Midnight in Europe Read Online Free PDF Page B

Roumanian and Serbo-Croatian. Among the top five in his graduating class, he was hired as an associate by Coudert Frères, the first interview in his search for a position as a lawyer. By the age of twenty-nine he was made a junior partner and, six years later, a senior partner.
    6 January, 1938. The Coudert Frères office was in a handsome old building at 52, avenue des Champs-Elysées, a prominent address for a prominent clientele. On the list of clients could be found Whitneys, Drexels, Guggenheims, Vanderbilts, Gulbenkians, Wanamakers, and many others. But the interior echoed the style of the New York office: well-aged furniture—simple wooden desks and filing cabinets, battered oak desk-chairs on wheels—and a floorthat was no color beyond dark and creaked underfoot. This absence of pretension spoke well of Coudert: a long-established, honorable firm, it was said that you could sense probity, the legal version of “integrity,” when you walked through the door.
    The office of the managing partner, George Barabee, was no exception, its only decoration a group portrait of eight Coudert partners painted in 1889, ten years after the firm was established in Paris. Four seated lawyers, four standing behind them, most bewhiskered in the style of the day—thick muttonchop sideburns; full, well-tailored beards—all the subjects looking terribly stiff and dignified, a portrait genre known waggishly as a treeful of owls .
    Barabee had tousled fair hair, wore tortoiseshell eyeglasses, his body thick and broad in the way of a former athlete; he’d played football at Princeton. Graduating from the Columbia Law School in 1916, he was admitted to the New York bar, then flew fighter planes over France when the American Expeditionary Force joined the war against Germany. On the inside of his right forearm was a puckered burn scar, the result of being shot down over a cow pasture where he’d managed to land the burning Spad. He’d stayed in Paris after the war and gone to work for Coudert, in time becoming managing partner, a position that required social contact with prominent people in the city, a job he described as both his duty and his pleasure. Thus he joined clubs, went to state dinners, played squash once a week with J. J. Wilkinson, the second secretary of the American embassy.
    On the evening of the seventh, Barabee leaned back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. It was quiet in the office—except for taxi drivers honking their horns out on the avenue—the end of the day; he was tired, he wanted to go home, he wanted a drink. But one more problem had to be dealt with and, seated across from him, Cristián Ferrar lit a cigarette and opened a file folder he’d brought to Barabee’s office.
    “What’s our history with these clients?” Barabee said.
    “In 1932 we advised the Union of Hungarian Credit Associationson a bond issue. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, one of the members, a small private bank in Budapest called First Danubian Trust, saw trouble coming in central Europe and retained us. They wanted to know if they could transfer their incorporation to France while the physical bank stayed in Budapest. We didn’t believe the French would accept that, but what we could do, and ultimately did, was create a French holding company. Thus the bank in Budapest is controlled from Paris; the holding company essentially owns it in every respect and protects it from being taken over, in case things go very wrong in the political future, by the Hungarian government.”
    “In fact, things are going wrong all over Europe. So, a small private bank—family owned, I would imagine.”
    “It is. Owned by two brothers called Polanyi—nobility, one of them is a count, a diplomat at the Hungarian legation in Paris—and a sister who married a man called Belesz.”
    “And then?”
    “One of the bank’s accounts was a large commercial hotel near the railway station in Budapest. When it became clear that the hotel