Alan Furst - Kingdom of Shadows

Dinner was exceptional. Deviled carp with onions, cabbage stuffed with ground pork, and a Medoc from the Duchazy estates near Eger.

After dinner, Teresa left the men to themselves, and Morath and Duchazy sat by the fire. Cigars were lit, and for a time they smoked in companionable silence. “One thing I did want to ask you,” Duchazy said.

“Yes?”

“A few of us have gotten together to support Szalassy. Can I put you down for a contribution?” Szalassy was one of the leaders of the Arrow Cross.

“Thank you for asking, but not right now,” Morath said.

“Mmm. Oh well, I promised some people I’d ask.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Do you ever see Colonel Sombor, at the legation?”

“I’m hardly ever there.”

“Oh. He asked for you. I thought maybe you were friends.”

Tuesday. In the late afternoon, Morath took a trolley to the Kobanya district, where factory walls rose high above the track on both sides of the street. There was a smoky haze, as evening came on, and a light rain dappled the surface of the river. A young woman sat across from him, she had the liquid radiance of some Hungarian girls and long hair that blew across her face as the trolley went around a curve. She swept it back with one hand and glanced at Morath. The trolley stopped in front of a brewery, and the girl got off in a crowd of workmen. Some of them knew her, called her by name, and one of them gave her a hand down from the high step.

The slaughterhouse was at the next stop, where a metal sign bolted to the brickwork said GERSOVICZY. When Morath got off the trolley, the air was like ammonia and made his eyes water. It was a long way to the entrance that led to the office, past loading docks with open doors where he could see red carcasses hung on hooks and butchers in leather aprons. One of them rested a sledgehammer in the sawdust, the iron head beaten flat at both ends, while he took a minute to smoke a cigarette.

“The office?”

“Upstairs. Just keep going till you see the river.”

In the Gersoviczy brothers’ office there was a desk with a telephone and an adding machine, an ancient safe in one corner, a clothes tree behind the door. The brothers were waiting for him. They wore black homburgs and heavy suits and silver ties, and they had the long sidelocks and beards of Orthodox Jews. On the wall was a Hebrew calendar with a picture of a rabbi blowing a ram’s horn. Across the top it said, in Hungarian, Gersoviczy Brothers Wish You a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

A soot-blackened window looked out over the Danube, lights twinkling on a hill above the far bank. The brothers, both smoking oval cigarettes, peered at Morath through the gloom of the unlit office.

“You are Morath Uhr ?” He used the traditional form of address, Morath Sir.

“Yes. Count Polanyi’s nephew.”

“Please do sit down. I’m sorry we cannot offer you anything.”

Morath and the older brother, his beard streaked with silver, took the two wooden swivel chairs, as the younger brother leaned on the edge of the desk. “I am Szimon Gersoviczy,” he said. “And this is Herschel.” The older brother gave him a stiff nod.

Szimon spoke heavily accented Hungarian. “We’re Polish,” he explained. “From Tarnopol, twenty years ago. Then we came down here. Half of Galicia came here, a hundred years ago. We came for the same reason, to get away from the pogroms, to get a little opportunity. And it worked out like that. So, we stayed, and we Magyarized the name. It used to be just Gersovicz.”

The older brother finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in a tin ashtray. “Your uncle came to us for help, that was in September. I don’t know if he told you.”

“Not then, no.”

“Well, he did. Through our brother-in-law, in Paris. He asked if we would help, help the country. He saw the handwriting on the wall, as they say.”

He paused a moment. Outside, the drumming of a tugboat engine, hauling a line of barges north on the river.

“We don’t ask for anything,” he went on, “but now Polanyi knows, and you know, so …”

Szimon went over to the safe and began to work the combination. Then he pulled the handles to the up position and swung the doors open. Herschel leaned close to Morath. He smelled strong, of sweat and onions, cigarettes.

“It’s in pengo,” he said. “Maybe if the community was more involved, we could make it in something else. But the Count wanted it kept close, so it’s just a few people. Szimon and me, our family, you know, one or two others, but mostly us.”

Szimon began stacking piles of pengo on the desk, each fifty notes pinned at the corner. He flipped the ends of the stacks, wet his thumb, then counted in Yiddish as he shuffled through the bills. Herschel laughed. “For some reason,” he said, “it’s hard to do that in Hungarian.”

Morath shook his head. “Nobody ever thought it would come to this,” he said.

“Forgive me, sir, but it always comes to this.”

“ Zvei hundrit toizend, ” Szimon said.

“What will you call it?”

“I don’t know. The Free Hungary Committee-something like that.”

“In Paris?”

“Or London. If the country is occupied, the best place is the closest place. Closest safe place.”

“So, do you like New York?”

“God forbid.”

Szimon finished counting, then squared the stacks off by tapping the edges on the desk. “Four hundred thousand pengo,” he said. “About the same in French francs. Or, just in case God doesn’t forbid, eighty thousand dollars.”

“Tell me one thing,” Herschel said. “Do you think the country will be occupied? Some people say sell and get out.”

“And lose everything,” Szimon said. He slid the money across the desk-thousand-pengo notes, wider than French currency, with black and red engravings of Saint Istvan on one side and a castle on the other. Morath opened a briefcase, placed the stacks on the bottom, put Freya Stark on top.

“Don’t we have rubber bands?” Herschel said.

Morath pulled the straps tight and buckled them. Then he shook hands, very formally, with each of the brothers. “Go with God,” Herschel said.

That night, he met Wolfi Szubl at the Arizona, a nachtlokal in Szint Josef Alley on Margaret Island. Szubl wore a pale-blue suit and a flowery tie and smelled of heliotrope. “You never know,” he said to Morath. “It gets very late at night here.”

“Wolfi,” Morath said, shaking his head.

“There’s someone for everyone,” Szubl said.

Szubl led him to a table on a platform by the wall, then pressed a button which raised them ten feet. “Here it’s good.” They shouted down to a waiter for drinks, Polish vodkas, that came up on a mechanical tray.

The orchestra was dressed in white tuxedos and played Cole Porter songs to a packed dance floor, which sometimes disappeared into the basement to a chorus of shrieks and laughter from the dancers.

A naked girl floated past in a harness, dark hair streaming out behind her. Her pose was artistic, lofty, an insouciant hand resting against the wire that hung from the ceiling.

“Ahh,” Szubl said.

“You like her?”

Szubl grinned-who wouldn’t?

“Why ‘Arizona’?” Morath asked.

“The couple who own it got an unexpected inheritance, a fortune, from an uncle in Vienna. Decided to build a nightclub on Margaret Island. When they got the telegram they were in Arizona, so …”

“No. Really?”

Szubl nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Tucson.”

The drinks came. The girl went by again, headed the other way. “You see? She ignores us,” Szubl said.

“She just happened to fly past, naked on a wire. Don’t make assumptions.”