Kingdom of Shadows

“Will you help him?”

For a moment he was silent, then said, “I might.”

He didn’t want to talk about it, slid his hand down her stomach to change the subject. “See what happens when I take my Betravix?”

She snickered. “Now that is something I did see. A week after I was hired, I think it was. You were off someplace-wherever it is you go-and this strange little man showed up with his tonic. ‘For the nerves,’ he said. ‘And to increase the vigor.’ Courtmain was anxious to take it on. We sat in his office, this green bottle on his desk, somewhere he’d found a spoon. I took the cap off and smelled it. Courtmain looked inquisitive, but I didn’t say anything-I’d only been there a few days and I was afraid to make a mistake. Well, nothing scares Courtmain, he poured himself a spoonful and slugged it down. Then he turned pale and went running down the hall.”

“Betravix-keeps you running.”

“The look on his face.” She snorted at the memory.

The Ides of March. On the fifteenth, German motorized infantry, motorcycles, half-tracks, and armored cars entered Prague in a heavy blizzard. The Czech army did not resist, the air force stayed on the ground. All day long, the Wehrmacht columns wound through the city, headed for the Slovakian border. The following morning, Hitler addressed a crowd of Volksdeutsch from the balcony of Hradcany Castle. Over the next few days, there were five thousand arrests in Czechoslovakia and hundreds of suicides.

Two weeks earlier, Hungary had joined the Anti-Comintern Pact-Germany, Italy, and Japan-while simultaneously initiating a severe repression of Fascist elements throughout the country. We will oppose the Bolsheviks, the action seemed to say, and we can sign any paper we like, but we will not be ruled by Nazi surrogates. In a certain light, a dark, tormented kind of light, it made sense. Even more sense when, on 14 March, the Honved, the Royal Hungarian army, marched across the border and occupied Ruthenia. Slowly, painfully, the old territories were coming back.

In Paris, the driving snow in Prague fell as rain. The news was alive on the streets. Under black, shining umbrellas, crowds gathered at the kiosks where the headlines were posted. BETRAYAL. Morath could feel it in the air. As though the beast, safely locked in the basement at the time of Munich, had kicked the door down and started smashing the china.

The receptionist at the agency answered the phone while dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. A subdued Courtmain showed Morath a list of younger men in the office who would likely be mobilized-how to get along without them? In the hallways, conversations in urgent whispers.

But, when Morath left the office at midday, nobody was whispering. In the streets, at the cafe and the bank and everywhere else, it was merde and merde again. And merdeux, un beau merdier, merdique, emmerde, and emmerdeur. The Parisians had a lot of ways to say it and they used them all. Morath’s newspaper, violently pessimistic about the future, reminded its readers what Churchill had said in response to Chamberlain’s peace-with-honor speeches at the time of Munich: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”

On 28 March, Madrid fell to Franco’s armies, and the Spanish republic surrendered. Mary Day sat on the edge of the bed in her flannel nightshirt, listening to the voice on the radio. “You know I once had a friend,” she said, close to tears. “An Englishman. Tall and silly, blind as a bat-Edwin Pennington. Edwin Pennington, who wrote Annabelle Surprised, and Miss Lovett’s School. And then one day he went off and died in Andalusia.”

For Morath, at work that morning, a petit bleu, a telegram delivered via the pneumatic-tube system used by the Parisian post offices. A simple message: NOTRE DAME DE LORETTE. 1:30.

The church of Notre Dame de Lorette was out in the scruffy Ninth Arrondissement-the whores in the neighborhood known as Lorettes. In the streets around the church, Ilya would not seem especially noticeable. Morath’s best instincts told him not to go. He sat back in his chair, stared at the telegram, smoked a cigarette, and left the office at one.

It was dark and busy in the church, mostly older women, that time of day. War widows, he thought, dressed in black, early for the two o’clock Mass. He found the deepest shadow, toward the back, away from the stained-glass windows. Ilya appeared almost immediately. He was tense, the small bravado of the Maubert market was no more. He sat down, then took a deep breath and let it out, as though he’d been running. “Good,” he said, speaking softly. “You are here.

“You see what happens in Prague,” he said, “and next is Poland. You don’t need me to tell you that. But what is not known is that the directive is written, the war plan is made. It has a name, Fall Weiss, Case White, and it has a date, any time after the first of September.”

Morath repeated the name and the date.

“I can prove,” Ilya said, excited, losing his French. “With papers.” He paused a moment, then said, “This is good Chekist work, but it must go-up high. Otherwise, war. No way to stop it. Can you help?”

“I can try.”

Ilya stared into his eyes to see if he was telling the truth. “That is what I hope.” He had enormous presence, Morath thought. Power. Even battered and hungry and frightened, he had it.

“There’s somebody I can go to,” Morath said.

Ilya’s expression said If that’s what I can get, I’ll take it. “The Poles are in the middle of this thing,” he said. “And they are difficult, impossible. In the five-man junta that runs the country, only Beck and Rydz-Smigly matter-Beck for foreign policy, Rydz-Smigly for the army-but they are all Pilsudski’s children. When he died, in 1935, they inherited the country, and they have the same experience. They fought for independence in 1914, and got it. Then they beat the Russians, in 1920, before the gates of Warsaw, and now they want nothing to do with them. Too many wars, the last hundred years. Too much blood spilled. There’s a point where, between nations, it’s too late. That’s Russia and Poland.

“Now, they think they can beat Germany. Jozef Beck’s background is in clandestine service-he was expelled from France in 1923 when he served as Polish military attache, suspected of spying for Germany. So what he knows of Russia and Germany he knows from the shadows, where the truth is usually to be found.

“What the Poles want is alliance with France and Britain. Logical, on the surface. But how can Britain help them? With ships? Like Gallipoli? It’s a joke. The only nation that can help Poland, today, is Russia-look at a map. And Stalin wants the same thing the Poles want, alliance with Britain, for the same reason, to keep Hitler’s wolves away from the door. But we are despised by the British, feared, hated, Godless communists and murderers. That’s true, but what is also true, even more true, is that we are the only nation that can form, with Poland, an eastern front against the Wehrmacht.

“Chamberlain and Halifax don’t like this idea, and there is more than a little evidence that what they do like is the idea of Hitler fighting Stalin. Do they think Stalin doesn’t know it? Do they? So here is the truth: If Stalin can’t make a pact with the British, he will make one with Germany. He will have no choice.”

Morath didn’t answer, trying to take it all in. The two o’clock Mass had begun, a young priest serving in the afternoon. Morath thought he would hear about bloody crimes: famines, purges. Ilya wasn’t the only defector from the Russian secret service-there was a GRU general, called Krivitsky, who’d written a bestseller in America. Ilya, he assumed, wanted protection, refuge, in return for evidence that Stalin meant to rule the world.

“You believe?” Ilya said.

“Yes.” More or less, from a certain angle.

“Your friend, can approach the British?”

“I would think he could. And the papers?”

“When he agrees, he’ll have them.”

“What are they?”

“From the Kremlin, notes of meetings. NKVD reports, copies of German memoranda.”

“Can I contact you?”

Ilya smiled and, slowly, shook his head. “How much time do you need?”

“A week, perhaps.”

“So be it.” Ilya stood. “I will go first, you can leave in a few minutes. Is safer, that way.”