Kingdom of Shadows

“Babel.”

“In French?”

“English. My father was Irish, but I had to learn it in school. My mother was French, and we lived in Paris and spoke French at home.”

“So, officially, you’re French.”

“Irish. I’ve only been there twice, but on my eighteenth birthday I had to pick one or the other. Both my parents wanted me to be Irish-something my mother wanted for my father, I think that’s what it was. Anyhow, who cares. Citizen of the world, right?”

“Are you?”

“No, I’m French, my heart is, I can’t help it. My publisher thought I wrote in English, but I lied about it. I write in French and translate.”

Morath walked over to the window, stared down at the snow floating past the street lamps. Mary Day followed, a moment later, and leaned against him. He took her hand.

“Did you like Ireland?” His voice was soft.

“It was very beautiful,” she said.

It was a relief to get it over with, the first time, because God only knew what could go wrong. The second time was much better. She had a long, smooth body, silky and lean. Was a little shy to begin with, then not. The bed was narrow, not really meant for two, but she slept in his arms all night so it didn’t matter.

Christmas Eve. A long-standing tradition, the baroness Frei’s Christmas party. Mary Day was tense in the taxi-this was a party they hadn’t quite fought over. He had to go, he didn’t want to leave her home alone on Christmas Eve. “Something new for you,” he’d said. “A Hungarian evening.”

“Who will I talk to?”

“Mary, ma douce, there is no such thing as a Hungarian who speaks only Hungarian. The people at the party will speak French, perhaps English. And if, God forbid, you are presented to somebody only to discover that you cannot say a single comprehensible word to each other, well, so what? A smile of regret, and you escape to the buffet.”

In the end, she went. In something black-and very faintly strange, like everything she wore-but she looked even more heartbreaking than usual. She was of course delighted at the impasse Villon, and the house. And the servant who bowed when they came to the door and whisked away their coats.

“Nicholas?” she whispered.

“Yes?”

“That was a liveried footman, Nicholas.” She looked around. The candles, the silver, the hundred-year-old creche above the fireplace, the men, the women. In a distant room, a string quartet.

The baroness Frei was pleased to see him accompanied, and obviously approved of his choice. “You must come and see me sometime, when we can talk,” she said to Mary Day. Who stayed on Morath’s arm for only ten minutes before a baron took her away.

Morath, glass of champagne in hand, found himself in conversation with a man introduced as Bolthos, an official at the Hungarian legation. Very refined, with gray hair at the temples, looking, Morath thought, like an oil painting of a 1910 diplomat. Bolthos wanted to talk politics. “Hitler is enraged with them,” he said of the Roumanians. “Calinescu, the interior minister, made quick work of the Iron Guard. With the king’s approval, naturally. They shot Codreanu and fourteen of his lieutenants. ‘Shot while trying to escape,’ as the saying goes.”

“Perhaps we have something to learn from them.”

“It was a message, I think. Keep your wretched trash out of our country, Adolf.”

Morath agreed. “If we joined with Poland and Roumania, even the Serbs, and confronted him, we might actually survive this.”

“Yes, the Intermarium. And I agree with you, especially if the French would help.”

The French had signed a treaty of friendship with Berlin two weeks earlier-Munich reconfirmed. “Would they?” Morath said.

Bolthos had some champagne. “At the last minute, perhaps, after we’ve given up hope. It takes the French a long time to do the right thing.”

“The Poles won’t have any Munich,” Morath said.

“No, they’ll fight.”

“And Horthy?”

“Will slither, as always. In the end, however, it may not be enough. Then into the cauldron we go.”

Bolthos’s stunning wife joined them, all platinum hair and diamond earrings. “I hope I haven’t caught you talking politics,” she said with a mock scowl. “It’s Christmas, dearest, not the time for duels.”

“Your servant, sir.” Morath clicked his heels and bowed.

“There, you see?” Madame Bolthos said. “Now you’ll have to get up at dawn, and serves you right.”

“Quick!” said a young woman. “It’s Kolovitzky!”

“Where?”

“In the ballroom.”

Morath followed her as she cut through the crowd. “Do I know you?”

The woman looked over her shoulder and laughed.

In the ballroom, the eminent cellist Bela Kolovitzky stood on the raised platform and grinned at the gathering crowd. His colleagues, the remainder of the string quartet, joined them. Kolovitzky tucked a handkerchief between his neck and shoulder and settled himself around a violin. He’d been famous and successful in Budapest, then, in 1933, had gone to Hollywood.

” ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’!” somebody called out, clearly joking.

Kolovitzky played a discordant bleat, then looked between his feet. “Something else?”

Then he began to play, a slow, deep, romantic melody, vaguely familiar. “This is from Enchanted Holiday,” he said.

The music grew sadder. “Now Hedy Lamarr looks up at the steamship.”

And now, wistful. “She sees Charles Boyer at the railing…. He is searching for her … among the crowd…. She starts to raise her hand … halfway up … now back down … no, they can never be together … now the steamship blows its horn”-he made the sound on the violin-“Charles Boyer is frantic … where is she?”

“What is that?” a woman asked. “I almost know it.”

Kolovitzky shrugged. “Something midway between Tchaikovsky and Brahms. Brahmsky, we call him.” He began to speak English, in a comic Hungarian accent. “It muzt be zo tender, ro-man-tic, zenti-mental. Zo lovely it makes … Sam Goldwyn cry … and makes … Kolovitzky … rich.”

Morath wandered through the party, looking for Mary Day. He found her in the library, sitting by a blazing fire. She was leaning forward on a settee, a thumb keeping her place in a book, as she listened earnestly to a tiny white-haired gentleman in a leather chair, his hand resting on a stick topped with a silver ram’s head. At Mary Day’s feet lay one of the vizslas, supine with bliss, as Mary Day’s ceaseless stroking of its velvety skin had reduced it to a state of semiconsciousness. “Then, from that hill,” said the white-haired gentleman, “you can see the temple of Pallas Athena.”

Morath sat on a spindly chair by a French door, eating cake from a plate balanced on his knee. The baroness Frei sat close to him, back curved in a silk evening gown, face, as always, luminous. One could say, Morath thought, that she is the most beautiful woman in Europe.

“And your mother, Nicholas, what did she say?”

“She will not leave.”

“I will write to her,” the baroness said firmly.

“Please,” he said. “But I doubt she’ll change her mind.”

“Stubborn! Always her way.”

“She did say, just before I left, that she could live with the Germans, if she had to, but if the country was to be occupied by the Russians, I must find a way to get her out. ‘Then,’ she told me, ‘I will come to Paris.’ “

He found Mary Day and took her out into the winter garden; dead leaves plastered to the iron chairs and