Kingdom of Shadows

NIGHT TRAIN TO BUDAPEST

Paris that September was tense and brooding, on the edge of war, darker than Morath had ever known it. The retour, the return to daily life after the August vacation, was usually a sweet moment in Parisian life, but not that autumn. They came back to the office, the dinner party, the love affair, but Hitler was screaming at them from every newspaper stand and they had no taste for any of it. At Morath’s morning cafe the waiter said, “Let them come and drop their bombs, I’m tired of waiting.”

They couldn’t bear it, the idea of another war-they’d never really recovered from the last one. The man who came home from the trenches and made love to his wife on the day the war ended in 1918 now had a nineteen-year-old son, just the right age for the army. On the sixth of September, the morning papers wondered if the Sudeten issue was really worth a world war. The next day, a Times of London editorial supported partition.

In Germany, the annual Nazi party rally in Nuremberg began on the sixth and was to end on the twelfth, with torchlight parades, gymnastic maidens, and, the grand finale, a speech in the colossal Hall of the Fifty Thousand, where the Fuhrer promised to reveal what he had in mind for the Czechs.

On the tenth, Parisian radio reported Roosevelt’s statement that it was “one hundred percent wrong” to assume the United States would join Britain and France in a war over Czechoslovakia. On the eleventh, the proprietor of the stationery store on the rue Richelieu showed Morath his old Lebel revolver from the Great War. “Well, here is my answer to all this,” he said. Which answer was that? Suicide? Shooting a German tourist? Sniping at the Wehrmacht?

“He has us where he wants us,” Polanyi said, at lunch on the quai de la Tournelle. “Did you see the newsreel of Horthy’s arrival at Kiel station?” Morath hadn’t. “You get a glimpse of me, just over Count Csaky’s shoulder.” Then he described how Hungary had been offered a return of disputed territories if she would agree to march into Slovakia when Hitler attacked the Czechs.

“Horthy declined. On the basis that we barely have an army, and what we have barely has guns and bullets,” Polanyi said, then went on to repeat Hitler’s remark about the meal and the cooking.

They were eating blanquette de veau at a table on the terrace of a Norman restaurant. Polanyi waited while two young men hurried past. “So naturally,” he said, “some units are being recalled to service. But I made sure you weren’t included in that.” He ran a forkful of fried potatoes through a dish of mayonnaise, then paused before eating and said, “I trust I did the right thing.”

Morath didn’t bother to answer.

“Why waste your life in a barracks?” Polanyi said. “And besides, I need you with me.”

Eight-thirty in the morning on the fourteenth of September-Chamberlain had flown to Berchtesgaden to consult with Hitler-the phone rang in Morath’s apartment. It was Cara, in a voice he’d never heard her use. “I hope you will come over and say good-bye to me,” she said.

He started to say “What-” but she hung up on him.

Twenty minutes later he was there. The door was open, he walked in. Two men in blue smocks were packing Cara’s clothing in the drawers of a large steamer trunk, its wardrobe side already crammed with dresses on little hangers. A third man, bigger than the others, stood and watched them, his arms folded across his chest. A chauffeur or a bodyguard, Morath thought, with a heavy face and a collarless jacket. When Morath came into the room he took a half step toward him and let his arms hang by his sides.

Cara was sitting on the edge of the bed, the Picasso nude in its gold frame held on her knees. “Monsieur Morath,” she said, her voice dull and flat, “allow me to present my father, Senor Dionello.”

A short man, sitting in the bedroom chair, got to his feet. He had a black-and-white mustache and wore a double-breasted suit with black and white stripes and a black Borsalino-style hat. He said “Sir” in Spanish, tipped his hat, and shook hands. It was clear to Morath that he was not pleased to meet his daughter’s forty-four-year-old lover, Hungarian lover, Parisian lover, but he would agree not to make a scene if Morath didn’t.

Morath sought Cara’s eyes-What do you want me to do? Family was family, but he was not going to allow her to be abducted against her will.

She shook her head and closed her eyes. It was subtle, a small, fragile gesture of surrender, but she’d told him what he needed to know.

His heart sank, he’d lost her.

Senor Dionello spoke to her in rapid Spanish, his voice not unkind.

“It’s the war, Nicky,” Cara said. “My father expresses his regrets, but my mother and grandmother are sick with worry, he says, that I will be, hurt.”

Senor Dionello smiled ruefully at Morath as Cara spoke, in his expression a plea for understanding, a plea that he not be forced to use power or money to get his way.

“My father is staying at the Meurice, I am to join him there for a few days, until the boat leaves.”

Morath nodded to Senor Dionello, forcing himself to be as gracious as he could.

Senor Dionello spoke again and smiled at Morath. “My father would be pleased if you would join us for dinner at the hotel.” She hesitated, then said, “It’s a lot for him, Nicky.”

Morath declined. Cara translated, then said, “Un momentito, por favor.”

As they went out into the hall, Senor Dionello made a small gesture and the bodyguard stayed where he was.

In the hall, Cara clenched his shirt in her fists and sobbed, silently, with her face pressed against him. Then she pushed him away, wiped the tears off with her hand, took two steps toward the door, looked at him one last time, and went back into the apartment.

On the twenty-first of September, Chamberlain tried again. Flew to Bad Godesberg and offered Hitler what he said he wanted. The Sudetenland, with French and British approval, would become a German possession. But the Fuhrer didn’t quite work the way Chamberlain thought he did. Once he got what he wanted, he wanted more. Now it was military occupation, by October 1.

Or else, war.

So, on the twenty-ninth, Chamberlain flew back to Germany, this time to Munich, and agreed to the occupation. The Czechoslovakian army abandoned its forts and moved back from the mountains.

18 October.

Morath stared out the train window, a tiny village slid away down the track. Was it called Szentovar? Maybe. Or that was another place, a hundred kilometers and a hundred years away from Budapest, where the peasants still rubbed garlic on barn doors to keep the vampires from milking the cows at night.

On the road, a Gypsy wagon. The driver looked up just as Morath’s window went by. Prosperously fat, with three chins and clever eyes, perhaps a primas, a clan leader. He held the reins loosely in his hands and turned and said something to the women in the wagon behind him. Morath never saw their faces, simply the red and yellow colors of their clothing as the train clattered past.

October was a dead month, he thought. The brutal politics played out in the newspapers. The French relaxed, congratulated themselves on having done the right thing, the smart thing, for once in their dreamy lives. Morath smoked too much and stared out the window when he woke up in the morning.

He was surprised at his broken heart. He had always told himself that the love affair with Cara was a passing thing that stayed. But now she was gone, he missed what he’d taken for granted, and he ached for what she’d lost. “When I lived in Paris,” she would say to her friends in Buenos Aires.

Count Polanyi didn’t care for this mood and let Morath know it. “We’ve all been thrown off the horse,” he said. “The thing to do is get back in the saddle.” When that didn’t work, he tried harder. “This is no time to feel sorry for yourself. Need something to do? Go back to Budapest and save your mother’s life.”

Keleti Palyuadvar. The east railroad station where, this being Hungary, all important trains arrived from the west. There were cabs in the street but Morath decided to walk-in the late afternoon of an autumn day, what else. It is your nose that tells you you’re home, he thought. Burnt coffee and coal dust, Turkish tobacco and rotten fruit, lilac water from the barbershops, drains and damp stone, grilled chicken, God only knew what it really was. A deep breath, another-Morath inhaled his childhood, his country, the exile returned.

He walked for a long time, taking the cobbled alleys, heading more or less across the city, toward a villa in the hills of the Third District, on the Buda side of the Danube. He dawdled, stopped to look in shop windows. As always, this time of day, a melancholy, speculative idleness settled over the city and Morath slowed down to meet its rhythm. At five-thirty, when the sun hit the windows of a tenement on Kazinczy Avenue and turned them flaming gold, Morath took the number-seven tram across the Chain Bridge and went home.

They didn’t really talk until the next morning. In the living room, the rugs were still up for the summer, so when his mother spoke there was a faint echo. She sat, perfectly composed, on a spindly chair in front of the French doors, a silhouette in garden light. She was, as always, slim and lovely, with ice-colored hair set in steel and pale skin that showed in the vee of her silk dress.

“And do you see Lillian Frei?” she asked.

“Now and then. She always asks for you.”

“I miss her. Does she still wear the suits from De Pinna?”

“Where?”

“A store on Fifth Avenue, in New York.”

Morath shrugged politely, he had no idea.

“In any event, you’ll kiss her for me.”

Morath drank a sip of coffee.

“Would you care for a pastry, Nicholas? I can send Malya to Gundel’s.”

“No, thank you.”

“Bread and butter, then.”

“Really, just coffee.”

“Oh Nicholas, what a Parisian you are. You’re sure?”

Morath smiled. He’d never in his life been able to eat anything before noon. “How long has it been, anyuci, since you’ve seen Paris?” This was mother, very much her preference. She had never been mama.

His mother sighed. “Oh a long time,” she said. “Your father was alive, the war just over. 1919-could that be right?”

“Yes.”

“Has it changed? People say it has.”

“There are more automobiles. Electric signs. Cheap restaurants on the boulevards. Some people say it’s not as nice as it was.”

“Here it is the same.”

“Anyuci?”

“Yes?”

“Janos Polanyi feels that, with the situation in Germany, you, and perhaps Teresa, should consider, should find a place …”

When she smiled, his mother was still incredibly beautiful. “You haven’t come all the way here for that, I hope. Ferenc Molnar has moved to New York. He is living at the Plaza and is said to be utterly miserable.”

A long look, mother and son.

“I won’t leave my house, Nicholas.” And how can you not have known it?

They went to the movies in the afternoon. A British comedy, dubbed in Hungarian, from the 1920s. It had a cruise ship, nightclubs with shiny floors, a hound called Randy, a hero with patent-leather hair called Tony, a blonde with kiss curls that they fought over, called Veronica, which sounded very strange in Hungarian.

Morath’s mother loved it-he glanced over and saw her eyes shining like a child’s. She laughed at every joke and ate caramels from a little bag. During a song-and-dance sequence at the nightclub, she hummed along with the music: Akor mikor, Lambeth utodon

Bar melyek este, bar melyek napon,

Ugy talalnad hogy mi mind is

Setaljak a Lambeth Walk. Oi!

Minden kis Lambeth leany

Az o kis, Lambeth parjaval

Ugy talalnad hogy ok

Setaljak a Lambeth Walk. Oi!

Afterward, they went to the tearoom of the Hotel Gellert and had acacia honey and whipped cream on toasted cake.

3:30 in the morning. In the rambling, iron-gated gardens of the villa district, some people kept nightingales. Other than that, he could hear wind in the autumn leaves, a creak in a shutter, a neighbor’s fountain, a distant rumble of thunder-north, he thought, in the mountains.

Still, it was hard to sleep. Morath lay in his old bed and read Freya Stark-this was the third time he’d started it, a travel narrative, adventures in the wild mountain valleys of Persia.

He’d always stayed up late in this house, his father’s very own son. He used to hear him, sometimes, pacing around the living room. Often he played records on the Victrola while he worked in his office-sliding stamps into glassine envelopes with a silver tweezers.

They weren’t rich, but his father never worked for money. He had been one of the great philatelists of Hungary, very strong in both nineteenth-century Europe and colonials. Morath supposed his father had traded in the international markets, perhaps he’d made some money that way. Then, too, before the war, nobody really had to work. At least, nobody they knew.

But, after Trianon, everything changed. Families lost the income they’d had from land in the countryside. Even so, most of them managed, they simply had to learn to improvise. It became fashionable to say things like “If only I could afford to live the way I live.”

Then, on a June day in 1919, the communists killed his father.

In the spasms of political chaos that followed the loss of the war, there came a Soviet Republic of Hungary-a government born of a national desperation so deluded it persuaded itself that Lenin and the Red Army would save them from their enemies, the Serbs and the Roumanians.

The Soviet was led by a Hungarian journalist named Bela Kun who, while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army, had deserted to the Russians during the war. Kun, his henchman Szamuelly, and forty-five commissars began a rule of one hundred and thirty-three days, and shot and burned and hanged their way from one end of Hungary to the other. They were then chased out of the country-across the border and, eventually, into the Lubianka-by a Roumanian army, which occupied Budapest, wandered aimlessly about the countryside, and spent its days in desultory looting until it was shooed back across the border by a Hungarian army, led by Miklos Horthy. The counterrevolution then gave birth to the White Terror, which shot and burned and hanged its way from one end of Hungary to the other, paying particular attention to the Jews, since Jews were Bolsheviks (or bankers), and Kun and a number of his comrades were Jewish.

It was one of Kun’s wandering bands that murdered Morath’s father. He had gone, one weekend, to the country house in the Carpathian foothills. The communist militia rode into the yard at dusk, demanded jewelry for the oppressed masses, then bloodied the farm manager’s nose, threw Morath’s father into a horse trough, took three stamp albums-1910 commemoratives from Luxembourg-all the cash they could find, several shirts, and a lamp. They chased the servant girls into the woods but couldn’t catch them and, in one corner of the kitchen, set a fire, which burned a hole in the pantry wall and went out.

Morath’s father dried himself off, calmed the servant girls, put a cold spoon on old Tibor’s neck to stop the bleeding, then poured a small glass of plum brandy and sat down in his favorite chair, where, with his glasses folded up and held gently in one hand, he died.

Morath went to his sister’s house for dinner. A new villa, also in the Third District but up in the newly elegant quarter known as Rose Hill. His sister, in a low-cut dress and red felt boots with tiny mirrors on them-oh, Cara-gave him a sexy hug and a warm kiss on the lips. “I’m so happy to see you, Nicholas. I am.” She didn’t let him go until a maid came into the room.

This was not new. She was three years older than Morath. When he was nine and she was twelve, she liked to comb his hair, would slip into his bed during a scary thunderstorm, would always know when he was melancholy and be tender to him.

“Teresa,” he said. “My only love.” They both laughed.

Morath looked around. There was too much furniture in the Duchazy house, much too expensive and much too new. How his sister could have married that idiot Duchazy was beyond him. They had three children, including a ten-year-old Nicholas-the absolute image of that idiot Duchazy.

Still, Teresa had married him, and her days of worrying about money were long over. The Duchazy family owned flour mills-thirty years earlier there’d been more mills in Budapest than in any other city in the world. Morath’s mother, who disliked Duchazy even more than he did, would refer to him in private as “the miller.”

Not the typical miller. He strode toward Morath and embraced him. He was a sinewy man with uncomfortably stiff posture, a pencil mustache, and strange, pale-green eyes. Well then, how was Paris? Still in the advertising business? Still a bachelor? What a life! The children were brought out, shown off, and put away. Duchazy poured brandies and had the fire lit.

The conversation wandered here and there. The Duchazy family was not exactly nyilas but close enough. Teresa warned him with a glance, more than once, when he was headed into a sensitive area. By the end of the second brandy, Duchazy had thrown a second log on the fire, which blazed merrily in a newly installed surround of yellow tile.

“Janos Polanyi thinks Mother ought to leave Budapest,” Morath said.

“Why is that?” Duchazy was annoyed.

“War,” Morath said.

Teresa shrugged. “She won’t go.”

“Maybe if you two considered it, she might.”

“But we won’t,” Duchazy said. “We’re patriots. Besides, I think it’s going to go on this way for a long time.” He meant diplomacy, marches, street fighting-the sort of thing they’d seen in the Sudetenland. “Hitler means to dominate the Balkans,” he continued. “Someone’s going to, it might as well be him. And he wants it quiet in Hungary and south of here-that’s the granary, and the oil fields. I don’t think the British dare to fight him, but, if it comes to that, he’ll need the wheat and the oil. Anyhow, if we’re smart, we’ll stay in his good graces, because the borders are going to start moving.”

“They already are,” Teresa said.

That was true. Hungary, having supported the occupation of the Sudetenland, was to be rewarded with the return of some of its northern territory, especially in lower Slovakia, where the population was eighty-five percent Magyar.

“Laszlo’s brother is fighting up in Ruthenia,” Teresa said.

Morath found this puzzling. Duchazy gave his wife the look that meant you’ve been indiscreet.

“Really?” Morath said.

Duchazy shrugged. “Nothing’s secret around here.” He meant, Morath thought, the house, Budapest, the nation itself.

“In Ruthenia?”

“Near Uzhorod. We’re in it with the Poles. They have irregulars, in the north, and we have the Rongyos Garda.” The Ragged Guard.

“What’s that?”

“Arrow Cross men, the street-corner boys and what have you, led by a few army officers in civilian clothing. They’re fighting the Sich, the Ukrainian militia. The next thing is, local Hungarians demand an end to the instability, and we send in the regular army. This used to be Hungary, after all, why should it belong to the Czechs?”

Jackals, Morath thought. Now that the prey was down they’d tear off a piece for themselves.

“The world’s changing,” Duchazy said. His eyes sparkled. “And about time.”

Dinner was exceptional. Deviled carp with onions, cabbage stuffed with ground pork, and a Medoc from the Duchazy estates near Eger.

After dinner, Teresa left the men to themselves, and Morath and Duchazy sat by the fire. Cigars were lit, and for a time they smoked in companionable silence. “One thing I did want to ask you,” Duchazy said.

“Yes?”

“A few of us have gotten together to support Szalassy. Can I put you down for a contribution?” Szalassy was one of the leaders of the Arrow Cross.

“Thank you for asking, but not right now,” Morath said.

“Mmm. Oh well, I promised some people I’d ask.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Do you ever see Colonel Sombor, at the legation?”

“I’m hardly ever there.”

“Oh. He asked for you. I thought maybe you were friends.”

Tuesday. In the late afternoon, Morath took a trolley to the Kobanya district, where factory walls rose high above the track on both sides of the street. There was a smoky haze, as evening came on, and a light rain dappled the surface of the river. A young woman sat across from him, she had the liquid radiance of some Hungarian girls and long hair that blew across her face as the trolley went around a curve. She swept it back with one hand and glanced at Morath. The trolley stopped in front of a brewery, and the girl got off in a crowd of workmen. Some of them knew her, called her by name, and one of them gave her a hand down from the high step.

The slaughterhouse was at the next stop, where a metal sign bolted to the brickwork said GERSOVICZY. When Morath got off the trolley, the air was like ammonia and made his eyes water. It was a long way to the entrance that led to the office, past loading docks with open doors where he could see red carcasses hung on hooks and butchers in leather aprons. One of them rested a sledgehammer in the sawdust, the iron head beaten flat at both ends, while he took a minute to smoke a cigarette.

“The office?”

“Upstairs. Just keep going till you see the river.”

In the Gersoviczy brothers’ office there was a desk with a telephone and an adding machine, an ancient safe in one corner, a clothes tree behind the door. The brothers were waiting for him. They wore black homburgs and heavy suits and silver ties, and they had the long sidelocks and beards of Orthodox Jews. On the wall was a Hebrew calendar with a picture of a rabbi blowing a ram’s horn. Across the top it said, in Hungarian, Gersoviczy Brothers Wish You a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

A soot-blackened window looked out over the Danube, lights twinkling on a hill above the far bank. The brothers, both smoking oval cigarettes, peered at Morath through the gloom of the unlit office.

“You are Morath Uhr?” He used the traditional form of address, Morath Sir.

“Yes. Count Polanyi’s nephew.”

“Please do sit down. I’m sorry we cannot offer you anything.”

Morath and the older brother, his beard streaked with silver, took the two wooden swivel chairs, as the younger brother leaned on the edge of the desk. “I am Szimon Gersoviczy,” he said. “And this is Herschel.” The older brother gave him a stiff nod.

Szimon spoke heavily accented Hungarian. “We’re Polish,” he explained. “From Tarnopol, twenty years ago. Then we came down here. Half of Galicia came here, a hundred years ago. We came for the same reason, to get away from the pogroms, to get a little opportunity. And it worked out like that. So, we stayed, and we Magyarized the name. It used to be just Gersovicz.”

The older brother finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in a tin ashtray. “Your uncle came to us for help, that was in September. I don’t know if he told you.”

“Not then, no.”

“Well, he did. Through our brother-in-law, in Paris. He asked if we would help, help the country. He saw the handwriting on the wall, as they say.”

He paused a moment. Outside, the drumming of a tugboat engine, hauling a line of barges north on the river.

“We don’t ask for anything,” he went on, “but now Polanyi knows, and you know, so …”

Szimon went over to the safe and began to work the combination. Then he pulled the handles to the up position and swung the doors open. Herschel leaned close to Morath. He smelled strong, of sweat and onions, cigarettes.

“It’s in pengo,” he said. “Maybe if the community was more involved, we could make it in something else. But the Count wanted it kept close, so it’s just a few people. Szimon and me, our family, you know, one or two others, but mostly us.”

Szimon began stacking piles of pengo on the desk, each fifty notes pinned at the corner. He flipped the ends of the stacks, wet his thumb, then counted in Yiddish as he shuffled through the bills. Herschel laughed. “For some reason,” he said, “it’s hard to do that in Hungarian.”

Morath shook his head. “Nobody ever thought it would come to this,” he said.

“Forgive me, sir, but it always comes to this.”

“Zvei hundrit toizend,” Szimon said.

“What will you call it?”

“I don’t know. The Free Hungary Committee-something like that.”

“In Paris?”

“Or London. If the country is occupied, the best place is the closest place. Closest safe place.”

“So, do you like New York?”

“God forbid.”

Szimon finished counting, then squared the stacks off by tapping the edges on the desk. “Four hundred thousand pengo,” he said. “About the same in French francs. Or, just in case God doesn’t forbid, eighty thousand dollars.”

“Tell me one thing,” Herschel said. “Do you think the country will be occupied? Some people say sell and get out.”

“And lose everything,” Szimon said. He slid the money across the desk-thousand-pengo notes, wider than French currency, with black and red engravings of Saint Istvan on one side and a castle on the other. Morath opened a briefcase, placed the stacks on the bottom, put Freya Stark on top.

“Don’t we have rubber bands?” Herschel said.

Morath pulled the straps tight and buckled them. Then he shook hands, very formally, with each of the brothers. “Go with God,” Herschel said.

That night, he met Wolfi Szubl at the Arizona, a nachtlokal in Szint Josef Alley on Margaret Island. Szubl wore a pale-blue suit and a flowery tie and smelled of heliotrope. “You never know,” he said to Morath. “It gets very late at night here.”

“Wolfi,” Morath said, shaking his head.

“There’s someone for everyone,” Szubl said.

Szubl led him to a table on a platform by the wall, then pressed a button which raised them ten feet. “Here it’s good.” They shouted down to a waiter for drinks, Polish vodkas, that came up on a mechanical tray.

The orchestra was dressed in white tuxedos and played Cole Porter songs to a packed dance floor, which sometimes disappeared into the basement to a chorus of shrieks and laughter from the dancers.

A naked girl floated past in a harness, dark hair streaming out behind her. Her pose was artistic, lofty, an insouciant hand resting against the wire that hung from the ceiling.

“Ahh,” Szubl said.

“You like her?”

Szubl grinned-who wouldn’t?

“Why ‘Arizona’?” Morath asked.

“The couple who own it got an unexpected inheritance, a fortune, from an uncle in Vienna. Decided to build a nightclub on Margaret Island. When they got the telegram they were in Arizona, so …”

“No. Really?”

Szubl nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Tucson.”

The drinks came. The girl went by again, headed the other way. “You see? She ignores us,” Szubl said.

“She just happened to fly past, naked on a wire. Don’t make assumptions.”

Szubl raised his glass. “To the Free Hungary Committee.”

“May it never exist.”

Morath liked Polish vodka, potato vodka. It had a ghost of a taste he could never quite understand. “So, how did you do?”

“Not bad. From the Salon Kitty, on Szinyei Street, two hundred and fifty thousand pengo. Most of it from Madame Kitty, but she wanted us to know that three of the girls contributed. Then, from the nephew of the late, lamented minister of finance, another one hundred and fifty.”

“That’s all? His uncle would steal the wool from a sheep.”

“Too late, Nicholas. The casino got most of it-he’s a candidate for the boat.”

The citizens of Budapest were partial to suicide, so the municipal authority maintained a boat tied up below the Ferenc Josef Bridge. A riverman waited in the bow with a long pole, ready to haul in the night’s jumpers before they drowned.

“What about you?” Szubl said.

“Four hundred thousand from the Gersoviczy brothers. I go out to Kolozsvar tomorrow.”

“Shooting animals?”

“Christ, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I’m to see Voyschinkowsky.”

” ‘The Lion of the Bourse.’ He lives in Paris, what’s he doing here?”

“Nostalgia.”

“Waiter!”

“Sir?”

“Two more, please.”

A big redhead came gliding by. She blew a kiss, put her hands beneath her breasts and wobbled them, then raised an eyebrow.

“Let me buy her for you, Wolfi. All night, my treat.”

They drank their vodkas, ordered doubles. The dance floor reappeared. The leader of the orchestra had shiny black hair and a little mustache and smiled like a saint as he waved his baton.

“When you begin-n-n-n, the beguine.” Szubl took a deep breath and sighed. “You know,” he said, “what I really like is to look at naked women.”

“You do?”

“No, Nicholas, don’t make fun of me, I’m serious. I mean, I really don’t like anything else. If I could have begun this at fourteen, as my life’s work, as the only thing I did, day and night, there never would have been a reason for me to disturb the world in any other way.

“But, of course, they wouldn’t let me do that. So, now I crowd into trains, make telephones ring, throw orange peels into trash cans, make women buy girdles, ask for change, it doesn’t stop. And, worst of all, on a lovely day, when you’re happy and calm you go out in the street-and there I am! Really, there’s no end to it. And it won’t stop until I take up the space in the graveyard you wanted for your mother.”

The orchestra played the “Tango du Chat.” Morath remembered the song from the bar on the beach in Juan-les-Pins. “Tell you what,” he said to Szubl. “We’ll go over to Szinyei Street, to Kitty’s. Order a parade around the parlor, every girl in the house. Or, a game of tag. No, wait, hide-and-seek!”

“Nicholas. You know, you’re a romantic.”

Later, Morath went to the WC, met an old friend, gossiped for a few minutes. When he came back, the redhead was sitting on Szubl’s lap, playing with his tie and laughing. Wolfi’s voice floated down from the platform. “Good night, Nicholas. Good night.”

At Kolozsvar railroad station, a bright, cold morning.

There were two other Hungarians who left the train with him. Hunters, with shotguns under their arms. The conductor on the platform wished him good morning, in Hungarian, as he got off the train. And the two women mopping the floor in the station waiting room bantered in Hungarian and, in fact, laughed in Hungarian. A pleasant Magyar world-it just happened to be in Roumania. Once Kolozsvar, now Cluj. Nem, nem, soha.

A journey to the estate of Prince Hrubal turned out to be infernally complicated to arrange. It had required, in the end, several medieval phone calls, three telegrams-one of which went, inexplicably, to Wales, a verbal message taken to the castle by a gamekeeper’s daughter, and a personal intervention by the village mayor. But, in the end, it worked.

In the street outside the station, Prince Hrubal’s head groom was waiting for him, mounted on a bay gelding and holding the reins of a dock-tailed chocolate mare. This was, Morath knew, much the best way. You could try the road by automobile, but you spent more time digging than driving, and the trip by horse and carriage would hammer your teeth flat. That left walking and riding, and riding was faster.

He swung up into the saddle and tucked his briefcase under his arm. He’d made sure, in Budapest, to wear boots for the journey.

“Your excellency, I kiss your hands,” said the steward.

“Good morning to you,” Morath said, and they were off.

The good road in Cluj led to the bad road outside Cluj, then onto a road paved long ago, by some nameless dreamer/bureaucrat, and soon forgotten. This was northern Transylvania, mountainous and lost, where for generations Hungarian nobles ruled the lives of Roumanian serfs. There were, now and then, savage jacqueries, peasant risings, and the looting and burning would go on until the army arrived, coils of rope hung on their saddles. The trees were already there. Now, for the moment at least, it was quiet. Very quiet. Out in the countryside, a ruined castle broke the line of a mountain crest, then there was only forest, sometimes a field.

It took Morath back to the war. They’d been no different than any of the armies who came down these roads on mornings in the fall. He remembered wisps of autumn mist caught on the barbed wire, the sound of wind in the stubble of the rye fields, the creak of harness, crows wheeling in the sky and laughing at them. Sometimes they saw geese flying south; sometimes, when it rained at dawn, they only heard them. A thousand horses’ hooves rang on the paved roads-their coming was no secret, and the riflemen waited for them. Once there was a sergeant, a Croat, adjusting a stirrup in the shade of an oak tree. The air cracked, an officer shouted. The sergeant put a hand over his eye, like a man reading an eye chart. The horse reared, galloped down the road a little way, and began to graze.

Prince Hrubal owned forests and mountains.

A servant answered Morath’s knock and led him to the great hall-stag heads on the wall and tennis racquets in the corner. The prince showed up a moment later. “Welcome to my house,” he said. He had merciless eyes; black, depthless, and cruel, a shaven head, a drooping Turkish mustache, the nickname “Jacky,” acquired during his two years at Cornell, a taste for Italian fashion models, and a near manic passion for charity. His bookkeeper could barely keep track of it-broom factories for the blind, orphanages, homes for elderly nuns, and, lately, roof repairs on ancient monasteries. “This may do it for me, Nicholas,” he said, a heavy arm draped around Morath’s shoulders. “I’ve had to sell my sugar contracts in Chicago. But, still, the contemplative life must be lived, right? If not by you and me, by somebody, right? We can’t have wet monks.”

The baroness Frei once told Morath that the prince’s life was the story of an aristocrat of the blood seeking to become an aristocrat of the heart. “Hrubal’s a little mad,” she said. “And it remains to be seen if his wealth can accommodate his madness. But whatever happens, these are thrilling races to watch, don’t you agree? Poor man. Thirty generations of ancestors, brutal and bloody as the day is long, roasting rebels on iron thrones and God knows what, and only one lifetime for redemption.”

The prince led Morath outside. “We’ve been moving boxwood,” he said. He wore high boots, corduroy field pants, and a peasant blouse, a pair of cowhide gloves in his back pocket. At the end of the lawn, two peasants waited for him, leaning on their shovels.

“And Janos Polanyi,” Hrubal said. “He’s in good form?”

“Always up to something.”

Hrubal laughed. “The King of Swords-that’s his tarot card. A leader, powerful, but dark and secretive. His subjects prosper but regret they ever knew him.” The prince laughed again, fondly, and patted Morath’s shoulder. “Hasn’t killed you yet, I see. But have no fear, Nicky, he will, he will.”

Dinner for twelve. Venison from Hrubal’s forest, trout from his stream, sauce from his red currants and sauce from his figs, a traditional salad-lettuce dressed with lard and paprika-and burgundy, Bull’s Blood, from the Hrubal vineyards.

They ate in the small dining room, where the walls were lined with red satin, sagging, here and there, in melancholy folds and well spotted with champagne, wax, and blood. “But it proves the room,” Hrubal said. “Last burned in 1810. A long time, in this part of the world.” Dinner was eaten by the light of two hundred candles, Morath felt the sweat running down his sides.

He sat close to the head of the table, between Annalisa, the prince’s friend from Rome-pale as a ghost, with long white hands, last seen in the April Vogue-and the fiancee of the Reuters correspondent in Bucharest, Miss Bonington.

“It is miserable now,” she said to Morath. “Hitler is bad enough, but the local spawn are worse.”

“The Iron Guard.”

“They are everywhere. With little bags of earth around their necks. Sacred earth, you see.”

“Come to Rome,” Annalisa said. “And see them strut, our fascisti. Chubby little men, they think it’s their time.”

“What are we supposed to do?” Miss Bonington said, her voice shrill. “Vote?”

Annalisa flipped a hand in the air. “Be worse than they are, I suppose, that’s the tragedy. They have created a cheap, soiled, empty world, and now we are to have the pleasure of living in it.”

“Well, personally, I never imagined-”

“Basta,” Annalisa said softly. “Hrubal is looking at us. To talk politics with food is against the rules.”

Miss Bonington laughed. “What then?”

“Love. Poetry. Venice.”

“Dear man.”

The three of them turned their eyes to the head of the table.

“I loved the life there,” Hrubal said. “On Saturday afternoon, the big game. That’s what they called it-the big game! As for me, well, I was their saber champion, what else, and only our girlfriends came to the matches. But we all went to see the football. I had a giant horn, for cheering.”

“A giant horn?”

“Damn. Somebody …”

“A megaphone, I think,” said the Reuters man.

“That’s it! Thank you, for years I’ve wanted to remember that.”

A servant approached the table and whispered to Hrubal. “Yes, very well,” he said.

The string quartet had arrived. They were shown into the dining room and the servants went for chairs. The four men smiled and nodded, wiping the rain from their hair and drying their instrument cases with their handkerchiefs.

When everyone had gone to their rooms, Morath followed Hrubal to an office high in a crumbling turret, where the prince opened an iron box and counted out packets of faded Austrian schillings. “These are very old,” he said. “I never know quite what to do with them.” Morath converted schilling to pengo as the money went into the briefcase. Six hundred thousand, more or less. “Tell Count Janos,” Hrubal said, “that there’s more if he needs it. Or, you know, Nicholas, whatever it might be.”

Later that night, Morath heard a soft tapping and opened his door. After venison from Prince Hrubal’s forest and trout from his stream, a servant girl from his kitchen. They never spoke a word. She stared at him with grave, dark eyes and, when he’d closed the door, lit the candle by his bedside and pulled her shift over her head. She had a faint mustache, a lush body, and wore knitted, red-wool stockings that came to midthigh.

A sweet morning, Morath thought, riding through the orange leaves on the floor of the forest. Delicately, the mare walked across a wide stream-a few inches of fast silver water-then down a series of rocky ledges. Morath kept the reins loose, let her find her own way. It was an old Magyar cavalryman who’d taught him that a horse can go anywhere a man can go without using his hands.

Morath kept his weight balanced, steadied the briefcase on the saddle, tugged a gentle reproach when the mare saw something she wanted for breakfast. “Manners,” he whispered. Did she speak Hungarian? A Transylvanian horse, she must.

Up ahead, Hrubal’s head groom rode his bay gelding. Morath pulled up for a moment and whistled softly, the groom half turned in the saddle to look back at him. He thought he’d heard other horses, not far away, but, when he listened, they weren’t there. He rode up even with the groom and asked him about it.

“No, your excellency,” the groom said. “I believe we are alone.”

“Hunters, perhaps.”

The groom listened, then shook his head.

They rode on. Morath watched a bank of mist as it drifted over the side of a mountain. He looked at his watch-a little after noon. The groom carried a picnic hamper of sandwiches and beer. Morath was hungry, but decided to ride for another hour.

In the forest, somewhere above him on the gentle slope, a horse whickered, then stopped, abruptly, as though someone had put a hand over its muzzle.

Morath rode even with the groom. “Surely you heard that.”

“No, your excellency. I did not.”

Morath stared at him. He had a sharp face, with gray hair and beard cut short, and there was something in his voice, subtle but there, that suggested defiance: I chose not to hear it.

“Are you armed?”

The groom reached under his shirt, held up a large revolver, then put it away. Morath wanted it.

“Are you able to use it?” he asked.

“Yes, your excellency.”

“May I see it for a moment?”

“Forgive me, your excellency, but I must decline.”

Morath felt the heat in his face. He was going to be murdered for this money and he was very angry. He threw the reins over hard and dug his heels in the horse’s side. She sped off, dead leaves whispering beneath her hooves as she galloped down the slope. Morath looked back and saw that the groom was following him, his horse easily keeping pace. But there was no revolver to be seen, and Morath let the mare slow to a walk.

“You’d better go back now,” he called out to the groom. “I’ll go on by myself.” He was breathing hard, after the gallop.

“I cannot, your excellency.”

Why don’t you shoot me and get it over with? Morath let the mare walk downhill. Something made him look back once more, and he saw, through the bare trees, a horse and rider, then another, some way up the slope. When they realized he’d seen them they walked their horses into cover, but seemed to be in no great hurry. Morath thought of tossing the briefcase away, but by then he knew it wouldn’t matter. He called up to the groom, “Who are your friends?” his voice almost mocking, but the man wouldn’t answer.

A few minutes later he came to the road. It had been built in Roman times, the stone blocks hollowed and cracked by centuries of horse and wagon traffic. Morath turned toward Kolozsvar. When he looked up into the forest, he caught an occasional glimpse of the other riders, keeping pace with him. Directly behind him was the groom, on the bay gelding.

When he heard the automobile, sputtering and tapping, he stopped, and stroked the mare on her heaving side. A gentle animal, she’d done her best, he hoped they wouldn’t shoot her. It was an old Citroen that appeared from a grove of birch trees by the side of the road. There was mud spattered on the doors and the wheel guards, a brown sweep across the windshield where the driver had tried to clear the dust with the single wiper.

The Citroen stopped with a loud squeak from the brakes and two men climbed out, both of them heavy and short. They wore straw hats, dark suits, and soiled white shirts buttoned at the throat. Siguranza, he thought. Roumanian secret police. Obviously they’d been waiting for him.

“Get down from there,” the driver said. It was Hungarian, badly spoken. Morath took a little longer to dismount than they liked. The man on the passenger side of the car opened his jacket, showing Morath the handgrip of an automatic pistol in a shoulder holster. “If you need to be shot, we’ll be happy to oblige you,” he said. “Maybe it’s a matter of honor, or something.”

“Don’t bother,” Morath said. He got off the horse and held her by the bridle. The driver approached and took the briefcase. Something about him made the mare nervous, she tossed her head and stamped her feet on the stone block. The driver unbuckled the briefcase and had a look inside, then he called out to the groom, “You can go home now, Vilmos. Take his horse.”

“Yes, excellency,” the groom said. He was very frightened.

“And keep your mouth shut.”

Morath watched as he rode back up into the forest, leading the mare by the reins.

The Siguranza men tied his wrists with a length of cord and shoved him into the backseat of the car, then made jokes as the starter engine whined and faded until the engine caught. They talked for a moment more-Morath didn’t understand Roumanian but caught the word Bistrita, a small town north of Kolozsvar. As the car bounced along the road, the passenger opened the briefcase and divided up Morath’s underwear and shaving kit. The two men argued briefly over Morath’s spare shirt but the driver gave in almost immediately. The passenger then turned in his seat and stared at Morath. He hadn’t shaved for several days, the stubble on his face black and gray.

He leaned over the back of the seat and slapped Morath in the face. Then did it again, harder. The driver laughed. The passenger stretched sideways until he could see himself in the rearview mirror and adjusted the brim of his hat.

Morath did not feel pain where he’d been slapped, he felt it in his wrists, where he’d tried to break the cord as the Siguranza man hit him. Later on, when he managed to twist around and get a look, he saw that he was bleeding.

Bistrita had been part of the Ottoman Empire until 1878, and not that much had changed. Dusty streets and lime trees, stucco buildings painted yellow and pale green, with fishscale roofing on the better houses. The Catholic crosses were mounted on the domes of the former mosques, the women on the street kept their eyes lowered, and so did the men.

The Citroen pulled up in front of the police station, and the two men hauled Morath out by the elbow and kicked him through the door. He made a point of not falling down. Then they beat him down the stairs, along a hallway, and to the door of a cell. When they cut the cord on his wrists, the knife sliced through the back of his jacket. One of them made a joke, the other one snickered. Then they cleaned out his pockets, took his shoes and socks, jacket and tie, threw him in the cell, slammed the iron door, shot the bolt.

Black dark in the cell, no window, and the walls breathed cold air. There was a straw mattress, a bucket, and a pair of rusted, ancient brackets in the wall. Used for chains-in 1540, or last night. They brought him a salt herring, which he knew better than to eat-he would suffer terribly from thirst-a lump of bread, and a small cup of water. He could hear, in the room directly above him, somebody pacing back and forth.

Heidelberg. Half-timbered houses, the bridge over the Neckar. When he was at Eotvos they’d gone up there for Schollwagen’s lectures on Aristophanes. And-it was late February-just to be somewhere else. In a weinstube, Frieda. Curly hair, broad hips, a wonderful laugh. He could hear it.

A two-day love affair, and long ago, but every minute of it stayed in his memory and, now and then, he liked to go back over it. Because she liked to make love in every possible way and shivered with excitement. He was nineteen, he thought that women did such things as favors, maybe, when they loved you, on your birthday, or you paid whores a special rate.

There was a thump above him. A sack of flour thrown on the floor. Cara had no particular interest in choses affreuses. She would have done them-would have done anything, to be sophisticated and chic, that’s what excited Cara. Did she do it with Francesca? She liked to tease him that she did, because she knew it interested him. Another sack of flour. This one cried out when it hit the floor.

Fuck you, he told them.

He’d thought about seeing Eva Zameny in Budapest, his former fiancee, who’d left her husband. Jesus, she’d been so beautiful. No other country made women who looked like that. Not much of a film of Eva-passionate kisses in the vestibule of her house. Once he had unbuttoned her blouse. She had wanted, she told him, to become a nun. Went to Mass twice a day because it gave her peace, she said, and nothing else did.

Married to Eva, two children, three, four. To work as a lawyer, spend his days with wills and contracts. Friday-night dinner at his mother’s house, Sunday lunch at hers. Make love on Saturday night under a feather quilt in the Hungarian winter. Summer cabin on Lake Balaton. He’d have a coffeehouse, a gentlemen’s club, a tailor. Why had he not lived his life in this way?

Really, why?

He wouldn’t be in a Roumanian dungeon if he had. Who’d sold him, he wondered. And would he-God grant! — have a chance to square that account? Was it somebody at Hrubal’s house? Duchazy?

Stop it. Here is Frieda: curly hair, broad hips, sweet laugh.

“Bad luck, Monsieur Morath. For you and for us. God only knows how we are going to get this straightened out. What, in the name of heaven, were you thinking of?”

This one was also from the Siguranza, Morath thought, but much higher up. Well shaven, well pomaded, and well spoken, in French.

The man rested his elbows on the desk and steepled his fingers. Told Morath he was guilty of technical crimes, no question, but who really cared. He didn’t. Still, what the hell was he doing with all that money? Playing Hungarian-minority-politics? In Roumania? “Couldn’t you have murdered somebody? Robbed a bank? Burned down a church? No. You had to make my life complicated, on Saturday morning, when I’m supposed to play golf with my father-in-law.” Yes, it was Roumania, douce decadence, Byzance apres Byzance, it was all too true. Still, they had laws.

Morath nodded, he knew. But what law, exactly, had he broken?

Overwhelmed, the Siguranza officer barely knew what to say-too many, too few, old ones, new ones, some we’re just now making up. “Let’s talk about Paris. I’ve told them to bring you coffee and a brioche.” He looked at his watch. “They’ve gone to the cafe across the square.”

Now here he really envied Morath, he might as well admit it. A man of his class and connection, taking the pleasures of this delightful city. One would know, don’t bother denying it, the most stimulating people. French generals, Russian emigres, diplomats. Had he met Monsieur X, Herr Y, Senor Z? What about, Colonel Something at the British embassy. Don’t know him? Well, really you ought to meet him. He is, one hears, an amusing fellow.

No, Morath told him.

No? Well, why not? Morath was certainly the sort of gentleman who could meet anybody he liked. What could be-oh, was it money? Not to be indelicate, but the bills did pile up. Annoying people sent annoying letters. Being in debt could be a full-time occupation.

A lifelong hobby. But Morath didn’t say it.

Life didn’t have to be so hard, the officer told him. He himself had, for example, friends in Paris, businessmen, who were always seeking the advice and counsel of somebody like Morath. “And for them, believe me, money is no problem.”

A policeman brought in a tray with two cups, a zinc coffeepot, and a large brioche. Morath tore a strip off the fluted brioche, yellow and sweet. “I’ll bet you have this every morning, at home,” the officer said.

Morath smiled. “I am traveling, as you know, on a Hungarian diplomatic passport.”

The officer nodded, brushing a crumb off his lapel.

“They will want to know what’s become of me.”

“No doubt. They will send us a note. So we will send them one. Then they will send us one. And so on. A deliberate sort of process, diplomacy. Quite drawn out.”

Morath thought it over. “Still, my friends will worry. They’ll want to help.”

The officer stared at him, made it clear he had a bad, violent temper. Morath had offered him a bribe, and he didn’t like it. “We have been very good to you, you know.” So far.

“Thank you for the coffee,” Morath said.

The officer was again his affable self. “My pleasure,” he said. “We’re not in a hurry to lock you up. Twenty years in a Roumanian prison won’t do you any good. And it doesn’t help us. Much better, put you over the border at Oradea. Good-bye, good luck, good riddance. But, it’s up to you.”

Morath indicated he understood. “Perhaps I need to think it over.”

“You must do what’s best for you,” the officer said. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

In the room above him, the pacing never stopped. Outside, a storm. He heard the thunder and the drumming of the rain. A slow seep of water covered the floor, rose an inch, then stopped. Morath lay on the straw mattress and stared at the ceiling. They didn’t kill me and take the money. For the Siguranza thugs who’d arrested him it was a fortune, a life on the French Riviera. But this was Roumania, “kiss the hand you cannot bite,” and they had done what they’d been told to do.

He slept, sometimes. The cold woke him, and bad dreams. Even when he woke up, bad dreams.

In the morning, they took him to a small room on the top floor, likely the office, he thought, of the chief of the Bistrita police. There was a calendar on the wall, scenic views of Constanta on the Black Sea coast. A framed photograph on the desk, a smiling woman with dark hair and dark eyes. And an official photograph of King Carol, in white army uniform with sash and medals, hung on the wall.

Out the window, Morath could see life in the square. At the stalls of the marketplace, women were buying bread, carrying string bags of vegetables. In front of the fountain there was a Hungarian street singer. A rather comic fat man who sang like an opera tenor, arms thrown wide. An old song of the Budapest nachtlokals:

Wait for me, please wait for me,

even when the nights are long,

my sweet, my only dove,

oh please, wait for me.

When somebody dropped a coin in the battered hat on the ground in front of him, he smiled and nodded gracefully and somehow never missed a beat.

It was Colonel Sombor who entered the office, pulling the door shut behind him. Sombor, with glossy black hair like a hat and slanted eyebrows, in a sharp green suit and a tie with a gold crown on it. Very tight-lipped and serious, he greeted Morath and shook his head-Now look what you’ve done. He took the swivel chair at the police chief’s desk, Morath sat across from him. “I flew right over when I heard about it,” Sombor said. “Are you, all right?”

Morath was filthy, unshaven, and barefoot. “As you see.”

“But they haven’t done anything.”

“No.”

Sombor took a pack of Chesterfields from his pocket, laid it on the desk, put a box of matches on top. Morath tore the foil open, extracted a cigarette, and lit it, blowing out a long, grateful stream of smoke.

“Tell me what happened.”

“I was in Budapest. I came over to Roumania to see a friend, and they arrested me.”

“The police?”

“Siguranza.”

Sombor looked grim. “Well, I’ll have you out in a day or two, don’t worry about that.”

“I would certainly appreciate it.”

Sombor smiled. “Can’t have this sort of thing happening to our friends. Any idea what they’re after?”

“Not really.”

Sombor looked around the office for a moment, then he stood, walked to the window, and stared out at the street. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” he said.

Morath waited.

“This job I have,” Sombor said, “seems to grow bigger every day.” He turned back toward Morath. “Europe is changing. It’s a new world, we’re part of it, whether we want to be or not, and we can win or lose, depending how we play our cards. The Czechs, for instance, have lost. They trusted the wrong people. You’ll agree to that, I think.”

“Yes.”

“Now look, Morath, I have to be frank with you. I understand who you are and what you think-Kossuth, civil liberty, democracy, all that Shadow Front idealism. Perhaps I don’t agree, but who cares. You know the old saying, ‘Let the horse worry about politics, his head is bigger.’ Right?”

“Right.”

“I have to see the world in a practical way, I don’t have time to be a philosopher. Now I have the greatest respect for Count Polanyi, he too is a realist, perhaps more than you know. He does what he needs to do, and you’ve helped him do it. You’re not a virgin, is what I mean.”

Sombor waited for a response. “And so?” Morath said it quietly.

“Just as I’ve come to help you, I would like you to help me. Help your country. That, I trust, would not be against your principles.”

“Not at all.”

“You will have to get your hands dirty, my friend. If not today, tomorrow, whether you like the idea or don’t like it. Believe me, the time has come.”

“And if I say no?”

Sombor shrugged. “We will have to accept your decision.”

It didn’t end there.

Morath lay on the wet straw and stared into the darkness. Outside, a truck rumbled past, driving slowly around the square. A few minutes later it returned, paused briefly in front of the station, then drove off.

Sombor had gone on at length-whatever light there’d been in his eyes had blown out like a candle but his voice never changed. Getting you out may not be so easy. But don’t you worry. Do our best. The prison at Iasi. The prison at Sinaia. Forced to stand with his nose touching the wall for seventy-two hours.

For supper, they’d brought him another salt herring. He broke off a tiny piece, just to see what it tasted like. Ate the bread, drank the cold tea. They’d taken his cigarettes and matches when they put him back in the cell.

I flew right over when I heard about it. Said casually enough. The legation in Paris had two Fiesler Storch airplanes, sold to Hungary by the Germans after endless, agonizing negotiation and God only knew what favors. I’m more important than you think, Sombor meant. I command the use of the legation airplane.

When Sombor got up to leave, Morath said, “You’ll let Count Polanyi know what’s happened.”

“Naturally.”

Polanyi would never know. Nacht und Nebel, Adolf Hitler’s phrase, night and fog. A man left his home in the morning and was never heard of again. Morath worked hard, think only of the next hour, but despair rose in his heart and he could not make it go away. Petofi, Hungary’s national poet, said that dogs were always well looked after and wolves starved, but only wolves were free. So here, in this cell or those to come, was freedom.

They came for him at dawn.

The door opened and two guards took him under the arms, ran him down the hall, and hauled him up the staircase. It was barely daylight, but even the soft gloom hurt his eyes. They gave him back his shoes, then shackled him at the wrists and ankles, and he shuffled out the front door to a waiting truck. There were two other prisoners in there, one a Gypsy, the other perhaps a Russian, tall, with sheared white hair and blue tears tattooed at the corners of his eyes.

Only the women who swept the street saw him leave. They paused for a bare moment, their brooms, made of bundles of reeds, resting on the ground. Poor boys. God help you. Morath never forgot it.

The truck bounced on the cobbles. The Gypsy caught Morath’s eye and sniffed the air-they’d driven past a bakery. It wasn’t a long ride, maybe fifteen minutes. Then they were at the railroad station where trains, Morath understood perfectly, left for towns like Iasi, or Sinaia.

Three men in chains and six policemen. That was something worth looking at when your train stopped in Bistrita. Passengers lowered the tops of their windows to see the show. A commercial traveler, from the look of him, peeling an orange and throwing the rind on the station platform. A woman in a pillbox hat, the dark veil hiding her eyes, white hands resting atop the window. Other faces, pale in the early light. A man made a joke, his friend laughed. A child, who watched Morath with wide eyes, knowing she was allowed to stare. A man in an overcoat with a velvet collar, stern, elegant, who nodded to Morath as though he knew him.

Then, chaos. Who were they? For slow-motion moments the question raced through Morath’s mind. They came from nowhere. Moving too fast to count, shouting in-was it Russian? Polish? The policeman at Morath’s side was hit. Morath heard the impact, then a yelp, then he staggered off somewhere, groping at his holster. A man in a soft hat stepped from a cloud of steam vented by the locomotive. A cool, frosty morning, he’d wrapped a muffler around his throat, tucked the ends inside his jacket, and turned up the collar. He studied Morath carefully, for what seemed like a long time, then swung his shotgun a little to one side and fired both barrels. Several passengers gasped, the sound, to Morath, was clear as a bell.

The Russian prisoner knew. Maybe too much, Morath thought later. He stretched out full length on the platform and covered his head with his shackled hands. A lifelong convict, perhaps, who knew that this business was, sadly, not for him, his gods weren’t that powerful. The Gypsy cried out to a man with a handkerchief tied over his face and extended his wrists. Free me! But the man pushed him aside. He almost fell, then tried to run away, taking tiny steps, his ankle chain scraping along the concrete.

In the killing, they almost forgot Morath. He stood alone at the center of it. A detective, at least a man in a suit holding a revolver, ran past, then turned toward Morath, his face anxious, uncertain, the right thing must be done. He hesitated, started to raise his pistol, closed his eyes, bit his lip, and sat down. Now he knew what to do but it was too late. The pistol moved only a few inches, a red gash opened in his forehead, and, very slowly, he collapsed. A few yards away, the train conductor was lying back against a wheel of the coal car. In his eyes, a look Morath knew. He was dying.

Now a black car came driving, very slowly, along the platform. Driven by a young boy, no more than thirteen, hands white on the wheel, face knotted with concentration. He stopped the car while the man in the soft hat dragged another man by the back of his jacket, sliding him up to the rear door of the car. He opened the door and threw him in the backseat. In the middle of it all, screams and shots, Morath could hardly believe that anybody could be that strong.

“Move, dumb ox!” The words in German, the Slavic accent so thick it took Morath a moment to understand. The man gripped his arm like a steel claw. A hook nose, dark face, an unlit cigarette in his lips. “To the truck, yes?” he said. “Yes?”

Morath walked as fast as he could. Behind him, from the train, a cry in Hungarian. A woman, cursing, enraged, screaming, telling them all, brutes, devils, to cease this fouling of the world and go and burn in hell. The man at Morath’s side lost all patience-the rise and fall of distant sirens coming nearer-and dragged Morath toward the truck. The driver reached over and helped him and he sprawled across the passenger seat, then fought his way upright.

The driver was an old man with a beard and a scar that cut across his lips. He pressed the gas pedal, gingerly, the engine raced, then died back. “Very good,” he said.

“Hungarian?”

The man shook his head. “I learn in war.”

He pressed the clutch pedal to the floor as the man in the soft hat ran toward the truck and violently waved his shotgun. Go. Move. “Yes, yes,” the driver said, this time in Russian. He shoved the gear lever forward, and, after a moment, it engaged. He gave Morath an inquisitive look. Morath nodded.

They drove away slowly, into the street behind the station. A police car was idling at the corner, both doors open. Morath could hear the train moving out of the station-the engineer at last come to his senses. A black sedan came flying past and, tires squealing, cut in front of them, then slowed down. A hand came out of the driver’s window and beckoned them forward. The sedan accelerated and, at the next street, turned sharply and sped away.

They were quickly out of Bistrita, the road narrowed, turned to dirt, wound past a few dilapidated farms and villages, then climbed into the Transylvanian forest. At sunset, despite the cold iron on his wrists and ankles, Morath slept. Then woke in darkness. Out the window, a field painted in frost and moonlight. The old man was bent over the wheel, squinting to see the road.

“Where are we?” Morath said.

From the old man, an eloquent shrug. He took a scrap of brown paper from atop the dashboard and handed it to Morath. A crosshatch of lines, drawn in blunt pencil, with notes in Cyrillic script scrawled along the margin. “So, where we are?”

Morath had to laugh.

The old man joined him. Maybe they would find their way, maybe not, so life went.

The truck worked its way up a long hill, the wheels slipping in the frozen ruts, the old man restlessly shifting gears. “Like tractor,” he said. In the distance, Morath saw a dull glow that appeared and disappeared through the trees. This turned out to be, a few minutes later, a low stone building at the junction of two ancient roads, its windows lit by oil lamps. An inn, a wooden sign hung on chains above the door.

The old man smiled in triumph, let the truck roll to a stop in the cobblestone yard, and honked the horn. This produced two barking mastiffs, galloping back and forth in the headlights, and an innkeeper wearing a leather apron, a blazing pitch-pine torch held high in one hand. “You are welcome in this house,” he said, in formal Hungarian.

A deliberate man, round and genial. He took Morath to the stable, set the torch in a bracket, and, with hammer and chisel, broke the shackles and took them off. As he worked, his face grew sorrowful. “So my grandfather,” he explained, repositioning the chain atop an anvil. “And his.”

When he was done he led Morath to the kitchen, sat him in front of the fire, and served him a large glass of beer and a thick slice of fried cornmeal. When Morath had eaten, he was shown to a room off the kitchen, where he fell dead asleep.

When he woke, the truck was gone. The innkeeper gave him an old jacket and a peaked cap, and, later that morning, he sat next to a farmer on a wagon and entered Hungarian territory by crossing a hayfield.

Morath had always liked the Novembers of Paris. It rained, but the bistros were warm, the Seine dark, the lamps gold, the season’s love affairs new and exciting. The 1938 November began well enough, tout Paris ecstatic that it wouldn’t have to go to war. But then, Kristallnacht, on the night of 9 November, and in the shimmering tons of shattered Jewish glass could be read, more clearly than anybody liked, what was coming. Still, it wasn’t coming here. Let Hitler and Stalin rip each other’s throats out, went that week’s thinking, we’ll go up to Normandy for the weekend.

Morath arranged to meet his uncle at some cuisine grand-mere hole-in-the-wall out in Clichy. He’d spent ten days in Budapest, collecting money, listening to poor Szubl’s misadventures with the redheaded chorus girl he’d met at the nightclub. Then the two of them had hidden the cash in a cello and taken the night express back to Paris. For the moment, Morath was a man with well over two million pengo in his closet.

It was obvious to Morath that Count Polanyi had gotten an early start on lunch. Trying to sit down, he lurched into the neighboring table, very nearly causing a soup accident and drawing a sharp glance from the grand-mere. “It seems the gods are after me today,” he said, in a gust of cognac fumes.

It wasn’t the gods. The pouches beneath his eyes had grown alarmingly and darkened.

Polanyi peered at the chalked menu on the blackboard. “Andouillette,” he said.

“I hear you’ve been away,” Morath said.

“Yes, once again I’m a man with a house in the country, what’s left of it.” On 2 November, the Vienna Commission-Hitler-had awarded Hungary, in return for supporting Germany during the Sudeten crisis, the Magyar districts of southern Czechoslovakia. Twelve thousand square miles, a million people, the new border running from Pozsony/Bratislava all the way east to Ruthenia.

The waiter arrived with a carafe of wine and a plate of snails.

“Uncle Janos?”

“Yes?”

“How much do you know about what happened to me in Roumania?”

From Polanyi’s expression it was clear he didn’t want to talk about it. “You had difficulties. It was seen to.”

“And that’s that.”

“Nicholas, don’t be cross with me. Basically, you were lucky. Had I left the country two weeks earlier you might have been gone for good.”

“But, somehow, you heard about it.”

Polanyi shrugged.

“Did you hear that Sombor appeared? At the Bistrita police station?”

His uncle raised an eyebrow, speared a snail on the third try and ate it, dripping garlic butter on the table. “Mmm? What’d he want?”

“Me.”

“Did he get you?”

“No.”

“So where’s the problem?”

“Perhaps Sombor is a problem.”

“Sombor is Sombor.”

“He acted like he owned the world.”

“He does.”

“Was he responsible for what happened to me?”

“Now that’s an interesting idea. What would you do if he was?”

“What would you suggest?”

“Kill him.”

“Are you serious?”

“Kill him, Nicholas, or don’t ruin my lunch. Choose one.”

Morath poured himself a glass of wine and lit a Chesterfield. “And the people who rescued me?”

“Tres cher, Nicholas.”

“Who shall I thank for it?”

“Somebody owed me a favor. Now I owe him one.”

“Russian? German?”

“Eskimo! My dear nephew, if you’re going to be inquisitive and difficult about this …”

“Forgive me. Of course I’m grateful.”

“Can I have the last snail? That grateful?”

“At least that.”

Polanyi jammed the tiny fork into the snail and frowned as he worked it free of its shell. Then, for a moment, he looked very sad. “I’m just an old, fat Hungarian man, Nicholas. I can’t save the world. I’d like to, but I can’t.”

The last days of November, Morath pulled his overcoat tight and hurried through the streets of the Marais to the Cafe Madine. It was, Morath thought, frozen in time. Empty, as before, in the cold morning light, a cat asleep on the counter, the patron with his spectacles down on his nose.

The patron, Morath suspected, remembered him. Morath ordered a cafe au lait and, when it came, warmed his hands on the bowl. “I was here, once before,” he said to the patron. “Last March, I think it was.”

The patron gave him a look. Really?

“I met an old man. I can’t recall his name, I don’t think he mentioned it. At the time, a friend of mine had difficulties with a passport.”

The owner nodded. Yes, that sort of thing did happen, now and then. “It’s possible. Somebody like that used to come here, once in a while.”

“But not anymore.”

“Deported,” the owner said. “In the summer. He had a little problem with the police. But for him, the little problem became a big problem, and they sent him back to Vienna. After that, I can’t say.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Morath said.

“He is also sorry, no doubt.”

Morath looked down, felt the height of the wall between him and the patron, and understood there was nothing more to be said. “He had a friend. A man with a Vandyke beard. Quite educated, I thought. We met at the Louvre.”

“The Louvre.”

“Yes.”

The patron began drying a glass with a cloth, held it up to the light, and put it back on the shelf. “Cold, today,” he said.

“Perhaps a little snow.”

“You think so?”

“You can feel it in the air.”

“Maybe you’re right.” He began wiping the bar with the cloth, lifting Morath’s bowl, scooping up the cat and setting it gently on the floor. “You must let me clean, Sascha,” he said.

Morath waited, drinking his coffee. A woman with a baby in a blanket went past in the street.

“It’s quiet here,” Morath said. “Very pleasant.”

“You should come more often, then.” The patron gave him a tart smile.

“I will. Perhaps tomorrow.”

“We’ll be here. God willing.”

It took a half hour, the following morning. Then a woman-the woman who had picked up the money and, Morath remembered, kissed him on the steps of the Louvre, appeared at the cafe. “He’ll see you,” she told Morath. “Try at four-fifteen tomorrow, in the Jussieu Metro station. If he can’t get there, try the next day, at three-fifteen. If that doesn’t work, you’ll have to find another way.”

He wasn’t there on the first try. The station was crowded, late in the day, and if somebody was taking a look at him, making sure there were no detectives around, Morath never saw it. On the second day, he waited forty-five minutes, then gave up. As he climbed the stairs to the street, the man fell in step with him.

Not as portly as Morath remembered him, he still wore the Vandyke beard and the tweed suit, and something about him suggested affinity with the world of commercial culture. The art dealer. He was accompanied, as before, by a man with a white, bony face who wore a hat set square on a shaven head.

“Let’s take a taxi,” the art dealer said. “It’s too cold to walk.”

The three of them got in the back of a taxi that was idling at the curb. “Take us to the Ritz, driver,” said the art dealer.

The driver laughed. He drove slowly down the rue Jussieu and turned into the rue Cuvier.

“So,” the art dealer said. “Your friends still have problems with their papers.”

“Not this time,” Morath said.

“Oh? Then what?”

“I would like to meet somebody in the diamond business.”

“You’re selling?”

“Buying.”

“A little something for the sweetheart.”

“Absolutely. In a velvet box.”

The driver turned up the hill on the rue Monge. From the low sky, a few drops of rain, people on the street opened their umbrellas. “A substantial purchase,” Morath said. “Best would be somebody in the business a long time.”

“And discreet.”

“Very. But please understand, there’s no crime, nothing like that. We just want to be quiet.”

The art dealer nodded. “Not the neighborhood jeweler.”

“No.”

“Has to be in Paris?”

Morath thought it over. “Western Europe.”

“Then it’s easy. Now, for us, it’s a taxi ride and, maybe tomorrow, a train ride. So, we’ll say, five thousand francs?”

Morath reached into his inside pocket, counted out the money in hundred-franc notes, and put the rest away.

“One thing I should tell you. The market in refugee diamonds is not good. If you bought in Amsterdam a year ago and went to sell in Costa Rica tomorrow, you’d be badly disappointed. If you think a thousand carats of value is a thousand carats of value, like currency in a normal country somewhere, and all you’ll have to do is carve up the heel in your shoe, you’re wrong. People think it’s like that but it isn’t. Since Hitler, the gem market is a good place to lose your shirt. F’shtai?”

“Understood,” Morath said.

“Say, want to buy a Vermeer?”

Morath started to laugh.

“No? A Hals then, a little one. Fits in a suitcase. Good, too. I’ll vouch for it. You don’t know who I am, and I’d rather you never did, but I know what I’m talking about.”

“You need somebody rich.”

“Not this week, I don’t.”

Morath smiled regret.

The chalk-white man took off his hat and ran his hand over his head. Then said, in German, “Stop. He’s moral.”

“Is that it?” the art dealer said. “You don’t want to take advantage of a man who’s a fugitive?”

The driver laughed.

“Well, if you ever, God forbid, have to run for your life, then you’ll understand. It’s beyond value, by then. What you’ll be saying is ‘take the picture, give the money, thank you, good-bye.’ Once you only plan to live till the afternoon, you’ll understand.”

For a time, there was silence in the cab. The art dealer patted Morath on the knee. “Forgive me. What you need today is a name. That’s going to be Shabet. It’s a Hasidic family, in Antwerp, in the diamond district. There’s brothers, sons, all sorts, but do business with one and you’re doing business with all of them.”

“They can be trusted?”

“With your life. I trusted them with mine, and here I am.” The art dealer spelled the name, then said, “Of course I need to certify you to them. What should I call you?”

“Andre.”

“So be it. Give me ten days, because I have to send somebody up there. This is not business for the telephone. And, just in case, you and I need a confirmation signal. Go to the Madine, ten days from now. If you see the woman, it’s all settled.”

Morath thanked him. They shook hands. The chalk-white man tipped his hat. “Good luck to you, sir,” he said in German. The driver pulled over to the curb, in front of a charcuterie with a life-size tin statue of a pig by its doorway, inviting customers inside with a sweep of his trotter. “Voila le Ritz!” the driver called out.

Emile Courtmain sat back in his swivel chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared out at the avenue Matignon. “When you first think about it, it should be easy. But then you start to work, and it turns out to be very difficult.”

There were forty wash drawings set out around the office-pinned to the walls, propped up on chairs. French life. Peasant couples in the fields, or in the doorways of farmhouses, or sitting on wagons. Like Millet, perhaps, a benign, optimistic sort of Millet. Then there were Parisian papas and mamans out for a Sunday stroll, by a carousel, at the Arc de Triomphe. A pair of lovers on a bridge over the Seine, holding hands, she with bouquet, he in courting suit-facing the future. A soldier, home from the front, seated at the kitchen table, his good wife setting a tureen in front of him. This one wasn’t so bad, Morath thought.

“Too gentle,” Courtmain said. “The ministry will want something with a little more clenched fist in it.”

“Any text?”

“A word or two-Mary’s going to join us in a minute. Something like, ‘In a dangerous world, France remains strong.’ It’s meant to dispel defeatism, especially after what happened at Munich.”

“Exhibited where?”

“The usual places. Metro, street kiosk, post office.”

“Hard to dispel defeatism in a French post office.”

Morath sat down in a chair across from Courtmain. Mary Day knocked lightly on the frame of the open door. “Hello, Nicholas,” she said. She pulled up a chair, lit a Gitane, and handed Courtmain a sheet of paper.

” ‘France will win,’ ” he read. Then, to Morath, “That’s not poor Mary’s line.” From Courtmain, an affectionate grin. Mary Day had the smart person’s horror of the fatuous phrase.

“It’s the little man at the interior ministry,” she explained. “He, had an idea.”

“I hope they’re paying.”

Courtmain made a face. Not much. “Advertising goes to war-you can’t say no to them.”

Mary Day took the paper back from Courtmain. ” ‘France forever.’ “

“Bon Dieu,” Courtmain said.

” ‘Our France.’ “

Morath said, “Why not just ‘La France’?”

“Yes,” Mary Day said. “The Vive understood. That was my first try. They didn’t care for it.”

“Too subtle,” Courtmain said. He looked at his watch. “I have to be at RCA at five.” He stood, opened his briefcase and made sure he had what he needed, then adjusted the knot of his tie. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” he said to Morath.

“About ten,” Morath said.

“Good,” Courtmain said. He liked having Morath around and wanted him to know it. He said good-bye to each of them and went out the door.

Which left Morath alone in the room with Mary Day.

He pretended to look at the drawings and tried to think of something clever to say. She glanced at him, read over her notes. She was the daughter of an Irish officer in the Royal Navy and the French artist Marie d’Aumonville-an extraordinary combination, if you asked Morath, or anybody. A light sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of the nose; long, loose brown hair; and pleading brown eyes. She was flat-chested, amused, impish, absentminded, awkward. “Mary’s a certain type,” Courtmain had once told him. When she was sixteen, he suspected, all the boys wanted to die for her, but they were afraid to ask her to go to the movies.

She sat back in the chair and said, “Well, I suppose we have to go back to work.”

Morath agreed.

“And then, you’ll take me for a drink.” She started to gather up her papers. “Right?”

Morath stared, did she mean it? “With pleasure,” he said, retreating into formality. “At seven?”

Her smile was, as always, rueful. “You don’t have to, Nicholas.” She was just teasing him.

“I want to,” he said. “Fouquet, if you like.”

“Well,” she said. “That would be nice. Or the place around the corner.”

“Fouquet,” he announced. “Why not?”

A comic shrug-don’t know why not. “Seven,” she said, a little startled at what she’d done.

They hurried through the crowds, up the Champs Elysees, a few flakes of snow in the night air. She walked with big strides, shoulders hunched over, hands thrust in the pockets of what Morath thought was a very odd coat-three-quarter length, maroon wool with big buttons covered in brown fabric.

Fouquet was packed and noisy, throbbing with life, they had to wait for a table. Mary Day rubbed her hands to get warm. Morath gave a waiter ten francs and he found them a table in the corner. “What would you like?” Morath said.

She thought it over.

“Garcon, champagne!”

She grinned. “A vermouth, maybe. Martini rouge.”

Morath ordered a gentiane, Mary Day changed her mind and decided to have the same thing. “I like it, I just never remember to ask for it.” She spent a long moment watching the people around them-Parisian theatre of the night-and from the look on her face took great pleasure in it. “I wrote something about this place, back when, a piece for the Paris Herald. Restaurants with private rooms-what really goes on?”

“What does?”

“Balzac. But not as much as you’d like to think. Little anniversary parties. Birthday. First Communion.”

“You worked for the Herald?”

“Freelance. Anything and everything, as long as they’d pay for it.”

“Such as …”

“Wine festival in Anjou! Turkish foreign minister feted at the Lumpingtons!”

“Not so easy.”

“Not hard. You need stamina, mostly.”

“Somebody at the office said you wrote books.”

She answered in the tough-guy voice from American gangster movies. “Oh, so you found out about that, did ya?”

“Yes, you’re a novelist.”

“Oh, sort of, maybe. Naughty books, but they pay the rent. I got tired of wine festivals in Anjou, believe it or not, and somebody introduced me to an English publisher-he’s got a little office up in the place Vendome. The kindest man in the world. A Jew, I think, from Birmingham. He was in the textile business, came to France to fight in the war, discovered Paree, and just couldn’t bear to go home. So he started to publish books. Some of them famous, in a certain set, but most of them come in plain brown wrappers, if you know what I mean. A friend of mine calls them ‘books one reads with one hand.’ “

Morath laughed.

“Not so bad, the best of them. There’s one called Tropic of Cancer.”

“Actually, I think the woman I used to live with read it.”

“Pretty salty.”

“That was her.”

“Then maybe she read Suzette. Or the sequel, Suzette Goes Boating.”

“Are those yours?”

“D. E. Cameron, is what the jacket says.”

“What are they like?”

” ‘She slipped the straps from her white shoulders and let the shift fall to her waist. The handsome lieutenant …’ “

“Yes? What did he do?”

Mary Day laughed and shook her hair back. “Not much. Mostly it’s about underwear.”

The gentianes arrived, with a dish of salted almonds.

They had two more. And two more after that. She touched his hand with the tips of her fingers.

An hour later, they’d had all of Fouquet they wanted and went off to find dinner. They tried Lucas Carton but it was complet and they didn’t have a reservation. Then they wandered along the rue Marbeuf, found a little place that smelled good, and ate soup and omelettes and Saint Marcellin.

They gossiped about the office. “I have to travel, now and then,” Morath said, “but I like the time I spend in the office, I like what we do-the clients, what they’re trying to sell.”

“It can take over your life.”

“That’s not so bad.”

She tore a piece of bread in half and put some crumbly Saint Marcellin on it. “I don’t mean to pry, but you said ‘the woman I used to live with.’ Is she no more?”

“She left, had to leave. Her father came all the way from Buenos Aires and took her away. He thought we’d be at war by now.”

She ate the bread and cheese. “Do you miss her?”

It took Morath a moment to answer. “Of course I do, we had a good time together.”

“Sometimes that’s the most important thing.”

Morath agreed.

“I lost my friend a year ago. Maybe Courtmain told you.”

“He didn’t, it’s mostly all business with us.”

“It was very sad. We’d lived together for three years-we were never going to get married, it wasn’t like that. But we were in love, most of the time. He was a musician, a guitarist, from a town near Chartres. Classically trained, but he got to playing in the jazz clubs up in Montparnasse and fell in love with the life. Drank too much, smoked opium with his friends, never went to bed until the sun rose. Then, one night, they found him dead in the street.”

“From opium?”

She spread her hands, who knows?

“I am sorry,” Morath said.

Her eyes were shining, she wiped them with a napkin.

They were silent in the taxi, going back to her apartment. She lived on the rue Guisarde, a quiet street in the back of the Sixth Arrondissement. He came around to her side of the cab, opened the door, and helped her out. Standing in the doorway, she raised her face for the good-night bisou on the cheek but it became a little more than that, then a lot, and it went on for a long time. It was very tender, her lips dry and soft, her skin warm beneath his hand. He waited in the doorway until he saw her light go on, then he went off down the street, heart pounding.

He was a long way from home but he wanted to walk. Too good to be true, he told himself. Because the light of day hit these things and they turned to dust. A folie, the French would say, an error of the heart.

He’d been very low since he came back to Paris. The days in Bistrita the cell, the railroad station-it didn’t go away. He woke up at night and thought about it. So he’d sought refuge, distraction, at the Agence Courtmain. And then, an office romance. Everybody was a little in love with Mary Day, why not him?

The streets were cold and dark, the wind hit him hard as he crossed the Pont Royal. On the boulevard, an empty taxi. Morath climbed in. Go back to her apartment? “The rue Richelieu,” he told the driver.

But the next morning, in the light of day, she was wearing a pale gray dress with buttons up the front and a belt that tied, a dress that showed her in a certain way and, when their eyes met for the first time, he knew.

So the letter waiting for him in his mailbox that night brought him down to earth in a hurry. Prefecture de Police, Quai du Marche Neuf, Paris 1^ier. The Monsieur was printed, on the form letter, the Morath, Nicholas written in ink. Would he please present himself at la salle 24 of the prefecture on le 8 Decembre, between the hours of 9 et 12 du matin.

Veuillez accepter, Monsieur, l’expression de nos sentiments distingues.

This happened, from time to time. The summons to the prefecture-a fact of life for every foreigner, a cold front in the bureaucratic weather of the city. Morath hated going there; the worn linoleum and green walls, the gloomy air of the place, the faces of the summoned, each one with its own particular combination of boredom and terror.

Room 24. That was not his usual room, good old 38, where resident foreigners with mild diplomatic connections were seen. What did that mean, he wondered, putting on his best blue suit.

It meant a serious inspector with a hard, square face and military bearing. Very formal, very correct, and very dangerous. He asked for Morath’s papers, made notations on a form. Asked if there had been any changes in his situation: residence, employment, marital status. Asked if he had recently traveled to Roumania.

Morath felt the thin ice. Yes, at the end of October.

Exactly where, in Roumania.

In the district of Cluj.

And?

That was all.

And, please, for what purpose?

For a social engagement.

Not for, business.

Non, monsieur l’inspecteur.

Very well, would he be so good as to wait in the reception?

Morath sat there, the lawyer part of his mind churning away. Twenty minutes. Thirty. Bastards.

Then the inspector, Morath’s papers in his hand. Thank you, monsieur, there will be no further questions. At this time. A long instant, then, “Vos papiers, monsieur.”

Polanyi looked like he hadn’t slept. Rolled his eyes when he heard the story. Lord, why me. They met that afternoon, in the office of an elegant shop on the rue de la Paix that sold men’s accessories. Polanyi spoke to the owner, exquisitely dressed and barbered, in Hungarian. “May we have the use of your office, Kovacs Uhr, for a little while?” The man nodded eagerly, wrung his hands, there was fear in his eyes. Morath didn’t like it.

“I don’t believe they will pursue this,” Polanyi said.

“Can they extradite me to Roumania?”

“They can, of course, but they won’t. A trial, the newspapers, that’s not what they want. Two things I would suggest to you: First of all, don’t worry about it; second of all, don’t go to Roumania.”

Morath stubbed out a cigarette in the ashtray.

“Of course you are aware that relations between France and Roumania have always been important to both governments. French companies hold concessions in the Roumanian oil fields at Ploesti. So, you have to be careful.”

Polanyi paused for a moment, then said, “Now, as long as we’re here, I need to ask you a question. I have a letter from Hrubal, who wonders if I would find out from you what became of Vilmos, his chief groom, who never returned from escorting you to the Cluj railroad station.”

“Obviously they killed him.”

“Did they? Perhaps he simply ran away.”

“It’s possible. Does Hrubal know that his money vanished?”

“No. And he never will. I had to go to Voyschinkowsky who, without anything like a real explanation, agreed to make it good. So Prince Hrubal’s contribution to the national committee will be made in his name.”

Morath sighed. “Christ, it never ends,” he said.

“It’s the times we live in, Nicholas. Cold comfort, I know, but it’s been worse in the past. In any event, I don’t want you losing sleep over any of this. As long as I’m here to protect you, you’re reasonably safe.”

To follow the art dealer’s instructions, Morath had to go to the Cafe Madine that morning, but he went first of all to the office. Which he found silent and deserted-he was too early. Then, suddenly, a swirl of activity. Mary Day with an apprentice copywriter, Mary Day with Leon, the artist, Mary Day talking to Courtmain through his open door. In a white, angelic sweater, she glanced at him as he hurried past like a man who actually had something to do. Morath retreated to his office, looked at his watch, came out, went back in. Finally, she was alone at her desk, head in hands over five words typed on a sheet of yellow paper. “Mary,” he said.

She looked up. “Hello,” she said. Where have you been?

“I tried to call, last night, I couldn’t find your number.”

“Oh that’s a long story,” she said. “The apartment is actually …” She looked around. People everywhere. “Damn, I’m out of pencils.”

She rose brusquely and he followed her to the supply room, a large closet. He pulled the door closed behind them. “Here it is,” she said, writing it down.

“I want to see you.”

She handed him a slip of paper, then kissed him. He put his arms around her, held her for a moment, inhaled her perfume. “Tomorrow night?” she said.

Morath calculated. “By ten, I think.”

“There’s a cafe on the corner of the rue Guisarde.” She pressed her hand against the side of his face, then grabbed a handful of pencils. “Can’t get caught mugging in the supply room,” she said, laughing.

He followed her swinging skirt down the hall until she disappeared into the bookkeeper’s office, looking back over her shoulder as she closed the door.

At the Cafe Madine, Morath stood at the counter and had his usual coffee. Twenty minutes later-somebody, somewhere was watching, he decided-the woman showed up. She ignored Morath, sat at a table by the wall, read her copy of Le Temps.

So then, Antwerp. He went to see Boris Balki at the nightclub.

“Still at it?” Balki said, pouring two Polish vodkas.

“I guess I am,” Morath said.

“Well, I should say thank you.” Balki raised his glass in a silent toast and drank the vodka. “My friend Rashkow’s out of prison. They brought him his clothes in the middle of the night, took him to the back gate, gave him a good kick in the ass, and told him not to come back.”

“I’m glad I could help.”

“Poor little Rashkow,” Balki said.

“I need to go up to Antwerp,” Morath said. “I’m hoping you’ll come with me.”

“Antwerp.”

“We’ll need a car.”

At dawn, Morath stamped his feet to keep warm and curled into his overcoat, waiting in a white fog by the entry to the Palais Royal Metro station. A splendid car, Morath thought. It came, very slowly, up the rue Saint-Honore, a 201 Peugeot, ten years old, painted deep forest-green and glowing with polish and affection.

They drove north, following lines of trucks, into Saint-Denis. Morath directed Balki through a maze of winding streets to a park behind a church where, working hard at the reluctant latches, they took out the backseat. “Please, Morath,” Balki said. “Don’t hurt anything. This is somebody’s life, this car.” He wore a stiff brown suit, white shirt, no tie, and a peaked cap-a bartender on his day off.

Morath opened his valise and stuffed thick packets of pengo under the wire coils in the seat. Balki was grim, shook his head as he saw all the money.

Route 2, headed north and east of Paris, went through Soissons and Laon, with signs for Cambrai and Amiens, the flat, weedy plain where they’d always fought the Germans. In the villages, smoke rose from the chimneys, women opened their shutters, glanced up at the sky, and put the pillows and blankets out to air. There were kids going to school, their dogs trotting along beside them, shop assistants raising the metal shutters of their shops, milkmen setting bottles on the doorsteps.

Just beyond the French town of Bettignies, the Belgian police at the border post were busy smoking and leaning against their shed and couldn’t be bothered looking at the Peugeot as it drove past.

“Half done,” Balki said, relief in his voice.

“No, that’s it,” Morath said as the shed disappeared in the mirror. “Once we get to Antwerp, we’re tourists. Probably I should’ve just taken the train.”

Balki shrugged. “Well, you never know.”

They turned off the road, drove out into the farmland, and put the money back in the valise.

It was slow going through Brussels, they stopped for eels and frites in a bar on the outskirts, then drove along the Schelde River into Antwerp. They could hear a foghorn in the distance as a freighter worked its way out into the harbor. The diamond district was on Van Eycklei Street, in a luxurious neighborhood by a triangular park. “I’ll walk from here,” Morath said. Balki pulled over, wincing as a tire scraped against the curb.

“Shabet? Two stalls down,” they told him. He’d found the diamond exchange on Pelikaanstraat-long tables of diamond brokers, with the cutters’ offices on the floor above. The Shabet he found was in his thirties, balding and worried. “I think you’d better see my uncle,” he said. Morath waited by the table while a phone call was made, and ten minutes later the uncle showed up. “We’ll go to my office,” he said.

Which was back on Van Eycklei, on the second floor of an imposing gray stone building, and rather splendid: Persian carpets, a vast mahogany breakfront crowded with old books, an ornate desk with a green baize inset.

The elder Shabet settled himself at the desk. “So then, how can we help you?”

“An acquaintance in Paris gave me your name.”

“Paris. Oh, are you Monsieur Andre?”

“It’s the name I asked him to use.”

Shabet looked him over. He was in his sixties, Morath thought, with fine features and silver hair, a white silk yarmulke on the back of his head. A comfortable man, wealthy, and confident in what he knew about the world. “The times we live in,” he said, forgiving Morath a small deception. “Your friend in Paris sent someone up to see me. Your interest is, I believe, investment.”

“More or less. The money is in Hungarian pengo, about two million.”

“You don’t interest yourself in shape or quality, that you leave to us. Simply a question of conversion.”

“To diamonds.”

Shabet folded his hands on the desk, his thumbs pressed together. “The stones are available, of course.” He knew it wasn’t that simple.

“And once we own them, we would like them sold.”

“By us?”

“By your associates, perhaps family associates, in New York. And the money paid into an account in America.”

“Ah.”

“And if, to save the expense of shipping, the firm in New York was to use its own inventory, stones of equal value, that would not concern us.”

“You have in mind a letter, I think. Us to them, and the accounting worked out within the family, is that it?”

Morath nodded and handed Shabet a sheet of cream-colored writing paper.

Shabet took a pince-nez from his breast pocket and settled it on the bridge of his nose. “United Chemical Supply,” he read. “Mr. J. S. Horvath, treasurer. At the Chase National Bank, the Park Avenue branch.” He laid the paper on the desk and put the pince-nez back in his pocket.

“Monsieur Andre? What sort of money is this?”

“Donated money.”

“For espionage?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“For certain funds. To be available in case of-national emergency.”

“Am I doing business with the Hungarian government?”

“You are not. The money is given by private donors. It is not Fascist money, not expropriated, not extorted, not stolen. The politics of this money is the politics of what the newspapers call ‘the Shadow Front.’ Which is to say, liberals, legitimists, Jews, intellectuals.”

Shabet wasn’t pleased, he frowned, the look of a man who might want to say no but can’t. “It’s a great deal of money, sir.”

“We ask just this single transfer.”

Shabet looked out the window, a few flakes of snow drifted through the air. “Well, it’s a very old method.”

“Medieval.”

Shabet nodded. “And you trust us to do this? There will be no receipt, nothing like that.”

“You are, we believe, an established firm.”

“I would say we are, Monsieur Andre, I would have to say we are. Since 1550.”

Shabet took the sheet of paper from his desk, folded it in half, and slipped it in the desk drawer. “There was a time,” he said, “when we might have suggested you do business with somebody else. But now-” It wasn’t necessary to finish the sentence, and Shabet didn’t bother. “Very well,” he said, “you have the money with you?”

It was dusk by the time they tried to find their way out of Antwerp. They had a city map, apparently drawn by a high-spirited Belgian anarchist, and argued with each other as the Peugeot wound through the narrow streets, Morath stabbing his finger at the map and telling Balki where they were, Balki looking at the street signs and telling Morath where they weren’t.

The windshield wipers squeaked as they swept wet snow back and forth across the cloudy glass. In one street, a fire, it took forever to back the car out. They turned into the next street behind a junk man’s horse and wagon, then tried another, which led to a statue of a king and a dead end. Balki said, “Merde,” got the car going in the opposite direction, took the next left.

Which was, for some reason, vaguely familiar to Morath, he’d been there before. Then he saw why-the shop called Homme du Monde, Madame Golsztahn’s tuxedo-rental business. But there was no mannequin in the window. Only a hand-lettered sign saying FERME.

“What is it?” Balki said.

Morath didn’t answer.

Maybe the Belgian border guards didn’t care who came and went, but the French customs inspectors did. “The watch, monsieur. Is it, ah, new?”

“Bought in Paris,” Balki told them.

It was hot in the customs shed, an iron stove glowed in one corner, and it smelled of wet wool from the inspectors’ capes. A Russian? And a Hungarian? With residence permits? Work permits? The Hungarian with a diplomatic passport? In a borrowed automobile?

So then, just exactly what kind of, business had them crossing the border in a snowstorm? Perhaps we’ll have a look in the trunk. The key, monsieur, if you please.

Morath began to calculate time. To be at the cafe on the rue Guisarde at ten o’clock, they should have left this hell an hour earlier. Outside, a truck driver honked his horn. The traffic began to back up as one of the inspectors tried to reach the Paris prefecture on the telephone. Morath could hear the operator’s voice as she argued with the inspector, who held his hand over the receiver and said to his supervisor, “She says there’s a line down in Lille.”

“Our calls don’t go through Lille, she of all people should know that!”

Morath and Balki exchanged a look. But the chief officer grew bored with them a few minutes later and sent them on their way with an imperious flip of the hand. If they insisted on being foreigners it certainly wasn’t his fault.

Out on Route 2, snow.

The Peugeot crawled behind an old Citroen camionnette with the name of a Soissons grocery painted on the rear door. Balki swore under his breath and tried to pass, the wheels spun, the Peugeot began to fishtail, Balki stamped on the brake, Morath saw the white, furious face of the camionnette‘s driver as it skidded past, the Peugeot spun in a circle, then plowed into a field, wheels bouncing on ruts beneath the snow.

They came to rest a few feet from a large plane tree, its trunk scarred by the indiscretions of past motorists. Balki and Morath stood in the falling snow and stared at the car. The right rear tire was flat.

Ten minutes to midnight, the rue Guisarde white and silent in the whispering snow, the lights of the cafe an amber glow at the end of the street. He saw her right away, the last customer, looking very sorrowful and abandoned, sitting hunched over a book and an empty cup of coffee.

He sat down across from her. “Forgive me,” he said.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter.”

“A nightmare, out on the roads. We had to change a tire.”

He took her hands.

“You’re wet,” she said.

“And cold.”

“Maybe you should go home. It hasn’t been a good night.”

He didn’t want to go home.

“Or you could come upstairs. Dry your hair, at least.”

He rose. Took a few francs from his pocket and put them on the table for the coffee.

A very small apartment, a single room with a bed in an alcove and a bathroom. He took off his overcoat, she hung it by the radiator. Put his jacket in the armoire and his soaked shoes on a sheet of newspaper.

They sat on an elaborate old sofa, a Victorian horror, the sort of thing that, once it came up five flights of stairs, was never going anywhere again. “Dear old thing,” she said affectionately, smoothing the brown velvet cushion with her hand. “She often plays a role in the D. E. Cameron novels.”

“Field of honor.”

“Yes.” She laughed and said, “Actually, I was lucky to find this place. I’m not the legal tenant, that’s why my name isn’t in the phone book. It belongs to a woman called Moni.”

“Moni?”

“Well, I think she’s actually Mona but, if you’re Mona, I guess the only pet name is Moni.”

“Short and dark? Likes to stir up trouble?”

“That’s her. She’s an artist, from Montreal, lives with her girlfriend over by Bastille somewhere. Where did you meet Moni?”

“Juan-les-Pins. She was one of Cara’s friends.”

“Oh. Well, anyhow, she was a godsend. When Jean-Marie died, I swore I was going to stay in that apartment, but I couldn’t bear it. I miss a refrigerator, in the summer, but I have a hotplate, and I can see Saint Sulpice.”

“It’s quiet.”

“Lost in the stars.”

She took a bottle of wine from the windowsill, opened it and poured him a glass, and one for herself. He lit a cigarette and she got him a Ricon ashtray.

“It’s Portuguese,” she said.

He took a sip. “Very good.”

“Not bad, I’d say.”

“Not at all.”

“I like it.”

“Mm.”

“Garrafeira, it’s called.”

Christ it’s a long way across this couch.

“What was it you were reading, in the cafe?”

“Babel.”

“In French?”

“English. My father was Irish, but I had to learn it in school. My mother was French, and we lived in Paris and spoke French at home.”

“So, officially, you’re French.”

“Irish. I’ve only been there twice, but on my eighteenth birthday I had to pick one or the other. Both my parents wanted me to be Irish-something my mother wanted for my father, I think that’s what it was. Anyhow, who cares. Citizen of the world, right?”

“Are you?”

“No, I’m French, my heart is, I can’t help it. My publisher thought I wrote in English, but I lied about it. I write in French and translate.”

Morath walked over to the window, stared down at the snow floating past the street lamps. Mary Day followed, a moment later, and leaned against him. He took her hand.

“Did you like Ireland?” His voice was soft.

“It was very beautiful,” she said.

It was a relief to get it over with, the first time, because God only knew what could go wrong. The second time was much better. She had a long, smooth body, silky and lean. Was a little shy to begin with, then not. The bed was narrow, not really meant for two, but she slept in his arms all night so it didn’t matter.

Christmas Eve. A long-standing tradition, the baroness Frei’s Christmas party. Mary Day was tense in the taxi-this was a party they hadn’t quite fought over. He had to go, he didn’t want to leave her home alone on Christmas Eve. “Something new for you,” he’d said. “A Hungarian evening.”

“Who will I talk to?”

“Mary, ma douce, there is no such thing as a Hungarian who speaks only Hungarian. The people at the party will speak French, perhaps English. And if, God forbid, you are presented to somebody only to discover that you cannot say a single comprehensible word to each other, well, so what? A smile of regret, and you escape to the buffet.”

In the end, she went. In something black-and very faintly strange, like everything she wore-but she looked even more heartbreaking than usual. She was of course delighted at the impasse Villon, and the house. And the servant who bowed when they came to the door and whisked away their coats.

“Nicholas?” she whispered.

“Yes?”

“That was a liveried footman, Nicholas.” She looked around. The candles, the silver, the hundred-year-old creche above the fireplace, the men, the women. In a distant room, a string quartet.

The baroness Frei was pleased to see him accompanied, and obviously approved of his choice. “You must come and see me sometime, when we can talk,” she said to Mary Day. Who stayed on Morath’s arm for only ten minutes before a baron took her away.

Morath, glass of champagne in hand, found himself in conversation with a man introduced as Bolthos, an official at the Hungarian legation. Very refined, with gray hair at the temples, looking, Morath thought, like an oil painting of a 1910 diplomat. Bolthos wanted to talk politics. “Hitler is enraged with them,” he said of the Roumanians. “Calinescu, the interior minister, made quick work of the Iron Guard. With the king’s approval, naturally. They shot Codreanu and fourteen of his lieutenants. ‘Shot while trying to escape,’ as the saying goes.”

“Perhaps we have something to learn from them.”

“It was a message, I think. Keep your wretched trash out of our country, Adolf.”

Morath agreed. “If we joined with Poland and Roumania, even the Serbs, and confronted him, we might actually survive this.”

“Yes, the Intermarium. And I agree with you, especially if the French would help.”

The French had signed a treaty of friendship with Berlin two weeks earlier-Munich reconfirmed. “Would they?” Morath said.

Bolthos had some champagne. “At the last minute, perhaps, after we’ve given up hope. It takes the French a long time to do the right thing.”

“The Poles won’t have any Munich,” Morath said.

“No, they’ll fight.”

“And Horthy?”

“Will slither, as always. In the end, however, it may not be enough. Then into the cauldron we go.”

Bolthos’s stunning wife joined them, all platinum hair and diamond earrings. “I hope I haven’t caught you talking politics,” she said with a mock scowl. “It’s Christmas, dearest, not the time for duels.”

“Your servant, sir.” Morath clicked his heels and bowed.

“There, you see?” Madame Bolthos said. “Now you’ll have to get up at dawn, and serves you right.”

“Quick!” said a young woman. “It’s Kolovitzky!”

“Where?”

“In the ballroom.”

Morath followed her as she cut through the crowd. “Do I know you?”

The woman looked over her shoulder and laughed.

In the ballroom, the eminent cellist Bela Kolovitzky stood on the raised platform and grinned at the gathering crowd. His colleagues, the remainder of the string quartet, joined them. Kolovitzky tucked a handkerchief between his neck and shoulder and settled himself around a violin. He’d been famous and successful in Budapest, then, in 1933, had gone to Hollywood.

” ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’!” somebody called out, clearly joking.

Kolovitzky played a discordant bleat, then looked between his feet. “Something else?”

Then he began to play, a slow, deep, romantic melody, vaguely familiar. “This is from Enchanted Holiday,” he said.

The music grew sadder. “Now Hedy Lamarr looks up at the steamship.”

And now, wistful. “She sees Charles Boyer at the railing…. He is searching for her … among the crowd…. She starts to raise her hand … halfway up … now back down … no, they can never be together … now the steamship blows its horn”-he made the sound on the violin-“Charles Boyer is frantic … where is she?”

“What is that?” a woman asked. “I almost know it.”

Kolovitzky shrugged. “Something midway between Tchaikovsky and Brahms. Brahmsky, we call him.” He began to speak English, in a comic Hungarian accent. “It muzt be zo tender, ro-man-tic, zenti-mental. Zo lovely it makes … Sam Goldwyn cry … and makes … Kolovitzky … rich.”

Morath wandered through the party, looking for Mary Day. He found her in the library, sitting by a blazing fire. She was leaning forward on a settee, a thumb keeping her place in a book, as she listened earnestly to a tiny white-haired gentleman in a leather chair, his hand resting on a stick topped with a silver ram’s head. At Mary Day’s feet lay one of the vizslas, supine with bliss, as Mary Day’s ceaseless stroking of its velvety skin had reduced it to a state of semiconsciousness. “Then, from that hill,” said the white-haired gentleman, “you can see the temple of Pallas Athena.”

Morath sat on a spindly chair by a French door, eating cake from a plate balanced on his knee. The baroness Frei sat close to him, back curved in a silk evening gown, face, as always, luminous. One could say, Morath thought, that she is the most beautiful woman in Europe.

“And your mother, Nicholas, what did she say?”

“She will not leave.”

“I will write to her,” the baroness said firmly.

“Please,” he said. “But I doubt she’ll change her mind.”

“Stubborn! Always her way.”

“She did say, just before I left, that she could live with the Germans, if she had to, but if the country was to be occupied by the Russians, I must find a way to get her out. ‘Then,’ she told me, ‘I will come to Paris.’ “

He found Mary Day and took her out into the winter garden; dead leaves plastered to the iron chairs and table, bare rose canes climbing up through the trellis. The frozen air made the sky black and the stars white and sharp. When she started to tremble, Morath stood behind her and wrapped her in his arms. “I love you, Nicholas,” she said.