Free Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst

seemed like a long time, then got their first view of the Tisza. About a hundred yards wide and running at spring flood, heavy and gray in the darkness, with plumes of white foam where the water surged around a rock or a snag.
    “And where is this bridge?” Pavlo said.
This supposed bridge.
    Morath nodded his head—just up the path. They walked for another ten minutes, then he saw a dry root at the foot of a tree, sat down, gave Pavlo a cigarette and lit one for himself. Balto, they were called, he’d bought them in Uzhorod.
    “Lived in Paris a long time?” Pavlo asked.
    “A long time.”
    “I can see that.”
    Morath smoked his cigarette.
    “You seem to forget how life goes, over here.”
    “Take it easy,” Morath said. “We’ll be in Hungary soon enough. Find a tavern, have something to eat.”
    Pavlo laughed. “You don’t believe the Pole is going to wait for us, do you?”
    Morath looked at his watch. “He’s there.”
    Pavlo gave Morath a sorrowful look. “Not for long. He’ll be going home to his wife any minute now. And on the way he’ll stop and have a word with the police.”
    “Calm down,” Morath said.
    “Over here, it’s about one thing, and one thing only. And that is money.”
    Morath shrugged.
    Pavlo stood. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
    “What are you doing?”
    “A few minutes,” he said, over his shoulder.
    Christ!
Morath heard him for a minute or so, heading back the way they’d come, then it was quiet. Maybe he’d gone, really gone. Or he was going back to check on Mierczak, which made no sense at all.
Well, he must have value to somebody.
When Morath was growing up, his mother went to Mass every day. She often told him that all people were good, it was just that some of them had lost their way.
    Morath stared up at the tops of the trees. The moon was in and out, a pale slice among the clouds. A long time since he’d been in a forest. This was an old one, probably part of a huge estate. Prince Esterhazy had three hundred thousand acres in Hungary, with eleven thousand people in seventeen villages. Not so unusual, in this part of the world. The nobleman who owned this property no doubt intended his grandchildren to cut the slow-growing hardwood, mostly oak and beech.
    It occurred to Morath that, when all was said and done, he hadn’t actually lied to the Czech customs officer. He’d said he was going to look at woodland; well, here he was, looking at it. In the distance, two pops, and, a moment later, a third.
    When Pavlo returned, he said only, “Well, we should be getting on our way.” What needed to be done was done, why talk about it. The two of them walked in silence, and, a few minutes later, they saw the bridge. A narrow, rickety old thing, the water sucked into deep eddies around the wooden poles that held it up, the surface maybe ten feet below the walkway. As Morath watched the bridge, it moved. The far end was sharp against the sky—a broken shard of railing thrust out toward the Hungarian side of the river. And, by moonlight, he could just make out the blackened char pattern on the wood, where the part that had been set on fire—or dynamited, or whatever it was—had fallen into the water.
    Morath was already so sickened inside at what Pavlo had done that he hardly cared. He’d seen it in the war, a dozen times, maybe more, and it brought always the same words, never spoken aloud.
Pointless
was the important one, the rest never mattered that much.
Pointless, pointless.
As though anything in the world might happen as long as somebody, somewhere, could see the point of it. A rather black joke, he’d thought at the time. The columns riding through the smoking villages of Galicia, a cavalry officer saying
pointless
to himself.
    “They’ll have a way to get across,” Pavlo said.
    “What?”
    “The people who go back and forth across the border at night. Will have a way to do it.”
    He was probably right, Morath thought. A boat, another bridge,