Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst Read Free Book Online Page A

friend.
    Then he told Morath where to be, and when.
    Two days later, now it was Friday. A busy afternoon at the Louvre. Morath had to work to find the right room—up the stairs here in order to go down the stairs there, past Napoleon’s swag from Egypt, past rooms of small, puzzling Roman things, around a corner and down an endless corridor of British schoolboys. At last,
the room with the Ingres portrait.
A luminous nude, seated at a table, her back curved and soft.
    A man rose from a bench against the wall, smiled, and spread his hands in welcome. He knew who Morath was, had probably looked him over at the café. A handsome gentleman, portly, with a Vandyke beard and a tweed suit. Something like, Morath thought, the owner of a prosperous art gallery. He had, apparently, a colleague, standing on the other side of the room and staring at a painting, hands clasped behind his back. Morath saw them exchange a glance. White as chalk, this man, as though missing a lifelong beard, he wore a black homburg set square on a shaved head.
    The man who looked like an art dealer sat next to Morath on the wooden bench. “I’m told that you are seeking a document of the finest quality,” he said. He spoke French like an educated German.
    “I am.”
    “That would be a corpse.”
    “All right.”
    “You are buying from the family of the deceased, naturally, and they will want twenty-five hundred francs. For our work, for the change of identity, it is another thousand francs. Can we agree?”
    “Yes.”
    The art dealer opened a newspaper, revealing a report of a polo match in the Bois de Boulogne and a passport in a cardboard folder. “The family wishes to sell immediately. The nationality of the passport is Roumanian, and has seventeen months to run.” The head in the identification photograph was of a man in middle years, formal, self-satisfied, his dark mustache carefully clipped and groomed. Below it, the name
Andreas Panea.
    “I will pay you now, if you like.”
    “Half now. Half when we give you the finished product. Your photo goes in place of the deceased, the raised lettering on the photo is provided by the technician. The physical description is washed out and your own put in. The one thing that can’t be changed is the place of birth—that’s on the seal. So, the bearer of the document will be called this name, is of Roumanian nationality, and was born in Cluj.”
    “What happened to him?”
    The art dealer stared for a moment.
Why are you concerned with that?
Then he said, “Nothing dramatic.” And, a moment later, “He came to the end of caring. It is quite common.”
    “Here’s the photograph,” Morath said.
    The art dealer was mildly surprised. It wasn’t Morath. A man in his twenties, a hard, bony face made even more severe by steel-rimmed spectacles and hair cut back to a colorless inch and brushed flat. A student, perhaps. At best, that. Given a passing grade by his professors whether he attended the lectures or not. The art dealer turned the photo over. Stamped on the back was the name of the photography studio, in Serbo-Croatian, and the word
Zagreb.
    The art dealer signaled to his friend, who joined them on the bench, took the photograph, and studied it for a long minute, then said something in Yiddish. Morath, who spoke fluent German, would ordinarily have gotten the sense of it but this was argot of some kind, spoken rapidly, the tone sarcastic.
    The art dealer nodded, almost smiled.
    “Can the bearer work?” Morath asked.
    “In Roumania. Not here. Here he could apply to work, but . . .”
    “And, if it should be checked with the Roumanian authority?”
    “Why would it be checked?”
    Morath didn’t answer.
    The man wearing the homburg took a stub of pencil from his pocket and asked a question, again in Yiddish.
    “He wants to know, how tall, how much does he weigh?”
    Morath gave him the numbers—lean, shorter than average.
    “Eyes?”
    “Gray. The hair is blond.”
    “Identifying