Heart of Lies (14 page)

It was several moments before he withdrew from her body. Then he took off the rest of his clothes and pressed his naked body to hers. Their kisses overflowed with tenderness now, their passionate demands momentarily sated.

“You are my wife, Martha Levy.”

“And you are my husband, Leopold Hoffman.”

“I missed you so much”

“My love.”

And so their endearments continued, until at last they nestled down in the big four-poster bed, her back curled up against his stomach, his arm beneath her head, and drifted into a sleep of cozy contentment.

He awoke after dark and saw her standing at the window, his shirt wrapped around her like a nightdress, an apparition of extraordinary loveliness bathed in moonlight.

“Consummation,” he whispered, not realizing that he’d spoken aloud.

She turned toward him, smiling.

“What did you say, darling?”

“I said, ‘consummation.’”

Her smile deepened, and she moved closer. “Is that an observation or an invitation?”

“Both.” He sat up and patted the bed next to him. “I was looking at you, and thinking about how lovely you are, and thought again that our lovemaking is the essence of that word—consummation. That’s what I
thought the first time we made love, and it’s still true.” He did not add that he had a generous basis for comparison. There was no reason to hurt Martha with his history.

She sat next to him and tucked her feet under his thighs. “Would it be possible to consume something of a different nature first? For the first time in weeks, I’m hungry.”

“If you insist. Supper will be ready in a moment.” Leo reached over to pull the bell cord that summoned Duo Win, then stopped, his hand in midair, when he realized that no one would be in the kitchen to hear it. Deciphering his movements, Martha laughed.

“I don’t suppose we can give the whole staff the day off every time we make love, can we?”

“Guess not. I would have to make every day a holiday.”

“What a pleasant thought,” she said, abandoning her seated position and curling up next to him.

“House would be a wreck, though,” he added absent-mindedly as she began to stroke his chest. Could he persuade her to wait a few minutes before heading to the kitchen? Then again, why not make love there, too?

Leo did not get the opportunity to make this suggestion. Martha bolted upright, eyes full of anxiety. “Leo, what is going on? How could you afford all this? What have you been doing for the past six months? How do you go from being a concierge to lord and master of a place like this?”

Because I killed, and stole, and gambled. Because I had to find a way of staying alive and out of prison, to be with you again. Because I had to have money to protect you and make you happy. But would you, could you, still love me, knowing what I have done?
No, he could not tell her his story, at
least, not all of it, for he could not bear to lose her if she could neither understand nor forgive him.

Leo pulled Martha back down next to him. He turned to face her, so that they were laying side by side, hands clasped between them, their faces only inches apart. Her eyes were serious now, and so full of love that Leo felt a lump form in his throat. What had he ever done to deserve love like this? That this beautiful woman would wait for him, and cross the world for him, bringing a heart so full and pure? He closed his eyes and inhaled again. Then he began to speak.

“Martha, I was not in Paris on a holiday. I was there to function as an interpreter for a group of businessmen.”

“As an interpreter?”

“Yes. You noticed when we were in Paris that I speak several languages. We’re speaking German now, because that’s your first language. But I seem to have a special talent for languages. I pick them up easily.

“Someone I knew in Budapest decided that I was the person he needed to facilitate an international business transaction. It wasn’t really legal, for it involved buying weapons for the Hungarian army in violation of the peace treaty. But this man, and the group he was with, appealed to my sense of national pride, and, I suppose I have to admit, to my vanity. So I agreed to help them. I thought I would be helping myself, and Hungary.”

He shifted onto his back and stared at the ceiling, choosing his words carefully, anxious to get close enough to the truth to be credible without incriminating himself too deeply.

“You know I’d just arrived in Paris when we met. The morning I left you in front of Notre Dame, I learned that the men I was helping were
not working for the Hungarian government at all. They were members of the Hungarian Fascist Party, attempting to acquire weapons for their own organization. Rather than cooperate, I decided to foil their plans.”

“What did you do?”

“There was a story in the paper that morning about a Hungarian army officer who’d been arrested at the Hague passing counterfeit French francs. That gave me an idea. I contacted one of the man responsible for selling the weapons, drew his attention to the article, and warned him, in confidence, that he’d better make sure the Hungarian group he was dealing with did not intend to pay him with fake francs. I assumed, of course, that the deal would be called off immediately, or at least delayed. I planned to lay low for the day, meet you at five o’clock, go with you to Munich, and be done with the whole business. But when I returned to my hotel to collect my passport, I discovered that I’d underestimated the people with whom I was dealing. There was another man in my room. Dead.”

“Dead? How?”

“If you mean how was he killed, I don’t know, exactly. There was too much blood to tell easily, and I didn’t want to examine things too closely.”

“Oh my God, Leo, how awful.” Martha threw herself across Leo’s chest, her eyes filling with tears. She knew that he had abandoned her for a reason, but she never imagined anything so appalling. How could she have ever felt a moment of self-pity?

Leo continued, stroking her hair as he spoke. “I knew then that I was meant to take the blame for the murder. I suppose the leader of the group I was with thought the dead man was
the one who’d betrayed them, and that I was expendable. At any rate, I had to leave the country immediately.”

“But couldn’t you prove you were innocent? I would’ve told the police that you were with me all night, and couldn’t possibly have killed anyone.”

“Martha, I’m Hungarian. You’re German. The French hate us. What’s more, we’re Jewish. I learned after the war that Jews make the most convenient scapegoats. The murder was orchestrated by powerful people with international connections. There was no way the French police were going to let me off the hook, not even with an alibi as beautiful as you.”

“But why didn’t you go to Germany? Or England? Somewhere closer?”

“I’m a Hungarian citizen. I can’t travel freely in Europe without both entry and transit visas. I didn’t know how far they would look for me. I knew I had to get beyond their net as quickly as possible.”

“So you came to Shanghai.”

“So I came to Shanghai.”

“But will you be safe here?”

“I think so. As safe as I could be anywhere in the world. I was a little fish, and people don’t tend to ask questions here. No one cares much about the past. It’s amazing that way.”

“And the house?”

“The murdered man evidently had some scheme of his own going on the side, something the rest of them must not have known about. You see, he had a lot of money with him. That money brought me here.”

Martha gasped. “You stole money from a dead man?”

“I didn’t go through his pockets while he…I mean, he must have taken off his coat before he was killed. I saw it and went through it, looking for some identification. That’s how I confirmed who he was: Imre Károly, the police chief of Budapest. He was an outspoken member of the Fascist party, and had a personal reputation for being corrupt, so I was pretty sure he hadn’t made that money lawfully. Maybe he’d played a part in the counterfeiting scheme, I don’t know. At any rate, given what his fellow Fascists had done to him and were trying to do to me, taking his money was the only way I could think of to escape from them.”

“But Leo, didn’t it occur to you that taking the money would make you look guilty? And that you could be charged with another crime for stealing it?”

“So they could put me in jail for theft and then hang me for murder? No, Martha. I saw my chance to evade their plans for me and I took it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t take you with me. I didn’t know how to find you, and every moment I stayed in France placed me, and our future together, in greater peril.”

“But why did you take so long to send for me?”

“I didn’t want to put you in any danger. I needed some time to make certain that I was safe here. And, I needed to know that I could create a future worthy of sharing with you. Until then, it was pointless. It was better for you to just forget about me.”

“As if I could.”

Hearing the tenderness in her voice, Leo felt relief flood through every limb of his body. Martha was satisfied with his story. She could still love a man falsely accused of murder, who had taken what was not his out of self-defense.

“When I arrived here, I discovered that I have a talent for investing, and, after a rocky start, managed to turn my initial investment into a tidy sum.”

“A tidy sum? This must cost a fortune. The house, the servants—” Leo grinned. “That, my dear, is one of the luxuries of Shanghai. I can keep seven servants for the price of one decent gardener in Europe. The house was not inexpensive, but didn’t cost nearly what it would have anywhere else. To make money is the main reason people come to Shanghai. The life you can lead after you’ve made some here is one reason they stay. Will you stay and be the queen of my castle? Could you be happy here?”

“Anywhere, with you, my love. Anywhere.”

And they decided to put supper off for a while longer, after all.

They were married four days later, at eleven o’clock in the morning, in the office of a Justice of the Peace in the French Concession. Martha wore a simple ankle-length wedding dress, created especially for her by the leading American designer at one of Nanking Road’s finest dress shops. He designed the dress in pale green silk embroidered with violets, saved, he claimed, “for the purpose of adorning a truly beautiful redhead.” Lawrence Cosgrove and the Justice’s elderly secretary served as their witnesses. At the proper moment, Leo held Martha’s hands, and uttered the vow he’d longed to make since meeting her in Paris.

“I, Leopold Gustave Hoffman, take you, Martha Katrina Levy, to be my lawful wedded wife; to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse; for richer, or poorer; in sickness, and in health; to honor and cherish, forsaking all others in steadfast love, ’til death us do part.”

“’Til death us do part,” repeated Martha, in turn. And then, flooded with emotion, she looked at the diamond band encircling her finger and thought,
no. Ours is a bond not even death could break.

They celebrated with a festive brunch at the dining room of the Palace. “So this is what it feels like to be blissfully happy,” sighed Martha, leaning against Leo’s shoulder, feeling giddy and more than a little tipsy. She wasn’t used to champagne and felt its effects very quickly.

“I want you to be this happy every day,” said a slightly less tipsy Leo, meaning it.

“Leo, may I see the license?”

“Why? Don’t you believe that we’re married?”

“You silly darling. I just want to read it. I want to see it, in print. With my own two little eyes, where it says, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Leopold Hoffman.’”

“All right then.” A guarded note had entered Leo’s voice, but Martha did not notice. He pulled an official-looking piece of paper out of his breast pocket and handed it to his wife.

“Ah, there it is.” She sighed another happy sigh and carefully spread the document out on the table in front of her. A quizzical expression soon wrinkled her forehead.

“Leo, what’s this?”

“I thought you spoke French,” he answered, his tone deliberately light.

“You know I do. What I mean is, why does it say here that we’re Catholic?”

“Does it? What an embarrassing mistake.”

“Well, shouldn’t we have it corrected?”

“Why?”

“It’s an official document. This is our marriage license. I don’t want to start our marriage with a lie.”

“A lie? That is a bit harsh, isn’t it? Most Hungarians are Catholic. The old girl at the notary’s office probably just assumed I was, and that, therefore, you were, too. Doesn’t change anything. We’re not any less married. French law respects the civil ceremony, not the religious one. It’s not worth the trouble to correct it.”

“But it’s not right. It’s not who we are.”

“And just who are we?” Leo asked, serious now. He lowered his voice. “Did you decide to be Jewish?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Do you go to synagogue?”

“No.”

“Do you follow the laws of Jehovah?”

“No, but—”

“Did your parents?”

“No, but Leo—”

“Do you even know a single Hebrew prayer?”

“No, but it doesn’t—”

“But what? When I was a boy, growing up in Budapest, I was taught that one’s religion was irrelevant. It was the age of science. The age of reason. Talent and hard work were all that mattered, and God was a matter of conscience. Well, it seems that’s only true when there’s enough to go around. When someone goes hungry, the hungry blame the Jews. When there’s a war, the losers blame the Jews. When the country collapses, the bankrupt blame the Jews. I won’t have my children blamed: not for famine, not for financial chaos, not for war. I didn’t choose to be born Jewish, and I choose for my children not to be born Jews.”

Martha stared hard at the piece of paper in front of her, trying to make sense out of Leo’s words. Through the diminishing fog of her champagne euphoria, she comprehended that the misinformation on their marriage license was not the secretary’s mistake. Leo had given the wrong religion on purpose. This fact troubled Martha, in a vague, inexplicable way. She’d never felt as if she’d had any meaningful religious connection to her Jewish heritage, but it didn’t feel right to have it snatched away from her with the stroke of a pen. It seemed blasphemous, somehow. She thought of her father and her sister. Living under some false pretense would make her feel even farther away from them. How could she make Leo understand?