Alan Furst - Kingdom of Shadows

“You could stay for a while, if you liked.”

Wolfi sighed. If only he could. “I wonder,” he said, “if you know anybody who needs to make a little money. Maybe one of your ladies has a husband who’s out of work.”

“What would he have to do?”

“Not much. Lend his passport to a friend of mine for a week or so.”

She propped herself on her elbow and looked down at him. “Wolfi, are you in trouble?”

“Not me. The friend pays five hundred American dollars for the loan. So I thought, well, maybe Trudi knows somebody.”

He watched her. Fancied he could hear the ring of a cash-register drawer as she converted the dollars into schilling. “Maybe,” she said. “A woman I know, her husband could use it.”

“How old?”

“The husband?” She shrugged. “Forty-five, maybe. Always problems-she comes to me for a loan, sometimes.”

“Is it possible tonight?”

“I suppose.”

“I’ll give you the money now, Liebchen, and I’ll stop by tomorrow night for the passport.”

28 June. A fine day with bright sunshine, but not a ray of it reached the hunting lodge. Three stories, thirty rooms, a grand hall, all sunk in dark, musty gloom. Morath and Balki had hired a car in Bratislava and driven up into the wooded hills north of the Danube. They were in historical Slovakia-Hungarian territory since 1938-and only a few miles from the Austrian border.

Balki looked around him in a kind of dispirited awe-trophy heads on every wall, their glass eyes glittering in the forest light. Tentatively, he settled himself on the leather cushion of a huge wooden chair with hunting scenes carved into the high back.

“Where giants sat,” he said.

“That’s the idea.”

The old empire lived on, Morath thought. One of the baroness’s pet aristocrats had agreed to loan him the hunting lodge. “So very private, ” he’d said with a wink. It was that. In the Little Carpathians, thick with pines, by a rushing brook that wound past the window and a picturesque waterfall that foamed white over a dark outcropping.

Balki wandered about, gazing up at the terrible paintings. Sicilian maidens caught as they filled amphorae from little streams, Gypsy girls with tambourines, a dyspeptic Napoleon with his hand on a cannon. At the far end of the room, between the stuffed heads of a bear and a tusky wild boar, he stood before a gun cabinet and tapped his fingers on the oiled stock of a rifle. “We’re not going to play with these, are we?”

“We are not.”

“No cowboys and Indians?”

Emphatically, Morath shook his head.

There was even a telephone. Of a sort-easy to imagine Archduke Franz Ferdinand calling his taxidermist: a wooden box on the kitchen wall, with the earpiece on a cord and a black horn in the center into which one could speak. Or shout, more likely. Morath lifted the earpiece from the cradle, heard static, put it back, looked at his watch.

Balki took off his workman’s cap and hung it on an antler. “I’ll come along if you like, Morath.”

That was pure bravery-a Russian going into Austria. “Guard the castle,” Morath said. “Enough that you took vacation days for this, you don’t have to get arrested in the bargain.”

Once again, Morath looked at his watch. “Well, let’s try it,” he said. He lit a cigarette, put the telephone receiver to his ear and tapped the cradle. From the static, an operator speaking Hungarian.

“I’d like to book a call to Austria,” Morath said.

“I can get through right away, sir.”

“In Vienna, 4025.”

Morath heard the phone, a two-ring signal. Then: “Herr Kreml’s office.”

“Is Herr Kreml in?”

“May I say who’s calling?”

“Mr. Stevenson.”

“Hold the line, please.”

Kreml was on right away. A smooth, confident, oily voice. Saying that it was good of him to call. Morath asked after Kolovitzky’s health.

“In excellent spirits!” Well, perhaps a little, how to say, oppressed, what with his various tax difficulties, but that could soon be put right.

“I’m in contact with Madame Kolovitzky, here in Paris,” Morath said. “If the paperwork can be resolved, a bank draft will be sent immediately.”

Kreml went on a little, lawyer’s talk, then mentioned a figure. “In terms of your American currency, Herr Stevenson, I think it would be in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars.”

“The Kolovitzkys are prepared to meet that obligation, Herr Kreml.”

“I’m so pleased,” Kreml said. “And then, in a month or so, once the draft has been processed by our banks, Herr Kolovitzky will be able to leave Austria with a clear conscience.”

“A month, Herr Kreml?”

“Oh, at least that, the way things are here.” The only way to expedite matters, Kreml said, would be to use a rather obscure provision of the tax code, for payments in cash. “That would clear things up immediately, you see.”

Morath saw. “Perhaps the best way,” he said.

Well, that was up to the Kolovitzkys, wasn’t it. “Herr Stevenson, I do want to compliment you on your excellent German. For an American …”

“Actually, Herr Kreml, I was born in Budapest, as Istvanagy. So, after I emigrated to California, I changed it to Stevenson.”

Ah! Of course!

“I will speak with Madame Kolovitzky, Herr Kreml, but please be assured that a cash payment will reach you within the week.”

Kreml was very pleased to hear that. They chattered on for a time. The weather, California, Vienna, then started to say good-bye.

“Oh yes,” Morath said, “there is one more thing. I would very much like to have a word with Herr Kolovitzky.”

“Naturally. Do you have the number of the Hotel Schoenhof?”

“I called there-he seems always to be unavailable.”

“Really? Well, you know, that doesn’t surprise me. An amiable man, Herr Kolovitzky, makes friends everywhere he goes. So, I would suppose he’s in and out, being entertained, sitting in the pastry shops. Have you left a message?”

“Yes.”

“Then what’s the problem? He’ll call you back, the minute he gets a chance. Then too, Herr Stevenson, the telephone lines between here and Paris-it can be difficult.”

“Likely that’s it.”

“I must say good-bye, Herr Stevenson, but I look forward to hearing from you.”

“Be certain that you will.”

“Good-bye, Herr Stevenson.”

“Good-bye, Herr Kreml.”

They drove to Bratislava the next morning, where Morath meant to take the train to Vienna, but it was not to be. Chaos at Central Station, crowds of stranded travelers, all the benches taken, people out on Jaskovy Avenue, sitting on their suitcases. “It’s the Zilina line,” the man at the ticket window explained. All passenger trains had been canceled to make way for flatbed cars carrying Wehrmacht tanks and artillery, moving east in a steady stream. Morath and Balki stood on the platform and stared, in the midst of a silent crowd. Two locomotives pulled forty flatbeds, the long snouts of the guns thrust out from beneath canvas tarpaulins. Twenty minutes later, a trainload of horses in cattle cars, then a troop train, soldiers waving as they went by, a message chalked beneath the coach windows- We’re going to Poland to beat up the Jews.

The town of Zilina lay ten miles from the Polish frontier. It would have a hospital, a hotel for the general staff, a telephone system. Morath’s heart sank as he watched the trains-this was hope slipping away. It could be intimidation, he thought, a feint, but he knew better. Here was the first stage of an invasion-these were the divisions that would attack from Slovakia, breaking through the Carpathian passes into southern Poland.