Kingdom of Shadows

“Not just your ladies. What is that I see? Did you drop something, over there?”

“Did I? Oh dear.” Hands on hips, she walked like a model on the runway, a shoulder thrust forward with every step, chin high, mouth set in a stylish pout. “Two dozen? Sixty percent off?”

“You read my mind.”

At the wall, she bent over and held the pose. “I don’t see anything.”

Szubl rose from his chair, came up behind her and began to unsnap the tiny buttons. When he was done, she ran to the bed with baby steps and lay on her stomach with her chin propped on her hands.

Szubl began to undo his tie.

“Wolfi,” she said softly. “Not a day goes by I don’t think about you.”

Szubl took off his underpants and twirled them around his finger.

The apartment was above her shop, also Frau Trudi, on the Prinzstrasse, next to a bakery, and the smell of cookies in the oven drifted up through the open window. A warmish day in Vienna, the beastly Fohn not blowing for a change, Frau Trudi’s canary twittering in its cage, everything peaceful and at rest. By now it was twilight, and they could hear the bell on the door of the shop below them as the customers went in and out.

Frau Trudi, damp and pink after lovemaking, nestled against him. “You like it here, Wolfi? With me?”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“You could stay for a while, if you liked.”

Wolfi sighed. If only he could. “I wonder,” he said, “if you know anybody who needs to make a little money. Maybe one of your ladies has a husband who’s out of work.”

“What would he have to do?”

“Not much. Lend his passport to a friend of mine for a week or so.”

She propped herself on her elbow and looked down at him. “Wolfi, are you in trouble?”

“Not me. The friend pays five hundred American dollars for the loan. So I thought, well, maybe Trudi knows somebody.”

He watched her. Fancied he could hear the ring of a cash-register drawer as she converted the dollars into schilling. “Maybe,” she said. “A woman I know, her husband could use it.”

“How old?”

“The husband?” She shrugged. “Forty-five, maybe. Always problems-she comes to me for a loan, sometimes.”

“Is it possible tonight?”

“I suppose.”

“I’ll give you the money now, Liebchen, and I’ll stop by tomorrow night for the passport.”

28 June. A fine day with bright sunshine, but not a ray of it reached the hunting lodge. Three stories, thirty rooms, a grand hall, all sunk in dark, musty gloom. Morath and Balki had hired a car in Bratislava and driven up into the wooded hills north of the Danube. They were in historical Slovakia-Hungarian territory since 1938-and only a few miles from the Austrian border.

Balki looked around him in a kind of dispirited awe-trophy heads on every wall, their glass eyes glittering in the forest light. Tentatively, he settled himself on the leather cushion of a huge wooden chair with hunting scenes carved into the high back.

“Where giants sat,” he said.

“That’s the idea.”

The old empire lived on, Morath thought. One of the baroness’s pet aristocrats had agreed to loan him the hunting lodge. “So very private,” he’d said with a wink. It was that. In the Little Carpathians, thick with pines, by a rushing brook that wound past the window and a picturesque waterfall that foamed white over a dark outcropping.

Balki wandered about, gazing up at the terrible paintings. Sicilian maidens caught as they filled amphorae from little streams, Gypsy girls with tambourines, a dyspeptic Napoleon with his hand on a cannon. At the far end of the room, between the stuffed heads of a bear and a tusky wild boar, he stood before a gun cabinet and tapped his fingers on the oiled stock of a rifle. “We’re not going to play with these, are we?”

“We are not.”

“No cowboys and Indians?”

Emphatically, Morath shook his head.

There was even a telephone. Of a sort-easy to imagine Archduke Franz Ferdinand calling his taxidermist: a wooden box on the kitchen wall, with the earpiece on a cord and a black horn in the center into which one could speak. Or shout, more likely. Morath lifted the earpiece from the cradle, heard static, put it back, looked at his watch.

Balki took off his workman’s cap and hung it on an antler. “I’ll come along if you like, Morath.”

That was pure bravery-a Russian going into Austria. “Guard the castle,” Morath said. “Enough that you took vacation days for this, you don’t have to get arrested in the bargain.”

Once again, Morath looked at his watch. “Well, let’s try it,” he said. He lit a cigarette, put the telephone receiver to his ear and tapped the cradle. From the static, an operator speaking Hungarian.

“I’d like to book a call to Austria,” Morath said.

“I can get through right away, sir.”

“In Vienna, 4025.”

Morath heard the phone, a two-ring signal. Then: “Herr Kreml’s office.”

“Is Herr Kreml in?”

“May I say who’s calling?”

“Mr. Stevenson.”

“Hold the line, please.”

Kreml was on right away. A smooth, confident, oily voice. Saying that it was good of him to call. Morath asked after Kolovitzky’s health.

“In excellent spirits!” Well, perhaps a little, how to say, oppressed, what with his various tax difficulties, but that could soon be put right.

“I’m in contact with Madame Kolovitzky, here in Paris,” Morath said. “If the paperwork can be resolved, a bank draft will be sent immediately.”

Kreml went on a little, lawyer’s talk, then mentioned a figure. “In terms of your American currency, Herr Stevenson, I think it would be in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars.”

“The Kolovitzkys are prepared to meet that obligation, Herr Kreml.”

“I’m so pleased,” Kreml said. “And then, in a month or so, once the draft has been processed by our banks, Herr Kolovitzky will be able to leave Austria with a clear conscience.”

“A month, Herr Kreml?”

“Oh, at least that, the way things are here.” The only way to expedite matters, Kreml said, would be to use a rather obscure provision of the tax code, for payments in cash. “That would clear things up immediately, you see.”

Morath saw. “Perhaps the best way,” he said.

Well, that was up to the Kolovitzkys, wasn’t it. “Herr Stevenson, I do want to compliment you on your excellent German. For an American …”

“Actually, Herr Kreml, I was born in Budapest, as Istvanagy. So, after I emigrated to California, I changed it to Stevenson.”

Ah! Of course!

“I will speak with Madame Kolovitzky, Herr Kreml, but please be assured that a cash payment will reach you within the week.”

Kreml was very pleased to hear that. They chattered on for a time. The weather, California, Vienna, then started to say good-bye.

“Oh yes,” Morath said, “there is one more thing. I would very much like to have a word with Herr Kolovitzky.”

“Naturally. Do you have the number of the Hotel Schoenhof?”