by Alan Furst
The windshield wipers squeaked as they swept wet snow back and forth across the cloudy glass. In one street, a fire, it took forever to back the car out. They turned into the next street behind a junk man’s horse and wagon, then tried another, which led to a statue of a king and a dead end. Balki said, “Merde,” got the car going in the opposite direction, took the next left.
Which was, for some reason, vaguely familiar to Morath, he’d been there before. Then he saw why-the shop called Homme du Monde, Madame Golsztahn’s tuxedo-rental business. But there was no mannequin in the window. Only a hand-lettered sign saying FERME.
“What is it?” Balki said.
Morath didn’t answer.
Maybe the Belgian border guards didn’t care who came and went, but the French customs inspectors did. “The watch, monsieur. Is it, ah, new?”
“Bought in Paris,” Balki told them.
It was hot in the customs shed, an iron stove glowed in one corner, and it smelled of wet wool from the inspectors’ capes. A Russian? And a Hungarian? With residence permits? Work permits? The Hungarian with a diplomatic passport? In a borrowed automobile?
So then, just exactly what kind of, business had them crossing the border in a snowstorm? Perhaps we’ll have a look in the trunk. The key, monsieur, if you please.
Morath began to calculate time. To be at the cafe on the rue Guisarde at ten o’clock, they should have left this hell an hour earlier. Outside, a truck driver honked his horn. The traffic began to back up as one of the inspectors tried to reach the Paris prefecture on the telephone. Morath could hear the operator’s voice as she argued with the inspector, who held his hand over the receiver and said to his supervisor, “She says there’s a line down in Lille.”
“Our calls don’t go through Lille, she of all people should know that!”
Morath and Balki exchanged a look. But the chief officer grew bored with them a few minutes later and sent them on their way with an imperious flip of the hand. If they insisted on being foreigners it certainly wasn’t his fault.
Out on Route 2, snow.
The Peugeot crawled behind an old Citroen camionnette with the name of a Soissons grocery painted on the rear door. Balki swore under his breath and tried to pass, the wheels spun, the Peugeot began to fishtail, Balki stamped on the brake, Morath saw the white, furious face of the camionnette‘s driver as it skidded past, the Peugeot spun in a circle, then plowed into a field, wheels bouncing on ruts beneath the snow.
They came to rest a few feet from a large plane tree, its trunk scarred by the indiscretions of past motorists. Balki and Morath stood in the falling snow and stared at the car. The right rear tire was flat.
Ten minutes to midnight, the rue Guisarde white and silent in the whispering snow, the lights of the cafe an amber glow at the end of the street. He saw her right away, the last customer, looking very sorrowful and abandoned, sitting hunched over a book and an empty cup of coffee.
He sat down across from her. “Forgive me,” he said.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter.”
“A nightmare, out on the roads. We had to change a tire.”
He took her hands.
“You’re wet,” she said.
“And cold.”
“Maybe you should go home. It hasn’t been a good night.”
He didn’t want to go home.
“Or you could come upstairs. Dry your hair, at least.”
He rose. Took a few francs from his pocket and put them on the table for the coffee.
A very small apartment, a single room with a bed in an alcove and a bathroom. He took off his overcoat, she hung it by the radiator. Put his jacket in the armoire and his soaked shoes on a sheet of newspaper.
They sat on an elaborate old sofa, a Victorian horror, the sort of thing that, once it came up five flights of stairs, was never going anywhere again. “Dear old thing,” she said affectionately, smoothing the brown velvet cushion with her hand. “She often plays a role in the D. E. Cameron novels.”
“Field of honor.”
“Yes.” She laughed and said, “Actually, I was lucky to find this place. I’m not the legal tenant, that’s why my name isn’t in the phone book. It belongs to a woman called Moni.”
“Moni?”
“Well, I think she’s actually Mona but, if you’re Mona, I guess the only pet name is Moni.”
“Short and dark? Likes to stir up trouble?”
“That’s her. She’s an artist, from Montreal, lives with her girlfriend over by Bastille somewhere. Where did you meet Moni?”
“Juan-les-Pins. She was one of Cara’s friends.”
“Oh. Well, anyhow, she was a godsend. When Jean-Marie died, I swore I was going to stay in that apartment, but I couldn’t bear it. I miss a refrigerator, in the summer, but I have a hotplate, and I can see Saint Sulpice.”
“It’s quiet.”
“Lost in the stars.”
She took a bottle of wine from the windowsill, opened it and poured him a glass, and one for herself. He lit a cigarette and she got him a Ricon ashtray.
“It’s Portuguese,” she said.
He took a sip. “Very good.”
“Not bad, I’d say.”
“Not at all.”
“I like it.”
“Mm.”
“Garrafeira, it’s called.”
Christ it’s a long way across this couch.
“What was it you were reading, in the cafe?”
“Babel.”
“In French?”
“English. My father was Irish, but I had to learn it in school. My mother was French, and we lived in Paris and spoke French at home.”
“So, officially, you’re French.”
“Irish. I’ve only been there twice, but on my eighteenth birthday I had to pick one or the other. Both my parents wanted me to be Irish-something my mother wanted for my father, I think that’s what it was. Anyhow, who cares. Citizen of the world, right?”
“Are you?”
“No, I’m French, my heart is, I can’t help it. My publisher thought I wrote in English, but I lied about it. I write in French and translate.”
Morath walked over to the window, stared down at the snow floating past the street lamps. Mary Day followed, a moment later, and leaned against him. He took her hand.
“Did you like Ireland?” His voice was soft.
“It was very beautiful,” she said.
It was a relief to get it over with, the first time, because God only knew what could go wrong. The second time was much better. She had a long, smooth body, silky and lean. Was a little shy to begin with, then not. The bed was narrow, not really meant for two, but she slept in his arms all night so it didn’t matter.
Christmas Eve. A long-standing tradition, the baroness Frei’s Christmas party. Mary Day was tense in the taxi-this was a party they hadn’t quite fought over. He had to go, he didn’t want to leave her home alone on Christmas Eve. “Something new for you,” he’d said. “A Hungarian evening.”
“Who will I talk to?”
“Mary, ma douce, there is no such thing as a Hungarian who speaks only Hungarian. The people at the party will speak French, perhaps English. And if, God forbid, you are presented to somebody only to discover that you cannot say a single comprehensible word to each other, well, so what? A smile of regret, and you escape to the buffet.”
In the end, she went. In something black-and very faintly strange, like everything she wore-but she looked even more heartbreaking than usual. She was of course delighted at the impasse Villon, and the house. And the servant who bowed when they came to the door and whisked away their coats.
“Nicholas?” she whispered.
“Yes?”
“That was a liveried footman, Nicholas.” She looked around. The candles, the silver, the hundred-year-old creche above the fireplace, the men, the women. In a distant room, a string quartet.
The baroness Frei was pleased to see him accompanied, and obviously approved of his choice.
“You must come and see me sometime, when we can talk,” she said to Mary Day. Who stayed on Morath’s arm for only ten minutes before a baron took her away.
Morath, glass of champagne in hand, found himself in conversation with a man introduced as Bolthos, an official at the Hungarian legation. Very refined, with gray hair at the temples, looking, Morath thought, like an oil painting of a 1910 diplomat. Bolthos wanted to talk politics. “Hitler is enraged with them,” he said of the Roumanians. “Calinescu, the interior minister, made quick work of the Iron Guard. With the king’s approval, naturally. They shot Codreanu and fourteen of his lieutenants. ‘Shot while trying to escape,’ as the saying goes.”
“Perhaps we have something to learn from them.”
“It was a message, I think. Keep your wretched trash out of our country, Adolf.”
Morath agreed. “If we joined with Poland and Roumania, even the Serbs, and confronted him, we might actually survive this.”
“Yes, the Intermarium. And I agree with you, especially if the French would help.”
The French had signed a treaty of friendship with Berlin two weeks earlier-Munich reconfirmed. “Would they?” Morath said.
Bolthos had some champagne. “At the last minute, perhaps, after we’ve given up hope. It takes the French a long time to do the right thing.”
“The Poles won’t have any Munich,” Morath said.
“No, they’ll fight.”
“And Horthy?”
“Will slither, as always. In the end, however, it may not be enough. Then into the cauldron we go.”
Bolthos’s stunning wife joined them, all platinum hair and diamond earrings. “I hope I haven’t caught you talking politics,” she said with a mock scowl. “It’s Christmas, dearest, not the time for duels.”
“Your servant, sir.” Morath clicked his heels and bowed.
“There, you see?” Madame Bolthos said. “Now you’ll have to get up at dawn, and serves you right.”
“Quick!” said a young woman. “It’s Kolovitzky!”
“Where?”
“In the ballroom.”
Morath followed her as she cut through the crowd. “Do I know you?”
The woman looked over her shoulder and laughed.
In the ballroom, the eminent cellist Bela Kolovitzky stood on the raised platform and grinned at the gathering crowd. His colleagues, the remainder of the string quartet, joined them. Kolovitzky tucked a handkerchief between his neck and shoulder and settled himself around a violin. He’d been famous and successful in Budapest, then, in 1933, had gone to Hollywood.
” ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’!” somebody called out, clearly joking.
Kolovitzky played a discordant bleat, then looked between his feet. “Something else?”
Then he began to play, a slow, deep, romantic melody, vaguely familiar. “This is from Enchanted Holiday,” he said.
The music grew sadder. “Now Hedy Lamarr looks up at the steamship.”
And now, wistful. “She sees Charles Boyer at the railing…. He is searching for her … among the crowd…. She starts to raise her hand … halfway up … now back down … no, they can never be together … now the steamship blows its horn”-he made the sound on the violin-“Charles Boyer is frantic … where is she?”
“What is that?” a woman asked. “I almost know it.”
Kolovitzky shrugged. “Something midway between Tchaikovsky and Brahms. Brahmsky, we call him.” He began to speak English, in a comic Hungarian accent. “It muzt be zo tender, ro-man-tic, zenti-mental. Zo lovely it makes … Sam Goldwyn cry … and makes … Kolovitzky … rich.”
Morath wandered through the party, looking for Mary Day. He found her in the library, sitting by a blazing fire. She was leaning forward on a settee, a thumb keeping her place in a book, as she listened earnestly to a tiny white-haired gentleman in a leather chair, his hand resting on a stick topped with a silver ram’s head. At Mary Day’s feet lay one of the vizslas, supine with bliss, as Mary Day’s ceaseless stroking of its velvety skin had reduced it to a state of semiconsciousness. “Then, from that hill,” said the white-haired gentleman, “you can see the temple of Pallas Athena.”
Morath sat on a spindly chair by a French door, eating cake from a plate balanced on his knee. The baroness Frei sat close to him, back curved in a silk evening gown, face, as always, luminous. One could say, Morath thought, that she is the most beautiful woman in Europe.
“And your mother, Nicholas, what did she say?”
“She will not leave.”
“I will write to her,” the baroness said firmly.
“Please,” he said. “But I doubt she’ll change her mind.”
“Stubborn! Always her way.”
“She did say, just before I left, that she could live with the Germans, if she had to, but if the country was to be occupied by the Russians, I must find a way to get her out. ‘Then,’ she told me, ‘I will come to Paris.’ “
He found Mary Day and took her out into the winter garden; dead leaves plastered to the iron chairs and table, bare rose canes climbing up through the trellis. The frozen air made the sky black and the stars white and sharp. When she started to tremble, Morath stood behind her and wrapped her in his arms. “I love you, Nicholas,” she said.
INTERMARIUM
10 March 1939.
Amen. The world in chaos, half the armies in Europe mobilized, diplomats in constant motion, popping up here and there like tin monkeys in shooting galleries. Very much, Morath thought, like tin monkeys in shooting galleries.
Crossing the Pont Royal on his way to lunch, late, unhurried, he stopped and leaned on the stone parapet. The river ran full and heavy, its color like shining slate, its surface roughed up by the March wind and the spring currents. In the western sky, white scud blew in from the channel ports. The last days of Pisces, he thought, dreams and mysteries. When it rained in the middle of the night they woke up and made love.
He looked at his watch-Polanyi would be waiting for him-was there any way to avoid this? From here the Seine flowed north, to Rouen, to Normandy, to the sea. Escape.
No, lunch.
Thirty minutes later, the Brasserie Heininger. A white marble staircase climbed to a room of red plush banquettes, painted cupids, gold cords on the draperies. Waiters in muttonchop whiskers ran back and forth, carrying silver trays of pink langoustes. Morath was relieved. No more Prevert, “the beauty of sinister things,” the Count von Polanyi de Nemeszvar had apparently risen from the lower depths, tempted by sumptuous food and a wine list bound in leather.
Polanyi greeted him formally in Hungarian and stood to shake hands.
“I’m sorry to be late.”
A bottle of Echezeaux was open on the table, a waiter scurried over and poured Morath a glass. He took a sip and stared at the mirrored panel above the banquette. Polanyi followed his eyes.
“Don’t look now, but there’s a bullet hole in the mirror behind you,” Morath said.
“Yes. The infamous Table Fourteen, this place has a history.”
“Really?”
“Two years ago, I think. The headwaiter was assassinated while sitting on the toilet in the ladies’ bathroom.”
“Well he won’t do that again.”
“With a machine gun, it’s said. Something to do with Bulgarian politics.”
“Oh. And in his memory …”
“Yes. Also, the story goes, some kind of British spymistress used to hold court here.”
“At this very table.”
The waiter returned, Polanyi ordered mussels and a choucroute royale.
“What’s ‘royale‘?” Morath asked.
“They cook the sauerkraut in champagne instead of beer.”
“You can taste the champagne? In sauerkraut?”
“An illusion. But one likes the idea of it.”
Morath ordered supremes de volaille, chicken breast in cream, the simplest dish he could find.
“Have you heard what’s happened at the French
air ministry?” Polanyi said.
“Now what.”
“Well first of all, they let a contract for building fighter planes to a furniture manufacturer.”
“Somebody’s brother-in-law.”
“Probably. And then, they decided to store their secret papers at a testing facility just outside Paris. Stored them in a disused wind tunnel. Only they forgot to tell the technicians, who turned the thing on and blew the papers all over the neighborhood.”
Morath shook his head; there was a time when it would have been funny. “They’ll have Adolf in the Elysee Palace, if they don’t watch out.”
“Not in our lifetime,” Polanyi said, finishing off his wine and refilling the glass. “We think Adolf is about to make a mistake.”
“Which is?”
“Poland. Lately he’s been screaming about Danzig-‘is German, has always been German, will always be German.’ His radio station tells Germans in the city to ‘keep a list of your enemies, soon the German army will help you to punish them.’ So what must happen now is a pact, between the Poles, the Roumanians, and us-the Yugoslavs can join if they like. The Intermarium, so-called, the lands between the seas, the Baltic and the Adriatic. Together, we’re strong. Poland has the largest land army in Europe, and we can deny Hitler Roumanian wheat and oil. If we can make him back down, call his bluff, that will be the end of him.”
Polanyi saw that Morath was skeptical. “I know, I know,” he said. “Ancient hatreds and territorial disputes and all the rest of it. But, if we don’t do something, we’ll all go the way of the Czechs.”
The lunch arrived, the waiter announcing each dish as he set it down.
“And what does Horthy think about all this?”
“Supports it. Perhaps you know the background of political events in February, perhaps you don’t. Officially, Imredy resigned and Count Teleki became the prime minister. In fact, Horthy was told that a Budapest newspaper was about to publish proof, obtained in Czechoslovakia, that Dr. Bela Imredy, the rabid anti-Semite, was Jewish. Had, at least, a Jewish great-grandfather. So Imredy didn’t jump, he was pushed. And, when he resigned, Horthy chose to replace him with Teleki, an internationally prominent geographer and a liberal. Which means Horthy supports at least some resistance to German objectives as the best means of keeping Hungary out of another war.”