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“Will your friend see me?” he said, his voice urgent.

“He will.”

“Everything has changed, tell him that. Litvinov is finished—it’s a signal to Hitler that Stalin wants to do business.” Litvinov was the Soviet foreign minister. “Do you understand it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Litvinov is a Jewish intellectual—an old-line Bolshevik. Now, for this negotiation, Stalin provides the Nazis with a more palatable partner. Which is perhaps Molotov.”

“If you want to see my friend, you’ll have to say where and when.”

“Tomorrow night. Ten-thirty. At the Parmentier Métro stop.”

A deserted station, out in the 11th Arrondissement. “What if he can’t come?” Morath meant
won’t
and he sensed Ilya knew it.

“Then he can’t. And I either contact you or I don’t.”

Moving quickly, he turned, walked away, disappeared.

For a time, Morath considered letting it die right there. Suddenly, Ilya
knew things.
How? This wasn’t hiding in a room with a sack of oats. Could he have been caught? Then made a deal with the NKVD? But Polanyi had said
leave it to me.
He was no fool, would not go unprotected to a meeting like this. You have to let him decide, Morath thought. Because if the information was real, it meant Hitler didn’t have to worry about three hundred Russian divisions, and that meant war in Poland. This time, the British and the French would have to fight, and that meant war in Europe.

When Morath reached the Agence Courtmain, he called the legation.

“A fraud,” Polanyi said. “We are being used—I don’t exactly understand why, but we are.”

They sat in the backseat of a shiny black Grosser Mercedes, Bolthos in front with the driver. On the sixth day of May, benign and bright under a windswept sky. They drove along the Seine, out of the city at the Porte de Bercy, headed south for the village of Thiais.

“You went alone?” Morath said.

Polanyi laughed. “A strange evening at the Parmentier Métro—heavyset men reading Hungarian newspapers.”

“And the documents?”

“Tonight. Then
adieu
to comrade Ilya.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter now.” Litvinov had resigned two days earlier.

“No, we must do something. Wake the British up—it’s not too late for the diplomats. I would say that Poland is an autumn project, after the harvest, before the rains.”

The car moved slowly through the village of Alfortville, where a row of dance halls stood side by side on the quai facing the river. Parisians came here on summer nights, to drink and dance until dawn. “Poor soul,” Polanyi said. “Perhaps he drank in these places.”

“Not many places he didn’t,” Bolthos said.

They were on their way to the funeral of the novelist Josef Roth, dead of delirium tremens at the age of forty-four. Sharing the backseat with Polanyi and Morath, a large, elaborate wreath, cream-colored roses and a black silk ribbon, from the Hungarian legation.

“So then,” Morath said, “this fugitive business is just a ruse.”

“Likely it is. Allows the people who sent him to deny his existence, maybe that’s it. Or perhaps just an exercise in the Soviet style—deceit hides deception and who knows what. One thing that does occur to me is that he is being operated by a faction in Moscow, people like Litvinov, who don’t want to do business with Hitler.”

“You will take care, when you see him again.”

“Oh yes. You can be sure that the Nazi secret service will want to keep any word of a Hitler/Stalin negotiation a secret from the British. They would not like us to be passing documents to English friends in Paris.” He paused, then said, “I’ll be glad when this is over, whichever way it goes.”

He seemed tired of it all, Morath thought. Sombor, the Russians, God only knew what else. Sitting close together, the scent of bay rum and brandy was strong in the air, suggesting power and rich, easy life. Polanyi looked at his watch. “It’s at two o’clock,” he said to the driver.

“We’ll be on time, your excellency.” To be polite, he sped up a little.

“Do you read the novels, Nicholas?”

“
Radetzky March,
more than once.
Hotel Savoy. Flight Without End.
”

“There, that says it. An epitaph.” Roth had fled from Germany in 1933, writing to a friend that “one must run from a burning house.”

“A Catholic burial?” Morath said.

“Yes. He was born in a Galician shtetl but he got tired of being a Jew. Loved the monarchy, Franz Josef, Austria-Hungary.” Polanyi shook his head. “Sad, sad, Nicholas. He hated the émigré life, drank himself to death when he saw the war coming.”

They arrived at Thiais twenty minutes later, and the driver parked on the street in front of the church. A small crowd, mostly émigrés, ragged and worn but brushed up as best they could. Just before the Mass began, two men wearing dark suits and decorations carried a wreath into the church. “Ah, the Legitimists,” Polanyi said. Across the wreath, a black-and-yellow sash, the colors of the Dual Monarchy, and the single word
Otto
—the head of the House of Habsburg and heir to a vanished empire. It occurred to Morath that he was witness to the final moment in the life of Austria-Hungary.

In the graveyard by the church, the priest spoke briefly, mentioned Roth’s wife, Friedl, in a mental institution in Vienna, his military service in Galicia during the war, his novels and journalism, and his love of the church and the monarchy.
We all overestimated the world,
Morath thought. The phrase, written to a friend after Roth fled to Paris, was from an obituary in the morning paper.

After the coffin was lowered into the grave, Morath took a handful of dirt and sprinkled it on top of the pinewood lid. “Rest in peace,” he said. The mourners stood silent while the gravediggers began to shovel earth into the grave. Some of the émigrés wept. The afternoon sun lit the tombstone, a square of white marble with an inscription:

Josef Roth

Austrian Poet

Died in Paris in Exile

On the morning of 9 May, Morath was at the Agence Courtmain when he was handed a telephone message.
Please call Major Fekaj at the Hungarian legation.
His heart sank a little—Polanyi had told him, on the way back from Thiais, that Fekaj now sat in Sombor’s office, his own replacement due from Budapest within the week.

Morath put the message in his pocket and went off to a meeting in Courtmain’s office. Another poster campaign—a parade, a pageant, the ministries preparing to celebrate, in July, the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the revolution of 1789. After the meeting, Courtmain and Morath treated a crowd from the agency to a raucous lunch in an upstairs room at Lapérouse, their own particular answer to the latest valley in the national morale.

By the time he got back to the avenue Matignon, Morath knew he had to call—either that or think about it for the rest of the day.

Fekaj’s voice was flat and cold. He was a colorless man, precise, formal, and reserved. “I called to inform you, sir, that we have serious concerns about the well-being of his excellency, Count Polanyi.”

“Yes?” Now what.

“He has not been seen at the legation for two days and does not answer his telephone at home. We want to know if you, by any chance, have been in contact with him.”

“No, not since the sixth.”

“Did he, to your knowledge, have plans to go abroad?”

“I don’t think he did. Perhaps he’s ill.”

“We have called the city hospitals. There is no record of admission.”

“Have you gone to the apartment?”

“This morning, the concierge let us in. Everything was in order, no indication of . . . anything wrong. The maid stated that his bed had not been slept in for two nights.” Fekaj cleared his throat. “Would you care to tell us, sir, if he sometimes spends the night elsewhere? With a woman?”

“If he does he doesn’t tell me about it, he keeps the details of his personal life to himself. Have you informed the police?”

“We have.”

Morath had to sit down at his desk. He lit a cigarette and said, “Major Fekaj, I don’t know how to help you.”

“We accept,” Fekaj hesitated, then continued. “We understand that certain aspects of Count Polanyi’s work had to remain—out of view. For reasons of state. But, should he make contact with you, we trust that you will at least let us know that he is, safe.”

Alive, you mean.
“I will,” Morath said.

“Thank you. Of course you’ll be notified if we hear anything further.”

Morath held the receiver in his hand, oblivious to the silence on the line after Fekaj hung up.

Gone.

He called Bolthos at his office, but Bolthos didn’t want to speak on the legation telephone and met him, just after dark, in a busy café.

“I spoke to Fekaj,” Morath said. “But I had nothing to tell him.”

Bolthos looked haggard. “It’s been difficult,” he said. “Impossible. Because of our atrocious politics, we’re cursed with separate investigations. Officially, the
nyilas
are responsible, but any real work must be done by Polanyi’s friends. Fekaj and his allies won’t involve themselves.”

“Where do you think he is?”

A polite shrug. “Abducted.”

“Murdered?”

“In time.”

After a moment Bolthos said, “He wouldn’t jump off a bridge, would he?”

“Not him, no.”

“Nicholas,” Bolthos said. “You’re going to have to tell me what he was doing.”

Morath paused, but he had no choice. “On Tuesday, the sixth, he was supposed to meet a man who said he had defected from the Soviet special services, which Polanyi did not believe. He didn’t run, according to Polanyi, he was sent. But, even so, he came bearing information that Polanyi thought was important—Litvinov’s dismissal, a negotiation between Stalin and Hitler. So Polanyi met him and agreed to a second, a final meeting. Documents to be exchanged for money, I suspect.

“But, if you’re looking for enemies you can’t stop there—you have to consider Sombor’s colleagues, certainly suspicious of what went on at the legation, and capable of anything. And you can’t ignore the fact that Polanyi was in touch with the Germans—diplomats, spies, Wehrmacht staff officers. And he also had some kind of business with the Poles; maybe Roumanians and Serbs as well, a potential united front against Hitler.”

From Bolthos, a sour smile. “But no scorned mistress, you’re sure of that.”

They sat in silence while the café life swirled around them. A woman at the next table was reading with a lorgnette, her dachshund asleep under a chair.

“That was, of course, his work,” Bolthos said.

“Yes. It was.” Morath heard himself use the past tense. “You think he’s dead.”

“I hope he isn’t, but better that than some dungeon in Moscow or Berlin.” Bolthos took a small notebook from his pocket. “This meeting, will you tell me where it was supposed to take place?”

“I don’t know. The first meeting was at the Parmentier Métro station. But in my dealings with this man he was careful to change time and location. So, in a way, the second meeting would have been anywhere
but
there.”

“Unless Polanyi insisted.” Bolthos flipped back through the notebook. “I’ve been working with my own sources in the Paris police. On Tuesday, the sixth, a man was shot somewhere near the Parmentier Métro station. This was buried among all the robberies and domestic disturbances, but there was something about it that caught my attention. The victim was a French citizen, born in Slovakia. Served in the Foreign Legion, then discharged for political activity. He crawled into a doorway and died on the rue Saint-Maur, a minute or so away from the Métro.”

“A phantom,” Morath said. “Polanyi’s bodyguard—is that what you think? Or maybe his assassin. Or both, why not. Or, more likely, nobody, caught up in somebody’s politics on the wrong night, or killed for a ten-franc piece.”

Bolthos closed the notebook. “We have to try,” he said. He meant he’d done the best he could.

“Yes. I know,” Morath said.

Temetni Tudunk,
a Magyar sentiment, complex and ironic:
How to bury people, that is one thing we know.
It was Wolfi Szubl who said the words, at a Hungarian nightclub in the cellar of a strange little hotel out in the 17th Arrondissement. Szubl and Mitten, the baroness Frei escorted by a French film producer, Bolthos and his wife and her cousin, Voyschinkowsky and Lady Angela Hope, the artist Szabo, the lovely Madame Kareny, various other strays and aristocrats who had floated through Janos Polanyi’s complicated life.

It wasn’t a funeral—there was no burial, thus Szubl’s ironic twist on the phrase, not even a memorial, only an evening to remember a friend. “A difficult friend”—Voyschinkowsky said that, an index finger wiping the corner of his eye. There was candlelight, a small Gypsy orchestra, platters of chicken with paprika and cream, wine and fruit brandy, and, yes, it was said more than once as the evening wore on, Polanyi would have liked to be there. During one of the particularly heartbreaking songs, a pale, willowy woman, supremely, utterly
Parisienne
and rumored to be a procuress who lived in the Palais Royal, stood in front of the orchestra and danced with a shawl. Morath sat beside Mary Day and translated, now and then, what was said in Hungarian.

They drank to Polanyi,
wherever he is tonight,
meaning heaven or hell. “Or maybe Palm Beach,” Herbert Mitten said. “I guess there’s nothing wrong in thinking that if you care to.”

The bill came to Morath at two in the morning, on a silver tray, with a grand bow from the
patron.
Voyschinkowsky, thwarted in his attempt to pay for the evening, insisted on taking Morath and Mary Day home in his chauffeur-driven Hispano-Suiza automobile.

We have to try,
Bolthos had said it for both of them. Which meant, for Morath, one obvious but difficult strand, really the only one he knew, in what must have been a vast tangle of shadowy connections.

He went up to the Balalaika the following afternoon and drank vodka with Boris Balki.

“A shame,” Balki said, and drank “to his memory.”