Kingdom of Shadows

It took two cars to get them all to the railroad station, the maids and the gardener stood by the door when they drove away. The thirty-first of August turned out to be, of course, a diabolically perfect day. The sky chalk- blue, the children’s-book clouds with chiseled edges, the little train from another time. Simon shook his hand and said, “We’ll hope for the best, right?” Morath nodded. Cara dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief and held on to Francesca as the train pulled in. And Simon’s mother took his hands in hers. She had cool gray eyes and gave him a good long look. “I’m so glad you could come,” she said. “And we do want you to come back, Nicholas. You’ll try, won’t you?”

He promised he would, and held her hands.

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.