Alan Furst - Kingdom of Shadows

Two days later, a letter at the post office, an address on the edge of Uzhorod, he had to take a droshky. Down streets of packed dirt lined with one-story log houses, each with a single window and a thatched roof. A woman answered his knock on the door. She was dark, with black, curly hair, wore crimson lipstick and a tight, thin dress. Perhaps Roumanian, he thought, or Gypsy. She asked him a question in a language he didn’t recognize.

He tried her in German. “Is Pavlo here?”

She’d expected him, he could sense that; now he’d arrived and she was curious, looked him over carefully. Morath heard a door slam in the house, then a man’s voice. The woman stood aside and Pavlo came to the door. He was one of those people who look very much like their photograph. “Are you the man from Paris?” The question was asked in German. Not good, but serviceable.

“Yes.”

“They took their time, getting you here.”

“Yes? Well, now I’m here.”

Pavlo’s eyes swept the street. “Maybe you’d better come inside.”

The room was crowded with furniture, heavy chairs and couches covered in various patterns and fabrics, much of it red, some of the fabric very good, some not. Morath counted five mirrors on the walls. The woman spoke quietly to Pavlo, glanced over at Morath, then left the room and closed the door.

“She is packing her suitcase,” Pavlo said.

“She’s coming with us?”

“She thinks she is.”

Morath did not show a reaction.

Pavlo took that for disapproval. “Try it sometime,” he said, his voice a little sharp, “life without a passport.” He paused, then, “Have you money for me?”

Morath hesitated-maybe somebody was supposed to give Pavlo money, but it wasn’t him. “I can let you have some,” he said, “until we get to Paris.”

This wasn’t the answer Pavlo wanted, but he was in no position to argue. He was perhaps a few years older than Morath had thought, in his late twenties. He had on a stained blue suit, colorful tie, and scuffed, hard-worn shoes.

Morath counted out a thousand francs. “This should tide you over,” he said.

It was much more than that, but Pavlo didn’t seem to notice. He put eight hundred francs in his pocket and looked around the room. Under a shimmering aquamarine vase with a bouquet of satin tulips in it was a paper doily. Pavlo slid two hundred-franc notes beneath the doily so the edges of the bills were just visible.

“Here’s the passport,” Morath said.

Pavlo looked it over carefully, held it up to the light, squinted at the photograph, and ran a finger over the raised lettering on the edge. Then he shrugged. “It will do,” he said. “Why Roumanian?”

“That’s what I could get.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t speak it. I’m Croatian.”

“That won’t be a problem. We’re going across the Hungarian border. At Michal’an. Are you carrying another passport? I don’t think we have to worry about it, but still …”

“No. I had to rid of it.”

He left the room. Morath could hear him, talking to the woman. When he reappeared, he was carrying a briefcase. Walking behind him, the woman held a cheap valise in both hands. She’d put on a hat, and a coat with a ragged fur collar. Pavlo whispered something to her and kissed her on the forehead. She looked at Morath, her eyes suspicious but hopeful, and sat on a couch, the valise between her feet.

“We’re going out for an hour or so,” Pavlo said to the woman. “Then we’ll be back.”

Morath wanted no part of it.

Pavlo closed the door. Out in the street, he grinned and cast his eyes to heaven.

They walked for a long time before they found a droshky. Morath directed the driver back to the hotel, then Pavlo waited in the room while Morath went to see the proprietor in a tiny office behind the kitchen where he was laboring over a bookkeeper’s ledger. As Morath counted out Czech koruny to pay the bill, he said, “Do you know a driver with a car? As soon as possible-I’ll make it worthwhile.”

The proprietor thought it over. “Are you going,” he said delicately, “some distance away from here?”

He meant, borders.

“Some.”

“We are, as you know, blessed with many neighbors.”

Morath nodded. Hungary, Poland, Roumania.

“We are going to Hungary.”

The proprietor thought it over. “Actually, I do know somebody. He’s a Pole, a quiet fellow. Just what you want, eh?”

“As soon as possible,” Morath said. “We’ll wait in the room, if that’s all right with you.” He didn’t know who was looking for Pavlo, or why, but railroad stations were always watched. Better, a quiet exit from Uzhorod.

The driver appeared in the late afternoon, introduced himself as Mierczak, and offered Morath a hand like tempered steel. Morath sensed a powerful domesticity. “I’m a mechanic at the flour mill,” he said. “But I also do this and that. You know how it is.” He was ageless, with a receding hairline and a genial smile and a British shooting jacket, in houndstooth check, that had somehow wandered into this region in an earlier age.

Morath was actually startled by the car. If you closed one eye it didn’t look so different from the European Fords of the 1930s, but a second look told you it wasn’t anything like a Ford, while a third told you it wasn’t anything. It had lost, for example, all its color. What remained was a shadowy tone of iron, maybe, that faded or darkened depending on what part of the car you looked at.

Mierczak laughed, jiggling the passenger-side door until it opened. “Some car,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“No,” Morath said. He settled down on the horse blanket that had, a long time ago, replaced the upholstery. Pavlo got in the back. The car started easily and drove away from the hotel.

“Actually,” Mierczak said, “it’s not mine. Well, it’s partly mine. Mostly it is to be found with my wife’s cousin. It’s the Mukachevo taxi, and, when he’s not working at the store, he drives it.”

“What is it?”

“What is it,” Mierczak said. “Well, some of it is a Tatra, built in Nesseldorf. After the war, when it became Czechoslovakia. The Type II, they called it. Some name, hey? But that’s that company. Then it burned. The car, I mean. Though, now that I think about it, the factory also burned, but that was later. So, after that, it became a Wartburg. We had a machine shop in Mukachevo, back then, and somebody had left a Wartburg in a ditch, during the war, and it came back to life in the Tatra. But-we didn’t really think about it at the time-it was an old Wartburg. We couldn’t get parts. They didn’t make them or they wouldn’t send them or whatever it was. So, it became then a Skoda.” He pressed the clutch pedal to the floor and revved the engine. “See? Skoda! Just like the machine gun.”

The car had used up the cobblestone part of Uzhorod and was now on packed dirt. “Gentlemen,” Mierczak said. “We’re going to Hungary, according to the innkeeper. But, I must ask if you have a particular place in mind. Or maybe it’s just ‘Hungary.’ If that’s how it is, I perfectly understand, believe me.”

“Could we go to Michal’an?”

“We could. It’s nice and quiet there, as a rule.”

Morath waited. “But …?”

“But even quieter in Zahony.”

“Zahony, then.”

Mierczak nodded. A few minutes later, he turned a sharp corner onto a farm road and shifted down to second gear. It sounded like he’d swung an iron bar against a bathtub. They bumped along the road for a time, twenty miles an hour, maybe, until they had to slow down and work their way around a horse cart.

“What’s it like there?”

“Zahony?”

“Yes.”