Kingdom of Shadows (4 page)

“On the fifth of March,” she said, “a fire in a shed in the Eighth District,
Csikago
”—Chicago, as in factories and gangsters—“police inspectors were called when rifles and pistols were found to have been stored there.”

She coughed, covering her mouth with the back of her hand, and rested the cigarette among a line of brown scars on the edge of the desk. “An Arrow Cross member, by trade a cabinetmaker, detained for defacing public property, was found in possession of the home telephone number of the German economic attaché. A police informer in Szeged, murdered on the sixth of March. Eight young men, members of the
Turul
student association, observed carrying out a surveillance of the army barracks at Arad. A furniture-mover’s truck, parked in an alley by the south railroad station, was searched by police on information received from the estranged wife of the driver. A Berthier heavy machine gun was found, with eighty-five belts of ammunition.”

“I’m going to have to make notes,” Morath said.

Golsztahn’s eyes met his. “You aren’t going anywhere, are you?” She paused. “East?”

Morath shook his head. “Just to Paris. Tonight.”

She handed him an unused rental receipt. “Use the back. The police official notes that a report of these events has been routed, in the customary way, to the office of Colonel Sombor in the Hungarian legation in Paris.”

“A minute,” Morath said. He was almost caught up. Sombor had something to do with security at the legation—the same name as the head of the secret police, taken from a town in the south of Hungary. This usually meant Hungarians of German, Saxon, ancestry.

When he looked up, she continued. “An Arrow Cross informant reports that several of his colleagues are preparing to send their families out of the city the first week in May. And . . .” She peered closely at the top of the receipt. “What?” she said, then, “Oh. Two known agents of the German intelligence service, the SD, had in their room at the Hotel Gellert photographs of the architectural blueprints of the Water District police station and the Palace of Justice. The police official states finally that there are further instances of this kind of activity, some three dozen, that point to a political action in the near future.”

It was quiet on the evening train to Paris. Courtmain worked, jotting notes on a tablet, and Morath read the newspaper. The leading stories continued to focus on Austria and the Anschluss. The British politician Churchill, a member of the Tory opposition, was quoted by a political columnist on the editorial page, from a speech given in parliament at the end of February: “Austria has now been laid in thrall, and we do not know whether Czechoslovakia will suffer a similar fate.”

Well, somebody will.

Morath touched the receipt in his pocket. Golsztahn had burned hers in a coffee cup, then poked the ashes apart with the end of a pencil.

Of all the cities, Otto Adler loved Paris the most. He had arrived in the winter of 1937, installed his life—a wife, four children, two cats, and an editorial office—in a big, drafty old house in Saint Germain-en-Laye, where, from a window in his study, he could look out over miles of Parisian rooftops.
Paris—the best idea mankind ever had.

“Third time lucky!” was the way his wife put it. Otto Adler had grown up in Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, in the Baltic German community. After university in Berlin, he came home a Marxist, then spent the decade of his thirties becoming a Social Democrat, a journalist, and a pauper. “When you are that poor,” he’d say, “the only thing left for you is to start a little magazine.” So,
Die Aussicht,
The Outlook, was born. Not so popular, it turned out, in the tight,
Volksdeutsch
world of Königsberg. “This failed postcard painter from Linz will destroy German culture,” he said of Hitler in 1933. Two broken windows, for that, his wife cursed in the butcher shop, and, soon enough, a big, drafty old apartment in Vienna.

Otto Adler fitted in much better there. “Otto, darling, I think you were born to be Viennese,” his wife said. He had a round, hairless, rosy face, a beaming smile, he wished the world well—one of those bighearted people who can be benign and angry at once and laugh at himself in the bargain. Somehow, he kept publishing the magazine. “We should probably call it
The Ox,
it plods along in all weathers.” And in time, a little Viennese money—from progressive bankers, Jewish businessmen, union leaders—began to come his way. As
Die Aussicht
gained credibility, he managed to obtain an article by one of the gods of German literary culture, Karl Kraus, the savage, brilliant satirist whose disciples—his readers, his students—were known as
Krausianer.

In 1937,
Die Aussicht
published a brief
reportage
by an Italian journalist, the wife of a diplomat, who’d been present at one of Hermann Goering’s infamous dinners at Schorfheide, his hunting lodge. The usual Nazi merriment, with the soup and the fish, but before the main course arrived Goering left the table and returned wearing a rawhide shirt, with a bearskin thrown over his shoulders—a warrior costume from the old Teutonic tribes. Not nearly, of course, enough. Goering was armed with a spear and led a pair of hairy bison, harnessed in chains, around and around the room while the guests roared. Still, not enough. The entertainment concluded with the mating of the bison. “A party to remember,” it said in
Die Aussicht.
Adler’s children were expelled from school, a swastika chalked on his door, the maid quit, the neighbors ceased to say
“Gruss Gott.”

It was a big, drafty old house they found in Geneva. But nobody was very happy there. What the
Volksdeutsch
and the Austrians did with party operatives, the Swiss did with clerks. Nobody actually said anything about the magazine—he could, apparently, publish whatever he wanted in Democratic Switzerland, but life was a spiderweb of rules and regulations that controlled mailing permits, alien residence, and, it seemed to Adler, the very air they breathed.

It was a little quiet around the dinner table when Adler informed the family they had to move. “A necessary adventure,” he said, beaming away. Under the table, his wife put her hand on his knee. So, December of ’37, Paris. Saint Germain-en-Laye was a classic of the exile’s geography, it turned out, a time-honored refuge for princes unwelcome in many lands. There was a grand Promenade Anglais where one could walk for hours, just right for a bittersweet contemplation of the lost crown, castle, or homeland. Adler found a sympathetic printer, made contacts in the community of liberal German émigrés, and went back to work hammering the fascists and the Bolsheviks. Such was the destiny of the Social Democrat, and who was that man in the raincoat by the newspaper kiosk.

Meanwhile, Adler fell in love with the public gardens of Paris. “What sort of lunatic takes a train to go to the park?” The kind who filled his briefcase with books; Schnitzler, Weininger, Mann, maybe von Hoffmansthal, two pens, and a cheese sandwich, then sat in the Jardin du Luxembourg and watched the dappled light of the plane trees playing on the gravel path. A few centimes to the old dragon who kept watch on the chairs, and one could spend the afternoon in a painting.

At first he went in nice weather, later in light rain. It became his habit. As time went by, as the spring of 1938 worked its way toward whatever summer had in store, Otto Adler, fountain pen scratching out a new editorial or, for a moment, just snoozing, was almost always to be found in the park.

The note from the baroness Frei invited
My dearest Nicholas
to call at her house at five in the afternoon on the sixteenth of April. Morath took a taxi to the Sèvres-Babylone Métro stop and from there walked to the rue de Villon.

Buried deep in a maze of narrow lanes that crisscrossed the border between the Sixth and Seventh Arrondissements, it was, like paradise everywhere, damned hard to find. Taxi drivers thumbed through their city directories, then sped off to the rue François-Villon, named for the medieval robber poet, in a distant neighborhood where, on arrival, it was immediately clear to both driver and patron that this was not the right street
at all.

The one true rue de Villon could be entered only through a vaulted alley—the impasse Villon—a tunnel of perpetual dusk that dared the courageous
automobiliste
to try his luck. It could sometimes be done, depending on the model and year of the machine, and was always a matter of centimeters, but it did not
look
like it could be done. The alley gave no indication of what lay beyond it, the casual passerby tended to do exactly that, while the truly self-confident tourist peered defiantly down the tunnel and then went away.

On the other side, however, light from heaven poured down on a row of seventeenth-century houses, protected by wrought-iron palings, that dead-ended at a garden wall: 3, rue de Villon, to 9, rue de Villon, in a sequence whose logic was known only to God and the postman. In the evening, the tiny street was lit by Victorian gas lamps, which made soft shadows of a vine that twisted its way along the top of the garden wall. The garden belonged to number three—a faint impression of the number could be found on a rusty metal door, the width of a carriage—which was owned by the baroness Lillian Frei. She did not know her neighbors. They did not know her.

A maid answered the door and led Morath to the garden. Sitting at the garden table, the baroness put her cheek up to be kissed. “Dearest love,” she said. “I am so happy to see you.” Morath’s heart warmed, he smiled like a five-year-old and kissed her with pleasure.

The baroness Frei was possibly sixty. She was bent over in a lifelong crouch, and one side of her back humped far above her shoulder. She had shimmering blue eyes and soft, snow-white hair and a radiance like the sun. She was, at the moment, as always, surrounded by a pack of vizsla dogs—not one of which could Morath distinguish from another but which, as the baroness liked to tell her guests, belonged to a vast, capricious, bumptious family who lived out an unending romantic epic in the house and garden. Korto, bred to Fina, loved Malya, his daughter by the gallant and long-departed Moselda. Of course, for the integrity of the line, they could never “be together,” so, in heat, the exquisite Malya was sent to live in the kitchen whilst poor Korto lay about on the garden gravel with his chin slumped atop his forepaws or stood on his hind legs, peered myopically through the windows, and barked until the maid threw a rag at him.

Now they stormed around Morath’s legs and he bent to run his hands along the satin skin of their sides.

“Yes,” said the baroness, “here’s your friend Nicholas.”

The vizslas were fast, Morath got a wet kiss on the eye and never saw it coming.

“Korto!”

“No, no. I’m flattered.”

The dog smacked his forepaws against the ground.

“What, Korto, you want to hunt?”

Morath roughed him up a little and he mewed with pleasure.

“Go to the forest?”

Korto danced sideways—
chase me.

“A bear? That would be best?”

“He would not run away,” the baroness said. Then, to the dog, “Would you?”

Korto wagged his tail, Morath stood up, then joined the baroness at the table.

“Pure courage,” she said. “And the last five minutes of his life would be the best.” The maid approached, pushing a glass-topped cart with a squeaky wheel. She set a tray of pastries on the table, poured a cup of tea and set it down by Morath. Silver tongs in hand, the baroness looked over the pastries. “Let’s see . . .”

A doughy roll, folded over itself, with walnuts and raisins. The lightly sugared crust was still warm from the oven.

“And so?”

“Like the Café Ruszwurm. Better.”

For that lie, a gracious nod from the baroness. Below the table, many dogs. “You must wait, darlings,” the baroness said. Her smile was tolerant, infinitely kind. Morath had once visited at midmorning and counted twenty pieces of buttered toast on the baroness’s breakfast tray.

“I was in Budapest last week,” she said.

“How was it?”

“Tense, I should say. Underneath all the usual commotion. I saw your mother and sister.”

“How are they?”

“In good health. Teresa’s oldest girl may go to school in Switzerland.”

“Maybe for the best.”

“Maybe. They send you their love. You will write to them.”

“I will.”

“Your mother told me that Eva Zameny has left her husband.” She and Morath had, long ago, been engaged to marry.

“I am sorry.”

The baroness’s expression indicated she wasn’t. “For the best. Her husband was a hound. And he gambled terribly.”

A bell—the kind worked by pulling a cord—rang in the house. “That will be your uncle.”

There were other guests. The women in hats with veils, bolero jackets, and the black and white polka-dot dresses that were popular in springtime. Former citizens of the Dual Monarchy, the guests spoke the Austrian dialect with High German flourishes, Hungarian, and French, shifting effortlessly between languages when only a very particular expression would say what they meant. The men were well barbered and used good cologne. Two of them wore decorations, one a black and gold ribbon beneath a medal marked K.u.K.—
Kaiser und Königlich,
meaning “Imperial and Regal,” the Dual Monarchy; the other awarded for service in the Russo-Polish war of 1920. A refined group, very courteous, it was hard to tell who was rich and who wasn’t.

Morath and Polanyi stood by a large boxwood at a corner of the garden wall, holding their cups and saucers.

“Christ, I’d like a drink,” Polanyi said.

“We can go somewhere, after this.”

“I’m afraid I can’t. I have cocktails with the Finns, dinner with the Venezuelan foreign minister, Flores, up in the sixteenth.”

Morath nodded, sympathetic.

“No, not Flores.” Polanyi compressed his lips, annoyed at the lapse. “Montemayor, I should’ve said. Flores is, pfft.”

“Any news of home?”

“It’s what you passed along to me, when you came back from Antwerp. And worse.”