Kingdom of Shadows

Bulgaria. It had been IMRO operatives who assassinated King Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1934, in Marseilles. They had been trained in camps in Hungary which, in service of an alliance with Italy, also provided military instructors and false papers. Papers issued, quite often, in the name of Edouard Benes, the hated president of Czechoslovakia. A certain sense of humor at work there, Morath thought.

“Balkan, Balkan,” they said in France of a pimp slapping a whore or three kids beating up a fourth-anything barbarous or brutal. In the seat across from Morath, Pavlo slumbered away, arms crossed protectively over his briefcase.

The passport formalities at the Austrian border were, mercifully, not too drawn out. For Andreas Panea, the Roumanian, that particular masked rudeness of central Europe-you practically had to be Austrian to know you’d been insulted. For everybody else, it took a day or two, and by then you’d left the country.

A long time on the train, Morath thought, anxious to be back in the life he’d made in Paris. Hungarian plain, Austrian valley, German forest, and, at last, French fields, and the sun came out in Morath’s heart. By evening, the train chugged through the Ile-de-France, wheatfields and not much else, then the conductor-who was all French train conductors, broad and stocky with a black mustache-announced the final stop, just the edge of a song in his voice. Pavlo grew attentive, peering out the window as the train slowed for the villages outside the city.

“You’ve been to Paris?”

“No.”

On the tenth of May 1938, the night train from Budapest pulled into the Gare du Nord a little after 9:20 P.M. It was, on the whole, a quiet evening in Europe, cloudy and warm for the season, rain expected toward dawn. Nicholas Morath, traveling on a Hungarian diplomatic passport, stepped slowly from the first-class car and headed for the taxi rank outside the station. Just as he left the platform he turned, as though he was about to say something to a companion, but, on looking back, he discovered that whoever he’d been with had disappeared into the crowd.

VON SCHLEBEN’S WHORE

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

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

Morath sat on a stool. “Not too bad.”

“What can I get for you?”

“A beer.”

“Pelforth all right?”

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

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

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

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

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

“And one to go.”

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

Balki read further. “Who is Count Bethlen?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morath shrugged.

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

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

“I sometimes wonder,” Balki said.

It wasn’t an answer Morath expected.

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

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

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

“And then?”

“Well, eventually the Cheka showed up. Then they were the only gang in town. I