by Alan Furst
“She just happened to fly past, naked on a wire. Don’t make assumptions.”
Szubl raised his glass. “To the Free Hungary Committee.”
“May it never exist.”
Morath liked Polish vodka, potato vodka. It had a ghost of a taste he could never quite understand. “So, how did you do?”
“Not bad. From the Salon Kitty, on Szinyei Street, two hundred and fifty thousand pengo. Most of it from Madame Kitty, but she wanted us to know that three of the girls contributed. Then, from the nephew of the late, lamented minister of finance, another one hundred and fifty.”
“That’s all? His uncle would steal the wool from a sheep.”
“Too late, Nicholas. The casino got most of it-he’s a candidate for the boat.”
The citizens of Budapest were partial to suicide, so the municipal authority maintained a boat tied up below the Ferenc Josef Bridge. A riverman waited in the bow with a long pole, ready to haul in the night’s jumpers before they drowned.
“What about you?” Szubl said.
“Four hundred thousand from the Gersoviczy brothers. I go out to Kolozsvar tomorrow.”
“Shooting animals?”
“Christ, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I’m to see Voyschinkowsky.”
” ‘The Lion of the Bourse.’ He lives in Paris, what’s he doing here?”
“Nostalgia.”
“Waiter!”
“Sir?”
“Two more, please.”
A big redhead came gliding by. She blew a kiss, put her hands beneath her breasts and wobbled them, then raised an eyebrow.
“Let me buy her for you, Wolfi. All night, my treat.”
They drank their vodkas, ordered doubles. The dance floor reappeared. The leader of the orchestra had shiny black hair and a little mustache and smiled like a saint as he waved his baton.
“When you begin-n-n-n, the beguine.” Szubl took a deep breath and sighed. “You know,” he said, “what I really like is to look at naked women.”
“You do?”
“No, Nicholas, don’t make fun of me, I’m serious. I mean, I really don’t like anything else. If I could have begun this at fourteen, as my life’s work, as the only thing I did, day and night, there never would have been a reason for me to disturb the world in any other way.
“But, of course, they wouldn’t let me do that. So, now I crowd into trains, make telephones ring, throw orange peels into trash cans, make women buy girdles, ask for change, it doesn’t stop. And, worst of all, on a lovely day, when you’re happy and calm you go out in the street-and there I am! Really, there’s no end to it. And it won’t stop until I take up the space in the graveyard you wanted for your mother.”
The orchestra played the “Tango du Chat.” Morath remembered the song from the bar on the beach in Juan-les-Pins. “Tell you what,” he said to Szubl. “We’ll go over to Szinyei Street, to Kitty’s. Order a parade around the parlor, every girl in the house. Or, a game of tag. No, wait, hide-and-seek!”
“Nicholas. You know, you’re a romantic.”
Later, Morath went to the WC, met an old friend, gossiped for a few minutes. When he came back, the redhead was sitting on Szubl’s lap, playing with his tie and laughing. Wolfi’s voice floated down from the platform. “Good night, Nicholas. Good night.”
At Kolozsvar railroad station, a bright, cold morning.
There were two other Hungarians who left the train with him. Hunters, with shotguns under their arms. The conductor on the platform wished him good morning, in Hungarian, as he got off the train. And the two women mopping the floor in the station waiting room bantered in Hungarian and, in fact, laughed in Hungarian. A pleasant Magyar world-it just happened to be in Roumania. Once Kolozsvar, now Cluj. Nem, nem, soha.
A journey to the estate of Prince Hrubal turned out to be infernally complicated to arrange. It had required, in the end, several medieval phone calls, three telegrams-one of which went, inexplicably, to Wales, a verbal message taken to the castle by a gamekeeper’s daughter, and a personal intervention by the village mayor. But, in the end, it worked.
In the street outside the station, Prince Hrubal’s head groom was waiting for him, mounted on a bay gelding and holding the reins of a dock-tailed chocolate mare. This was, Morath knew, much the best way. You could try the road by automobile, but you spent more time digging than driving, and the trip by horse and carriage would hammer your teeth flat. That left walking and riding, and riding was faster.
He swung up into the saddle and tucked his briefcase under his arm. He’d made sure, in Budapest, to wear boots for the journey.
“Your excellency, I kiss your hands,” said the steward.
“Good morning to you,” Morath said, and they were off.
The good road in Cluj led to the bad road outside Cluj, then onto a road paved long ago, by some nameless dreamer/bureaucrat, and soon forgotten. This was northern Transylvania, mountainous and lost, where for generations Hungarian nobles ruled the lives of Roumanian serfs. There were, now and then, savage jacqueries, peasant risings, and the looting and burning would go on until the army arrived, coils of rope hung on their saddles. The trees were already there. Now, for the moment at least, it was quiet. Very quiet. Out in the countryside, a ruined castle broke the line of a mountain crest, then there was only forest, sometimes a field.
It took Morath back to the war. They’d been no different than any of the armies who came down these roads on mornings in the fall. He remembered wisps of autumn mist caught on the barbed wire, the sound of wind in the stubble of the rye fields, the creak of harness, crows wheeling in the sky and laughing at them. Sometimes they saw geese flying south; sometimes, when it rained at dawn, they only heard them. A thousand horses’ hooves rang on the paved roads-their coming was no secret, and the riflemen waited for them. Once there was a sergeant, a Croat, adjusting a stirrup in the shade of an oak tree. The air cracked, an officer shouted. The sergeant put a hand over his eye, like a man reading an eye chart. The horse reared, galloped down the road a little way, and began to graze.
Prince Hrubal owned forests and mountains.
A servant answered Morath’s knock and led him to the great hall-stag heads on the wall and tennis racquets in the corner. The prince showed up a moment later. “Welcome to my house,” he said. He had merciless eyes; black, depthless, and cruel, a shaven head, a drooping Turkish mustache, the nickname “Jacky,” acquired during his two years at Cornell, a taste for Italian fashion models, and a near manic passion for charity. His bookkeeper could barely keep track of it-broom factories for the blind, orphanages, homes for elderly nuns, and, lately, roof repairs on ancient monasteries. “This may do it for me, Nicholas,” he said, a heavy arm draped around Morath’s shoulders. “I’ve had to sell my sugar contracts in Chicago. But, still, the contemplative life must be lived, right? If not by you and me, by somebody, right? We can’t have wet monks.”
The baroness Frei once told Morath that the prince’s life was the story of an aristocrat of the blood seeking to become an aristocrat of the heart. “Hrubal’s a little mad,” she said. “And it remains to be seen if his wealth can accommodate his madness. But whatever happens, these are thrilling races to watch, don’t you agree? Poor man. Thirty generations of ancestors, brutal and bloody as the day is long, roasting rebels on iron thrones and God knows what, and only one lifetime for redemption.”
The prince led Morath outside. “We’ve been moving boxwood,” he said. He wore high boots, corduroy field pants, and a peasant blouse, a pair of cowhide gloves in his back pocket. At the end of the lawn, two peasants waited for him, leaning on their shovels.
“And Janos Polanyi,” Hrubal said. “He’s in good form?”
“Always up to something.”
Hrubal laughed. “The King of Swords-that’s his tarot card. A leader, powerful, but dark and secretive. His subjects prosper but regret they ever knew him.” The prince laughed again, fondly, and patted Morath’s shoulder. “Hasn’t killed yo
u yet, I see. But have no fear, Nicky, he will, he will.”
Dinner for twelve. Venison from Hrubal’s forest, trout from his stream, sauce from his red currants and sauce from his figs, a traditional salad-lettuce dressed with lard and paprika-and burgundy, Bull’s Blood, from the Hrubal vineyards.
They ate in the small dining room, where the walls were lined with red satin, sagging, here and there, in melancholy folds and well spotted with champagne, wax, and blood. “But it proves the room,” Hrubal said. “Last burned in 1810. A long time, in this part of the world.” Dinner was eaten by the light of two hundred candles, Morath felt the sweat running down his sides.
He sat close to the head of the table, between Annalisa, the prince’s friend from Rome-pale as a ghost, with long white hands, last seen in the April Vogue-and the fiancee of the Reuters correspondent in Bucharest, Miss Bonington.
“It is miserable now,” she said to Morath. “Hitler is bad enough, but the local spawn are worse.”
“The Iron Guard.”
“They are everywhere. With little bags of earth around their necks. Sacred earth, you see.”
“Come to Rome,” Annalisa said. “And see them strut, our fascisti. Chubby little men, they think it’s their time.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Miss Bonington said, her voice shrill. “Vote?”
Annalisa flipped a hand in the air. “Be worse than they are, I suppose, that’s the tragedy. They have created a cheap, soiled, empty world, and now we are to have the pleasure of living in it.”
“Well, personally, I never imagined-”
“Basta,” Annalisa said softly. “Hrubal is looking at us. To talk politics with food is against the rules.”
Miss Bonington laughed. “What then?”
“Love. Poetry. Venice.”
“Dear man.”
The three of them turned their eyes to the head of the table.
“I loved the life there,” Hrubal said. “On Saturday afternoon, the big game. That’s what they called it-the big game! As for me, well, I was their saber champion, what else, and only our girlfriends came to the matches. But we all went to see the football. I had a giant horn, for cheering.”
“A giant horn?”
“Damn. Somebody …”
“A megaphone, I think,” said the Reuters man.
“That’s it! Thank you, for years I’ve wanted to remember that.”
A servant approached the table and whispered to Hrubal. “Yes, very well,” he said.
The string quartet had arrived. They were shown into the dining room and the servants went for chairs. The four men smiled and nodded, wiping the rain from their hair and drying their instrument cases with their handkerchiefs.
When everyone had gone to their rooms, Morath followed Hrubal to an office high in a crumbling turret, where the prince opened an iron box and counted out packets of faded Austrian schillings. “These are very old,” he said. “I never know quite what to do with them.” Morath converted schilling to pengo as the money went into the briefcase. Six hundred thousand, more or less. “Tell Count Janos,” Hrubal said, “that there’s more if he needs it. Or, you know, Nicholas, whatever it might be.”
Later that night, Morath heard a soft tapping and opened his door. After venison from Prince Hrubal’s forest and trout from his stream, a servant girl from his kitchen. They never spoke a word. She stared at him with grave, dark eyes and, when he’d closed the door, lit the candle by his bedside and pulled her shift over her head. She had a faint mustache, a lush body, and wore knitted, red-wool stockings that came to midthigh.
A sweet morning, Morath thought, riding through the orange leaves on the floor of the forest. Delicately, the mare walked across a wide stream-a few inches of fast silver water-then down a series of rocky ledges. Morath kept the reins loose, let her find her own way. It was an old Magyar cavalryman who’d taught him that a horse can go anywhere a man can go without using his hands.
Morath kept his weight balanced, steadied the briefcase on the saddle, tugged a gentle reproach when the mare saw something she wanted for breakfast. “Manners,” he whispered. Did she speak Hungarian? A Transylvanian horse, she must.
Up ahead, Hrubal’s head groom rode his bay gelding. Morath pulled up for a moment and whistled softly, the groom half turned in the saddle to look back at him. He thought he’d heard other horses, not far away, but, when he listened, they weren’t there. He rode up even with the groom and asked him about it.
“No, your excellency,” the groom said. “I believe we are alone.”
“Hunters, perhaps.”
The groom listened, then shook his head.
They rode on. Morath watched a bank of mist as it drifted over the side of a mountain. He looked at his watch-a little after noon. The groom carried a picnic hamper of sandwiches and beer. Morath was hungry, but decided to ride for another hour.
In the forest, somewhere above him on the gentle slope, a horse whickered, then stopped, abruptly, as though someone had put a hand over its muzzle.
Morath rode even with the groom. “Surely you heard that.”
“No, your excellency. I did not.”
Morath stared at him. He had a sharp face, with gray hair and beard cut short, and there was something in his voice, subtle but there, that suggested defiance: I chose not to hear it.
“Are you armed?”
The groom reached under his shirt, held up a large revolver, then put it away. Morath wanted it.
“Are you able to use it?” he asked.
“Yes, your excellency.”
“May I see it for a moment?”
“Forgive me, your excellency, but I must decline.”
Morath felt the heat in his face. He was going to be murdered for this money and he was very angry. He threw the reins over hard and dug his heels in the horse’s side. She sped off, dead leaves whispering beneath her hooves as she galloped down the slope. Morath looked back and saw that the groom was following him, his horse easily keeping pace. But there was no revolver to be seen, and Morath let the mare slow to a walk.
“You’d better go back now,” he called out to the groom. “I’ll go on by myself.” He was breathing hard, after the gallop.
“I cannot, your excellency.”
Why don’t you shoot me and get it over with? Morath let the mare walk downhill. Something made him look back once more, and he saw, through the bare trees, a horse and rider, then another, some way up the slope. When they realized he’d seen them they walked their horses into cover, but seemed to be in no great hurry. Morath thought of tossing the briefcase away, but by then he knew it wouldn’t matter. He called up to the groom, “Who are your friends?” his voice almost mocking, but the man wouldn’t answer.
A few minutes later he came to the road. It had been built in Roman times, the stone blocks hollowed and cracked by centuries of horse and wagon traffic. Morath turned toward Kolozsvar. When he looked up into the forest, he caught an occasional glimpse of the other riders, keeping pace with him. Directly behind him was the groom, on the bay gelding.
When he heard the automobile, sputtering and tapping, he stopped, and stroked the mare on her heaving side. A gentle animal, she’d done her best, he hoped they wouldn’t shoot her. It was an old Citroen that appeared from a grove of birch trees by the side of the road. There was mud spattered on the doors and the wheel guards, a brown sweep across the windshield where the driver had tried to clear the dust with the single wiper.
The Citroen stopped with a loud squeak from the brakes and two men climbed out, both of them heavy and short. They wore straw hats, dark suits, and soiled white shirts buttoned at the throat. Siguranza, he thought. Roumanian secret police. Obviously they’d been waiting for him.
“Get down from there,” the driver said. It was Hungarian, badly spoken. Morath took a little longer to dismount than they liked. The man on the passenger side of the car opened his jacket, showing Morath the handgrip of an automatic pistol in a shoulder holster. “If
you need to be shot, we’ll be happy to oblige you,” he said. “Maybe it’s a matter of honor, or something.”
“Don’t bother,” Morath said. He got off the horse and held her by the bridle. The driver approached and took the briefcase. Something about him made the mare nervous, she tossed her head and stamped her feet on the stone block. The driver unbuckled the briefcase and had a look inside, then he called out to the groom, “You can go home now, Vilmos. Take his horse.”
“Yes, excellency,” the groom said. He was very frightened.
“And keep your mouth shut.”
Morath watched as he rode back up into the forest, leading the mare by the reins.
The Siguranza men tied his wrists with a length of cord and shoved him into the backseat of the car, then made jokes as the starter engine whined and faded until the engine caught. They talked for a moment more-Morath didn’t understand Roumanian but caught the word Bistrita, a small town north of Kolozsvar. As the car bounced along the road, the passenger opened the briefcase and divided up Morath’s underwear and shaving kit. The two men argued briefly over Morath’s spare shirt but the driver gave in almost immediately. The passenger then turned in his seat and stared at Morath. He hadn’t shaved for several days, the stubble on his face black and gray.
He leaned over the back of the seat and slapped Morath in the face. Then did it again, harder. The driver laughed. The passenger stretched sideways until he could see himself in the rearview mirror and adjusted the brim of his hat.
Morath did not feel pain where he’d been slapped, he felt it in his wrists, where he’d tried to break the cord as the Siguranza man hit him. Later on, when he managed to twist around and get a look, he saw that he was bleeding.
Bistrita had been part of the Ottoman Empire until 1878, and not that much had changed. Dusty streets and lime trees, stucco buildings painted yellow and pale green, with fishscale roofing on the better houses. The Catholic crosses were mounted on the domes of the former mosques, the women on the street kept their eyes lowered, and so did the men.
The Citroen pulled up in front of the police station, and the two men hauled Morath out by the elbow and kicked him through the door. He made a point of not falling down. Then they beat him down the stairs, along a hallway, and to the door of a cell. When they cut the cord on his wrists, the knife sliced through the back of his jacket. One of them made a joke, the other one snickered. Then they cleaned out his pockets, took his shoes and socks, jacket and tie, threw him in the cell, slammed the iron door, shot the bolt.