Night Soldiers 02 - Dark Star by Alan Furst

Author:Alan Furst
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307483577
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1990-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

“So pleased you've come,” said a voice from the doorway. He was rather ageless, perhaps in the last years of his fifties, with faded steel-colored hair brushed very flat against the sides of his head. Tall and politely stooped, he was wearing a formal dinner jacket and a bow tie that had gone slightly askew. He'd evidently walked a short distance through the rain without coat or umbrella and was patting his face with a folded handkerchief. “I'm Joseph de Montfried,” he said. He articulated the name carefully, sounding the hard t and separating the two syllables, the latter lightly emphasized, as though it were a difficult name and often mispronounced. Szara was amused—a cultured Frenchman would as likely have gotten the Baron de Rothschild's name wrong. This family too had a baron, Szara knew, but he believed that was the father, or the uncle.

“Do you like the collection? ” Said with sincerity, as though it mattered whether Szara liked it or not.

“It's yours?”

“Part of mine. Most of it's at home, up the street, and I keep some in the country. But the club has been indulgent with me, and I've spared them walls of leatherbound Racine that nobody's ever read.” He laughed self-consciously. “What've you got there?” Szara turned the book's spine toward him. “Karl Borns, yes. A perfect madman, Borns, had his funeral cortege on the Zürich local. The local!” He laughed again. “Please,” he said, indicating that Szara should sit down at one end of a couch. De Montfried took a club chair.

“We'll have supper right here, if you don't mind. Do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. Sandwiches and something to drink. I've got to meet my wife for some beastly charity thing at ten—my days of eating two dinners are long over, I'm afraid.”

Szara did mind. Going upstairs, he'd caught a glimpse of a silk-walled dining room and a glittering array of china and crystal. All that money invested at the barber and the dry cleaner and now sandwiches. He tried to smile like a man who gets all the elaborate dinners he cares to have.

“Shall we stay in French? ” de Montfried asked. “I can try to get along in Russian, but I'm afraid I'll say awful things.”

“You speak Russian?”

“Grew up speaking French en famille and Russian to the servants. My father and uncle built much of the Russian railroad system, then came the revolution and the civil war and most of it was destroyed. Very entrepreneurial place—at one time anyhow. How's it go? ‘Sugar by Brodsky, Tea by Vysotsky, Revolution by Trotsky.' I suppose it's aimed at Jews, but it's reasonably faithful to what happened. Oh well.” He pressed a button on the wall and a waiter appeared almost instantly. De Montfried ordered sandwiches and wine, mentioning only the year, '27. The waiter nodded and closed the door behind him.

They chatted for a time. De Montfried found out quite a bit about him, the way a certain kind of aristocrat seemed able to do without appearing to pry.

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