Alan Furst - Kingdom of Shadows

Morath loved the Cara of Juan-les-Pins, where the warm air heated her excessively. “We will be up very late tonight,” she would say, “so we will have to rest this afternoon.” A wash in the sulphurous, tepid water that trickled into the rust-stained tub, then sweaty, inspired love on the coarse sheet. Half asleep, they lay beneath the open window, breathing the pine resin on the afternoon wind. At dusk, the cicadas started, and went on until dawn. Sometimes they would take a taxi up to the restaurant on the moyenne corniche above Villefranche, where they brought you bowls of garlicky tapenade and pancakes made of chickpea flour and then, finding you at peace with the world and unable to eat another bite, dinner.

Too proud and Magyar for beach sandals, Morath ran to the sea at noon, burning his feet on the hot pebbles, then treading water and staring out at the flat horizon. He would stay there a long time, numb as a stone, as happy as he ever got, while Cara and Francesca and their friends stretched out on their towels and glistened with coconut oil and talked.

“Half past eight in Juan-les-Pins, half past nine in Prague.” You heard that at the Bar Basque, where people went in the late afternoon to drink white rum. So the shadow was there, darker on some days, lighter on others, and if you didn’t care to take measurements for yourself, the newspapers would do it for you. Going to the little store for a Nice Matin and a Figaro, Morath joined the other addicts, then went to a cafe. The sun was fierce by nine in the morning, the shade of the cafe umbrella cool and secret. “According to Herr Hitler,” he read, ” ‘The Czechs are like bicycle racers-they bow from the waist but down below they never stop kicking.’ ” In June, that was the new, the fashionable, place for the war to start, Czechoslovakia. The Volksdeutsch of the old Austrian provinces, Bohemia and Moravia-the Sudetenland-demanded unification with the Reich. And the incidents, the fires, the assassinations, the marches, were well under way.

Morath turned the page.

Spain was almost finished now-you had to go to page three. The Falange would win, it was only a matter of time. Off the coast, British freighters, supplying Republican ports, were being sunk by Italian fighter planes flying from bases in Majorca. Le Figaro had reproduced a British editorial cartoon: Colonel Blimp says, “Gad sir, it is time we told Franco that if he sinks another 100 British ships, we shall retire from the Mediterranean altogether.”

Morath looked out to sea, a white sail in the distance. The fighting was heavy seventy kilometers north of Valencia, less than a day’s drive from the cafe where he drank his coffee.

Shublin had gone to Spain to fight, but the NKVD kicked him out. “The times we live in,” he said at the Bar Basque one evening. “The rule of the invertebrates.” He was in his thirties, with curly blond hair, a broken nose, and tobacco-stained fingers with oil paint under the nails. “And King Adolf will sit on the throne of Europe.”

“The French will smash him.” Bernhard was German. He had marched in a Communist demonstration in Paris and now he couldn’t go home.

“Still,” said Simon the lawyer. The others looked at him, but he wasn’t going to make a speech. A sad smile, that was it.

The table was at the edge of the dance floor, which was liberally dusted with sand and pine needles brought in by the wind. It blew hard off the sea, smelled like a jetty at low tide, and fluttered the tablecloths. The little band finished playing “Le Tango du Chat” and started up on “Begin the Beguine.”

Bernhard turned to Moni. “You have danced this ‘Beguine’?”

“Oh yes.”

“You have?” Marlene said.

“Yes.”

“When was that?”

“When you weren’t there to see.”

“Oh yes? And when was that ?”

“Dance with me, Nicky,” Sloth said and took him by the arm. They did something not unlike a fox-trot, and the band- Los Tres Hermanos was printed in script on the bass drum-slowed down to accomodate them. She leaned against him, heavy and soft. “Do you stay up late, when you’re here?”

“Sometimes.”

“I do. Montrouchet drinks at night, then he sleeps like the dead.”

They danced for a time.

“You’re lucky to have Cara,” she said.

“Mm.”

“She must be, exciting, to you. I mean, she just is that way, I can feel it.”

“Yes?”

“Sometimes I think about the two of you, in your room.” She laughed. “I’m terrible, aren’t I?”

“Not really.”

“Well, I don’t care if I am. You can even tell her what I said.”

Later, in bed, Cara sat back against the wall, sweat glistening between her breasts and on her stomach. She took a puff of Morath’s Chesterfield and blew out a long stream of smoke. “You’re happy, Nicky?”

“Can’t you tell?”

“Truly?”

“Yes, truly.”

Outside, the fall of waves on the beach. A rush, a silence, then the crash.

The moon was down, hazy gold, waning, in the lower corner of the window, but not for long. Cautiously, careful not to wake Cara, he reached for his watch on a chair by the bed. Three-fifty. Go to sleep. “That knits up the raveled sleeve of care.” Well, it would take some considerable knitting.

Cara was on to him, but that was just too bad. He was doomed to live with a certain heaviness of soul, not despair, but the tiresome weight of pushing back against it. It had cost him a wife, long ago, an engagement that never quite led to marriage, and had ended more than one affair since then. If you made love to a woman it had better make you happy-or else.

Maybe it was the war. He was not the same when he came back-he knew what people could do to each other. It would have been better not to know that, you lived a different life if you didn’t know that. He had read Remarque’s book, All Quiet on the Western Front, three or four times. And, certain passages, again and again. Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way anymore…. Let the months and the years come, they bring me nothing, they can bring me nothing. I am so alone and so without hope that I can confront them without fear.

A German book. Morath had a pretty good idea what Hitler was mining in the hearts of the German veterans. But it was not only about Germany. They had all, British, French, Russian, German, Hungarian, and the rest, been poured into the grinding machine. Where some of them died, and some of them died inside themselves. Who, he wondered, survived?

But who ever did? He didn’t know. The point was to get up in the morning. To see what might happen, good or bad, a red/black wager. But, even so, a friend of his used to say, it was probably a good idea that you couldn’t commit suicide by counting to ten and saying now.

Very carefully, he slid out of bed, put on a pair of cotton pants, crept downstairs, opened the door, and stood in the doorway. A silver line of wave swelled, then rolled over and vanished. Somebody laughed on the beach, somebody drunk, who just didn’t care. He could see, barely, if he squinted, the glow of a dying fire and a few silhouettes in the gloom. A whispered shout, another laugh.

Paris. 15 June.

Otto Adler settled in a chair in the Jardin du Luxembourg, just across from the round pool where children came with their sailboats. He folded his hands behind his head and studied the clouds, white and towering, sharp against the clear sky. Maybe a thunderstorm by late afternoon, he thought. It was hot enough, unseasonal, and he would have looked forward to it but for the few centimes it would cost him to seek refuge in the cafe on the rue de Medecis. He couldn’t afford a few centimes.