"And then?" I cried, trembling with curiosity.
The Jew shrugged his shoulders, waving his hands to and fro in the air.
"Then he disappeared. I saw him a few days before he went, and he gave me the instructions I have repeated to you for anybody who should come asking for him."
"But didn't he tell you where he was going?"
"He didn't even tell me he was going, Herr. He just vanished."
"When was this?"
"Somewhere about the first week in July ... it was the week of the bad news from France."
The message was dated July 1st, I remembered.
"I have a good set of Swedish papers," the Jew continued, "very respectable timber merchant ... with those one could live in the best hotels and no one say a word. Or Hungarian papers, a party rejected medically ... very safe those, but perhaps the gentleman doesn't speak Hungarian. That would be essential."
"I am in the same case as my brother," I said, "I must disappear."