Alan Furst: Kingdom of Shadows

“Well,” said Hooryckx. “What do the dots mean?”

“Two swans …” Courtmain said, letting his voice trail away. “No words can describe the delicacy, the loveliness of the moment.”

“Shouldn’t they be swimming?” Hooryckx said.

Courtmain reached into his briefcase and brought out the swimming version. His copy chief had warned him this would happen. Now the swans made ripples in a pond as they floated past a clump of reeds.

Hooryckx compressed his lips.

“I like them flying,” the son-in-law said. “More chic, no?”

“How about it?” Hooryckx said to Morath.

“It’s sold to women,” Morath said.

“So?”

“It’s what they feel when they use it.”

Hooryckx stared, back and forth, from one image to the other. “Of course,” he said, “swans sometimes fly.”

After a moment, Morath nodded. Of course.

Courtmain brought forth another version. Swans flying, this time in a sky turned aquamarine.

“Phoo,” Hooryckx said.

Courtmain whipped it away.

The son-in-law suggested a cloud, a subtle one, no more than a wash in the blue field. Courtmain thought it over. “Very expensive,” he said.

“But an excellent idea, Louis,” Hooryckx said. “I can see it.”

Hooryckx tapped his fingers on the desk. “It’s good when they fly, but I miss that curve in the neck.”

“We can try it,” Courtmain said.

Hooryckx stared for a few seconds. “No, better this way.”

After lunch, Courtmain went off to see a prospective client, and Morath headed for the central commercial district-to a shop called Homme du Monde, man about town, its window occupied by suave mannequins in tuxedos. Much too warm inside, where a clerk was on her knees with a mouthful of pins, fitting a customer for a pair of evening trousers.

“Madame Golsztahn?” Morath said.

“A moment, monsieur.”

A curtain at the rear of the shop was moved aside, and Madame Golsztahn appeared. “Yes?”

“I came up from Paris this morning.”

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Come in back.”

Behind the curtain, a man was pressing pants, working a foot pedal that produced a loud hiss and a puff of steam. Madame Golsztahn led Morath down a long rack of tuxedos and tailcoats to a battered desk, its cubbyholes packed with receipts. They had never met before, but Morath knew who she was. She’d been famous for love affairs, in her younger days in Budapest, the subject of poems in little journals, the cause of two or three scandals and a rumored suicide from the Elizabeth Bridge. He felt it, standing next to her. Like the current in a river. A ruined face and stark, brick-red hair above a dancer’s body in a tight black sweater and skirt. She gave him a tart smile, read him like a book, wouldn’t have minded, then swept the hair back off her forehead. There was a radio playing, Schumann maybe, violins, something exceptionally gooey, and, every few seconds, a loud hiss from the steam press. “So then,” she said, before anything actually happened.

“Should we go to a cafe?”

“Here would be best.”

They sat side by side at the desk, she lit a cigarette and held it between her lips, squinting as the smoke drifted into her eyes. She found one of the receipts, turned it over, and smoothed it flat with her hands. Morath could see a few letters and numbers, some circled. “Mnemonics,” she said. “Now all I have to do is remember how it works.”

“All right,” she said at last, “here is your uncle’s friend in Budapest, to be known as ‘a senior police official.’ He states that ‘as of 10 March, evidence points to intense activity among all sectors of the nyilas community.’ ” Neelosh -her voice was determinedly neutral. It meant the Arrow Cross, pure Hitlerite fascists; the E.M.E., which specialized in bomb attacks against Jewish women; the Kereszteny Kurzus, Chritian Course, which meant so much more than “Christian”; and various others, great and small.

“On the fifth of March,” she said, “a fire in a shed in the Eighth District, Csikago “-Chicago, as in factories and gangsters-“police inspectors were called when rifles and pistols were found to have been stored there.”

She coughed, covering her mouth with the back of her hand, and rested the cigarette among a line of brown scars on the edge of the desk. “An Arrow Cross member, by trade a cabinetmaker, detained for defacing public property, was found in possession of the home telephone number of the German economic attache. A police informer in Szeged, murdered on the sixth of March. Eight young men, members of the Turul student association, observed carrying out a surveillance of the army barracks at Arad. A furniture-mover’s truck, parked in an alley by the south railroad station, was searched by police on information received from the estranged wife of the driver. A Berthier heavy machine gun was found, with eighty-five belts of ammunition.”

“I’m going to have to make notes,” Morath said.

Golsztahn’s eyes met his. “You aren’t going anywhere, are you?” She paused. “East?”

Morath shook his head. “Just to Paris. Tonight.”

She handed him an unused rental receipt. “Use the back. The police official notes that a report of these events has been routed, in the customary way, to the office of Colonel Sombor in the Hungarian legation in Paris.”

“A minute,” Morath said. He was almost caught up. Sombor had something to do with security at the legation-the same name as the head of the secret police, taken from a town in the south of Hungary. This usually meant Hungarians of German, Saxon, ancestry.

When he looked up, she continued. “An Arrow Cross informant reports that several of his colleagues are preparing to send their families out of the city the first week in May. And …” She peered closely at the top of the receipt. “What?” she said, then, “Oh. Two known agents of the German intelligence service, the SD, had in their room at the Hotel Gellert photographs of the architectural blueprints of the Water District police station and the Palace of Justice. The police official states finally that there are further instances of this kind of activity, some three dozen, that point to a political action in the near future.”

It was quiet on the evening train to Paris. Courtmain worked, jotting notes on a tablet, and Morath read the newspaper. The leading stories continued to focus on Austria and the Anschluss. The British politician Churchill, a member of the Tory opposition, was quoted by a political columnist on the editorial page, from a speech given in parliament at the end of February: “Austria has now been laid in thrall, and we do not know whether Czechoslovakia will suffer a similar fate.”

Well, somebody will.

Morath touched the receipt in his pocket. Golsztahn had burned hers in a coffee cup, then poked the ashes apart with the end of a pencil.

Of all the cities, Otto Adler loved Paris the most. He had arrived in the winter of 1937, installed his life-a wife, four children, two cats, and an editorial office-in a big, drafty old house in Saint Germain-en-Laye, where, from a window in his study, he could look out over miles of Parisian rooftops. Paris-the best idea mankind ever had.

“Third time lucky!” was the way his wife put it. Otto Adler had grown up in Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia, in the Baltic German community. After university in Berlin, he came home a Marxist, then spent the decade of his thirties becoming a Social Democrat, a journalist, and a pauper. “When you are that poor,” he’d say, “the only thing left for you is to start a little magazine.” So, Die Aussicht, The Outlook, was born. Not so popular, it turned out, in the tight, Volksdeutsch world of Konigsberg. “This failed postcard painter from Linz will destroy German culture,” he said of Hitler in 1933. Two broken windows, for that, his wife cursed in the butcher shop, and, soon enough, a big, drafty old apartment in Vienna.