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They send you their love. You will write to them.”
    “I will.”
    “Your mother told me that Eva Zameny has left her husband.” She and Morath had, long ago, been engaged to marry.
    “I am sorry.”
    The baroness’s expression indicated she wasn’t. “For the best. Her husband was a hound. And he gambled terribly.”
    A bell—the kind worked by pulling a cord—rang in the house. “That will be your uncle.”
    There were other guests. The women in hats with veils, bolero jackets, and the black and white polka-dot dresses that were popular in springtime. Former citizens of the Dual Monarchy, the guests spoke the Austrian dialect with High German flourishes, Hungarian, and French, shifting effortlessly between languages when only a very particular expression would say what they meant. The men were well barbered and used good cologne. Two of them wore decorations, one a black and gold ribbon beneath a medal marked K.u.K.—
Kaiser und Königlich,
meaning “Imperial and Regal,” the Dual Monarchy; the other awarded for service in the Russo-Polish war of 1920. A refined group, very courteous, it was hard to tell who was rich and who wasn’t.
    Morath and Polanyi stood by a large boxwood at a corner of the garden wall, holding their cups and saucers.
    “Christ, I’d like a drink,” Polanyi said.
    “We can go somewhere, after this.”
    “I’m afraid I can’t. I have cocktails with the Finns, dinner with the Venezuelan foreign minister, Flores, up in the sixteenth.”
    Morath nodded, sympathetic.
    “No, not Flores.” Polanyi compressed his lips, annoyed at the lapse. “Montemayor, I should’ve said. Flores is, pfft.”
    “Any news of home?”
    “It’s what you passed along to me, when you came back from Antwerp. And worse.”
    “Another Austria?”
    “Not the same way, certainly. We are not
‘Ein volk,’
one people. But the pressure is growing—
be our allies, or else.
” He sighed, shook his head. “Now comes the real nightmare, Nicholas, the one where you see the monster but you can’t run away, you’re frozen in place. I think, more and more, that these people, this German aggression, will finish us, sooner or later. The Austrians pulled us into war in 1914—perhaps some day somebody will tell me precisely
why
we had to do all that. And now, it begins again. In the next day or so, the newspapers will announce that Hungary has come out in favor of the Anschluss. In return, Hitler will guarantee our borders. Quid pro quo, very tidy.”
    “You believe it?”
    “No.” He took a sip of tea. “I’ll amend that. To ‘maybe.’ Hitler is intimidated by Horthy, because Horthy is everything Hitler always wanted to be. Old nobility, aide-de-camp to Franz Josef, war hero, polo player, married into the cream of society. And they both paint. In fact, Horthy has now lasted longer than any other leader in Europe. That has to count for something, Nicholas, right?”
    Polanyi’s face showed exactly what it counted for.
    “So the current unrest . . . will be dealt with?”
    “Not easily, and maybe not at all. We’re facing insurrection. Conservatives out, fascists in, liberals
au poteau.
” The phrase from 1789—to the guillotine.
    Morath was surprised. In Budapest, when the Arrow Cross men dressed up in their uniforms and strutted about the city, the police forced them to strip and sent them home in their underwear. “What about the police? The army?”
    “Uncertain.”
    “Then what?”
    “If Daranyi means to stay in as premier, he’ll have to give them something. Or there will be blood in the streets. So, at the moment, we find ourselves negotiating. And we will be forced, among other things, to do favors.”
    “For who?”
    “Important people.”
    Morath felt it coming. Polanyi, no doubt, meant him to feel it. He set his cup and saucer on a table, reached in his pocket, took a cigarette from a tortoiseshell case and lit it with a silver lighter.
    *
    The last nights of April, but no sign of