Kingdom of Shadows (26 page)

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

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

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

“Sorry,” he said. Graciously.

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

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

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

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

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

Something had.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I didn’t know,” Polanyi said.

From Morath, a bitter smile.

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

“Not your fault, is that it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Done for the last time.”

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

“Who set the
préfecture
on me?”

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

“You know?”

“You never know. You assume.”

“To gain what?”

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

“Why send the clipping?”

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

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

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

“Why?”

“I owe you at least that much.”

“Why not have Von Schleben deal with it?”

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

“You know he would?”

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

“I am? How?”

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

“And you’ll pay.”

“And I’ll pay.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is Mitten here?”

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

“Good for him.”

“Not bad.
The Sins of Doktor Braunschweig.
”

“Which were—”

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

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

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

Szubl made a check mark on the list.

“Women try these on? The samples?”

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

“Congratulations.”

“Disaster.”

“Why?”

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

“So turn it down.”

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

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

“Why this?” Szubl said.

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

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

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

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

“Courage, Wolfi.”

“I don’t want to break rocks.”

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

Szubl nodded, unhappy and scared.

Morath called Polanyi and told him about it.

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

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