Cafe Europa

by Ed Ifkovic

  “Because of me.” Beaming, bowing.

  “So the American Embassy demands an arrest. Baron Meyerhold conveniently believes I am the man who took poor Cassandra’s short life away. But he’s caught between American and Hungarian influence. Of course, he despises Hungarians, but he is politically astute. Inept, but not a fool, that man.”

  “A horrible combination.”

  “He’s feeling the pressure from America.” Endre looked at Harold. “From your Mr. Hearst. Those headlines speak of scandal, cover-up, incompetence. Not good. And this latest attack on you, Harold, will bring him back to my rooms. As I said, an incompetent man, spinning in circles and hoping he’ll fall into a confession.” He laughed. “He’s afraid of America.”

  “He should be,” Harold said. “President—Hearst.”

  “Yes, even the Hungarian and Austrian newspapers are afraid of Mr. Hearst. He hammers and steams and pounds his fists.” He wagged a finger at Harold. “The editors here don’t know how to translate his explosive American idioms, but they understand the fury.”

  “So the Baron doesn’t know what to do?” I asked.

  “A messy murder—an American.”

  “So nothing will happen?” The prospect of a murderer going free gob-smacked me.

  “No,” Endre went on, “ultimately I will be arrested. But in terms acceptable to Hungarian authorities. Somehow I must be discredited, some manufactured scandal perhaps, something anti-Hungarian. Someone reports that he heard me curse my country in a late-night tavern. The newspapers report it. Some trumped-up nonsense that will have the Magyars nodding and saying—Ah, too bad, a true son of Hungary lost his way. Take him away. Chain him.”

  “Horrible,” I protested.

  “But a fact of life in a corrupt world.”

  “Hey, I got a question about the note you received from Cassandra that night.” Harold punctuated his words with his fist on the table.

  “What?” Endre asked, puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s one fact my spies can’t help me with. And something the police haven’t paid much mind to. The note Cassandra sent to you that night—the invitation to meet her in the garden.”

  Endre looked pained, turning his head aside and staring out the terrace to the Danube. “What does it matter now?”

  “Oh, but it does, my friend. How did you find that note?”

  Endre didn’t want to discuss it, but he sighed, resigned. “Someone slipped it under my door at my apartment. Not in the box at front. Under the door. I admit I was surprised.”

  “Why?”

  He smiled, his moustache twitching. “Earlier notes from Cassandra were left discreetly in the front box. But this time someone walked into the hallway—to be certain I received it that very night. I was there, in fact, but heard nothing. When I walked past my door, I spotted the note on the floor. From Cassandra.”

  “And you answered it.”

  “Of course. The note they found on her…her body. I said I’d meet her as she asked. I left it with the clerk in front.”

  “That’s my point,” Harold stressed. “Cassandra would have asked the day clerk or the night clerk, one of the porters, even a bellboy, to deliver the note.”

  “And?” I asked, impatient.

  “And no one has admitted delivering the note. I’ve checked—my sources. Cassandra gave it to someone not connected to the staff. Someone she trusted.”

  “Mrs. Pelham?” I wondered out loud.

  “I doubt it.” Harold glanced at the table where Mrs. Pelham sat with the Russian, her back turned from us. When I glanced over—we all did, unfortunately—she must have sensed that she was being discussed. She swung around and glared, but only for a brief second. Frowning, she emptied the last of her wine. The Russian was signaling for a check.

  “Could Cassandra herself have slipped out and left it?” I asked.

  Silence, long and uncomfortable. “Maybe,” Harold acknowledged. “Unlikely, but possible. She was known to slip away from Mrs. Pelham’s brutal eye now and then.”

  Endre laughed. “Yes, she did. We did meet secretly.”

  “So it is possible.” I looked into Endre’s face.

  “She wouldn’t walk into the building—too daring. Even if she did, wouldn’t she have knocked on the door?” he asked. “A quick comment—meet me tonight. Then rush off. Impossible.”

  “No,” I concluded, “someone in the Blaine household—a maid perhaps, or the valet—could have done it—in defiance of her parents’ rule. Dangerous for them, but maybe Cassandra bribed one—or pleaded. A few gold coins pressed into an eager palm. Or, in fact, perhaps one of the servants might have sympathized with her.”

  “But the household staff is gone now.” Endre shrugged. “It’s impossible to know.”

  Harold was quiet too long. Finally, swallowing, he grumbled, “It’s driving me crazy.” Another long silence. “But I do have a suspicion.”

  Then, like an apparition, floating and swaying, Zsuzsa Kós drifted in from the terrace, her arms outstretched dramatically, her head thrown back. From her lips a plaintive humming. A stage entrance, I thought, Salome with the gaudy veils and noontime yellow hair. She called out Harold’s name, elongating it so that it became a spooky chant. A mourner’s keening. Harrrooollld. We all started, shifted in our seats. No, that wasn’t true. Harold didn’t move a muscle, eyes focused on the floating woman. Endre and I—and I think the rest of the café—watched her awful performance. Again, in English, a long wail. Wooounded my prince.

  Well, her wounded prince was having none of it. An icy stare, chin jutting, fingers gripping the edge of the table.

  Zsuzsa had doubtless learned of the assault on her midnight lover.

  Dressed in a turquoise-colored gown with a gold shawl covering her shoulders, an enormous hat of feathers and veils atop that golden pompadour, she struck me as a woman from a French melodrama—or a sleepwalking Marie Antoinette headed for the guillotine on that fateful day. A sweep of fluttering arms, a twirling of her body, a tossing of her head—syncopated movements designed to make her a cynosure on the stage. Or, in this case, the dimly lit Café Europa.

  She approached the table, stood over Harold, waiting. He refused to look up. Quietly, she reached out, and her fingertips touched the bandage on his head, lingered there for a moment, and then she drifted away, her shawl falling off her shoulders and dragging behind her.

  Salome of the seven veils. Or, at least, one veil.

  Winifred poked me in the shoulder. “Splendid, no?”

  I was speechless.

  Then she was gone, disappeared into the warm Budapest night.

  We waited.

  “As I was saying,” Harold began.

  Endre interrupted. “Mr. Gibbon, surely you…” His gaze followed the disappeared Zsuzsa. “What?”

  Harold shook his head mechanically, his voice booming now. “As I was saying.” But then he said nothing more.

  I smiled at Winifred. Harold Gibbon, suave but bogus bon vivant, suddenly bested by the sad cabaret singer. The price, I supposed, he paid for investigative reporting deep in the night.

  “Mr. Gibbon, the wages of sin…” I began. His glare stopped me.

  A waiter placed a bottle of mineral water on the table. Vladimir Markov, emerging from the kitchen, approached and squinted at Harold. “A bromide, sir?” he asked. “A headache.”

  Harold shook his head. “Very kind, sir, but no.”

  Markov bowed and stepped away, but Harold called him back. “Mr. Markov, has that Serbian worker returned to your kitchen?”

  “Sir?”

  “The one who was drunk the night Cassandra Blaine was murdered. The one taken to jail.”

  Markov turned pale, stammered. “Of course. A good baker, that one, and…”

  “I’d like to question him. Ivo
—his name, right?”

  Markov bit his lip. Winifred looked at me and shook her head. She raised her voice, “Mr. Gibbon, could you please not terrorize the kitchen?”

  “I’m doing my job. I have a few questions for my article. I need an outsider’s perspective on the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina—the Serbian point of view.”

  Markov spoke up, “But, sir, he’s a baker, not a…a politician.”

  “Still and all.”

  “And he was born in Budapest. He is Hungarian.”

  “Yet he speaks Serbian.”

  “Most people in Hungary understand it a little bit. Many speak it. You know the Serbian Orthodox Church on Szerb Utca where many devout, good Serbians pray. I can speak the language, sir. A little. You speak it, no?”

  “Nevertheless.” Harold touched the man’s sleeve. “Sit and talk with us a bit, good sir. Indulge me.”

  Markov looked toward the lobby, his voice dropping to a ragged whisper. “You would have me fired, Mr. Gibbon.” Breathing in, a rasp at the back of his throat, he shot a look at Winifred and then at me. “Dear ladies, the other day when I spoke with you, that brief conversation, meaningless, but confiding with guests, forbidden, my words, someone tells the owners. Someone listening—though we were alone.” He hurriedly glanced toward the entrance. “I have been spoken to by the man who pays my wages. A violation, such…friendliness. My job is to serve. So I have been warned. My job is in danger.”

  “The hell with that,” Harold snarled. “I’ll talk to people. I know people.”

  But Markov was already backing away. “No, please. My job. This is what I have. Now that my family is back in Russia in a village, my wife is gone…no money…sir.”

  He kept backing up, a few steps at a time, until he finally disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Mr. Gibbon,” I implored, “could you please leave the man alone? Your quest for information is relentless.”

  “It’s my…”

  “Job,” Winifred finished for him, her voice too loud in the room.

  At that moment Mrs. Pelham was leaving, but she paused, deliberated, and then announced in a loud, very British voice, “Americans should never be given passports. They are children, always. And children should never leave their homes.”

  Harold burst out laughing, and even Endre, surprised, smiled. Mrs. Pelham barged out of the room, trailed by the Russian who had no idea what had just happened.

  Standing, Harold announced he needed to lie down, and Endre offered to escort his friend to his room. Winifred and I were left alone at the table, looking at each other with wide, bright eyes. “My lord,” I began. “Harold does stir up some pots.”

  “He started to say he had an idea.”

  “Yes, a suspicion about something. But what?”

  “The murder?”

  “Or the death of the empire?”

  She laughed. “Harold on the track of solving something?”

  “But he seems not to be able to put the pieces together.”

  She nodded. “Is it possible that Harold may have discovered something and not realized its importance?”

  “Well, maybe he can’t see the whole picture.”

  Again, the throaty laugh. “And we can?”

  I smiled back at her. Perhaps that will be my task.

  Yes.

  After all, Harold wasn’t the only American reporter in town.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The garden alongside the hotel’s terrace was filled with late-blooming red roses and oleander, so the air was rich with a heady perfume. So potent the scent that I got momentarily dizzy, my eyes watery. I wondered about the night Cassandra was murdered in this very garden—the late night quiet, the bracing cool air, the faraway hum of the Danube, and the intoxicating power of the flowers. Now, in the middle of a quiet morning following a heavy rainstorm at dawn, the garden glistened as if all the green leaves had been painstakingly polished. I sat on a wrought-iron bench and faced the hazy sun hovering over the river.

  I also faced Lajos Tihanyi who was standing ten feet from me, his stare penetrating, a sketchbook on a portable easel. He was drawing me. So intense was his concentration that I immediately thought of a classic painting: Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. No Homer here, to be sure, but a self-conscious American short-story writer trying to look winsome and fetching. Neither trait I’d ever allowed myself.

  Of course, I’d refused to model for him. Over and over. To paint me in red—his redundant plea. I also knew that he and Bertalan Pór had quietly sketched Winifred and me—and, to be sure, everyone else, including that rascal Harold Gibbon—as we lounged in the Café Europa. With no effort made to mask their activities, they peered and stabbed at their sketchpads, then peered again, smiled at each other, squinted, and waited for us to sit still. I suppose we accommodated them, or at least Winifred did, given her joy of being with the pioneer artists, wanderers out of some paint-smeared French atelier that housed Matisse or Juan Gris or…maybe Picasso. We freely let them.

  But Tihanyi wanted a longer session, his subject posing in the garden against a backdrop of leafy green branches and gray tree bark. Me, in a red jacket. As I told him, I owned none because such a vibrant color always struck me as too exhibitionist. The scarlet woman, targeted. But on the morning I agreed to sit for an hour, without talking—or with little talking—the hotel clerk handed me a package that contained a gorgeous crimson jacket, deepest red with tints of rose and gold. A little snug in the shoulders, but it did fit. And I had to begrudgingly admit that I felt grand in it, the Chinese emperor’s newest concubine. The Jewish slave girl on the Nile, outshining Cleopatra on that lumbering barge.

  Alone, the two of us, I was alarmed at first, given Tihanyi’s difficulties with speech. He sounded words that were unintelligible to me. I wished that Bertalan Pór were there, and he shortly was, rushing in from the quay as though he’d missed an engagement. But I’d not been bothered by Tihanyi’s quirky mannerisms, the two of us somehow finding an easy, emphatic way to communicate. He had a smooth companionability, a gentility I’d noticed in so many Hungarians, a masculine self-assuredness infused with the soft solicitousness a person associated with women. A startling juxtaposition, that combination, exaggerated by the clownish-looking man in the baggy jacket and the slough boy cap, a man who gestured wildly. I read his every gesture perfectly. He understood that. I liked him tremendously.

  Bertalan Pór lingered at the edge of the garden, his own sketchpad tucked into his chest. At one point he said something to his friend, coming up close to him, though the words, spoken in Hungarian, were laced with laughter. Tihanyi pointed his pencil at Pór, then winked at me. A little disconcerting, I thought, because I always demanded to know what was being said about me.

  “What did he say?” I asked Tihanyi, but I regretted my words. Did I expect him to answer? But, in fact, he did, a mannered pantomime with his hands and facial expressions, even a low hum from the back of his throat, a routine that suggested he was having a wonderful time—that he’d gotten his wish. Miss Ferber, the American short-story writer, was sitting in a garden where the scent of roses and oleander overwhelmed. I smiled.

  “I don’t like my portrait being painted.”

  “Then you are not an egoist,” Bertalan Pór said.

  “Oh, but I am, sir. Anyone who dares to put words to paper or oil to a canvas has to be an egoist.” I paused. “Or a downright silly fool.”

  He laughed. “We are all fools.”

  “Thank you,” I quipped.

  Both men laughed.

  Bertalan Pór confided, “In 1907 the artist Berény displayed his portrait of me at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. I watched as visitors pointed at me and laughed. A critic called it ‘filth-smeared Gauguinism.’”

  I frowned. “I fear the same reaction will greet a portrait of me”—I paused�
�“in red.”

  But Lajos Tihanyi’s face suddenly tightened, and he made grunting, unpleasant sounds. He snapped his brush in two. I started but didn’t move. Zsuzsa Kós had entered the garden from the side, pausing a few feet from me, staring at me, staring at Lajos Tihanyi, narrowing her eyes at Bertalan Pór. A purplish color rose in her face, and her eyes flashed.

  She moved slowly but finally positioned herself between me and Tihanyi, her arms folded over her chest as she glared at the hapless painter.

  Bertalan Pór said something in Hungarian, and she flicked her head toward him. Anger there, raw hurt.

  “What?” I sputtered.

  Zsuzsa spoke to me in English, heavily accented, but her intent mightily evident. “You? You, the muse for the Hungarian painter?”

  I wasn’t amused by her attack, but kept still.

  Lajos Tihanyi grunted. Bubbles of spittle formed at the corners of his mouth as he gargled out some nonsense syllables. He stamped his foot like a pouting child.

  “I have been painted by the great Gustav Reich who painted Lola Montez. My portrait hung in the window of a gallery in the Kohlmarket. In Vienna. The Imperial Gallery begged to buy it for their collection. Only the Hungarians ignore their own singer.”

  Dressed in a simple periwinkle-blue morning dress with a white lace headscarf covering her golden hair, she twisted around like a dance-hall coquette, then posed, her palms placed under her chin. Then she approached Tihanyi’s easel and peered at what he’d drawn. Laughter rose in her throat as she pointed. “This…this is not art.”

  “Please.” Bertalan Pór sidled up to her. “This is not your moment, dear Zsuzsa Kós, you who’ve had so many beautiful moments.”

  It was, I thought, a beautiful line, and a moment especially for me as I sat in the perfumed garden.

  But Zsuzsa raged, swinging her arms at the drawing, and Tihanyi, appalled, stepped back, his hands in front of his face. Zsuzsa stared over our heads toward the late morning sky and cried, “They are saying it’s my fault, the murder of that girl. You think I don’t hear the ugly whispers in the café at night. Murder, murder, murder. The folks turn their heads on the street. They point at me with anger. ‘She, our Zsuzsa, the songbird, she led the American girl into murder.’ They tell me I am to blame. If I hadn’t introduced her to the count, she’d be alive, that girl. Me—blame me.”