Alan Furst: Kingdom of Shadows

“I can manage,” Morath said.

He walked up four flights of stairs, the carpet old and frayed. Just a commercial hotel, he thought. Like hundreds in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, anywhere one went. He found 403 and unlocked the door. An edelweiss pattern on the limp curtains and the coverlet on the narrow bed. Pale green walls, hushed, still air. Very quiet in this hotel.

He decided to take a walk, let them have a look at his valise. He handed the key to the owner at the desk and went out onto the Mauerplatz. At a newsstand he glanced at the headlines. POLAND THREATENS BOMBARDMENT OF DANZIG! Then bought a sport magazine, youths playing volleyball on the cover. A genteel neighborhood, he thought. Sturdy, brick apartments, women with baby carriages, a trolley line, a school where he could hear children singing, a smiling grocer in the doorway of his store, a little man who looked like a weasel sitting at the wheel of a battered Opel. Back at the Schoenhof, Morath retrieved his key and walked upstairs, past the fourth floor, up to the fifth. In the corridor, a heavy man with a red face sat on a chair tipped back against the wall. He stood when he saw Morath.

“What do you want up here?”

“I’m in room 403.”

“Then you’re on the wrong floor.”

“Oh. What’s up here?”

“Reserved,” the man said, “get moving.”

Morath apologized and hurried away. Very close, he thought. Ten rooms on the fifth floor, Kolovitzky was a prisoner in one of them.

Three in the morning. Morath lay on the bed in the dark room, sometimes a breeze from the Mauerplatz moved the curtains. Otherwise, silence. After dinner there’d been a street musician on the square, playing an accordion and singing. Then he’d listened to the radio on the night table, Liszt and Schubert, until midnight, when the national radio station went off the air. Not completely off the air-they played the ticking of a metronome until dawn. To reassure people, it was said.

Morath gazed at the ceiling. He’d been lying there for three hours with nothing to do but wait, had thought about almost everything he could think of. His life. Mary Day. The war. Uncle Janos. He missed Polanyi, it surprised him how much. Echezeaux and bay rum. The amiable contempt he felt for the world he had to live in. And his final trick. Here, you try it.

He wondered about the other guests in the hotel-the real ones, not the SS. They’d been easy enough to spot in the dining room, trying to eat the awful dinner. He’d mostly pushed noodles from one side of his plate to the other, kept an eye on the waiter, and figured out how the downstairs worked. As for the guests, he believed they would survive. Hoped they would.

From a church, somewhere in the neighborhood, the single chime for the half hour. Morath sighed and swung his legs off the bed. Put on his jacket, pulled his tie up. Then he took the stays from the envelope Szubl had given him. Celluloid. Made of soluble guncotton and camphor.

He took a deep breath and slowly turned the knob on his door, listened for twenty seconds, and stepped out into the hallway. He descended the staircase one slow step at a time. Somebody coughing on the third floor, a light under a door on the second.

A few steps from the bottom-the reception area-he stared out into the gloom. There had to be a guard. Where? Finally, he made out part of a silhouette above the back of a couch and heard the shallow breathing that meant light sleep. Morath moved cautiously around the newel post at the foot of the staircase, entered the dining room, then the hallway where the waiter had appeared and disappeared during dinner.

Finally, the kitchen. He lit a match, looked around, then blew it out. There was a streetlamp in the alley, not far from the windows, enough light for Morath to see what he was doing. He found the sinks-big, heavy tubs made of gray zinc-knelt on the floor below them and ran his fingertips over the cement. Found the grease trap, realized he’d have trouble prying up the lid, and abandoned the idea.

Next he tried the stove, and here he found what he needed. In a cabinet next to the oven door, a large metal can that had once contained lard was now used to store the grease poured from cooking pans. It was surprisingly heavy, maybe twenty pounds of yellow, rancid fat, mostly congealed, with an inch or so of oil floating on top. Sausages, butter, bacon, he thought. Roast goose.

He looked around, saw an iron ring above the stove where implements were hung, carefully removed a giant ladle, and served up a heaping scoop of thick fat. Took a handful, and smeared it on the wooden countertop. Worked it onto the walls and the window frames and the doors of the cabinets. Then he laid the can on its side in one corner, sunk the corset stays halfway into the fat, lit a match, and tossed it in.

The celluloid caught immediately; a hot, white flash, then the fat sputtered to life and a little river of liquid fire ran across the floor and began to burn its way up the wall. A few moments later, he saw the ceiling start to turn black.

Now he had to wait. He found a broom closet by the entrance to the kitchen, stepped inside, and closed the door. Barely room for him in there, he discovered. He counted eleven brooms. What the hell were they doing with so many brooms?

He told himself to stay calm, but the crackling sound from the kitchen and the smell of fire made his pulse race. Tried to count to a hundred and twenty, as he’d planned, but he never got there. He did not mean to die in a Viennese broom closet. He threw the door open and hurried down the hallway through a haze of oily smoke.

He heard a shout from the guard in the lobby, then another. Christ, there’d been two of them in there. “Fire!” he yelled as he ran up the stairs. He could hear doors opening, running footsteps.

Second floor. Third floor. Now he had to trust that the Austrian SS guards changed shifts like everybody else. Halfway up the stairs to the fifth floor he started yelling, “Police! Police!”

A bullet-headed man in his shirtsleeves came charging down the corridor, a Luger in his hand. “What’s happening?”

“Open these doors. The hotel’s on fire.”

“What?” The man backed up a step. Open the doors?

“Hurry up. You have the keys? Give them to me. Go, now, run, for God’s sake!”

“I have to-”

Morath the policeman had no time for him. Grabbed him by the shirt and ran him down the hall. “Go wake up your officers. Now. We don’t have time for monkey business.”

That, for whatever reason, did it. The man shoved the Luger into a shoulder holster and went bounding down the steps, shouting “Fire!” as he went.

Morath started opening doors-the room numbers, thank God, were on the keys. The first room was empty. In the second, one of the SS men, who sat up in bed and stared at Morath in terror. “What? What is it?”

“The hotel’s on fire. You better get out.”

“Oh.”

Relieved that it was only the hotel on fire. What had he thought?

There was smoke in the hallway. The SS man trotted past, wearing candy-striped pajamas and carrying a machine pistol by its strap. Morath found another empty room, then, next door, Kolovitzky, struggling to open the window.

“Not like that,” Morath said. “Come with me.”

Kolovitzky turned toward him. He wasn’t the same man who’d played the violin at the baroness’s party, this man was old and tired and frightened, wearing suspenders and a soiled shirt. He studied Morath’s face-was this some new trick, one they hadn’t tried on him yet?

“I came here for you,” Morath said. “I burned down this hotel for you.”

Kolovitzky understood. “Blanche,” he said.