by Alan Furst
The Agence Courtmain had a very bonne adresse indeed but, as an advertising agency, it had first of all to advertise its own success. Which it did, along with various lawyers, stock brokerages, and Lebanese bankers, by renting an absurdly expensive suite of offices in a building on the avenue Matignon. More than likely owned, Courtmain theorized—the title of the société anonyme gave no indication—“by an Auvergnat peasant with goatshit in his hat.”
Sitting across from Morath, Courtmain lowered his newspaper and glanced at his watch.
“On time?” Morath said.
Courtmain nodded. He was, like Morath, very well dressed. Emile Courtmain was not much over forty. He had white hair, thin lips, gray eyes, and a cold, distant personality found magnetic by virtually everybody. He smiled rarely, stared openly, said little. He was either brilliant or stupid, nobody knew, and it didn’t seem terribly important. What sort of life he may have had after seven in the evening was completely unknown—one of the copywriters claimed that after everybody left the office, Courtmain hung himself up in the closet and waited for daylight.
“We aren’t going to the plant, are we?” Morath said.
“No.”
Morath was grateful. The Soap King had taken them to his plant, a year earlier, just making sure they didn’t forget who they were, who he was, and what made the world go ’round. They didn’t forget. Huge, bubbling vats of animal fat, moldering piles of bones, kettles of lye boiling gently over a low flame. The last ride for most of the cart and carriage horses in northern Belgium. “Just give your behind a good wash with that!” Hooryckx cried out, emerging like an industrial devil from a cloud of yellow steam.
They arrived in Antwerp on time and climbed into a cab outside the station. Courtmain gave the driver complicated instructions—Hooryckx’s office was down a crooked street at the edge of the dockside neighborhood, a few rooms in a genteel but crumbling building. “The world tells me I’m a rich man,” Hooryckx would say. “Then it snatches everything I have.”
In the back of the cab, Courtmain rummaged in his briefcase and produced a bottle of toilet water called Zouave, a soldier with fierce mustaches stared imperiously from the label. This was also a Hooryckx product, though not nearly so popular as the soap. Courtmain unscrewed the cap, splashed some in his hand, and gave the bottle to Morath. They rubbed it on their faces and reeked like country boys in the city on Saturday night. “Ahh,” said Courtmain, as the heavy fragrance filled the air, “the finest peg-house in Istanbul.”
Hooryckx was delighted to see them. “The boys from Paris!” He had a vast belly and a hairstyle like a cartoon character that sticks his finger in a light socket. Courtmain took a colored drawing from his briefcase. Hooryckx, with a wink, told his secretary to go get his advertising manager. “My daughter’s husband,” he said. The man showed up a few minutes later, Courtmain laid the drawing on a table, and they all gathered around it.
In a royal-blue sky, two white swans flew above the legend Deux Cygnes . . . This was something new. In 1937, their magazine advertising had presented an attractive mother, wearing an apron, showing a bar of Deux Cygnes to her little girl.
“Well,” said Hooryckx. “What do the dots mean?”
“Two swans . . .” Courtmain said, letting his voice trail away. “No words can describe the delicacy, the loveliness of the moment.”
“Shouldn’t they be swimming?” Hooryckx said.
Courtmain reached into his briefcase and brought out the swimming version. His copy chief had warned him this would happen. Now the swans made ripples in a pond as they floated past a clump of reeds.
Hooryckx compressed his lips.
“I like them flying,” the son-in-law said. “More chic, no?”
“How about it?” Hooryckx said to Morath.
“It’s sold to women,” Morath said.
“So?”
“It’s what they feel when they use it.”
Hooryckx stared, back and forth, from one image to the other. “Of course,” he said, “swans sometimes fly.”
After a moment, Morath nodded. Of course.
Courtmain brought forth another version. Swans flying, this time in a sky turned aquamarine.
“Phoo,” Hooryckx said.
Courtmain whipped it away.
The son-in-law suggested a cloud, a subtle one, no more than a wash in the blue field. Courtmain thought it over. “Very expensive,” he said.
“But an excellent idea, Louis,” Hooryckx said. “I can see it.”
Hooryckx tapped his fingers on the desk. “It’s good when they fly, but I miss that curve in the neck.”
“We can try it,” Courtmain said.
Hooryckx stared for a few seconds. “No, better this way.”
After lunch, Courtmain went off to see a prospective client, and Morath headed for the central commercial district—to a shop called Homme du Monde, man about town, its window occupied by suave mannequins in tuxedos. Much too warm inside, where a clerk was on her knees with a mouthful of pins, fitting a customer for a pair of evening trousers.
“Madame Golsztahn?” Morath said.
“A moment, monsieur.”
A curtain at the rear of the shop was moved aside, and Madame Golsztahn appeared. “Yes?”
“I came up from Paris this morning.”
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Come in back.”
Behind the curtain, a man was pressing pants, working a foot pedal that produced a loud hiss and a puff of steam. Madame Golsztahn led Morath down a long rack of tuxedos and tailcoats to a battered desk, its cubbyholes packed with receipts. They had never met before, but Morath knew who she was. She’d been famous for love affairs, in her younger days in Budapest, the subject of poems in little journals, the cause of two or three scandals and a rumored suicide from the Elizabeth Bridge. He felt it, standing next to her. Like the current in a river. A ruined face and stark, brick-red hair above a dancer’s body in a tight black sweater and skirt. She gave him a tart smile, read him like a book, wouldn’t have minded, then swept the hair back off her forehead. There was a radio playing, Schumann maybe, violins, something exceptionally gooey, and, every few seconds, a loud hiss from the steam press. “So then,” she said, before anything actually happened.
“Should we go to a café?”
“Here would be best.”
They sat side by side at the desk, she lit a cigarette and held it between her lips, squinting as the smoke drifted into her eyes. She found one of the receipts, turned it over, and smoothed it flat with her hands. Morath could see a few letters and numbers, some circled. “Mnemonics,” she said. “Now all I have to do is remember how it works.”
“All right,” she said at last, “here is your uncle’s friend in Budapest, to be known as ‘a senior police official.’ He states that ‘as of 10 March, evidence points to intense activity among all sectors of the nyilas community.’ ” Neelosh—her voice was determinedly neutral. It meant the Arrow Cross, pure Hitlerite fascists; the E.M.E., which specialized in bomb attacks against Jewish women; the Kereszteny Kurzus, Chritian Course, which meant so much more than “Christian”; and various others, great and small.
“On the fifth of March,” she said, “a fire in a shed in the Eighth District, Csikago”—Chicago, as in factories and gangsters—“police inspectors were called when rifles and pistols were found to have been stored there.”
She coughed, covering her mouth with the back of her hand, and rested the cigarette among a line of brown scars on the edge of the desk. “An Arrow Cross member, by trade a cabinetmaker, detained for defacing public property, was found in possession of the home telephone number of the German economic attaché. A police informer in Szeged, murdered on the sixth of March. Eight young men, members of the Turul student association, observed carrying out a surveillance of the army barracks at Arad. A furniture-mover’s truck, parked in an alley by the south railroad station, was searched by police on information received from the estranged wife of the driver.
A Berthier heavy machine gun was found, with eighty-five belts of ammunition.”
“I’m going to have to make notes,” Morath said.
Golsztahn’s eyes met his. “You aren’t going anywhere, are you?” She paused. “East?”
Morath shook his head. “Just to Paris. Tonight.”
She handed him an unused rental receipt. “Use the back. The police official notes that a report of these events has been routed, in the customary way, to the office of Colonel Sombor in the Hungarian legation in Paris.”
“A minute,” Morath said. He was almost caught up. Sombor had something to do with security at the legation—the same name as the head of the secret police, taken from a town in the south of Hungary. This usually meant Hungarians of German, Saxon, ancestry.
When he looked up, she continued. “An Arrow Cross informant reports that several of his colleagues are preparing to send their families out of the city the first week in May. And . . .” She peered closely at the top of the receipt. “What?” she said, then, “Oh. Two known agents of the German intelligence service, the SD, had in their room at the Hotel Gellert photographs of the architectural blueprints of the Water District police station and the Palace of Justice. The police official states finally that there are further instances of this kind of activity, some three dozen, that point to a political action in the near future.”
It was quiet on the evening train to Paris. Courtmain worked, jotting notes on a tablet, and Morath read the newspaper. The leading stories continued to focus on Austria and the Anschluss. The British politician Churchill, a member of the Tory opposition, was quoted by a political columnist on the editorial page, from a speech given in parliament at the end of February: “Austria has now been laid in thrall, and we do not know whether Czechoslovakia will suffer a similar fate.”
Well, somebody will.
Morath touched the receipt in his pocket. Golsztahn had burned hers in a coffee cup, then poked the ashes apart with the end of a pencil.
Of all the cities, Otto Adler loved Paris the most. He had arrived in the winter of 1937, installed his life—a wife, four children, two cats, and an editorial office—in a big, drafty old house in Saint Germain-en-Laye, where, from a window in his study, he could look out over miles of Parisian rooftops. Paris—the best idea mankind ever had.
“Third time lucky!” was the way his wife put it. Otto Adler had grown up in Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, in the Baltic German community. After university in Berlin, he came home a Marxist, then spent the decade of his thirties becoming a Social Democrat, a journalist, and a pauper. “When you are that poor,” he’d say, “the only thing left for you is to start a little magazine.” So, Die Aussicht, The Outlook, was born. Not so popular, it turned out, in the tight, Volksdeutsch world of Königsberg. “This failed postcard painter from Linz will destroy German culture,” he said of Hitler in 1933. Two broken windows, for that, his wife cursed in the butcher shop, and, soon enough, a big, drafty old apartment in Vienna.
Otto Adler fitted in much better there. “Otto, darling, I think you were born to be Viennese,” his wife said. He had a round, hairless, rosy face, a beaming smile, he wished the world well—one of those bighearted people who can be benign and angry at once and laugh at himself in the bargain. Somehow, he kept publishing the magazine. “We should probably call it The Ox, it plods along in all weathers.” And in time, a little Viennese money—from progressive bankers, Jewish businessmen, union leaders—began to come his way. As Die Aussicht gained credibility, he managed to obtain an article by one of the gods of German literary culture, Karl Kraus, the savage, brilliant satirist whose disciples—his readers, his students—were known as Krausianer.
In 1937, Die Aussicht published a brief reportage by an Italian journalist, the wife of a diplomat, who’d been present at one of Hermann Goering’s infamous dinners at Schorfheide, his hunting lodge. The usual Nazi merriment, with the soup and the fish, but before the main course arrived Goering left the table and returned wearing a rawhide shirt, with a bearskin thrown over his shoulders—a warrior costume from the old Teutonic tribes. Not nearly, of course, enough. Goering was armed with a spear and led a pair of hairy bison, harnessed in chains, around and around the room while the guests roared. Still, not enough. The entertainment concluded with the mating of the bison. “A party to remember,” it said in Die Aussicht. Adler’s children were expelled from school, a swastika chalked on his door, the maid quit, the neighbors ceased to say “Gruss Gott.”
It was a big, drafty old house they found in Geneva. But nobody was very happy there. What the Volksdeutsch and the Austrians did with party operatives, the Swiss did with clerks. Nobody actually said anything about the magazine—he could, apparently, publish whatever he wanted in Democratic Switzerland, but life was a spiderweb of rules and regulations that controlled mailing permits, alien residence, and, it seemed to Adler, the very air they breathed.
It was a little quiet around the dinner table when Adler informed the family they had to move. “A necessary adventure,” he said, beaming away. Under the table, his wife put her hand on his knee. So, December of ’37, Paris. Saint Germain-en-Laye was a classic of the exile’s geography, it turned out, a time-honored refuge for princes unwelcome in many lands. There was a grand Promenade Anglais where one could walk for hours, just right for a bittersweet contemplation of the lost crown, castle, or homeland. Adler found a sympathetic printer, made contacts in the community of liberal German émigrés, and went back to work hammering the fascists and the Bolsheviks. Such was the destiny of the Social Democrat, and who was that man in the raincoat by the newspaper kiosk.
Meanwhile, Adler fell in love with the public gardens of Paris. “What sort of lunatic takes a train to go to the park?” The kind who filled his briefcase with books; Schnitzler, Weininger, Mann, maybe von Hoffmansthal, two pens, and a cheese sandwich, then sat in the Jardin du Luxembourg and watched the dappled light of the plane trees playing on the gravel path. A few centimes to the old dragon who kept watch on the chairs, and one could spend the afternoon in a painting.
At first he went in nice weather, later in light rain. It became his habit. As time went by, as the spring of 1938 worked its way toward whatever summer had in store, Otto Adler, fountain pen scratching out a new editorial or, for a moment, just snoozing, was almost always to be found in the park.
The note from the baroness Frei invited My dearest Nicholas to call at her house at five in the afternoon on the sixteenth of April. Morath took a taxi to the Sèvres-Babylone Métro stop and from there walked to the rue de Villon.
Buried deep in a maze of narrow lanes that crisscrossed the border between the Sixth and Seventh Arrondissements, it was, like paradise everywhere, damned hard to find. Taxi drivers thumbed through their city directories, then sped off to the rue François-Villon, named for the medieval robber poet, in a distant neighborhood where, on arrival, it was immediately clear to both driver and patron that this was not the right street at all.
The one true rue de Villon could be entered only through a vaulted alley—the impasse Villon—a tunnel of perpetual dusk that dared the courageous automobiliste to try his luck. It could sometimes be done, depending on the model and year of the machine, and was always a matter of centimeters, but it did not look like it could be done. The alley gave no indication of what lay beyond it, the casual passerby tended to do exactly that, while the truly self-confident tourist peered defiantly down the tunnel and then went away.
On the other side, however, light from heaven poured down on a row of seventeenth-century houses, protected by wrought-iron palings, that dead-ended at a garden wall: 3, rue de Villon, to 9, rue de Villon, in a sequence whose logic was known only to God and the postman. In the evening, the tiny street was lit by Victorian gas lamps, which made soft shadows of a vine that twisted its way along the top of the garden wall. The garden belonged to number three—a faint impression of the number could be found on a rusty metal door, the width of a carriage—whic
h was owned by the baroness Lillian Frei. She did not know her neighbors. They did not know her.
A maid answered the door and led Morath to the garden. Sitting at the garden table, the baroness put her cheek up to be kissed. “Dearest love,” she said. “I am so happy to see you.” Morath’s heart warmed, he smiled like a five-year-old and kissed her with pleasure.
The baroness Frei was possibly sixty. She was bent over in a lifelong crouch, and one side of her back humped far above her shoulder. She had shimmering blue eyes and soft, snow-white hair and a radiance like the sun. She was, at the moment, as always, surrounded by a pack of vizsla dogs—not one of which could Morath distinguish from another but which, as the baroness liked to tell her guests, belonged to a vast, capricious, bumptious family who lived out an unending romantic epic in the house and garden. Korto, bred to Fina, loved Malya, his daughter by the gallant and long-departed Moselda. Of course, for the integrity of the line, they could never “be together,” so, in heat, the exquisite Malya was sent to live in the kitchen whilst poor Korto lay about on the garden gravel with his chin slumped atop his forepaws or stood on his hind legs, peered myopically through the windows, and barked until the maid threw a rag at him.
Now they stormed around Morath’s legs and he bent to run his hands along the satin skin of their sides.
“Yes,” said the baroness, “here’s your friend Nicholas.”
The vizslas were fast, Morath got a wet kiss on the eye and never saw it coming.
“Korto!”
“No, no. I’m flattered.”
The dog smacked his forepaws against the ground.
“What, Korto, you want to hunt?”
Morath roughed him up a little and he mewed with pleasure.