Kingdom of Shadows

Later, Morath went to the WC, met an old friend, gossiped for a few minutes. When he came back, the redhead was sitting on Szubl’s lap, playing with his tie and laughing. Wolfi’s voice floated down from the platform. “Good night, Nicholas. Good night.”

At Kolozsvar railroad station, a bright, cold morning.

There were two other Hungarians who left the train with him. Hunters, with shotguns under their arms. The conductor on the platform wished him good morning, in Hungarian, as he got off the train. And the two women mopping the floor in the station waiting room bantered in Hungarian and, in fact, laughed in Hungarian. A pleasant Magyar world-it just happened to be in Roumania. Once Kolozsvar, now Cluj. Nem, nem, soha.

A journey to the estate of Prince Hrubal turned out to be infernally complicated to arrange. It had required, in the end, several medieval phone calls, three telegrams-one of which went, inexplicably, to Wales, a verbal message taken to the castle by a gamekeeper’s daughter, and a personal intervention by the village mayor. But, in the end, it worked.

In the street outside the station, Prince Hrubal’s head groom was waiting for him, mounted on a bay gelding and holding the reins of a dock-tailed chocolate mare. This was, Morath knew, much the best way. You could try the road by automobile, but you spent more time digging than driving, and the trip by horse and carriage would hammer your teeth flat. That left walking and riding, and riding was faster.

He swung up into the saddle and tucked his briefcase under his arm. He’d made sure, in Budapest, to wear boots for the journey.

“Your excellency, I kiss your hands,” said the steward.

“Good morning to you,” Morath said, and they were off.

The good road in Cluj led to the bad road outside Cluj, then onto a road paved long ago, by some nameless dreamer/bureaucrat, and soon forgotten. This was northern Transylvania, mountainous and lost, where for generations Hungarian nobles ruled the lives of Roumanian serfs. There were, now and then, savage jacqueries, peasant risings, and the looting and burning would go on until the army arrived, coils of rope hung on their saddles. The trees were already there. Now, for the moment at least, it was quiet. Very quiet. Out in the countryside, a ruined castle broke the line of a mountain crest, then there was only forest, sometimes a field.

It took Morath back to the war. They’d been no different than any of the armies who came down these roads on mornings in the fall. He remembered wisps of autumn mist caught on the barbed wire, the sound of wind in the stubble of the rye fields, the creak of harness, crows wheeling in the sky and laughing at them. Sometimes they saw geese flying south; sometimes, when it rained at dawn, they only heard them. A thousand horses’ hooves rang on the paved roads-their coming was no secret, and the riflemen waited for them. Once there was a sergeant, a Croat, adjusting a stirrup in the shade of an oak tree. The air cracked, an officer shouted. The sergeant put a hand over his eye, like a man reading an eye chart. The horse reared, galloped down the road a little way, and began to graze.

Prince Hrubal owned forests and mountains.

A servant answered Morath’s knock and led him to the great hall-stag heads on the wall and tennis racquets in the corner. The prince showed up a moment later. “Welcome to my house,” he said. He had merciless eyes; black, depthless, and cruel, a shaven head, a drooping Turkish mustache, the nickname “Jacky,” acquired during his two years at Cornell, a taste for Italian fashion models, and a near manic passion for charity. His bookkeeper could barely keep track of it-broom factories for the blind, orphanages, homes for elderly nuns, and, lately, roof repairs on ancient monasteries. “This may do it for me, Nicholas,” he said, a heavy arm draped around Morath’s shoulders. “I’ve had to sell my sugar contracts in Chicago. But, still, the contemplative life must be lived, right? If not by you and me, by somebody, right? We can’t have wet monks.”

The baroness Frei once told Morath that the prince’s life was the story of an aristocrat of the blood seeking to become an aristocrat of the heart. “Hrubal’s a little mad,” she said. “And it remains to be seen if his wealth can accommodate his madness. But whatever happens, these are thrilling races to watch, don’t you agree? Poor man. Thirty generations of ancestors, brutal and bloody as the day is long, roasting rebels on iron thrones and God knows what, and only one lifetime for redemption.”

The prince led Morath outside. “We’ve been moving boxwood,” he said. He wore high boots, corduroy field pants, and a peasant blouse, a pair of cowhide gloves in his back pocket. At the end of the lawn, two peasants waited for him, leaning on their shovels.

“And Janos Polanyi,” Hrubal said. “He’s in good form?”

“Always up to something.”

Hrubal laughed. “The King of Swords-that’s his tarot card. A leader, powerful, but dark and secretive. His subjects prosper but regret they ever knew him.” The prince laughed again, fondly, and patted Morath’s shoulder. “Hasn’t killed you yet, I see. But have no fear, Nicky, he will, he will.”

Dinner for twelve. Venison from Hrubal’s forest, trout from his stream, sauce from his red currants and sauce from his figs, a traditional salad-lettuce dressed with lard and paprika-and burgundy, Bull’s Blood, from the Hrubal vineyards.

They ate in the small dining room, where the walls were lined with red satin, sagging, here and there, in melancholy folds and well spotted with champagne, wax, and blood. “But it proves the room,” Hrubal said. “Last burned in 1810. A long time, in this part of the world.” Dinner was eaten by the light of two hundred candles, Morath felt the sweat running down his sides.

He sat close to the head of the table, between Annalisa, the prince’s friend from Rome-pale as a ghost, with long white hands, last seen in the April Vogue-and the fiancee of the Reuters correspondent in Bucharest, Miss Bonington.

“It is miserable now,” she said to Morath. “Hitler is bad enough, but the local spawn are worse.”

“The Iron Guard.”

“They are everywhere. With little bags of earth around their necks. Sacred earth, you see.”

“Come to Rome,” Annalisa said. “And see them strut, our fascisti. Chubby little men, they think it’s their time.”

“What are we supposed to do?” Miss Bonington said, her voice shrill. “Vote?”

Annalisa flipped a hand in the air. “Be worse than they are, I suppose, that’s the tragedy. They have created a cheap, soiled, empty world, and now we are to have the pleasure of living in it.”

“Well, personally, I never imagined-”

“Basta,” Annalisa said softly. “Hrubal is looking at us. To talk politics with food is against the rules.”

Miss Bonington laughed. “What then?”

“Love. Poetry. Venice.”

“Dear man.”

The three of them turned their eyes to the head of the table.

“I loved the life there,” Hrubal said. “On Saturday afternoon, the big game. That’s what they called it-the big game! As for me, well, I was their saber champion, what else, and only our girlfriends came to the matches. But we all went to see the football. I had a giant horn, for cheering.”

“A giant horn?”

“Damn. Somebody …”

“A megaphone, I think,” said the Reuters man.

“That’s it! Thank you, for years I’ve wanted to remember that.”

A servant approached the table and whispered to Hrubal. “Yes, very well,” he said.

The string quartet had arrived. They were shown into the dining room and the servants went for chairs. The four men smiled and nodded, wiping the rain from their hair and drying their instrument cases with their handkerchiefs.

When everyone had gone to their rooms, Morath followed Hrubal to an office high in a crumbling turret, where the prince opened an iron box and counted out packets of faded Austrian schillings. “These are very old,” he said. “I never know quite what to do with them.” Morath converted schilling to pengo as the money went into the briefcase. Six hundred thousand, more or less. “Tell Count Janos,” Hrubal said, “that there’s more if he needs it. Or, you know, Nicholas, whatever it might be.”