Kingdom of Shadows

that was in September. I don’t know if he told you.”

“Not then, no.”

“Well, he did. Through our brother-in-law, in Paris. He asked if we would help, help the country. He saw the handwriting on the wall, as they say.”

He paused a moment. Outside, the drumming of a tugboat engine, hauling a line of barges north on the river.

“We don’t ask for anything,” he went on, “but now Polanyi knows, and you know, so …”

Szimon went over to the safe and began to work the combination. Then he pulled the handles to the up position and swung the doors open. Herschel leaned close to Morath. He smelled strong, of sweat and onions, cigarettes.

“It’s in pengo,” he said. “Maybe if the community was more involved, we could make it in something else. But the Count wanted it kept close, so it’s just a few people. Szimon and me, our family, you know, one or two others, but mostly us.”

Szimon began stacking piles of pengo on the desk, each fifty notes pinned at the corner. He flipped the ends of the stacks, wet his thumb, then counted in Yiddish as he shuffled through the bills. Herschel laughed. “For some reason,” he said, “it’s hard to do that in Hungarian.”

Morath shook his head. “Nobody ever thought it would come to this,” he said.

“Forgive me, sir, but it always comes to this.”

“Zvei hundrit toizend,” Szimon said.

“What will you call it?”

“I don’t know. The Free Hungary Committee-something like that.”

“In Paris?”

“Or London. If the country is occupied, the best place is the closest place. Closest safe place.”

“So, do you like New York?”

“God forbid.”

Szimon finished counting, then squared the stacks off by tapping the edges on the desk. “Four hundred thousand pengo,” he said. “About the same in French francs. Or, just in case God doesn’t forbid, eighty thousand dollars.”

“Tell me one thing,” Herschel said. “Do you think the country will be occupied? Some people say sell and get out.”

“And lose everything,” Szimon said. He slid the money across the desk-thousand-pengo notes, wider than French currency, with black and red engravings of Saint Istvan on one side and a castle on the other. Morath opened a briefcase, placed the stacks on the bottom, put Freya Stark on top.

“Don’t we have rubber bands?” Herschel said.

Morath pulled the straps tight and buckled them. Then he shook hands, very formally, with each of the brothers. “Go with God,” Herschel said.

That night, he met Wolfi Szubl at the Arizona, a nachtlokal in Szint Josef Alley on Margaret Island. Szubl wore a pale-blue suit and a flowery tie and smelled of heliotrope. “You never know,” he said to Morath. “It gets very late at night here.”

“Wolfi,” Morath said, shaking his head.

“There’s someone for everyone,” Szubl said.

Szubl led him to a table on a platform by the wall, then pressed a button which raised them ten feet. “Here it’s good.” They shouted down to a waiter for drinks, Polish vodkas, that came up on a mechanical tray.

The orchestra was dressed in white tuxedos and played Cole Porter songs to a packed dance floor, which sometimes disappeared into the basement to a chorus of shrieks and laughter from the dancers.

A naked girl floated past in a harness, dark hair streaming out behind her. Her pose was artistic, lofty, an insouciant hand resting against the wire that hung from the ceiling.

“Ahh,” Szubl said.

“You like her?”

Szubl grinned-who wouldn’t?

“Why ‘Arizona’?” Morath asked.

“The couple who own it got an unexpected inheritance, a fortune, from an uncle in Vienna. Decided to build a nightclub on Margaret Island. When they got the telegram they were in Arizona, so …”

“No. Really?”

Szubl nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Tucson.”

The drinks came. The girl went by again, headed the other way. “You see? She ignores us,” Szubl said.

“She just happened to fly past, naked on a wire. Don’t make assumptions.”

Szubl raised his glass. “To the Free Hungary Committee.”

“May it never exist.”

Morath liked Polish vodka, potato vodka. It had a ghost of a taste he could never quite understand. “So, how did you do?”

“Not bad. From the Salon Kitty, on Szinyei Street, two hundred and fifty thousand pengo. Most of it from Madame Kitty, but she wanted us to know that three of the girls contributed. Then, from the nephew of the late, lamented minister of finance, another one hundred and fifty.”

“That’s all? His uncle would steal the wool from a sheep.”

“Too late, Nicholas. The casino got most of it-he’s a candidate for the boat.”

The citizens of Budapest were partial to suicide, so the municipal authority maintained a boat tied up below the Ferenc Josef Bridge. A riverman waited in the bow with a long pole, ready to haul in the night’s jumpers before they drowned.

“What about you?” Szubl said.

“Four hundred thousand from the Gersoviczy brothers. I go out to Kolozsvar tomorrow.”

“Shooting animals?”

“Christ, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I’m to see Voyschinkowsky.”

” ‘The Lion of the Bourse.’ He lives in Paris, what’s he doing here?”

“Nostalgia.”

“Waiter!”

“Sir?”

“Two more, please.”

A big redhead came gliding by. She blew a kiss, put her hands beneath her breasts and wobbled them, then raised an eyebrow.

“Let me buy her for you, Wolfi. All night, my treat.”

They drank their vodkas, ordered doubles. The dance floor reappeared. The leader of the orchestra had shiny black hair and a little mustache and smiled like a saint as he waved his baton.

“When you begin-n-n-n, the beguine.” Szubl took a deep breath and sighed. “You know,” he said, “what I really like is to look at naked women.”

“You do?”

“No, Nicholas, don’t make fun of me, I’m serious. I mean, I really don’t like anything else. If I could have begun this at fourteen, as my life’s work, as the only thing I did, day and night, there never would have been a reason for me to disturb the world in any other way.

“But, of course, they wouldn’t let me do that. So, now I crowd into trains, make telephones ring, throw orange peels into trash cans, make women buy girdles, ask for change, it doesn’t stop. And, worst of all, on a lovely day, when you’re happy and calm you go out in the street-and there I am! Really, there’s no end to it. And it won’t stop until I take up the space in the graveyard you wanted for your mother.”

The orchestra played the “Tango du Chat.” Morath remembered the song from the bar on the beach in Juan- les-Pins. “Tell you what,” he said to Szubl. “We’ll go over to Szinyei Street, to Kitty’s. Order a parade around the parlor, every girl in the house. Or, a game of tag. No, wait, hide-and-seek!”

“Nicholas. You know, you’re a romantic.”