sky above the hotels. In the lobby, the mother and daughter smiled at him, looking warmer than ever. Who would know? On a leather couch, a man in muttonchop whiskers and mountaineering costume was reading the Volkischer Beobachter. CZECH POLICE BURN SUDETEN FARMS went the headline. DOZENS INJURED. Animals confiscated. Dogs shot. Three young women missing.

Dr. Lapp, wearing a flat-brimmed straw boater at a jaunty angle, was waiting for him in the room, fanning himself with a room-service menu.

“I didn’t hear you knock,” Morath said.

“Actually, I did knock,” Dr. Lapp said, slightly amused. “Of course, I’ll be happy to apologize, if you wish.”

“Don’t bother.”

Dr. Lapp stared out the window. The streetlamps were on, couples strolling in the mountain air. “You know, I cannot abide these people, the Czechs.”

Morath hung up his jacket, then began undoing his tie. He did not want there to be a war in Europe, but he was going to take a bath.

“They have no culture,” Dr. Lapp said.

“They think they do.”

“What, Smetana? Perhaps you like Dvorak. Good God.”

Morath took off his tie, looped it over a hanger, sat on the edge of the bed, and lit a Chesterfield.

“I should mention,” Dr. Lapp said, “that I saw Count Polanyi not so long ago and that he sends his best regards. He said that you were considering, at one time, a vacation in Britain. Is it so?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Lapp nodded. “Can you still go?”

Morath thought about Cara. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

“I see. Well, if you can, you should.”

“I’ll try,” Morath said.

“They’re weakening, the British. This morning’s London Times says that the Czech government ought to grant ‘self-determination’ to the Sudeten Germans, ‘even if it should mean their secession from Czechoslovakia.’ I would suppose that comes from Chamberlain’s office. We know he met American correspondents at a lunch at Lady Astor’s a few weeks ago and told them that Britain thought the Sudetenland ought to be turned over to Germany. In the interest of world peace, you understand. What his problem really is, is that he doesn’t trust the French, he doesn’t trust the Russians, and he fears, politically, the possibility that Britain might have to fight alone.”

“He doesn’t trust the French?”

Dr. Lapp’s laugh was dry, and delicate, and very brief.

It was almost dark, they sat in silence for a long time. Finally, Dr. Lapp stood. “There is something I want you to look at,” he said. “I’ll send it along tomorrow, if you don’t mind.”

He closed the door silently behind him. Morath left the room in darkness. He went into the bathroom and turned on the water. There was a bright green mineral stain below the spout. Good for the health. If you believed in it, he thought. The water ran slow, just then, and Morath waited patiently and listened to the distant thunder.

He booked a call to Paris early the next morning, the hotel operator rang his room an hour later. “So much traffic, sir,” she apologized. “Not usual for August.”

In Paris, a very elegant voice: “Good morning, this is Cartier.”

Polanyi liked to say that the great fault in poets was that they never sang of the power of money in affairs between men and women. “So for that we are left to the mercy of cynics-bartenders, novelists, or lubricious aunts.” Amusing when he said it but not so amusing in real life. Morath didn’t like himself for making this telephone call, but he could think of nothing else. The other possibility was flowers, and flowers weren’t enough.

He found himself telling the saleswoman almost everything. “I understand,” she said. She thought a moment, then added, “We have just completed a new design, a bracelet, which might be exactly right for Madame. A little exotic-emeralds set in silver and black onyx-but very personal. And not at all the usual thing. Do you think she would like that?”

“Yes.”

“She would be the first in Paris to have it-it’s a new style for us. Would she like that?”

He knew she would. The saleswoman explained that the size was easily adjusted-so the bracelet could be sent by Cartier messenger to the residence. “And finally, monsieur“-now there was a different note in her voice, she was, for a moment, speaking from the heart-“the card.”

“Just say, ‘Love, Nicky.’ “

Later on, he was able to get through to an officer at the Credit Lyonnais. A bank draft would be sent over to Cartier that afternoon.

Novotny showed up at eleven and they worked most of the day, spending much of the time in the car, driving east on the northern borders of Moravia and Bohemia. More fortifications, more barbed wire, more artillery pointed toward Germany. “What happens to all this,” he asked, “if the Sudetenland is granted independence?”

Novotny laughed. “Then it all belongs to Hitler,” he said. “With good, flat roads running straight to Prague. A hundred kilometers, more or less, about two hours.”

By nightfall they had turned back to the west, headed for the Kreslice barracks and a regimental dinner-a farewell dinner-with the general in attendance. “There may be a speech,” Novotny said.

He paused a moment, peering into the darkness to find his way. They rattled over the crest of a mountain, then Novotny rode the brakes down the steep grade on the other side. “Decin,” he said-a cluster of lights in the trees. This was, Morath thought, one last demonstration: that Czech forces could move east and west without returning to the roads in the valleys. They’d improved the old village paths, used mostly for cows and goats. In the beams of the headlights he could see where holes had been filled with small stones and packed down flat.

“And then, after the speech …” Novotny said.

“Yes?” Oh no, he would refuse.

“Perhaps you would consider …”

Morath was blinded. An explosion of yellow light, then blackness, with the dazzling afterimage of a fiery star. He pressed his hands against his eyes but it wouldn’t fade. Something had burnt the air in front of his face then gone whizzing away into the trees. Novotny yelled-apparently in Czech, Morath didn’t understand. He shoved the door open, then reached for Novotny, who seemed frozen in place. As he grabbed hold of a sleeve there were two pings, metal on metal, and another tracer bullet, this one on the other side of the windshield. Morath could hear the machine gun, firing disciplined, five-round bursts. When he smelled gasoline he pulled with all his strength, dragging Novotny across the seat and out the passenger door.

Lying flat on the ground, he rubbed his eyes as the star began to fade.

“Can you see?” Novotny was now back in German.

“Not much.”

From the front of the car, a loud bang as a round hit the engine block, followed by the sharp smell of steam from the radiator. “Christ,” Morath said. He began to crawl away from the road, pulling Novotny with him. He fought his way into a tangle of vines and branches, a thorn raked him across the forehead. He could now see gray shapes resolving into trees and forest. He took a deep breath-a burned retina meant blindness for life and Morath knew it.

“What about you?” he said.

“Better.” Novotny probed his hairline with an index finger. “The thing actually burned me,” he said.

The machine gunner wouldn’t leave the car alone. He stitched frosted holes in the window glass, then blew out the tires on the traverse. Morath could hear gunfire in the distance, and an orange light flickered on a cloud above the town.

“Is it the invasion?” Morath said.

Novotny snorted with contempt. “It’s the oppressed Sudeten Germans,” he said. “Crying out for justice and equality.”

Morath got to his knees. “We’ll be better off in Decin.”

“I can’t,” Novotny said, “without the stick.”

Morath crawled back to the car, opened the back door, lay flat on the seat, and retrieved the walking stick and the holstered pistol. Novotny was glad to have both. He staggered to his feet, held the butt of the pistol, unsnapped the holster with his teeth, and swept the belt over his shoulder as the pistol slid free. “Now let them come,” he said, laughing at himself and the whole stupid business.

They walked through the woods, Novotny limping along and breathing hard but keeping up with Morath. As it turned out, they were fortunate he was in uniform-a sixteen-year-old militiaman with a machine pistol almost cut them down as they reached Decin.

Headed for the police station, they kept to the alleys, the walls pocked and chipped from small-arms fire. “I knew there was trouble here,” Morath said. “Marching and rioting, you see it in the newsreels. But nothing like this.”

From Novotny, a sour smile. “These are commando units, armed and trained by the SS. You won’t see that in the newsreels.”

The alley ended at a side street, Morath and Novotny crouched at the edge of a stucco wall. To their left, on the other side of a broad avenue, the town school was on fire, bursts of red sparks blown up into the night sky. There were two bodies lit by the firelight, their faces pressed into the angle between the street and the sidewalk. One of them had a bare foot.

“Go ahead,” Morath said. There was some small nobility in this-first across the road was a sacred axiom under fire. The enemy gunners saw the first, shot the second.

“Thanks just the same,” Novotny said. “We’ll go together.”

Even so, Morath took the side toward the gunfire, ran out of bravado midway across, grabbed Novotny around the waist and the two of them galloped to cover-a three-legged race-laughing like madmen as bullets sang past them.

It took them twenty minutes to reach the police station, where a shredded Czech flag hung limp above the barred windows. “Poor fucking thing,” said the Decin chief of police. “These fucking people keep shooting it.”

A strange scene at the station house. Policemen, some off duty when the attack came-one of them firing a rifle out the window with a forgotten napkin tucked in his belt-a few soldiers, local citizens. In the corner, lying flat on a desk, holding a compress to a bloody head wound, was a tall, spare man in a high collar and cutaway coat, one of the lenses in his eyeglasses was cracked in half.

“Our Latin teacher,” the police chief explained. “They beat him up. Forced their way into the school, started throwing Czech schoolbooks out in the street, set them on fire, started singing, you know, and set the school on fire. Then they marched around the neighborhood chanting Teach our children in German while a little man filmed from the roof of a car.

“We did-nothing. We’re under orders up here: don’t let them provoke you. So we smiled and bowed, unprovoked, got the nurse over here to paste the Latin teacher back together, and everything was just perfectly lovely.

“But, of course, they were under orders to provoke us or else, so they went and took a shot at a policeman. He shot back, everyone ran away, and now we have this.”

“You radioed the army?” Novotny said.

The policeman nodded. “They’re coming. In armored cars. But they’ve got four or five of these things to deal with, so it might not be right away.”

“You have weapons for us,” Morath said. It wasn’t a question.

Before the police chief could answer, Novotny spoke to him in rapid Czech. Then, later on, he explained as they moved toward the safe end of town. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But they’d kill me if I let anything happen to you.”

But the safe end of town wasn’t all that safe. At the bottom of a winding street, they found the milkman’s horse and cart, the milkman himself lying facedown on the cobblestones, the back of his jacket flung up over his head. The blinkered horse, standing patiently with his wagonload of milk cans, turned and stared at them as they went past.

The chief of police had directed them to a three-story brick monstrosity, perhaps the grandest house in Decin, on a broad boulevard shadowed by linden trees. The building was guarded by two policemen wearing French-style helmets and armed with rifles. They followed one of them to an overstuffed parlor on the top floor, the walls crowded with oil portraits of very fat people in very expensive clothing. As Morath and Novotny settled in, a local functionary came puffing up the stairs carrying two ledgers, a clerk and a secretary close behind him with two more. Still wheezing, he stopped dead, bowed politely, then spun on his heel and hurried off.

“His honor the mayor,” said the policeman. “The Germans keep trying to burn the town hall, so he brings the tax records up here.”

“Keep trying?”

The policeman nodded grimly. “Third time since March.”

From the parlor window, Morath looked out over Decin. According to the policeman, the German units held several buildings-garages and small workshops on the north side of the town-and the railroad station. Morath saw them once or twice as they changed positions; shapeless forms in peaked caps and jackets, bent low, running close to the walls. Once he got a clear view of a machine gunner and his helper, caught for an instant in the glow of a streetlamp, one carrying a Maxim gun, the other its tripod and belts. Then they scurried away into the darkness, disappearing between the deserted office buildings on the other side of the boulevard.

Midnight. The crackle of small-arms fire intensified. Then the town lights went out, and, a few minutes later, a call came on the radio, and Novotny and the senior policeman returned to the station. The other policeman came upstairs, took his helmet off, and sat on a sofa. He was young, Morath saw, not much more than twenty. “The armored cars should come soon,” he said.

Morath stared out into the street. It was hard to see, the warm, misty night darkened by smoke from the burning buildings. The distant firing slowed, then stopped, replaced by heavy silence. Morath looked at his watch. Two-twenty. Cara likely asleep, by now, on the avenue Bourdonnais, unless she’d gone out somewhere. The bracelet would have arrived that afternoon. Strange how far away that seemed. Not so far. He remembered the bars on the Mediterranean beach, the crash of the waves, people saying “half past eight in Juan-les-Pins, half past nine in Prague.”

A low, distant rumble, resolving, as Morath listened, to the throb of heavy engines. The policeman leaped to his feet. He was openly relieved-Morath hadn’t realized how frightened he’d been. “Now we’ll see,” he said, running his hand over a cowlick of wheat-colored hair. “Now we’ll see.”

Two of the armored cars crept up the boulevard, going no more than ten miles an hour. One of them broke off and headed for the north side of the town; the other stood in the middle of the street, its turret turning slowly as the gunner looked for a target. Somebody-somebody not very bright, Morath thought-shot at it. The response was a blast of the turret cannon, a yellow flare and a ragged boom that rolled over the empty streets.

“Idiot.”

“A sniper,” the policeman said. “He tries to fire into the aiming port of the turret.”

They both stood at the window. As the armored car moved forward, there was a second shot.

“Did you see it?”

Morath shook his head.

“Sometimes you can.” Now, quite excited, he spoke in a loud whisper. He knelt in front of the window, rested the rifle on the sill, and sighted down the barrel.

The armored car disappeared. From the other end of town, a serious engagement-cannon and machine-gun fire. Morath, leaning out the window, thought he could see flickers of light from the muzzle flashes. Something exploded, an armored car sped past, headed in the direction of the fighting. And something was on fire. Very slowly, the outlines of the buildings sharpened, touched with orange light. Downstairs, in the kitchen, an angry burst of static from the radio. The policeman swore softly, under his breath, as he ran off to answer it.

Four in the morning. The policeman was snoring away on the couch while Morath kept watch. The policeman had apologized for being so tired. “We spent two days in the street,” he said. “Fighting them with batons and shields.” Morath smoked to stay awake, making sure to keep well away from the window when he lit a match, cloaking the end of the cigarette with his hand. At one point, to his amazement, a freight train came through the town. He could hear it from a long way off. It didn’t stop, the slow chuffing of the locomotive moved from east to west, and he listened to it until the sound faded away into the distance.

A silhouette.

Morath came wide awake, crushed the cigarette out on the floor, snatched the rifle from the corner and rested it on the windowsill.

Was it there? He didn’t think so. A ghost, a phantom-the same phantoms we saw in Galicia. Until the dawn.

But no. Not this time.

A shape, on one knee, tight to the wall of a building across the boulevard and very still. It stood, ran a few feet, and stopped again. It held, Morath thought, something in its hand.

He touched the bolt of the rifle, making sure it was locked, then let his finger rest gently against the trigger. When he squinted over the open sight, he lost the shape until it moved again. Then he tracked it as it stood, ran, and knelt down. Stood, ran, knelt down. Stood, ran.

Tracked, squeezed.

The policeman cried out and rolled off the couch. “What happened?” he said, breathless. “Are they here?”

Morath shrugged. “I saw something.”

“Where is it?” The policeman knelt by his side.

Morath looked, there was nothing there.

But it was there an hour later, in gray light, when they crossed the boulevard. “A runner!” the policeman said. “To supply the sniper.”

Maybe. Not much more than a kid, he’d been knocked backward and tumbled into a cellar entry and died there, halfway down the steps, arms flung out to stop his fall, a sandwich wrapped in newspaper dropped on the sidewalk.

At daybreak they walked back to the police station but it wasn’t there anymore. What remained was a burned-out shell, blackened beams, smoke rising from the charred interior. One corner of the building had been blown out-a hand grenade, Morath thought, or a homemade bomb. There was no way to know; there was nobody left to tell the story. He stayed for a while, talking to the firemen as they wandered around and looked for something to do. Then an army captain showed up and drove him back to the hotel. “It wasn’t only Novotny,” he said. “We lost three others. They bicycled in from an observation post when they heard a call on the radio. Then there was the police chief, several officers, militia. At the end, they let the drunks out of the cells and gave them rifles.” He shook his head, angry and disgusted. “Somebody said they tried to surrender when the building caught on fire but the Germans wouldn’t let them.” He was silent for a time. “I don’t know, that might not be true,” he said. “Or maybe it doesn’t matter.”

Back at the Europa, there was a spray of gladioli in a silver vase on a table in the lobby. In the room, Morath slept for an hour, couldn’t after that. Ordered coffee and rolls, left most of it on the tray, and called the railroad station. “Of course they’re running,” he was told. As he hung up the phone, there was a knock at the door. “Fresh towels, sir.”

Morath opened the door and Dr. Lapp settled himself in the easy chair.

“Well, where are my towels?”

“You know, I once actually did that. Back when. In a maid’s uniform, pushing the little trolley.”

“There must have been-at least a smile.”

“No, actually not. The man who answered the door was the color of wood ash.”

Morath started to pack, folding underwear and socks into his valise.

“By the way,” Dr. Lapp said. “Have you met the two women who sit in the lobby?”

“Not really.”

“Oh? You didn’t, ah, avail yourself?”

A sideways glance. I told you I didn’t.

“They were arrested last night, is the reason I ask. In this very room, as it happens. Taken through the lobby in handcuffs.”

Morath stopped dead, a pair of silver hairbrushes in his hands. “Who were they?”

“Sudeten Germans. Likely working for the Sicherheitsdienst, SD, the SS intelligence service. It caused quite a stir downstairs. In Marienbad! Well! But the women hardly cared-they were laughing and joking. All the Czechs can do is keep them overnight in the police station, and they barely dare to do that.”

Morath slipped the brushes through loops in a leather case, then zipped it closed.

Dr. Lapp reached in his pocket. “As long as you’re packing.” He handed over a cellophane envelope, an inch square. Fitted neatly within was a photographic negative cut from a strip of film. Morath held it up to the light and saw a typed document in German.

A death sentence. He’d put his drawings of the mountain fortifications in a manila folder and slid it down the side of the valise. He could, he thought, get away with that, even if he was searched. Could say it was a property for sale or a sketch for a planned ski lodge. But not this.

“What is it?”

“A memorandum, on Oberkommando Wehrmacht stationery. From General Ludwig Beck, who has just resigned as head of the OKW, to his boss, General von Brauchitsch, the commander in chief of the German army. It says that Hitler ‘must abandon the intention of solving the Czech question by force.’ Actually, he said a great deal more, in person, to do with getting rid of the Gestapo and the Nazi party bosses and returning Germany to ‘probity and simplicity.’ Then, in protest, he quit. And his successor, General Halder, believes these things even more strongly than Beck did.”

“I will be asked how I came to have it.”

Dr. Lapp nodded. “The Abwehr, military intelligence, is part of the OKW. We go to the same meetings, then, at night, to the same dinner parties.” He crossed his legs, tapped the heel of his shoe, and gave Morath a look that said, of course you know where to put that. He leaned over the table, took the Hotel Europa butter knife from the place setting, held it to the light and studied its edge, then handed it to Morath.

Morath took off his shoe and went to work on the heel. He was very tired and sick of the world and had to force himself to be patient and careful. He prized up a corner of the heel and slid the negative in. It didn’t work, he could see the space easily enough and he could feel it when he walked.

Dr. Lapp shrugged. “Improvisation,” he said, letting his voice trail away into a sigh.

Morath finished packing, pulled the straps tight on his valise and buckled them.

“I don’t know who you’ll find to talk to, Herr Morath, but the more powerful the better. We’re opening as many lines of communication as we can, surely one of them will work.” From his voice, he didn’t believe it, sounded as though he were trying to persuade himself that two and two was five. “All we ask of the English is that they do nothing.” He looked up at Morath. “Is that asking too much?”

Morath glanced at his watch, lit a cigarette, and sat down to wait until it was time to leave for the train. It was quiet in the hotel: muffled voices in the hall, the sound of a maid’s vacuum cleaner.

“My poor country,” Dr. Lapp said. He hunted around in the inner pocket of his jacket, took out a pair of spectacles in a leather case, then a small metal box. “Perhaps you’d better have this.”

Morath opened it and found a gold swastika pin. He fastened it to his breast pocket and went to look at himself in the bathroom mirror.

“Use it when you reach the German border,” Dr. Lapp said, one hand on the doorknob. “But please do remember to take it off before you cross into France.”

“The two women,” Morath said. “Were they after me, in particular?”

Dr. Lapp shook his head slowly and looked sad. “God knows,” he said. “I don’t.”

17 August. Bromley-on-Ware, Sussex.

Morath stood at the end of a gravel driveway as a taxi rattled off down the lane. Francesca’s friend, Simon the lawyer, came smiling toward him, walking across the saintly lawn. He wore shorts and sandals, a shirt with the cuffs folded back, a jacket thrown over his shoulders, a pipe clenched in his teeth, and a newspaper under his arm. Behind him, a brick house with many chimneys, a blue sky, a white cloud.

Simon took his bag with one hand and his arm with the other and said, “So pleased you could come, Nicholas.”

As Morath followed him toward the house, Cara came out, wearing a thin summer dress that floated as she ran. “Oh you are terrible, Nicky,” she said, angry and forgiving in the same breath, holding him tight against her. Relieved, he thought, because she knew he had been up to something he couldn’t talk about, but most of all unwilling to sulk at someone’s country house. “You will have to make it up to me,” she said as they went up the steps.

On the terrace, women in straw hats, men with white hair, a whiskey and soda for Morath.

“How do you do, name’s Bromley.”

So then it is your village, and your castle, and your peasants. “Good afternoon, Mr. Bromley.”

“Heh, heh, that’s ‘Bramble’!”

“Mr. Bramble?”

“No, no. ‘Bram-well.’ Yes. Hmm.”

Cara’s bare behind was blue in the Sussex moonlight. “Not so loud,” she hissed.

“The bed squeaks-I can’t help it.”

“Mechant! We can’t make noise like that. Here, lie on your back.”

The bank of the river lay on the other side of a cow pasture. “Mind the cowpats,” Simon told him.

They sat on a bench by a huge willow, where the sun sparkled on the water as it left the shadow of the tree. “I have an old friend,” Morath said. “When he heard I was going to England for the August vacation, he asked me to take along some papers.”

“Oh?” Simon had thought the private conversation would be about Cara, women, that sort of thing. “Papers?”

“Confidential papers.”

“Oh.” Simon had a mop of brown hair that he pushed back off his forehead. “Are you a spy then, Nicholas?”

“No. Just someone who doesn’t like Hitler,” Morath said. “Doesn’t like Hitlers.” He told Simon about the Czechoslovakian mountain defense and the memorandum from General Beck. “My friend believes,” he explained, “that Hitler cannot be overthrown unless he fails. If your government holds firm, he will. One way or another.”

Simon took a minute to think it over. “It’s difficult, you see, because there are two sides to this. Like all politics, really. On one side, the side that doesn’t want to get involved, is Nevile Henderson, the ambassador to Germany. Very pro-German-pro-Nazi, it is said-and very anti-Czech. But Chamberlain does listen to him. Then, on the other side, there are people like Vansittart, the adviser to the foreign secretary, who’d be more in Churchill’s camp. So the question is, who do we talk to? For me, you see, Vansittart is the hero and Henderson the villain.” Un homme nefaste, Simon called him. A man who does harm.

“But then, if I find you a friend who can talk to Vansittart, eventually, aren’t you simply preaching to the choir?”

Morath thought Simon was in his late twenties but it sometimes amused him to be younger, to be terribly silly. Now, however, he seemed suddenly older, much older.

Simon stared down at the slow water. “So then,” he said. “What to do.”

Morath didn’t know. The serenity of the countryside-of the country itself-was like the airs of springtime, it made the Continent and its intrigues seem foolish and brutal and distant.

In the end, Simon got on the telephone and had a word with a friend of a friend.

Who stopped by for a drink that very evening. Left alone on the terrace with the family spaniel, they stumbled along in Morath’s hesitant English and the friend of a friend’s university French. Still, they managed. Morath explained the defenses and handed over the memo and passed along Dr. Lapp’s message as strongly as he could. He did somewhat better the following day, when friend of a friend-very good suit and military rank-brought along a smiling gnome who spoke Hungarian, Budapest Hungarian.

“We can always use a friend in Paris,” they said to him.

Morath declined with a smile.

They were never quite rude, after that. Inquisitive. How did he come to be involved with this? Was he simply an officer in the VK-VI, the Hungarian intelligence service? Had he met Germans? But it was none of their business and he didn’t tell them and was rescued, in the end, by Simon’s mother, who came out on the terrace and talked and laughed and flirted at them until they went away.

August 1938, the summer before the war. At night, the wireless crackled and the cicadas whirred. The Czechs mobilized, the British fleet mobilized, Benes offered Henlein and the Sudetenlanders everything either of them could think of-starting with complete autonomy and going on from there. But, not enough. In England, gas masks were issued and air-raid trenches dug in London parks. “But what will become of you, Nicholas?” Simon’s mother asked him at the lunch table.

He’d thought about that. More than he wanted to. He supposed he would be called back to duty, told to report to the regimental barracks, amid the chubby stockbrokers and balding lawyers, and ordered to fight alongside the Wehrmacht.

He discovered Cara, one night, wearing the Cartier bracelet, facedown on the bedspread, weeping into the pillow. “I shall tell my father,” she whispered, “that we must sell one of the estancias, because I am going to buy a villa in Lugano.”

At drinks the next day he was, attacked was the only word for it, by a neighbor in an army officer’s uniform, fierce, and crimson with anger. The man had a totally incomprehensible accent-his words disappeared in a thick black mustache-and Morath took a step back and had no idea what to do. It was Simon who saved him, whisking him away because he simply must meet the uncle from Perth. They were terribly, almost violently, kind to him at the house in Sussex. One rainy afternoon, when everyone but Morath and Cara played bridge, they dug deep in a chest and extracted a faded jigsaw puzzle, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Speaking of which:

On the twenty-sixth, the radio reported Admiral Horthy’s visit to the Reich, to Kiel, ostensibly as the last commander in chief of the Austro-Hungarian navy, to christen a new German battleship, the Prinz Eugen, and to have, the BBC said, “private consultations with Chancellor Hitler.” Nobody in the room looked at Morath; all eyes found something else infinitely more interesting. What the BBC didn’t say, the Count Polanyi did, three weeks later when they met in Paris. The whole business was staged so that Hitler could tell Horthy this: “If you want to join in the meal, you must help with the cooking.”

It took two cars to get them all to the railroad station, the maids and the gardener stood by the door when they drove away. The thirty-first of August turned out to be, of course, a diabolically perfect day. The sky chalk-blue, the children’s-book clouds with chiseled edges, the little train from another time. Simon shook his hand and said, “We’ll hope for the best, right?” Morath nodded. Cara dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief and held on to Francesca as the train pulled in. And Simon’s mother took his hands in hers. She had cool gray eyes and gave him a good long look. “I’m so glad you could come,” she said. “And we do want you to come back, Nicholas. You’ll try, won’t you?”

He promised he would, and held her hands.