Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst Page A

But almost all of them were farther away from the shooting than M. Coupin. The exception was a couple, a man and a woman, strolling arm in arm on a gravel path. The detectives watched the park for several days but the couple did not reappear, and, despite a plea in the story that ran in the newspapers, did not contact the
préfecture.
    “Extraordinary,” Count Polanyi said. He meant a soft waffle, folded into a conical shape so that a ball of vanilla ice cream rested on top. “One can eat it while walking.”
    Morath had met his uncle at the zoo, where a
glacier
by the restaurant offered the ice cream and waffle. It was very hot, Polanyi wore a silk suit and a straw hat. They strolled past a llama, then a lion, the zoo smell strong in the afternoon sun.
    “Do you see the papers, Nicholas, down there?”
    Morath said he did.
    “The Paris papers?”
    “Sometimes
Figaro,
when they have it.”
    Polanyi stopped for a moment and took a cautious taste of the ice cream, holding his pocket handkerchief under the small end of the waffle so that it didn’t drip on his shoes. “Plenty of politics, while you were away,” he said. “Mostly in Czechoslovakia.”
    “I read some of it.”
    “It felt like 1914—events overtaking politicians. What happened was this: Hitler moved ten divisions to the Czech border. At night. But they caught him at it. The Czechs mobilized—unlike the Austrians, who just sat there and waited for it to happen—and the French and British diplomats in Berlin went wild.
This means war!
In the end, he backed down.”
    “For the time being.”
    “That’s true, he won’t give it up, he hates the Czechs. Calls them ‘a miserable pygmy race without culture.’ So, he’ll find a way. And he’ll pull us in with him, if he can. And the Poles. The way he’s going to sell it, we’re simply three nations settling territorial issues with a fourth.”
    “Business as usual.”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, down where I was, nobody had any doubts about the future. War is coming, we’re all going to die, there is only tonight . . .”
    Polanyi frowned. “It seems a great indulgence to me, that sort of thing.” He stopped to have some more ice cream. “By the way, have you had any luck, finding a companion for my friend?”
    “Not yet.”
    “As long as you’re at it, it occurs to me that the lovebirds will need a love nest. Very private, of course, and discreet.”
    Morath thought it over.
    “It will have to be in somebody’s name,” Polanyi said.
    “Mine?”
    “No. Why don’t you ask our friend Szubl?”
    “Szubl and Mitten.”
    Polanyi laughed. “Yes.” The two men had shared a room, and the hardships of émigré life, for as long as anyone could remember.
    “I’ll ask them,” Morath said.
    They walked for a time, through the Ménagerie, into the gardens. They could hear train whistles from the Gare d’Austerlitz. Polanyi finished his ice cream. “I’ve been wondering,” Morath said, “what became of the man I brought to Paris.”
    Polanyi shrugged. “Myself, I make it a point not to know things like that.”
    It wasn’t hard to see Szubl and Mitten. Morath invited them to lunch. A Lyonnais restaurant, he decided, where a
grand déjeuner
would keep you going for weeks. They were famously poor, Szubl and Mitten. A few years earlier, there’d been a rumor that only one of them could go out at night, since they shared ownership of a single, ash-black suit.
    Morath got there early, Wolfi Szubl was waiting for him. A heavy man, fifty or so, with a long, lugubrious face and red-rimmed eyes and a back bent by years of carrying sample cases of ladies’ foundation garments to every town in Mitteleuropa. Szubl was a blend of nationalities—he never said exactly which ones they were. Herbert Mitten was a Transylvanian Jew, born in Cluj when it was still in Hungary. Their papers, and their lives, were like dead leaves of the old empire, for years blown aimlessly up and down the streets of a dozen