Cafe Europa

by Ed Ifkovic

  “That’s not a compliment.”

  “I know.” I looked around the dark room. “He’s not coming.”

  “And he’s supposed to reveal something to us.”

  I gathered my gloves and my purse, tightened the shawl I’d worn around my shoulders. “We need to get back.”

  Outside, the fading daylight threw mottled shadows across the narrow street. “There,” Winifred pointed. “Finally. Harold Gibbon.”

  We watched, annoyed, as Harold engaged someone in a lively talk on the corner, his notebook out, his pencil running over the sheet. But at the moment that he turned away from the old man, tucking his notebook into his breast pocket, another man approached him from across the street. A young man with a bushy beard and bulky leather headgear, dressed in a peasant jacket of winter sheepskin, embroidered in green and scarlet. A performer? An actor from a street revue? What? My mind raced. It’s June, it’s too hot, it’s ridiculous, it’s—

  It made no sense. Harold didn’t move, watching him, probably wondering that same thing. The man yelled something to Harold, but I couldn’t tell if he replied. All I heard was a rush of frantic words—Hungarian? Slavic? what?—from the man. Harold turned in our direction, spotted us perhaps twenty yards away, and held up his finger—Be right there!

  He broke into a run, lopsided, the frenzied, loping run of a child who didn’t know how to run.

  In a flash the bizarre man drew a pistol from his pocket, aimed, and fired one shot at Harold. Harold screamed, twisted around jerkily, and struggled to stand. The man fired a second shot, and Harold grabbed his neck, toppling against a wall, slipping down.

  One more shot, close range, the man standing over Harold.

  Then, leaning down, he reached into Harold’s vest pocket and extracted a sheaf of papers. He shook them, as if they were tainted with blood.

  A low moan from Harold.

  Casually, the man turned and walked away, disappearing into an alley.

  Frantic, Winifred and I rushed to Harold, standing over him, out of breath, dizzy, helpless. A gurgle from Harold’s throat.

  Winifred cried out.

  I crouched down on the grimy sidewalk, my knees buckling, the hem of my dress catching on a crack and tearing, and managed to lift Harold’s head off the pavement. Distraught, numb, I cradled his head in my lap, my hand resting on the side of his face. He was staring up at me, but the light in his eyes was dim, faraway. His eyes closed, then opened wide, and I saw astonishment and fright and bewilderment. His lips moved slowly, a jumble of words slipping out.

  “What?” I begged. “Keep your eyes open. Please, Harold…please.”

  But his skin was ashy now, clammy, and one of his hands twitched against my side. Blood was seeping out of the front of his vest, a bluish red blot that grew larger and larger, floodtide. Blood oozed onto my dress, dripped onto my hands. My fingers touched the side of his neck where a gash of blood spurted. My desperate, futile touch to stem the flow. His lips moved mechanically. His eyes held mine, panic there, confusion.

  “Harold, please. Oh God. Keep your eyes open.”

  A gurgling hum from the back of his throat, low, dreadful. Gasping, struggling, halting.

  “What?” I begged.

  I leaned close to his face and smelled raw fear. His nostrils swelled, begging for air.

  “What?”

  Into my ear he mumbled one word. “Zsuzsa.”

  I blinked wildly. I hadn’t expected that.

  Again. “Zsu…” He struggled to finish.

  I looked up and caught Winifred staring down at me, horror on her face. She was moaning.

  We stayed like that for a few minutes, maybe more, an awful tableau that seemed like suspended time, the three Americans frozen on that dark Budapest street as heavy clouds moved across the pale moon in the sky and night shadows enveloped us. I didn’t move, I didn’t want to, I could never move again. My throat dry and my lips trembling.

  I watched Harold’s face, a feeble rasp escape from his chest, and slowly, horribly, the brilliant life he savored left his body.

  Chapter Seventeen

  You wake in the middle of the night, your eyes pop open, and you tell yourself you are having a nightmare. Because you can see it so clearly, though the images twist into screaming demons, into impenetrable walls, into surging rivers, into blood so scarlet you gasp at the horror of it. You lie there, sweating in the hot June room, a window partially cracked, but you hug the covers. You tell yourself—yes, a phantasmagoric pyrotechnic nightmare. Something you ate. That overly rich liver paté you sampled at supper. That was it. Of course. But then, sitting up, staring across the dark room, focused on that garish painting of Franz Josef hung on the dumbwaiter, off kilter now, so intrusive—Why do his eyes follow you in the dark? Is there no escape from the madness of this bloated empire?—the truth overwhelms you. You struggle to breathe, gasp. And then, because there is nothing else you can do, you sob like a helpless baby. You think—can I ever stop crying?

  Because Harold Gibbon has died. Because you were there to hear his last breath. That choked, gargled word. You were there to see the eyes become glassy and dull. The fright passing with the light. Because you held his head in your lap and felt the spirit leave the man. Because…

  A pall shrouded the Café Europa at night. Winifred and I had avoided it during the day, Winifred sheltered in her rooms, shocked and unable to talk. At one point I took a long walk across the Chain Bridge, but the loneliness of that trek—alone as people bustled past, laughing, talking, happy—depressed me horribly. I returned to hide in my rooms, a dish of bacon biscuits and hot coffee safely and miraculously maneuvered to me via the dumbwaiter—as if the gods took pity on me.

  Inspector Horváth interviewed me earlier, and then spoke to Winifred. He’d stared, wide-eyed, as I described that horrific final scene, and Harold’s muttering that final word: “Zsuzsa.” Gracious, deferential, the inspector’s voice trembled as he jotted my words down. Yes, I wanted Harold’s murderer caught, but that seemed impossible. The bearded man dressed in that preposterous garb—a disguise, Inspector Horváth guessed—had blended back into the Budapest underworld of dark streets and unlit alleys.

  But eventually, hungry for companionship and soothing voices, Winifred and I drifted down to the night café, only to discover a pall covering the room. Hungarian cafés and coffee houses burst with nighttime noise, celebration, laughter, card playing, violins, and Gypsy song. But not this café—at least not this night. Somehow word of Harold’s murder had filtered through the walls where English-speaking visitors congregated—and they stayed away. Hotel guests stood in the entrance, deliberated, then headed away. Cassandra Blaine and now Harold Gibbon, both fixtures in the old café, two souls who had dominated that room. A few tables held newcomers, and a few stalwart Hungarians.

  István Nagy occupied his accustomed table, a book propped up before him, but I chose not to look in his direction. Why? I supposed he’d gloat, be offensive, remark on the double murder as some fortunate and expected poetic metaphor for the decline and fall of his beloved feudalistic world. I was not in the mood for his elegiac verse. Never in the mood for those art nouveau confections, effete and irrelevant, thin as mountain air. So I sat apart from him, my back to him. When I looked around the room, I noticed he’d left.

  Vladimir Markov stood with his back to the kitchen door and watched a waiter serve the few of us. Sadly, eyes half-closed, he surveyed his depopulated kingdom. If he rued the loss of business—and his continued employment—after the murder of Cassandra Blaine, well, the death knell had rung loudly and emphatically with the loss of Harold Gibbon. In his dark black suit, accented now with an elegant black necktie, he looked like the final mourner at a funeral, loathe to leave the waxen body. A flick of his head, an audible sigh, and he disappeared into the kitchen.

  Winifred surprised me. “I finally liked him.�
� She sighed. “Harold.”

  A hesitant smile. “It took a while.”

  “He charmed me, I suppose, because at heart he was a decent man.”

  “And he wanted you to like him. That’s why he teased you all the time.”

  “And now he’s gone, that spirited young man.” A crooked smile. “Men never tease me. It makes me lose balance.”

  My voice was mosquito thin. “I expect him to waltz through the doors, brazen, annoying us, filled with crackpot theories of this or that.”

  “Maybe they aren’t so crackpot after all.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Maybe he did know something. He said he had something to tell us last night.”

  “And he never did.” I shook my head. “Never.”

  “That’s why he was killed.”

  I stared into her face. “How do we find out what he knew?”

  “We don’t,” she said slowly. “Then they will kill us.”

  “No, they won’t.”

  She smiled. “Edna dear, there probably have been folks who wanted to kill you over the years.”

  “True, but they haven’t.” I cocked my head. “I fight to the death.”

  “You’re cocky.” A bittersweet smile. “So American, really.”

  “I take that as a compliment. I have a charmed life.”

  She waited a heartbeat. “But I’m sure Harold Gibbon believed his life was charmed. He thought he could walk through fire.”

  That gave me pause. “Fire,” I echoed. I looked down at my hands. They were pale, gripping the edge of the table.

  A rustling in the entrance. “Oh lord, I’m not ready for this,” Winifred grumbled.

  Zsuzsa Kós stood there, dressed in black funereal weeds, excessively so, I thought. Black everywhere, layers and layers of it, head to toe. A gigantic hat, dripping with black veils. She appeared the grieving caricature, though I supposed my depiction unfair. How was I to know her grief? To understand it. As she paused there, contemplating the sparse room, hers eyes searching for something, she emitted a shallow cry, and she watched us.

  “But I am,” I told Winifred. “I’ve been waiting for her.”

  That last word echoed in my head: Zsuzsa Zsuzsa Zsuzsa. Harold Gibbon’s valedictory cry. A punctuation mark on a lifetime. It had to mean something.

  I motioned Zsuzsa to our table. Though she hesitated, one hand gripping her neck, she walked toward us.

  She sat down. “I need to be with someone.” Her first words, chocked and raspy, in halting English. But then she repeated them in German.

  I knew Winifred had little patience with the woman, someone whose exaggerated look alienated her. A figure easy to parody perhaps. Zsuzsa struck Winifred as the antithesis of the emancipated woman she’d struggled all her life to establish. And yet…Zsuzsa was here, and grieving. And, more so, her name had been the last word spoken by the hapless Harold. What did that mean? Because, of course, it did mean something.

  “The police have been questioning me,” she said in slow, almost inaudible German. “The Royal Police. That Inspector Horváth, a sweet man, a flatterer, perhaps an admirer. But that Baron Meyerhold was with him, a hideous man with that fishy breath and marble skin, watching me, eyes hard as nails. He looks at you and you want to confess—but to what? To what?”

  I stared into her ravaged face. She’d slapped on some peach-colored powder, sloppily applied, cracking at the corners of her mouth. “Harold’s last word was your name, Zsuzsa.”

  She actually shrieked, which made Winifred jump. “I know, I know. Do you think I can get that out of my head? I’m tortured by it. Why, why, why? they ask me. Tell me, tell me, tell me. Over and over. They beg me. I sit up in bed, and I say my name out loud. I don’t know.”

  “Are you sure?” I probed.

  She paused, her eyes narrowing. “Do you think I’m lying?”

  “No, no, of course not. But there is a chance that you know something but don’t realize that you know something.”

  “What does that mean?” Bewilderment in her eyes.

  “I don’t really know. But Harold Gibbon must have told you something. He told us that you had told him something. He had a secret to reveal. He knew something.”

  Helpless, shrugging, her head flicked to the side. “But what? Yes, we talked, I told him things.” A sardonic chuckle. “He always said I talk too much.” She whispered now. “He told me I was a mad woman, yes, but a lovely one, madness giving me a devil’s charm. But I talked too much. It could be dangerous. But he said I told him something that made him think of something…but who knows? I used to go on and on. I was afraid to stop talking because he would go away. Leave me.” A deep sigh. “And now he has.”

  “Talk about what?” A long silence, all of us watching one another. Finally, breathing in, I said, “Tell me.”

  She waited, debating what to tell us. “What can I say? I don’t know what to say. What is important? What is not? I see how the world looks at me. Other women. An old hag, the pathetic singer relying on the old toothless men. A silly figure of fun. The crazy woman. Hello—look at Zsuzsa. Look at our Zsuzsa. Mock me, they all do. I’m the cartoon in the daily Hirlap. Zsuzsa Kós, the beautiful singer straggling back into Budapest from the royal courts. Tipsy on wine the old men feed her. They say it in front of me.”

  I broke in. “We don’t condemn you.”

  Her voice became a bitter rumble. “Hah! Everybody condemns me. The world needs people to make fun of. I learned that lesson years ago. A wonderful singer, she is, but her light dimmed, well, so fingers point at me. Look at her! Look at her!”

  “Zsuzsa,” I began, “tell me about Harold Gibbon.”

  A mischievous twinkle in her eye. “Ah, my Harold.”

  Winifred groaned.

  “Tell us.” My voice soft, reassuring. “Tell your story.”

  “Harold.” Her voice became wistful. “How he lied to me! That darling scamp making appeals to my vanity, that man. Wooing, whispering. And at night the sneaking in, the visits. Yet he came to care. He had some—real affection. I felt it. That I know. I’m a woman who can tell.” She laughed out loud. “I had my affairs of the heart so many years ago. Men flatter and promise and sing and dance around you. He did that, too. ‘Talk to me.’ Always the same line. So I talked to him. I lied to him. I made up stories that were better than the lies he told me. We lied at each other.” She paused. “Do you know why?”

  Winifred and I both nodded. “So he’d come back,” I told her.

  She smiled. “Smart lady. Yes, of course. But at one point I saw something different in him. I told myself that a part of him loved me…that he cared for me…He didn’t plan it—what man does? Especially a funny reporter like Harold. A man who was happy only when he was running away from things. But we came to have…something. That funny thing that women understand and men never will.”

  “Feelings.” I glanced at Winifred.

  “Yes. That’s it.” Zsuzsa sat back, her eyes misty. “I’m not a young girl anymore. He was a man maybe thirty. Maybe younger. I never knew. I asked him but he always laughed.”

  “Yes, a young man,” I told her.

  “He could have been my son.”

  “You never married?” Winifred asked her.

  A high, arch laugh. “The chances I had as a young girl in Vienna.” She teared up, reached for a handkerchief in a pocket, dabbed at her puffy eyes. The thick, peach-tinted powder smudged around her eyes.

  “Tell us.”

  A thin smile, a faraway voice, melancholic. “I was a beauty, you know. The little Hungarian girl from Gyoma. Some nights, weeping, my mother whispered about Gypsy blood, but my father beat her then. This was how those rumors drifted to Vienna—the attacks. On Sundays in that village I sang, and then I fled to Budapest. I sang and men pursued me, and then I was in Vienna. I sang in the b
eer halls and then in the cabarets. In an operetta. I acted onstage in glorious costume, diamonds in my hair, on my fingers. I sang—how I sang! My picture in the newspaper. On the arms of handsome men. And then I became friends with Kathi Stratt who soon became the mistress of Franz Josef. A selfish, stunning woman, but one who liked me.”

  Zsuzsa smiled at her memories. “Plump like a barnyard capon. How we laughed! Secrets shared. The dinners, the concerts, the affairs of the heart. I sang and sang. I acted. I was toasted, feted. Dancing at the pre-Lent balls. It was all a blur of champagne and flirtation and—and dreaming. Men begged me to marry them. A viscount, in fact. A Russian nobleman, drunk with me. He spilled emeralds into my lap.” A long silence.

  “And then?”

  “And then, of course, the fall from grace. Young girls, jealous of me. Husbands who got dizzy around me until their wives would spit in my face. The careless mistakes, something said one night after a little too much slivovitz. Words come back to haunt you, don’t they? Apologies afterwards mean nothing. A foolish slap in Demel’s coffee house. Suddenly ten years have gone by, and I disappear from invitations, from teas. From invitations to Sacher’s where everyone went to be seen. I end up singing in the grimy beer halls again, followed by some old men who still remember the young Hungarian girl who first came to Vienna.”

  “Then it was over.” I stared into her trembling face.

  “Over. Like that.” She snapped her fingers and one of her gaudy rings slipped down to her knuckle. Her fingers were so skinny. “I drifted here and there, a woman now forty, then maybe fifty, dragging her tattered gown through the streets. And then I have to come back here, and so many Hungarians treat me like a traitor. She sings for the Austrians, they say. So I live here and there for years, older and older, desperate, living on the crumbs from an old man—others—who remember that pretty young girl. A crown tossed my way when I sing in the Café Europa—the only place that lets me sing my Gypsy songs.”

  But something was shifting in her as she rambled. Her drifting evocation of her past strengthened her voice, her chin upturned, her eyes bright. Staring at her, I saw that feckless girl, innocent, tackling the world out there. The young girl with the God-given voice and looks who jumped head first into the whirlpool of Viennese stage life, and blossomed. Staring at her now, I saw that girl, but I realized she was still a beautiful woman. Behind the garish makeup and deep wrinkles and tattered dress and those awful spun-gold tresses—behind that hideous mask was a glorious woman. I regretted seeing her as parody, some throwaway woman, superficial. Rather, she had about her some simple dignity that she’d earned, step by step, song by song, in tackling a cold world that used her and then pushed her out.