Kingdom of Shadows

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

They both laughed.

“You see why I love him,” Balki said.

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

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

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

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

“Of course.”

“Before you go away?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My uncle keeps me busy.”

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

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

“That too.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Favors …”

“Well, what is one to do.”

“Quite.”

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

“An old friend. Locked up in Matyas.”

“For?”

“Selling worthless bonds.”

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

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

“Which is?”

“Rashkow.”

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

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

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

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

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“Is there a card?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Back in a minute.”

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

This was a privilege, not a sacrifice.

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

“Messieurs et mesdames.”

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

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