by Ed Ifkovic
He grinned sheepishly. “Not quite, but getting there. It’s annoying how tight-lipped the Austrians can be.”
“Do they know that Endre was there at midnight?” I asked, nervous.
“Of course. He told them, so I understand. His apartment is nearby, down on Andrássy, across from the Café New York, in fact, and someone alerted him early this morning. I thought that strange, but so be it. He rushed over, distraught. They tell me he was sobbing like a baby. I was hoping he’d come looking for me—but nothing so far.”
“Poor Endre.”
“Indeed,” said Winifred. “He’s in the thick of it, I’m afraid.”
“I need to tell the authorities that I saw him last night, but—but my words…incriminate. I hate to…” My voice trailed off.
Harold was watching both of us closely. “They’ll probably arrest him, though they’ll do it carefully. He’s from a well-known family—an historical family, as they say in Hungary—so the niceties have to be observed. Yet he’s not too popular with the Austrian authorities, given some of his friendships. Frankly, this baron is a driven constable, a notorious military background—torture, so rumored—and a vicious temperament. Before his parents shipped him off to Oxford, Endre as a young student was somewhat of a rabble-rouser, a protestor in the streets with the peasants, arrested once, and the Austrians have his name in their books. The fact that he was Cassandra’s real love counts against him—it seals his fate. You gotta believe that the count and his vicious circle will demand blood. Magyar blood. Innocent blood.” He smiled. “If not American blood.” He winked at me.
“I’m innocent,” I protested.
Harold looked at me curiously. “That doesn’t matter in a dictatorship. The prisons are full of souls crying out.”
“Never mind,” Winifred broke in, shaking her head. “Let’s not scare Edna.”
“It takes more than a strutting peacock like Baron Meyerhold to scare me. I interviewed hardened murderers when I reported in Milwaukee.”
Harold gestured toward the café, which had been shuttered all morning. “The authorities have cleared out. Coffee?”
No one was in the large room. Vladimir Markov stood against the kitchen door, his face drawn. When we walked in, he approached us, bowed, and hovered over us as we took a table. He was shaking his head back and forth.
“Are you all right?” Harold asked him.
He shook his head vigorously. “Never all right, sir. The innocent girl is…dead…like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Out there.” He pointed to the terrace where some police officers lingered. Markov trembled. “Footsteps away from here. Who will come to my café now? No one. The people will go to the others. The Café New York where the young writers go. The Japan where the artists meet their friends. We are old…old. They will fill the empty tables of the smoky Fiume Café. This café is a place of tears, this old café.” His voice trembling, he waved his hand around the empty room. “My life is this café, and now it is…this. The scene of a murder.” He shuddered. “The dark Hungarians are superstitious. They believe in the Gypsy curses. The old women will walk by and close their eyes, make the sign of the cross. They will stay away. The American dies here. The Americans stay away.” He threw up his hands in the air, grunted something in Russian, and walked away.
Harold brashly called after him. “Coffee, Mr. Markov, please. With whipped cream.”
“Mr. Gibbon, give the man air to breathe.”
Harold leaned into us. “There are so many rumors going around.”
“Like what?”
“Hooligans. Roving bands of bandits from the dark caves deep in the Buda hills. There’s been stories of tourists assailed, robbed of cash. Pickpockets. Angry peasants with pitchforks. That sort of thing.” He whispered. “Gypsies slinking in the night.”
“Do you believe that?” Winifred asked.
“Not on your life. A rich American girl wanders the quay or the hotel garden at midnight, planning an assignation, alone, without her dreadful chaperone, and she just happens to encounter a passing band of thieves? Never!”
“But I gather her jewelry was taken,” I said.
“A masquerade.”
“Then what do you think happened?”
Harold bit his lower lip and hunched up his shoulders. “I think the count had second thoughts and had her killed. That’s why he’s conveniently in Vienna. It would be embarrassing to call off such an engagement. I know that advisors in the inner circles didn’t like his mother’s plotting—after all, he was a bachelor who liked being unencumbered. Murder is…convenient. American brides are expendable.”
I whispered back. “Stop this, Mr. Gibbon. Such talk is dangerous. Please watch what you say. You’re impugning the integrity of a man of high station who…”
“Who is a militaristic, soulless creature.”
“Stop, Mr. Gibbon,” I pleaded.
He sat back, a smug look on his face. “Just an idea.”
Winifred was frowning at him. “Which you don’t really believe, young man. Do you hear yourself? You just want to foment trouble, stir the fires, all of which you’ll sensationalize and wire back to Hearst, that yellow journalistic hack.”
“He pays my salary, no?” He sucked in his cheeks.
Markov carried a tray to the table, apologizing. “The waiters they stay away today. No one comes to work. What am I to do?” He served coffee slowly, as if afraid he’d drop something. From the kitchen the boy György carried a pitcher of water, but Markov rolled his eyes, stammered. “György, this how you serve the people?”
Gyorgy wore his street clothes, a rumpled puffy white peasant shirt, open at the neck, and white pajama-like baggy trousers over worn boots. Markov pointed to his clothing. The boy sputtered, “I don’t…” But stopped.
The lad looked sad, his eyes moist and swollen. Markov motioned for him to return to the kitchen, though György stood there, hangdog. “He drags along, the snail today. He says it is like an arrow to the heart, the beautiful girl gone.” Suddenly he reached out and gripped the boy’s shoulder affectionately. “There is sadness in the world, yes?”
György stared back vacantly, uncomprehending. “Uncle,” he began, speaking in Hungarian, which Harold immediately translated for us. “Tell them about the door.”
Markov jerked back, surprised, letting out a tiny laugh. “György, such gossip.”
“You said…”
Harold sat up, boomed out, “What, György? Markov?”
“It is nothing,” Markov answered in English. He looked over his shoulder toward the lobby. “No one talks to me so I wonder…how important.”
“Tell us,” I demanded, irritated.
“When I close up the café late last night, I shut the French doors to the terrace and garden. Always. As I am told to do. I lock them. It is night. There are dangers, no? But I couldn’t sleep, so I sit in the lobby and talk with the desk clerk, Attila, an old friend. I drift to sleep. Two in the morning I wake up, walk back into the café, and the door is wide open. One of the doors is. I know I locked it.”
I nodded. “Of course. I walked back in from the Corso at midnight—through that door. I gave it no thought.”
“Someone unlocked it.”
“Maybe Cassandra,” I said, “as she headed to the garden.”
“But she didn’t walk by me as I sat in the lobby.”
“Are you sure?”
A thin smile. “No, of course not. We made coffee in the back room, Attila and me. No one was around. Even István Nagy joined us, which surprised us. He does not believe in having coffee with the workers.”
“Did you see Mrs. Pelham?”
A shake of his head. “No.”
György was nodding his head and began talking in German. “Tell the police, Uncle.”
Markov looked nervous. “I don’t know…”
> I raised my voice. “Of course you do. Maybe unimportant, but maybe not. Tell Inspector Horváth. He is the one…”
“I know the man,” Markov said. “He stops in for coffee and to hear the Gypsy music with his beautiful wife. A friendly man. But the other man scares us, pushing through the kitchen, yelling, pointing fingers. No questions…just…ordering everyone around. ‘Move! Move!’ he yells.” He grinned stupidly. “He makes me long for my Russian village.”
“Did you hear anything last night?” I asked. “When you were closing up?”
He shook his head. “Silence. Darkness. When I saw the door was open, I closed it, locked it again. I thought I forgot, but I know I didn’t. So I go home to my wife who is waiting up for me, and angry.” He smiled.
“Someone came into the hotel,” Harold concluded. “Someone walked in from the garden.”
“Or left the hotel,” I said. “Someone headed for the garden. It’s impossible to know the answer.”
“Had you seen Miss Blaine earlier that evening?” Winifred asked.
Markov considered, speaking now in his labored English and glancing nervously toward the doorway. Sweat glistened on his brow. “Very early, I think. But she didn’t stay. She walked in from the garden, through the café. Zsuzsa was drinking with that strange bearded American who scares everyone. I worry because of the…the scene with Zsuzsa and the American girl the day before. The slap in the face. So sad, that.” He leaned in, confided, “I don’t want my café to be a place for brawls. But Miss Blaine walked over to say something, and I think they smiled at each other, but I didn’t hear what they said.” He turned to György, who was holding the water pitcher at a suspect angle, a fact that Markov noted with a flick of his hand. In German. “You hear anything, boy?”
György had been staring toward the terrace, bored, leaning on one hip and then the other, at one point scratching a pimple on his cheek. Startled, he rolled his tongue into the corner of his mouth and shook his head. “I stayed away from her, Uncle.” A shake of his head, an aw-shucks smile. A speck of blood where he’d picked at the pimple. “I didn’t want her crazy at me again.” He sighed and muttered something in Hungarian, his eyes gleaming.
“What?” I turned to Harold.
“He says beautiful girls should never be made angry.”
Winifred growled. “But that’s the only fun some of us have.”
Frowning, Markov pushed György into the kitchen. “Shoo, shoo.” The corners of his mouth crinkled as he looked knowingly at Harold. “He is too young for Budapest.”
Harold appreciated the line, barking loudly, “And the rest of us are too old for this city.”
Markov looked puzzled. “What do you mean, sir?”
Harold didn’t answer and turned away, which further confused poor Markov. He bowed and began inspecting the samovar on the counter. Harold spoke too loudly. “I’m guessing that poor Endre Molnár is somewhere in the hotel. He’s gotta be a wreck of a man, haggard, tearful. I know that man—heart on his sleeve. But this martinet Meyerhold has sequestered him somewhere, probably grilling him, threatening, beating perhaps, covering him with his bratwurst breath, insulting his Hungarian blood so that Endre will show his hothead spirit. Meyerhold will get a confession out of him.”
“But Endre didn’t kill poor Cassandra,” I announced.
That startled Winifred. “Edna, what? How in the world do you know?”
“In my bones, Winifred. In my soul.”
She snickered. “You can never believe a good-looking man capable of atrocities, Edna.”
“Not true. Daguerreotypes of John Wilkes Booth show a handsome man…if a little cruel in the eyes.”
“Let me qualify that. Unless the evidence is overwhelming.”
I smiled wistfully. “You don’t know me, dear Winifred.”
“I know enough…”
Harold broke in. “What are you two ladies gabbing about? This is not the issue—the man’s good looks. You know, the police have that note from Endre, found on Cassandra’s body. It puts him there.” He actually pointed out to the terrace.
“No, it doesn’t,” I insisted. “It suggests his intention to meet her there. There is no proof he actually met her or talked with her.”
“Tell that to the police, Miss Ferber. Hardly conclusive.”
A garbled rasp sounded from the entrance, a barely-stifled sob. Zsuzsa Kós floated in, a large black silk handkerchief gripped tightly and held against her cheek. She stumbled near our table, almost toppling, as Harold rose to help her, but she waved him away. She tucked herself into a chair at a table in the far corner, buried her head on her arms for a moment, and then leaned back, staring up toward the ceiling. She was dressed all in black, a matronly funereal gown that swept the floor, a black cape lined with black satin dramatically slung over her shoulders, and on her head a monstrous hat constructed of ruffled fabric, enormous black silk roses, and dyed black ostrich feathers. The first keener at the funeral, and the most demonstrative. An inappropriate laugh, immediately suppressed, escaped her throat, followed by a full-throated sob.
“They say she’s going mad,” Harold told us.
“Shh.” From Winifred. “A sad woman, she is.”
“But slipping from reality.”
Winifred then quoted a line from Shakespeare, which touched me deeply. “Leave her to heaven,” she whispered.
Markov, approaching tentatively, offered coffee or wine but she held up her hand and mumbled something incoherent. Glancing at us, as though for help, he backed off.
To my horror, Harold bounced up, hesitated a moment, and then sailed over to her, pausing before her table. “My condolences,” he said. “I know you two were friends who…”
She screamed, “Go away.” In German. “You horrid little man.”
“I only…”
She shrieked and Harold backed away, bumping into a chair in his path. For some reason he wore a goofy smile, an expression owing more to nervousness than celebration—the pesky little boy, reprimanded.
Seated back at our table, Harold leaned in, motioning us forward. “I already got stacks of cables this morning. Hearst, of course. He wants banner headlines—fire in the gut. The news was wired out of Budapest early this morning. This is a big story—and it may get bigger. This is scandal, writ large. The American princess and the Habsburg count. Ill-fated marriage. Blighted love. The dashing, moody Hungarian porcelain magnate. Impassioned, inconsolable, perhaps the murderer. The supercilious count who was spotted last night dining at Sacher’s with a duchess from Saxony. It’ll be in all the afternoon papers. Murder in the midnight garden. Moonlight glowing on the Chain Bridge. Roses making you dizzy in the garden. Heads of state will react. Lines drawn. Anger. Tempers flaring. My byline, of course. I’m here in the thick of it. This is my new story. Hot off the presses. Let me tell you.”
“Harold…” I attempted to break in.
He ignored me. “The sinking of the Maine was nothing compared to what I’m going to say.”
Chapter Nine
The following afternoon, sheltered beneath towering walnut trees, Winifred and I strolled on the gravel walk through the Zoological Garden after a lunch of paté de foie gras sandwiches at an outdoor eatery. The city was famous for this delicacy. For a while we sat on benches in City Park, though the quiet was disturbed because Harold—was that imp everywhere?—called out to us. In German, for some reason. Grusz Gott! God’s greeting. We tried to ignore him, but he tagged after us as we got up to leave. He was spouting some nonsense about international conspiracies, the Frankfort bankers, and the danger of Tsar Nicholas’ unholy alliance with Serbia.
Turning a corner, we spotted Jonathan Wolf sitting at a table, dining by himself and reading a newspaper. Harold stopped, mid-sentence, just as Winifred was pooh-poohing his political science, and pointed at the elusive American in our path. Under his breath
, Harold hummed, “Jonathan Wolf. Somehow he’s in this story. I don’t trust that man.”
“No, please.” I touched his sleeve, but Harold bustled toward Wolf, who looked up, surprised and unhappy, at the intrusion.
“I’d like to make your acquaintance,” Harold told him.
Jonathan Wolf ran his tongue over his lips, dabbed at them with a napkin, and put down his glass. He was debating what to do, but finally, measuring his words carefully, he nodded at the table. “Won’t you all join me?” There was nothing friendly in his invitation.
Winifred protested, but to no avail. “Do we have to do this?”
Harold grinned. “Of course, we do. Miss Ferber’s face tells me she would love an introduction.”
Admittedly, I was staring intently into Jonathan Wolf’s upturned face, trying to size up the well-dressed man with the dark black beard, neatly trimmed. A tall man, broad in the shoulders, a wrestler’s chest. A light tan Savile Row summer suit, expensive. A diamond stickpin in his lapel with a Phi Beta Kappa key beneath it. A straw boater rested on the seat next to him. Gray kid gloves lay on the table. A tall highball glass with brandy and soda, melting ice. A plate of mushrooms-on-toast. A cigarette stubbed out in an ashtray. Here was the comfortable man of leisure, on holiday.
Harold introduced himself, but that gesture was not necessary. The man cut him off. “I know who you are, sir.” A smile difficult to interpret. “A scurrilous newsmonger from the tabloid Hearst syndicates. A man who annoys everyone. A tick on the belly of mankind.” Harold bowed, smiling. “And these ladies are Edna Ferber and Winifred Moss, also guests at the dilapidated firetrap called the Hotel Árpád.” He stared into Harold’s face. “You have been dying to talk to me for days now.”
“Well, of course,” Harold began. “Everywhere we go, you’re there.”
Jonathan Wolf held up a hand.
“You grant no one privacy, Mr. Gibbon. That’s clear from watching you strut around the café like a bantam rooster. No one can hide from you. No one can harbor secrets, even in so remote a place as Budapest.”
