Kingdom of Shadows

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

“An hour. A little more at night.”

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

Stay here, then.

“Is there another way across?” Pavlo said.

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

“By who?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s right there,” Mierczak said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A long time.”

“I can see that.”

Morath smoked his cigarette.

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

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

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

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

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

“Calm down,” Morath said.

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

Morath shrugged.

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

“What are you doing?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

Pavlo tapped his lips with his forefinger.

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