by Alan Furst
“Take off your tie,” Morath said.
Pavlo hesitated, then, reluctantly, pulled the knot apart.
“I’m going into the water, you follow. You hold on to one end of the tie, I’ll swim across and pull you with me. You do the best you can—kick your feet, paddle with your free arm. We’ll manage.”
Pavlo nodded.
Morath looked down at the water, ten feet below him, dark and swirling. The far shore seemed a long distance away, but at least the bank was low.
“Wait a minute,” Pavlo said.
“Yes?”
But there was nothing to say, he just didn’t want to go into the water.
“We’ll be fine,” Morath said. He decided to try for the next pole, something he could hang on to while he coaxed Pavlo to jump in after him. He pulled himself along, felt the planks beneath him quiver, then shift. He swore, heard a beam snap, was turned on his side and dropped. He fought the air, then landed with a shock that knocked him senseless. It wasn’t the icy jolt of the water, he was waiting for that. It was the rock. Smooth and dark, about two feet below the surface. Morath found himself on his hands and knees, no pain yet but he could feel it coming, the river churning around him. Hidden causeway. The oldest trick in the world.
Pavlo came crawling toward him, tie held in his hand, passport clenched in his teeth, steel spectacles askew, and laughing.
They walked to Zahony. Following first the river, then a cart track through the woods that turned into a road. It took all morning but they didn’t care. Pavlo was pleased not to be drowned, and his money wasn’t all that wet—he peeled the bills apart, Austrian, Czech, French, blew gently on the various kings and saints, then put it away in his briefcase.
Morath had hurt his wrist and knee, but not as badly as he’d feared, and had a bruise by his left eye. A plank, most likely, he never felt it happen. In time, the sun came out and light sparkled on the river. They passed a woodcutter, a tramp, and two boys fishing for the small sturgeon that ran in the Tisza. Morath spoke to the boys in Hungarian: “Any luck?” A little, yes, not too bad. They seemed not very surprised when two men in muddy clothes walked out of the forest. That’s what came from living on a frontier, Morath thought.
They found a little restaurant in Zahony, ate cabbage stuffed with sausage and a plate of fried eggs, and got on a train that afternoon. Pavlo fell asleep, Morath stared out the window at the Hungarian plain.
Well, he’d kept his word. Promised Polanyi he would bring this, this whatever-he-was to Paris. Pavlo. Certainly an alias—nom de guerre, code name, impersonation. Something. He claimed he was a Croat and that, Morath thought, just might be true. Perhaps a Croatian Ustachi. Which meant terrorist in some neighborhoods and patriot in others.
Croatia, a province of Hungary for centuries and her access to the sea—which was how Miklos Horthy came to be Admiral Horthy—had stewed up quite a bit of political history since becoming part of a manufactured kingdom, Yugoslavia, in 1918. The founder of the Ustachi, Ante Pavelic, had found celebrity by turning to a political opponent in the Croatian Chamber of Deputies and shooting him in the heart. Six months later, Pavelic returned from hiding, walked into the lobby of the chamber carrying a shotgun, and killed two more.
Under Mussolini’s protection, Pavelic moved to a villa in Turin, where he kept a guiding hand on the political philosophy of his organization: over forty train wrecks in ten years, numberless public buildings bombed, hand grenades thrown into soldiers’ cafés, and five thousand Croatian and Serbian officials murdered. The money came from Mussolini, the assassins from IMRO, Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, with headquarters in Bulgaria. It had been IMRO operatives who assassinated King Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1934, in Marseilles. They had been trained in camps in Hungary which, in service of an alliance with Italy, also provided military instructors and false papers. Papers issued, quite often, in the name of Edouard Benes, the hated president of Czechoslovakia. A certain sense of humor at work there, Morath thought.
“Balkan, Balkan,” they said in France of a pimp slapping a whore or three kids beating up a fourth—anything barbarous or brutal. In the seat across from Morath, Pavlo slumbered away, arms crossed protectively over his briefcase.
The passport formalities at the Austrian border were, mercifully, not too drawn out. For Andreas Panea, the Roumanian, that particular masked rudeness of central Europe—you practically had to be Austrian to know you’d been insulted. For everybody else, it took a day or two, and by then you’d left the country.
A long time on the train, Morath thought, anxious to be back in the life he’d made in Paris. Hungarian plain, Austrian valley, German forest, and, at last, French fields, and the sun came out in Morath’s heart. By evening, the train chugged through the Ile-de-France, wheatfields and not much else, then the conductor—who was all French train conductors, broad and stocky with a black mustache—announced the final stop, just the edge of a song in his voice. Pavlo grew attentive, peering out the window as the train slowed for the villages outside the city.
“You’ve been to Paris?”
“No.”
On the tenth of May 1938, the night train from Budapest pulled into the Gare du Nord a little after 9:20 P.M. It was, on the whole, a quiet evening in Europe, cloudy and warm for the season, rain expected toward dawn. Nicholas Morath, traveling on a Hungarian diplomatic passport, stepped slowly from the first-class car and headed for the taxi rank outside the station. Just as he left the platform he turned, as though he was about to say something to a companion, but, on looking back, he discovered that whoever he’d been with had disappeared into the crowd.
VON SCHLEBEN’S WHORE
THE BAR OF THE BALALAIKA, A LITTLE AFTER THREE, THE DUSTY, TIRED air of a nightclub on a spring afternoon. On the stage were two women and a man, dancers, in tight black clothing, harassed by a tiny Russian wearing a pince-nez, hands on hips, stricken with all the hopelessness in the world. He closed his eyes and pressed his lips together, a man who’d been right about everything since birth. “To leap like a Gypsy,” he explained, “is to leap like a Gypsy.” Silence. All stared. He showed them what he meant, shouting “Hah!” and throwing his arms into the air. He thrust his face toward them. “You, love, life!”
Boris Balki was leaning on his elbows, the stub of a blunt pencil stuck behind his ear, a half-completed crossword puzzle in a French newspaper spread out on the bar. He looked up at Morath and said, “Ça va?”
Morath sat on a stool. “Not too bad.”
“What can I get for you?”
“A beer.”
“Pelforth all right?”
Morath said it was. “Have one with me?”
Balki’s eyebrow raised a fraction as he got the bottles from beneath the counter. He opened one and poured the beer into a tilted glass.
Morath drank. Balki filled his own glass, looked down at his puzzle, flipped the page, took a look at the headlines. “Why I keep buying this rag I don’t know.”
Morath read the name upside down. It was one of the friskier Parisian weeklies: sexy gossip, risqué cartoons, photos of lurid chorus girls, pages of racing news from Auteuil and Longchamps. His name had once, to his shame and horror, appeared in it. Just before he met Cara he’d been going around with a second-rank movie star, and they’d called him “the Hungarian playboy Nicky Morath.” There’d been neither a duel nor a lawsuit but he’d considered both.
Balki laughed. “Where do they get this stuff? ‘There are currently twenty-seven Hitlers locked up in Berlin insane asylums.’ ”
“And one to go.”
Balki flipped the page, took a sip of his beer, read for a few moments. “Tell me, you’re Hungarian, right?”
“Yes.”
“So, it says here, now you have a law against the Jews.”
The last week in May, the Hungarian parliament had passed a law restricting Jewish employment in private companies to twenty percent of the workforce.
“Shameful,” Mora
th said. “But the government had to do something, something symbolic, or the Hungarian Nazis would have staged a coup d’état.”
Balki read further. “Who is Count Bethlen?”
“A conservative. Against the radical right.” Morath didn’t mention Bethlen’s well-known definition of the anti-Semite as “one who detests the Jews more than necessary.”
“His party fought the law,” Balki said. “Alongside the liberal conservatives and the Social Democrats. ‘The Shadow Front,’ they call it here.”
“The law is a token,” Morath said. “Nothing more. Horthy brought in a new prime minister, Imredy, to get a law passed and quiet the lunatics, otherwise—”
From the stage, a record of Gypsy violins. One of the woman dancers, a ginger blonde, raised her head to a haughty angle, held a hand high, and snapped her fingers. “Yes,” the tiny Russian cried out. “That’s good, Rivka, that’s Tzigane!” He made his voice husky and dramatic and said, “What man will dare to take me.” Morath, watching the dancer, could see how hard she was trying.
“And the Jews?” Balki said, raising his voice above the music. “What do they think?”
“They don’t like it. But they see what’s going on in Europe, and they can look at a map. Somehow the country has to find a way to survive.”
Disgusted, Balki flipped back to the crossword and took the pencil from behind his ear. “Politics,” he said. Then, “a wild berry?”
Morath thought it over. “Maybe fraise des bois?”
Balki counted the spaces. “Too long,” he said.
Morath shrugged.
“And you? What do you think?” Balki said. He was back to the new law.
“Of course I’m against it. But one thing we all know is that if the Arrow Cross ever takes power, then it will be like Germany. There will be another White Terror, like 1919. They’ll hang the liberals, the traditional right, and the Jews. Believe me, it will be like Vienna, only worse.” He paused a moment. “Are you Jewish, Boris?”
“I sometimes wonder,” Balki said.
It wasn’t an answer Morath expected.
“I grew up in an orphanage, in Odessa. They found me with the name ‘Boris’ pinned to a blanket. ‘Balki’ means ditch—that’s the name they gave me. Of course, Odessa, almost everybody’s something. Maybe a Jew or a Greek or a Tartar. The Ukrainians think it’s in the Ukraine, but people in Odessa know better.”
Morath smiled, the city was famously eccentric. In 1920, when French, Greek, and Ukrainian troops occupied Odessa during the civil war, the borders of the zones of occupation were marked by lines of kitchen chairs.
“I basically grew up in the gangs,” Balki said. “I was a Zakovitsa. Age eleven, a member of the Zakovits gang. We controlled the chicken markets in the Moldavanka. That was mostly a Jewish gang. We all had knives, and we did what we had to do. But, for the first time in my life, I had enough to eat.”
“And then?”
“Well, eventually the Cheka showed up. Then they were the only gang in town. I tried going straight, but, you know how it is. Zakovits saved my life. Got me out of bed one night, took me down to the dock, and put me on a Black Sea freighter.” He sighed. “I miss it sometimes, bad as it was.”
They drank their beer, Balki working on the puzzle, Morath watching the dance rehearsal.
“It’s a hard world,” Morath said. “Take, for instance, the case of a friend of mine.”
Balki looked up. “Always in difficulties, your friends.”
“Well, that’s true. But you have to try and help them out, if you can.”
Balki waited.
“This one friend of mine, he has to do business with the Germans.”
“Forget it.”
“If you knew the whole story, you’d be sympathetic, believe me.” He paused, but Balki was silent. “You lost your country, Boris. You know what that feels like. We’re trying not to lose ours. So it’s what you just said, we’re doing what we have to do. I’m not going to be a conard and offer you money, but there is money in this, for somebody. I can’t believe you won’t put them in the way of it. At least, find out what the offer is.”
Balki softened. Everybody he knew needed money. There were women, out in Boulogne where the Russian émigrés lived, going blind from doing contract embroidery for the fashion houses. He gestured with his hands, helpless. Je m’en fous—I’m fucked no matter what happens.
“Old story. German officer in Paris, needs girlfriend.”
Balki was offended. “Someone told you I was a pimp?”
Morath shook his head. It’s not like that.
“Tell me,” Balki said. “Who are you?” He meant, what are you?
“Nicholas Morath. I’m in the advertising business. You can look me up in the telephone book.”
Balki finished his beer. “Oh, all right.” He gave in, more to some fate he thought he had than to Morath. “What’s the rest of it.”
“Pretty much as I said.”
“Monsieur Morath—Nicholas, if you don’t mind—this is Paris. If you want to fuck a camel, all it takes is a small bribe to the zookeeper. Whatever you want to do, any hole you can think of and some you can’t, it’s up in Pigalle, out in Clichy. For money, anything.”
“Yes, I know. But, remember what happened to Blomberg and Fritsch”—two generals Hitler had gotten rid of, one accused of a homosexual affair, the other married to a woman rumored to have been a prostitute. “This officer can’t be seen to have a mistress. Boris, I don’t know the man, but my friend tells me he has a jealous wife. They both come from stodgy old Catholic families in Bavaria. He can be ruined. Still, here he is in Paris, it’s everywhere, it’s all around him, in every café, on every street. So he’s desperate to arrange something, a liaison. But it must be discreet. For the woman, for the woman who, tells absolutely nobody and understands what’s at stake without being told too much and makes him happy in the bargain, there’s a monthly arrangement. Five thousand francs a month. And, if everybody’s satisfied, more over time.”
That was a lot of money. A schoolteacher earned twenty-five hundred francs a month. Balki’s face changed, Morath saw it. No more Boris the bartender. Balki the Zakovitsa.
“I don’t handle the money.”
“No.”
“Then maybe,” Balki said. “Let me think it over.”
Juan-les-Pins, 11 June.
Her breasts, pale in the moonlight.
Late at night, Cara and her friend Francesca, holding hands, laughing, rising naked from the sea, shining with water. Morath sat on the sand, his pants rolled to midcalf, feet bare. Next to him, Simon something, a British lawyer, said, “My God,” awed at the Lord’s work running up the beach toward them.
They came down here every year, around this time, before the people showed up. To what they called “Juan.” Where they lived by the sea in a tall, apricot-colored house with green shutters. In the little village where you could buy a Saint-Pierre from the fishermen when the boats returned at midday.
Cara’s crowd. Montrouchet from the Théâtre des Catacombes, accompanied by Sloth. A handsome woman, ingeniously desirable. Montrouchet called her by her proper name, but to Morath she was Sloth and always would be. They stayed at the Pension Helga, up in the pine forest above the village. Francesca was from Buenos Aires, from the Italian community in Argentina, the same as Cara, and lived in London. Then there was Mona, known as Moni, a Canadian sculptor with an apartment in Paris, and the woman she lived with, Marlene, who made jewelry. Shublin, a Polish Jew who painted fire, Ilsa, who wrote small novels, and Bernhard, who wrote poems about Spain. And others, a shifting crowd, friends of friends or mysterious strangers, who rented little cabins in the pines or took cheap rooms at the Hôtel de la Mer or slept under the stars.
Morath loved the Cara of Juan-les-Pins, where the warm air heated her excessively. “We will be up very late tonight,” she would say, “so we will have to rest this afternoon.” A wash in the sulphurous, tepid water that trickled into
the rust-stained tub, then sweaty, inspired love on the coarse sheet. Half asleep, they lay beneath the open window, breathing the pine resin on the afternoon wind. At dusk, the cicadas started, and went on until dawn. Sometimes they would take a taxi up to the restaurant on the moyenne corniche above Villefranche, where they brought you bowls of garlicky tapenade and pancakes made of chickpea flour and then, finding you at peace with the world and unable to eat another bite, dinner.
Too proud and Magyar for beach sandals, Morath ran to the sea at noon, burning his feet on the hot pebbles, then treading water and staring out at the flat horizon. He would stay there a long time, numb as a stone, as happy as he ever got, while Cara and Francesca and their friends stretched out on their towels and glistened with coconut oil and talked.
“Half past eight in Juan-les-Pins, half past nine in Prague.” You heard that at the Bar Basque, where people went in the late afternoon to drink white rum. So the shadow was there, darker on some days, lighter on others, and if you didn’t care to take measurements for yourself, the newspapers would do it for you. Going to the little store for a Nice Matin and a Figaro, Morath joined the other addicts, then went to a café. The sun was fierce by nine in the morning, the shade of the café umbrella cool and secret. “According to Herr Hitler,” he read, “ ‘The Czechs are like bicycle racers—they bow from the waist but down below they never stop kicking.’ ” In June, that was the new, the fashionable, place for the war to start, Czechoslovakia. The Volksdeutsch of the old Austrian provinces, Bohemia and Moravia—the Sudetenland—demanded unification with the Reich. And the incidents, the fires, the assassinations, the marches, were well under way.
Morath turned the page.
Spain was almost finished now—you had to go to page three. The Falange would win, it was only a matter of time. Off the coast, British freighters, supplying Republican ports, were being sunk by Italian fighter planes flying from bases in Majorca. Le Figaro had reproduced a British editorial cartoon: Colonel Blimp says, “Gad sir, it is time we told Franco that if he sinks another 100 British ships, we shall retire from the Mediterranean altogether.”