by Alan Furst
Morath took off his shoe and went to work on the heel. He was very tired and sick of the world and had to force himself to be patient and careful. He prized up a corner of the heel and slid the negative in. It didn’t work, he could see the space easily enough and he could feel it when he walked.
Dr. Lapp shrugged. “Improvisation,” he said, letting his voice trail away into a sigh.
Morath finished packing, pulled the straps tight on his valise and buckled them.
“I don’t know who you’ll find to talk to, Herr Morath, but the more powerful the better. We’re opening as many lines of communication as we can, surely one of them will work.” From his voice, he didn’t believe it, sounded as though he were trying to persuade himself that two and two was five. “All we ask of the English is that they do nothing.” He looked up at Morath. “Is that asking too much?”
Morath glanced at his watch, lit a cigarette, and sat down to wait until it was time to leave for the train. It was quiet in the hotel: muffled voices in the hall, the sound of a maid’s vacuum cleaner.
“My poor country,” Dr. Lapp said. He hunted around in the inner pocket of his jacket, took out a pair of spectacles in a leather case, then a small metal box. “Perhaps you’d better have this.”
Morath opened it and found a gold swastika pin. He fastened it to his breast pocket and went to look at himself in the bathroom mirror.
“Use it when you reach the German border,” Dr. Lapp said, one hand on the doorknob. “But please do remember to take it off before you cross into France.”
“The two women,” Morath said. “Were they after me, in particular?”
Dr. Lapp shook his head slowly and looked sad. “God knows,” he said. “I don’t.”
17 August. Bromley-on-Ware, Sussex.
Morath stood at the end of a gravel driveway as a taxi rattled off down the lane. Francesca’s friend, Simon the lawyer, came smiling toward him, walking across the saintly lawn. He wore shorts and sandals, a shirt with the cuffs folded back, a jacket thrown over his shoulders, a pipe clenched in his teeth, and a newspaper under his arm. Behind him, a brick house with many chimneys, a blue sky, a white cloud.
Simon took his bag with one hand and his arm with the other and said, “So pleased you could come, Nicholas.”
As Morath followed him toward the house, Cara came out, wearing a thin summer dress that floated as she ran. “Oh you are terrible, Nicky,” she said, angry and forgiving in the same breath, holding him tight against her. Relieved, he thought, because she knew he had been up to something he couldn’t talk about, but most of all unwilling to sulk at someone’s country house. “You will have to make it up to me,” she said as they went up the steps.
On the terrace, women in straw hats, men with white hair, a whiskey and soda for Morath.
“How do you do, name’s Bromley.”
So then it is your village, and your castle, and your peasants. “Good afternoon, Mr. Bromley.”
“Heh, heh, that’s ‘Bramble’!”
“Mr. Bramble?”
“No, no. ‘Bram-well.’ Yes. Hmm.”
Cara’s bare behind was blue in the Sussex moonlight. “Not so loud,” she hissed.
“The bed squeaks-I can’t help it.”
“Mechant! We can’t make noise like that. Here, lie on your back.”
The bank of the river lay on the other side of a cow pasture. “Mind the cowpats,” Simon told him.
They sat on a bench by a huge willow, where the sun sparkled on the water as it left the shadow of the tree. “I have an old friend,” Morath said. “When he heard I was going to England for the August vacation, he asked me to take along some papers.”
“Oh?” Simon had thought the private conversation would be about Cara, women, that sort of thing. “Papers?”
“Confidential papers.”
“Oh.” Simon had a mop of brown hair that he pushed back off his forehead. “Are you a spy then, Nicholas?”
“No. Just someone who doesn’t like Hitler,” Morath said. “Doesn’t like Hitlers.” He told Simon about the Czechoslovakian mountain defense and the memorandum from General Beck. “My friend believes,” he explained, “that Hitler cannot be overthrown unless he fails. If your government holds firm, he will. One way or another.”
Simon took a minute to think it over. “It’s difficult, you see, because there are two sides to this. Like all politics, really. On one side, the side that doesn’t want to get involved, is Nevile Henderson, the ambassador to Germany. Very pro-German-pro-Nazi, it is said-and very anti-Czech. But Chamberlain does listen to him. Then, on the other side, there are people like Vansittart, the adviser to the foreign secretary, who’d be more in Churchill’s camp. So the question is, who do we talk to? For me, you see, Vansittart is the hero and Henderson the villain.” Un homme nefaste, Simon called him. A man who does harm.
“But then, if I find you a friend who can talk to Vansittart, eventually, aren’t you simply preaching to the choir?”
Morath thought Simon was in his late twenties but it sometimes amused him to be younger, to be terribly silly. Now, however, he seemed suddenly older, much older.
Simon stared down at the slow water. “So then,” he said. “What to do.”
Morath didn’t know. The serenity of the countryside-of the country itself-was like the airs of springtime, it made the Continent and its intrigues seem foolish and brutal and distant.
In the end, Simon got on the telephone and had a word with a friend of a friend.
Who stopped by for a drink that very evening. Left alone on the terrace with the family spaniel, they stumbled along in Morath’s hesitant English and the friend of a friend’s university French. Still, they managed. Morath explained the defenses and handed over the memo and passed along Dr. Lapp’s message as strongly as he could. He did somewhat better the following day, when friend of a friend-very good suit and military rank-brought along a smiling gnome who spoke Hungarian, Budapest Hungarian.
“We can always use a friend in Paris,” they said to him.
Morath declined with a smile.
They were never quite rude, after that. Inquisitive. How did he come to be involved with this? Was he simply an officer in the VK-VI, the Hungarian intelligence service? Had he met Germans? But it was none of their business and he didn’t tell them and was rescued, in the end, by Simon’s mother, who came out on the terrace and talked and laughed and flirted at them until they went away.
August 1938, the summer before the war. At night, the wireless crackled and the cicadas whirred. The Czechs mobilized, the British fleet mobilized, Benes offered Henlein and the Sudetenlanders everything either of them could think of-starting with complete autonomy and going on from there. But, not enough. In England, gas masks were issued and air-raid trenches dug in London parks. “But what will become of you, Nicholas?” Simon’s mother asked him at the lunch table.
He’d thought about that. More than he wanted to. He supposed he would be called back to duty, told to report to the regimental barracks, amid the chubby stockbrokers and balding lawyers, and ordered to fight alongside the Wehrmacht.
He discovered Cara, one night, wearing the Cartier bracelet, facedown on the bedspread, weeping into the pillow. “I shall tell my father,” she whispered, “that we must sell one of the estancias, because I am going to buy a villa in Lugano.”
At drinks the next day he was, attacked was the only word for it, by a neighbor in an army officer’s uniform, fierce, and crimson with anger. The man had a totally incomprehensible accent-his words disappeared in a thick black mustache-and Morath took a step back and had no idea what to do. It was Simon who saved him, whisking him away because he simply must meet the uncle from Perth. They were terribly, almost violently, kind to him at the house in Sussex. One rainy afternoon, when everyone but Morath and Cara played bridge, they dug deep in a chest and extracted a faded jigsaw puzzle, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada.
Speaking of which:
On the twen
ty-sixth, the radio reported Admiral Horthy’s visit to the Reich, to Kiel, ostensibly as the last commander in chief of the Austro-Hungarian navy, to christen a new German battleship, the Prinz Eugen, and to have, the BBC said, “private consultations with Chancellor Hitler.” Nobody in the room looked at Morath; all eyes found something else infinitely more interesting. What the BBC didn’t say, the Count Polanyi did, three weeks later when they met in Paris. The whole business was staged so that Hitler could tell Horthy this: “If you want to join in the meal, you must help with the cooking.”
It took two cars to get them all to the railroad station, the maids and the gardener stood by the door when they drove away. The thirty-first of August turned out to be, of course, a diabolically perfect day. The sky chalk-blue, the children’s-book clouds with chiseled edges, the little train from another time. Simon shook his hand and said, “We’ll hope for the best, right?” Morath nodded. Cara dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief and held on to Francesca as the train pulled in. And Simon’s mother took his hands in hers. She had cool gray eyes and gave him a good long look. “I’m so glad you could come,” she said. “And we do want you to come back, Nicholas. You’ll try, won’t you?”
He promised he would, and held her hands.
NIGHT TRAIN TO BUDAPEST
Paris that September was tense and brooding, on the edge of war, darker than Morath had ever known it. The retour, the return to daily life after the August vacation, was usually a sweet moment in Parisian life, but not that autumn. They came back to the office, the dinner party, the love affair, but Hitler was screaming at them from every newspaper stand and they had no taste for any of it. At Morath’s morning cafe the waiter said, “Let them come and drop their bombs, I’m tired of waiting.”
They couldn’t bear it, the idea of another war-they’d never really recovered from the last one. The man who came home from the trenches and made love to his wife on the day the war ended in 1918 now had a nineteen-year-old son, just the right age for the army. On the sixth of September, the morning papers wondered if the Sudeten issue was really worth a world war. The next day, a Times of London editorial supported partition.
In Germany, the annual Nazi party rally in Nuremberg began on the sixth and was to end on the twelfth, with torchlight parades, gymnastic maidens, and, the grand finale, a speech in the colossal Hall of the Fifty Thousand, where the Fuhrer promised to reveal what he had in mind for the Czechs.
On the tenth, Parisian radio reported Roosevelt’s statement that it was “one hundred percent wrong” to assume the United States would join Britain and France in a war over Czechoslovakia. On the eleventh, the proprietor of the stationery store on the rue Richelieu showed Morath his old Lebel revolver from the Great War. “Well, here is my answer to all this,” he said. Which answer was that? Suicide? Shooting a German tourist? Sniping at the Wehrmacht?
“He has us where he wants us,” Polanyi said, at lunch on the quai de la Tournelle. “Did you see the newsreel of Horthy’s arrival at Kiel station?” Morath hadn’t. “You get a glimpse of me, just over Count Csaky’s shoulder.” Then he described how Hungary had been offered a return of disputed territories if she would agree to march into Slovakia when Hitler attacked the Czechs.
“Horthy declined. On the basis that we barely have an army, and what we have barely has guns and bullets,” Polanyi said, then went on to repeat Hitler’s remark about the meal and the cooking.
They were eating blanquette de veau at a table on the terrace of a Norman restaurant. Polanyi waited while two young men hurried past. “So naturally,” he said, “some units are being recalled to service. But I made sure you weren’t included in that.” He ran a forkful of fried potatoes through a dish of mayonnaise, then paused before eating and said, “I trust I did the right thing.”
Morath didn’t bother to answer.
“Why waste your life in a barracks?” Polanyi said. “And besides, I need you with me.”
Eight-thirty in the morning on the fourteenth of September-Chamberlain had flown to Berchtesgaden to consult with Hitler-the phone rang in Morath’s apartment. It was Cara, in a voice he’d never heard her use. “I hope you will come over and say good-bye to me,” she said.
He started to say “What-” but she hung up on him.
Twenty minutes later he was there. The door was open, he walked in. Two men in blue smocks were packing Cara’s clothing in the drawers of a large steamer trunk, its wardrobe side already crammed with dresses on little hangers. A third man, bigger than the others, stood and watched them, his arms folded across his chest. A chauffeur or a bodyguard, Morath thought, with a heavy face and a collarless jacket. When Morath came into the room he took a half step toward him and let his arms hang by his sides.
Cara was sitting on the edge of the bed, the Picasso nude in its gold frame held on her knees. “Monsieur Morath,” she said, her voice dull and flat, “allow me to present my father, Senor Dionello.”
A short man, sitting in the bedroom chair, got to his feet. He had a black-and-white mustache and wore a double-breasted suit with black and white stripes and a black Borsalino-style hat. He said “Sir” in Spanish, tipped his hat, and shook hands. It was clear to Morath that he was not pleased to meet his daughter’s forty-four-year-old lover, Hungarian lover, Parisian lover, but he would agree not to make a scene if Morath didn’t.
Morath sought Cara’s eyes-What do you want me to do? Family was family, but he was not going to allow her to be abducted against her will.
She shook her head and closed her eyes. It was subtle, a small, fragile gesture of surrender, but she’d told him what he needed to know.
His heart sank, he’d lost her.
Senor Dionello spoke to her in rapid Spanish, his voice not unkind.
“It’s the war, Nicky,” Cara said. “My father expresses his regrets, but my mother and grandmother are sick with worry, he says, that I will be, hurt.”
Senor Dionello smiled ruefully at Morath as Cara spoke, in his expression a plea for understanding, a plea that he not be forced to use power or money to get his way.
“My father is staying at the Meurice, I am to join him there for a few days, until the boat leaves.”
Morath nodded to Senor Dionello, forcing himself to be as gracious as he could.
Senor Dionello spoke again and smiled at Morath. “My father would be pleased if you would join us for dinner at the hotel.” She hesitated, then said, “It’s a lot for him, Nicky.”
Morath declined. Cara translated, then said, “Un momentito, por favor.”
As they went out into the hall, Senor Dionello made a small gesture and the bodyguard stayed where he was.
In the hall, Cara clenched his shirt in her fists and sobbed, silently, with her face pressed against him. Then she pushed him away, wiped the tears off with her hand, took two steps toward the door, looked at him one last time, and went back into the apartment.
On the twenty-first of September, Chamberlain tried again. Flew to Bad Godesberg and offered Hitler what he said he wanted. The Sudetenland, with French and British approval, would become a German possession. But the Fuhrer didn’t quite work the way Chamberlain thought he did. Once he got what he wanted, he wanted more. Now it was military occupation, by October 1.
Or else, war.
So, on the twenty-ninth, Chamberlain flew back to Germany, this time to Munich, and agreed to the occupation. The Czechoslovakian army abandoned its forts and moved back from the mountains.
18 October.
Morath stared out the train window, a tiny village slid away down the track. Was it called Szentovar? Maybe. Or that was another place, a hundred kilometers and a hundred years away from Budapest, where the peasants still rubbed garlic on barn doors to keep the vampires from milking the cows at night.
On the road, a Gypsy wagon. The driver looked up just as Morath’s window went by. Prosperously fat, with three chins and clever eyes, perhaps a primas, a clan leader. He held the reins loosely in his hands and turne
d and said something to the women in the wagon behind him. Morath never saw their faces, simply the red and yellow colors of their clothing as the train clattered past.
October was a dead month, he thought. The brutal politics played out in the newspapers. The French relaxed, congratulated themselves on having done the right thing, the smart thing, for once in their dreamy lives. Morath smoked too much and stared out the window when he woke up in the morning.
He was surprised at his broken heart. He had always told himself that the love affair with Cara was a passing thing that stayed. But now she was gone, he missed what he’d taken for granted, and he ached for what she’d lost. “When I lived in Paris,” she would say to her friends in Buenos Aires.
Count Polanyi didn’t care for this mood and let Morath know it. “We’ve all been thrown off the horse,” he said. “The thing to do is get back in the saddle.” When that didn’t work, he tried harder. “This is no time to feel sorry for yourself. Need something to do? Go back to Budapest and save your mother’s life.”
Keleti Palyuadvar. The east railroad station where, this being Hungary, all important trains arrived from the west. There were cabs in the street but Morath decided to walk-in the late afternoon of an autumn day, what else. It is your nose that tells you you’re home, he thought. Burnt coffee and coal dust, Turkish tobacco and rotten fruit, lilac water from the barbershops, drains and damp stone, grilled chicken, God only knew what it really was. A deep breath, another-Morath inhaled his childhood, his country, the exile returned.
He walked for a long time, taking the cobbled alleys, heading more or less across the city, toward a villa in the hills of the Third District, on the Buda side of the Danube. He dawdled, stopped to look in shop windows. As always, this time of day, a melancholy, speculative idleness settled over the city and Morath slowed down to meet its rhythm. At five-thirty, when the sun hit the windows of a tenement on Kazinczy Avenue and turned them flaming gold, Morath took the number-seven tram across the Chain Bridge and went home.