Cafe Europa

by Ed Ifkovic

  “Ridiculous, sir.”

  “No, not so. I’m not a fool, Miss Ferber. I’ve heard you questioning folks. But you need other eyes. This is alien territory for you, the young American short-story writer with the keen eye, walking the streets of Budapest.”

  “And you’re those other eyes?”

  “Among others.” He stood up. “I trust you, Miss Ferber. You now know my secret. We’ll talk. Keep in mind that everyone is a suspect.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Perhaps your Endre Molnár, whom your eyes follow with loving regard, is the murderer.”

  “Never.”

  “I knew you’d say that.” He laughed. “Even Mrs. Pelham. I overheard her wishing Cassandra dead. But we often say that about people we hate.”

  “You could be the murderer, sir.”

  “That’s true.”

  I watched him closely. “You could be lying to me now.”

  A twinkle in his eyes as he ran his fingers through his beard. “That’s also true.”

  He walked away.

  ***

  Bothered, I stayed by myself in my room, refusing supper with Winifred, avoiding the lobby. I didn’t know what to believe now, so rattled had I become after that brief, ambiguous conversation with that mysterious man in the park. Jonathan Wolf—or Ivan Farkas. Could he be trusted? Why seek me out for that serendipitous revelation of his identify? I didn’t know what to believe, though I suspected vast spaces of that man’s story begged credulity.

  Yet somehow he happened onto an idea I knew to be true—my own resolve to solve this murder. This murder? Which murder? Harold Gibbon, of course. But maybe also Cassandra Blaine’s horrible death in the hotel garden. Because, indeed, I was now convinced that both murders were interlocked in some maniacal, dreadful way. But how? And why? Why?

  So I needed to sit in my rooms, quiet, quiet. I munched on soda crackers and read the day-old London Times, retrieved from the café. But the day’s news was too distant with nothing of the vortex of anger and distrust and duplicity that seemed to rule this part of the globe. Austria-Hungary, the empire and the kingdom, both misnomers perhaps because empire and kingdom suggested allegiances, loyalty, fealty. What I sensed was fomenting revolution and dissent undermining the starved, decadent landscape.

  But then it was late, my eyes heavy, shutting. Outside my window a driving rain had begun falling, splatters against the windows, loud, sloppy. A strong wind coming off the Danube whistled through the shaky sills of the old loose windows. A pane rattled, a curtain moved. I shivered. When I went to call for tea, the telephone line connected, then broke. Silence, dead. I tried again—nothing. Yet sitting there, debating, the bell for the dumbwaiter chimed, though I knew it could not be for me, but the portrait of Franz Josef shifted as the creaky cable lifted to an upper floor. Then nothing. I swore those imperial eyes sought mine, held them, accused. His horrible whiskered face became Jonathan Wolf’s shadowy face—or that man now named Ivan Farkas. The shadows in the room shifted, played games, disturbed me. All of a sudden the overhead light dimmed, flickered, sputtered, then blazed back on. I breathed in. Then I heard an electric buzz, smelled something burning, a raw, sulfuric smell, and the room went dark. I sat there in the awful darkness, and I wondered if I was witness to the end of the world.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ivan Farkas came to Lajos Tihanyi’s atelier. That was my doing, though I wasn’t certain why I extended the invitation so cavalierly. Obviously Tihanyi was rattled because his mouth noises escalated and his face contorted as he stormed around the room.

  “I’m sorry,” I kept saying, turning to Bertalan Pór, imploring him to explain my behavior to his friend. But Bertalan Pór looked helpless and unhappy, choosing to sit in a chair by the bank of windows and stare vacantly down into the street below.

  No one was happy with me.

  I’d spent the first two hours in the studio with Tihanyi and Pór, acquiescing to Tihanyi’s request that I grant him a mere two hours in his studio. I liked his ramshackle but appealing work space with its heady hint of turpentine, old rags, oils, sweat, and old clothing. A painter’s lair, that comforting, large room, a kingdom of one man’s passion. I sat quietly on a stool, my body slightly inclined to the left, tucked into the red jacket given to me earlier, and holding a preposterous daisy that immediately wilted, replaced with a second, and then a third. I hated daisies, a bloom I associated with Pollyanna maidens, but I wasn’t the artist.

  He’d already transferred outlines from the various sketches he’d made earlier, including the rough painting he’d done in the hotel garden. The figure I glimpsed on the canvas looked—well, intimidating. A woman determined, forceful. My face bony and stark. Of course, it didn’t look like me, a point I immediately made to the artist, who ignored me. I supposed it wasn’t my prerogative, my captured image. What mattered was Tihanyi’s skewered view of me, some Expressionistic—how glibly I now hurled about that meaningless word!—rendering of a woman he saw as independent, fierce, determined. Perhaps a little maddened. A woman he deemed worthy of oil and canvas. Me. Miss Ferber, thirty years old, sitting on a stool in a Hungarian atelier, painted by man who couldn’t speak to me or listen to my reservations. Perhaps he preferred it that way.

  Meanwhile, Bertalan Pór sat sketching in a corner, rarely glancing up from his sketchpad, at one point brewing a pot of tea when I was granted a respite, but otherwise silent. Winifred Moss arrived after the first hour, was greeted enthusiastically by both men, but especially Bertalan Pór, who fawned and hovered and insisted she comment on the art. But even Winifred was surprised by my announcement that I’d invited the newly dubbed Ivan Farkas to the studio.

  “What are you up to?” Winifred asked, smiling slightly.

  “We had a talk yesterday. I thought about it last night as I stumbled around my darkened rooms, and I’ve decided to trust the man.”

  “I repeat: what are you up to? That look in your eye.”

  Bertalan Pór kept shooting questioning looks to Tihanyi, and muttering in Hungarian. I could see Tihanyi frantically attempting to read his friend’s lips, which he did—though he was baffled by what he read. He’d dart glances at me, sipping the hot brew, and shake his head. A whistling sound escaped that sad mouth.

  “This is Ivan Farkas.” I introduced Jonathan Wolf when he had climbed the stairs and stood in the doorframe.

  No one knew where to look.

  “Come in, please.”

  What startled me was that Ivan Farkas was now clean-shaven, revealing a sharp jaw line, a Roman nose, and the most unexpected dimples in his cheeks. He looked boyish now, and very American. He stroked his naked chin with his fingers, as though trying to understand who this new man was. It made me nervous.

  “You also know him as Jonathan Wolf. He has a story to tell us. And, I believe, we have things to tell him—all to the end of solving Harold’s murder.”

  Winifred yelped, startling herself. And Bertalan Pór, jotting the tenor of my words down on a slip of paper, showed it to Lajos Tihanyi.

  “Miss Ferber has chosen to believe my story, and I’ve come to trust her instincts. And those instincts suggest the three of you”—his glance swept from one to the other, held brief eye contact—“are to be trusted. You knew Harold.”

  I stressed my words. “And Cassandra, don’t forget. You watched her in the café. I refuse to let that girl be forgotten.”

  “She won’t be,” Farkas told us.

  He quickly summarized the tale he’d confided yesterday in the park, his role in monitoring the unethical Marcus Blaine. He drifted from German to Hungarian to English, an amalgam that was effective, crazy though the speech was. But I could see that Winifred and the two artists were still wary of the man, their faces rigid, eyes focused, waiting, waiting. “The murder of these two Americans haunts me. Hence this meeting.”

  “Why here?” B
ertalan Pór asked,

  “Away from the hotel and the café,” I told him.

  “What about Endre Molnár?” asked Winifred.

  A heartbeat. Then Ivan Farkas said in a low voice, “There is always the possibility that he is the murderer.”

  Hotly, I stammered, “Impossible.”

  Ivan smiled. “I believe that, too. My instincts say he is a fine man, honest, decent, and suffering these days.”

  “Then why?” I looked into his face.

  “The only thing I can say with certainly is that the five of us are free from suspicion.”

  Bertalan Pór arched his back, lifting up his head so that the overhead light brought his face out of the shadows. His look aristocratic, proud, with that high forehead, chiseled cheekbones, and swept-back blue-black hair. “But we do not know about you, sir.”

  Ivan grinned. “Ask Miss Ferber.”

  Everyone looked at me. “I could be wrong, a misguided fool, suckered in by this glib-talking man, but my instincts say no. I…”

  Winifred Moss finished for me. “Trust him.”

  I nodded. “I do.”

  “Are your instincts always right, Miss Ferber?” From Bertalan Pór.

  “So far.” But inside I quaked. Maybe not, maybe not.

  Ivan contemplated the large room, his eyes surveying the art hung on the walls and on the easels, canvases and drawings spread over the tables. He looked puzzled. “I’ll never understand the new world,” he concluded. “To me, it’s like the symbolic year 1900 signaled to young folks that there had to be a radical shift in everything. The old order passes and the new is alien to me. The airplane, the automobile. This!” He pointed at a particularly bizarre canvas, a landscape of peasant huts and farm fields but splashed with brilliant unreal color, blotches of paint so gaudy they seemed slathered willy-nilly on the canvas. But then, looking into the faces of the two young artists, he beamed. “But somehow it all seems right—now that I stand here and look at it.”

  He was stalling, perhaps unsure of how to approach the problem.

  I took over. “Another reason I wanted Jonathan—Ivan—to be here was to look at the sketches both of you accumulated for your book. Ivan has been in the Café Europa often, he’s watched the people there, he understands things we may not understand, and maybe he sees things we don’t. I’m not seeing something, and I think—I insist—something is there.”

  I indicated the chaotic stacks of sketches strewn on the library table by the window, and we all glanced at them. They seemed Biblical grails of wonder now, revelatory talismans of coded meaning.

  “I know Inspector Horváth,” Ivan said. “In fact, I met him in America—but that is another story. A good man, hampered by Austrian regulation and outright bias. But a dedicated man. I told him I’m coming here today.”

  That news alarmed the two Hungarians, Tihanyi nodding his head vigorously.

  “What did he say about that?” I asked.

  “He says maybe the Americans can solve the murder of the two Americans. Maybe the reason for the murder is not something in Austria-Hungary, but the solution looks back to America.”

  That idea stunned me. Something in America? What? Cassandra and Harold? Strangers back in the States. Well, virtually strangers in Hungary. How could that be? But perhaps Inspector Horváth was privy to something I’d not considered.

  “Mrs. and Mrs. Blaine? Hearst?”

  “I don’t know. But perhaps we need to look at the count and his mother.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” Winifred remarked, “what for? I don’t see the connection with Harold Gibbon.”

  “Perhaps there isn’t one,” Ivan told her.

  Winifred was looking at Ivan intently, her face suggesting she had reservations about him. Nevertheless, I’d invited him—assumed his integrity. She respected my decision.

  We sat at the table, with the exception of Lajos Tihanyi who refused to leave his place in front of the painting he was executing. Luckily, the easel faced away, so I could see the artist and not the splash of red that was an embryonic Edna Ferber portrait. I did notice Ivan looking at it before he sat down, choosing not to comment, but I thought I detected a bemused and not very salutatory look on his face.

  While we settled in, Tihanyi dabbed at the canvas, a brushstroke here, a correction there. When I glanced back at him, he wore a quizzical smile, and he looked content. I suppose the troubled, unfortunate artist always found his particular peace in front of an easel. That was good. Of course it was. Like my Oliver typewriter and me back at home, a comfortable sight, if trying and taxing. My kingdom there, ruled benevolently. I created my world and peopled it. So, too, this Hungarian artist.

  For a few minutes Ivan Farkas rifled through the piles of sketches, but he didn’t look happy. He kept moving them back and forth, peering at them, squinting, but I could tell he was not seeing anything there. There were just too many of them spread across the table. Perhaps my idea was a faulty one. Perhaps Tihanyi’s and Pór’s sketches were nothing more than colorful vignettes of a thriving café society, a kaleidoscope of varied faces lingering long hours in smoked-filled and aromatic coffee houses.

  “Let’s talk of what we know,” he began, sitting back and disregarding the stacks of drawings. “Harold Gibbon was dancing around too many fires, I think. So he probably made enemies. Who foremost?”

  “The Austrians,” I volunteered. “The empire. Harold prophesized doom and destruction for the empire. He wrote about the coming war. That had to rankle Vienna.”

  “And the Hungarians?” Bertalan Pór asked.

  I shook my head. “No, I can’t believe that. He wanted to be in Budapest because he loved it. He thought the Hungarians were treated unfairly by Vienna. He befriended Endre Molnár.”

  “No Hungarian would kill Harold,” Bertalan Pór announced fervently. He banged the table with his fist. Tihanyi, peering around his easel, made a rasp noise.

  “I believe that,” Ivan said. “Miss Ferber, tell us your thinking.”

  I deliberated. “I start with Harold’s last word to me. His final word. Repeated twice. A name. ‘Zsuzsa.’ A woman he believed held the secret to whatever he was looking into. A woman he purposely wooed, perhaps foolishly, though perhaps not, but a woman who admitted talking too much. A woman also who might have known something and not realized its importance.”

  Winifred was nodding. “Zsuzsa’s focus is on her own loss and sadness. She looks back to her heyday in Vienna and gets lost in the memories.”

  “It seems to me that Harold was trying to tell me that Zsuzsa had told him something, and at the moment he died he understood that she was right about it. But when I approached Zsuzsa, she begged ignorance. And I don’t believe she’s lying. I don’t think she knows.”

  Ivan clicked his tongue. “I’ve watched her. I’ve sat with her. The conversations I’ve had with her are depressing—even a little chilling.” He sighed and avoided looking at us. “She told me a woman must always look good for a man, no matter how old she is. Not for herself—but for a man.”

  Winifred broke in. “Her first mistake.”

  Ivan went on. “She hungers for kindness.”

  “Don’t we all,” I added. “But it’s interesting that she used the word ‘assassination’ when she talked of Harold’s death.” Then I remembered something else. “She also used it with Cassandra’s murder, but she added that all murders in the empire are assassinations.”

  “A melodramatic woman,” Bertalan Pór added. “A woman who lived a high style—intrigues, love affairs, royalty and politics and…”

  “And,” I broke in, “high drama. When she was important.” A wry chuckle on my part. “In her world only important people are assassinated.”

  Ivan Farkas twisted his mouth into a wry grin. “It’s a comfort knowing that my murder would be…commonplace.”

  �
��Don’t joke about such acts,” I insisted. I shivered. “There is too much death around me already. Too much loss.”

  “I’m sorry.” Blunt, direct, but there was no apology behind the words.

  “What did Zsuzsa and Harold talk about that last night? It was so crucial that Harold told Winifred and me that he was ready to reveal something that night when we met on Castle Hill.”

  “And never got the chance.”

  “So only Zsuzsa knows,” I concluded. “And I’ve already talked to her.” I nodded in Ivan’s direction. “You need a conversation with her, sir. I suspect that she responds better when in the company of attractive men. Me, the dowdy American writer, well, she could look around me. You, sir”—I grinned—“especially clean-shaven and looking very much the matinee idol of a rousing Broadway review, well, I think she can suddenly remember patches of that lost conversation.”

  Ivan Farkas raised his eyebrows as color rose in his cheeks. “Matinee idol? Me? Ben Hur in a chariot dragged across the footlights?”

  “Really, Edna.” Winifred was shaking her head, though her lips twitched slightly in a reluctant smile.

  “Don’t be that pleased with yourself, sir. I don’t consider a swaggering James O’Neill worthy of his picture on a tobacco card. And he’s popular these days on the boards in America and has long been a rah-rah-rah heartthrob for women.”

  None of this banter was making sense to Bertalan Pór, whose head bobbed up and down in an attempt to follow the loose-jointed American exchange.

  But Ivan agreed. “I’ll do it.” He bowed to me awkwardly—like a ham actor in the stage version of When Knighthood Was in Flower.

  “I want to step back a moment.” I looked at Winifred. “I want to review Cassandra’s behavior that last day. What do we know? I recall her at Gerbeaud’s, seeking me out, begging for a meeting, telling me she was afraid.” I stressed the word. “Afraid.”