Alan Furst - Kingdom of Shadows

Fouquet was packed and noisy, throbbing with life, they had to wait for a table. Mary Day rubbed her hands to get warm. Morath gave a waiter ten francs and he found them a table in the corner. “What would you like?” Morath said.

She thought it over.

“ Garcon, champagne!”

She grinned. “A vermouth, maybe. Martini rouge. ”

Morath ordered a gentiane, Mary Day changed her mind and decided to have the same thing. “I like it, I just never remember to ask for it.” She spent a long moment watching the people around them-Parisian theatre of the night-and from the look on her face took great pleasure in it. “I wrote something about this place, back when, a piece for the Paris Herald. Restaurants with private rooms-what really goes on?”

“What does?”

“Balzac. But not as much as you’d like to think. Little anniversary parties. Birthday. First Communion.”

“You worked for the Herald ?”

“Freelance. Anything and everything, as long as they’d pay for it.”

“Such as …”

“Wine festival in Anjou! Turkish foreign minister feted at the Lumpingtons!”

“Not so easy.”

“Not hard. You need stamina, mostly.”

“Somebody at the office said you wrote books.”

She answered in the tough-guy voice from American gangster movies. “Oh, so you found out about that, did ya?”

“Yes, you’re a novelist.”

“Oh, sort of, maybe. Naughty books, but they pay the rent. I got tired of wine festivals in Anjou, believe it or not, and somebody introduced me to an English publisher-he’s got a little office up in the place Vendome. The kindest man in the world. A Jew, I think, from Birmingham. He was in the textile business, came to France to fight in the war, discovered Paree, and just couldn’t bear to go home. So he started to publish books. Some of them famous, in a certain set, but most of them come in plain brown wrappers, if you know what I mean. A friend of mine calls them ‘books one reads with one hand.’ “

Morath laughed.

“Not so bad, the best of them. There’s one called Tropic of Cancer. ”

“Actually, I think the woman I used to live with read it.”

“Pretty salty.”

“That was her.”

“Then maybe she read Suzette. Or the sequel, Suzette Goes Boating. ”

“Are those yours?”

“D. E. Cameron, is what the jacket says.”

“What are they like?”

” ‘She slipped the straps from her white shoulders and let the shift fall to her waist. The handsome lieutenant …’ “

“Yes? What did he do?”

Mary Day laughed and shook her hair back. “Not much. Mostly it’s about underwear.”

The gentianes arrived, with a dish of salted almonds.

They had two more. And two more after that. She touched his hand with the tips of her fingers.

An hour later, they’d had all of Fouquet they wanted and went off to find dinner. They tried Lucas Carton but it was complet and they didn’t have a reservation. Then they wandered along the rue Marbeuf, found a little place that smelled good, and ate soup and omelettes and Saint Marcellin.

They gossiped about the office. “I have to travel, now and then,” Morath said, “but I like the time I spend in the office, I like what we do-the clients, what they’re trying to sell.”

“It can take over your life.”

“That’s not so bad.”

She tore a piece of bread in half and put some crumbly Saint Marcellin on it. “I don’t mean to pry, but you said ‘the woman I used to live with.’ Is she no more?”

“She left, had to leave. Her father came all the way from Buenos Aires and took her away. He thought we’d be at war by now.”

She ate the bread and cheese. “Do you miss her?”

It took Morath a moment to answer. “Of course I do, we had a good time together.”

“Sometimes that’s the most important thing.”

Morath agreed.

“I lost my friend a year ago. Maybe Courtmain told you.”

“He didn’t, it’s mostly all business with us.”

“It was very sad. We’d lived together for three years-we were never going to get married, it wasn’t like that. But we were in love, most of the time. He was a musician, a guitarist, from a town near Chartres. Classically trained, but he got to playing in the jazz clubs up in Montparnasse and fell in love with the life. Drank too much, smoked opium with his friends, never went to bed until the sun rose. Then, one night, they found him dead in the street.”

“From opium?”

She spread her hands, who knows?

“I am sorry,” Morath said.

Her eyes were shining, she wiped them with a napkin.

They were silent in the taxi, going back to her apartment. She lived on the rue Guisarde, a quiet street in the back of the Sixth Arrondissement. He came around to her side of the cab, opened the door, and helped her out. Standing in the doorway, she raised her face for the good-night bisou on the cheek but it became a little more than that, then a lot, and it went on for a long time. It was very tender, her lips dry and soft, her skin warm beneath his hand. He waited in the doorway until he saw her light go on, then he went off down the street, heart pounding.

He was a long way from home but he wanted to walk. Too good to be true, he told himself. Because the light of day hit these things and they turned to dust. A folie, the French would say, an error of the heart.

He’d been very low since he came back to Paris. The days in Bistrita the cell, the railroad station-it didn’t go away. He woke up at night and thought about it. So he’d sought refuge, distraction, at the Agence Courtmain. And then, an office romance. Everybody was a little in love with Mary Day, why not him?

The streets were cold and dark, the wind hit him hard as he crossed the Pont Royal. On the boulevard, an empty taxi. Morath climbed in. Go back to her apartment? “The rue Richelieu,” he told the driver.

But the next morning, in the light of day, she was wearing a pale gray dress with buttons up the front and a belt that tied, a dress that showed her in a certain way and, when their eyes met for the first time, he knew.

So the letter waiting for him in his mailbox that night brought him down to earth in a hurry. Prefecture de Police, Quai du Marche Neuf, Paris 1 ier. The Monsieur was printed, on the form letter, the Morath, Nicholas written in ink. Would he please present himself at la salle 24 of the prefecture on le 8 Decembre, between the hours of 9 et 12 du matin.

Veuillez accepter, Monsieur, l’expression de nos sentiments distingues.

This happened, from time to time. The summons to the prefecture- a fact of life for every foreigner, a cold front in the bureaucratic weather of the city. Morath hated going there; the worn linoleum and green walls, the gloomy air of the place, the faces of the summoned, each one with its own particular combination of boredom and terror.

Room 24. That was not his usual room, good old 38, where resident foreigners with mild diplomatic connections were seen. What did that mean, he wondered, putting on his best blue suit.

It meant a serious inspector with a hard, square face and military bearing. Very formal, very correct, and very dangerous. He asked for Morath’s papers, made notations on a form. Asked if there had been any changes in his situation: residence, employment, marital status. Asked if he had recently traveled to Roumania.

Morath felt the thin ice. Yes, at the end of October.

Exactly where, in Roumania.

In the district of Cluj.

And?

That was all.