Kingdom of Shadows

On the morning of 9 May, Morath was at the Agence Courtmain when he was handed a telephone message. Please call Major Fekaj at the Hungarian legation. His heart sank a little-Polanyi had told him, on the way back from Thiais, that Fekaj now sat in Sombor’s office, his own replacement due from Budapest within the week.

Morath put the message in his pocket and went off to a meeting in Courtmain’s office. Another poster campaign-a parade, a pageant, the ministries preparing to celebrate, in July, the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the revolution of 1789. After the meeting, Courtmain and Morath treated a crowd from the agency to a raucous lunch in an upstairs room at Laperouse, their own particular answer to the latest valley in the national morale.

By the time he got back to the avenue Matignon, Morath knew he had to call-either that or think about it for the rest of the day.

Fekaj’s voice was flat and cold. He was a colorless man, precise, formal, and reserved. “I called to inform you, sir, that we have serious concerns about the well-being of his excellency, Count Polanyi.”

“Yes?” Now what.

“He has not been seen at the legation for two days and does not answer his telephone at home. We want to know if you, by any chance, have been in contact with him.”

“No, not since the sixth.”

“Did he, to your knowledge, have plans to go abroad?”

“I don’t think he did. Perhaps he’s ill.”

“We have called the city hospitals. There is no record of admission.”

“Have you gone to the apartment?”

“This morning, the concierge let us in. Everything was in order, no indication of … anything wrong. The maid stated that his bed had not been slept in for two nights.” Fekaj cleared his throat. “Would you care to tell us, sir, if he sometimes spends the night elsewhere? With a woman?”

“If he does he doesn’t tell me about it, he keeps the details of his personal life to himself. Have you informed the police?”

“We have.”

Morath had to sit down at his desk. He lit a cigarette and said, “Major Fekaj, I don’t know how to help you.”

“We accept,” Fekaj hesitated, then continued. “We understand that certain aspects of Count Polanyi’s work had to remain-out of view. For reasons of state. But, should he make contact with you, we trust that you will at least let us know that he is, safe.”

Alive, you mean. “I will,” Morath said.

“Thank you. Of course you’ll be notified if we hear anything further.”

Morath held the receiver in his hand, oblivious to the silence on the line after Fekaj hung up.

Gone.

He called Bolthos at his office, but Bolthos didn’t want to speak on the legation telephone and met him, just after dark, in a busy cafe.

“I spoke to Fekaj,” Morath said. “But I had nothing to tell him.”

Bolthos looked haggard. “It’s been difficult,” he said. “Impossible. Because of our atrocious politics, we’re cursed with separate investigations. Officially, the nyilas are responsible, but any real work must be done by Polanyi’s friends. Fekaj and his allies won’t involve themselves.”

“Where do you think he is?”

A polite shrug. “Abducted.”

“Murdered?”

“In time.”

After a moment Bolthos said, “He wouldn’t jump off a bridge, would he?”

“Not him, no.”

“Nicholas,” Bolthos said. “You’re going to have to tell me what he was doing.”

Morath paused, but he had no choice. “On Tuesday, the sixth, he was supposed to meet a man who said he had defected from the Soviet special services, which Polanyi did not believe. He didn’t run, according to Polanyi, he was sent. But, even so, he came bearing information that Polanyi thought was important-Litvinov’s dismissal, a negotiation between Stalin and Hitler. So Polanyi met him and agreed to a second, a final meeting. Documents to be exchanged for money, I suspect.

“But, if you’re looking for enemies you can’t stop there-you have to consider Sombor’s colleagues, certainly suspicious of what went on at the legation, and capable of anything. And you can’t ignore the fact that Polanyi was in touch with the Germans-diplomats, spies, Wehrmacht staff officers. And he also had some kind of business with the Poles; maybe Roumanians and Serbs as well, a potential united front against Hitler.”

From Bolthos, a sour smile. “But no scorned mistress, you’re sure of that.”

They sat in silence while the cafe life swirled around them. A woman at the next table was reading with a lorgnette, her dachshund asleep under a chair.

“That was, of course, his work,” Bolthos said.

“Yes. It was.” Morath heard himself use the past tense. “You think he’s dead.”

“I hope he isn’t, but better that than some dungeon in Moscow or Berlin.” Bolthos took a small notebook from his pocket. “This meeting, will you tell me where it was supposed to take place?”

“I don’t know. The first meeting was at the Parmentier Metro station. But in my dealings with this man he was careful to change time and location. So, in a way, the second meeting would have been anywhere but there.”

“Unless Polanyi insisted.” Bolthos flipped back through the notebook. “I’ve been working with my own sources in the Paris police. On Tuesday, the sixth, a man was shot somewhere near the Parmentier Metro station. This was buried among all the robberies and domestic disturbances, but there was something about it that caught my attention. The victim was a French citizen, born in Slovakia. Served in the Foreign Legion, then discharged for political activity. He crawled into a doorway and died on the rue Saint-Maur, a minute or so away from the Metro.”

“A phantom,” Morath said. “Polanyi’s bodyguard-is that what you think? Or maybe his assassin. Or both, why not. Or, more likely, nobody, caught up in somebody’s politics on the wrong night, or killed for a ten-franc piece.”

Bolthos closed the notebook. “We have to try,” he said. He meant he’d done the best he could.

“Yes. I know,” Morath said.

Temetni Tudunk, a Magyar sentiment, complex and ironic: How to bury people, that is one thing we know. It was Wolfi Szubl who said the words, at a Hungarian nightclub in the cellar of a strange little hotel out in the 17th Arrondissement. Szubl and Mitten, the baroness Frei escorted by a French film producer, Bolthos and his wife and her cousin, Voyschinkowsky and Lady Angela Hope, the artist Szabo, the lovely Madame Kareny, various other strays and aristocrats who had floated through Janos Polanyi’s complicated life.

It wasn’t a funeral-there was no burial, thus Szubl’s ironic twist on the phrase, not even a memorial, only an evening to remember a friend. “A difficult friend”-Voyschinkowsky said that, an index finger wiping the corner of his eye. There was candlelight, a small Gypsy orchestra, platters of chicken with paprika and cream, wine and fruit brandy, and, yes, it was said more than once as the evening wore on, Polanyi would have liked to be there. During one of the particularly heartbreaking songs, a pale, willowy woman, supremely, utterly Parisienne and rumored to be a procuress who lived in the Palais Royal, stood in front of the orchestra and danced with a shawl. Morath sat beside Mary Day and translated, now and then, what was said in Hungarian.

They drank to Polanyi, wherever he is tonight, meaning heaven or hell. “Or maybe Palm Beach,” Herbert Mitten said. “I guess there’s nothing wrong in thinking that if you care to.”

The bill came to Morath at two in the morning, on a silver tray, with a grand bow from the patron. Voyschinkowsky, thwarted in his attempt to pay for the evening, insisted on taking Morath and Mary Day home in his chauffeur-driven Hispano-Suiza automobile.

We have to try, Bolthos had said it for both of them. Which meant, for Morath, one obvious but difficult strand, really the only one he knew, in what must have been a vast tangle of shadowy