Kingdom of Shadows Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 café?”
    “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 attaché. A police informer in Szeged, murdered on the sixth of March. Eight young men, members of the
Turul
student