Burning Cold

by Lisa Lieberman

  Stop it, I told myself.

  Now I was imagining a different scenario, one that involved turning back time. We woke up in Ian’s suite, tiptoeing past the Scotsman, who was snoring on the sofa. So far, we were keeping to the morning’s script, but instead of wasting precious minutes with Attila, who’d insisted on providing us with a bag of freshly-baked rolls for the journey, what if we’d arrived outside in time to stop the murder from happening? József’s assailants would have fled at our approach. Or maybe they wouldn’t have fled. Maybe they’d have turned on us because we were the intended victims, weren’t we? József might have been trying to warn us. He might have discovered them, lying in wait. He’d walked into an ambush intended for us.

  So many alternatives, but we’d done nothing. It was our fault he was dead.

  “Najdroższa,” said my husband, gently extricating himself from my grip. “We cannot stay here. It isn’t safe.” Taking my elbow, he steered me down the sidewalk, turning every so often to look over his shoulder. I heard my brother behind us, panting to keep up. “Quickly, quickly,” urged Jakub, hurrying us away from the Duna.

  It was barely light, and our side of the avenue was engulfed by shadows. Were József’s killers hiding among those shadows? I stumbled along, vision blurred by tears. Please keep us safe. Please keep us safe. I didn’t know who I was praying to. Father had cast aside his own religion long before I was born. I’d grown up without any particular faith, but actors are superstitious, seeking portents wherever we can. As we rounded the corner of the side street where we’d left the Škoda, I realized I’d been addressing my prayers to our missing brother. Zoltán utca was the name of the street where we’d parked. I’d remarked on the coincidence the evening before: was it a sign of some sort? Now, as we walked briskly toward the car, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Zoltán was working mysteriously behind the scenes, shepherding us in a direction as yet unknown.

  We reached the Škoda. Gray opened the trunk and put his and our bags inside, then handed the keys to Jakub and went around to check the tire. My husband slid behind the wheel and reached across to unlock the doors on the passenger side.

  “It’s down from where it was when I filled it,” said Gray, climbing into the back seat, “but we’re okay for now.”

  “Now is good enough for me. Let’s go!” Jakub turned the key in the ignition. I barely had time to slam the door shut before he took off, pulling out of the parking space and careening down the narrow street with a screech of tires as if we were in the Indy 500. Weaving around the rubble at such speed, I was sure we’d smash into something, or run over a piece of shrapnel. We couldn’t afford another flat.

  “Be careful, darling,” I said, my voice quavery. The heater was struggling to warm things up inside, but my shivering had little to do with the cold. I knew enough about Budapest’s geography to realize we weren’t going in the right direction for the service station. Instead of driving further east into Pest’s labyrinth of streets, Jakub had us heading off in the opposite direction, across the river to Buda on the Chain Bridge. We passed a pair of massive stone lions on either side of the long span and went under an arch, through which I could just make out the majestic castle perched high on the opposite bank. My husband’s eyes kept darting to the rearview mirror, checking to see if anyone was on our tail. We made it across the Danube without being followed, I was glad to observe. The next thing I knew, we were winding our way up a series of steep curves to the summit of Castle Hill.

  Buda was older and quainter than Pest, its cobblestone streets miraculously untouched by the strife below. Here were trees, and stately buildings ranged along a promenade with a vista overlooking the western hills. Jakub eased the Škoda onto a pull-out in front of a small park and turned off the engine. Above us loomed the spires of an ancient church. It was so quiet that when I rolled down my window for a breath of fresh air, I could hear birdsong.

  I was trying to recall every encounter we’d ever had with József in chronological order, to fix him in my memory forever. His voice on the telephone saying, “Yes, Zoltán is your brother,” his excitement carrying across the wires. After three years of sharing a cell, there wasn’t much the two of them didn’t know about one another, he’d told us, delighted to be of service. All the fineness of József’s character was already revealed in that first conversation, I realized. He’d set aside his troubles to help us track our brother down, putting our needs ahead of his own. It’s easy to notice a man like Zoltán, the standard-bearer who dashes headlong into the fray, but in his modest way, József had been no less noble. We’d never stopped to consider how much we were asking of him. He should have been with his family, making plans to keep Péti safe, not looking after us.

  It occurred to me that Jakub was equally selfless when it came to me. Now, for example, he’d started the car and was watching a black sedan as it drove up the hill toward us, his hand poised over the gearshift in readiness for a quick getaway. The car went past without slowing but he didn’t relax. He couldn’t. For my sake, he’d pushed his grief aside.

  I resolved to do the same. My beloved had enough on his mind without having to hold me together. We’d take care of one other, once we were safely back in Paris, but for now I needed to be strong. Scooting closer, I gave Jakub a peck on the cheek, letting him know I would be okay.

  “Hey, take a look at this.” Gray held up the Dante snippet we’d found in Zoltán’s typewriter. The English translation had been penciled in beneath the Hungarian stanza. Craning my neck to see over the back of the front seat, I could just make out the words. And the frost bound the tears between those orbs, and held them there.

  Jakub was puzzled. “What are we supposed to be looking at?”

  “This was sticking out of József’s pocket. He must have been intending to show it to us before we left, although damned if I can figure out why. I do know the place where it comes from.”

  “Go ahead,” I said, “tell us.” I’d encountered the Divine Comedy in boarding school, although it had left no mark on me. “Maybe we can figure it out together.”

  My brother needed no further prompting. “Dante comes upon a group of sinners, frozen in ice up to their necks. He describes them as blue-pinched, and there’s a lovely bit about the chattering of their teeth sounding like the cry of a stork. Two brothers, Alessandro and Napoleone Alberti, are stuck together, chest to chest, pressed so tightly against one another that the hair on their heads is intermingled. Dante stumbles upon them, literally. He practically steps on their heads. They both raise their faces to look at him and as they do, tears, unshed until that very moment, flow from their eyes and freeze, locking the brothers even more firmly together. The only way they can break the seal of those frozen tears is to butt heads, like goats.”

  “What did they do to land in Hell?” Despite myself, I was drawn in. I could actually picture the two brothers in the frozen lake, locked in ice for all eternity.

  “That’s what’s so interesting,” said Gray. “This section of the Inferno is known as the Caïna, named after Cain in the Bible, who killed his brother Abel, as I’m sure you both know.”

  Jakub nodded impatiently. “Yes, of course.” He’d been drawn in as well.

  “We’ve arrived in the ninth circle of Hell, where Dante’s theme is betrayal. Canto 33 introduces a number of traitors who betrayed their country, but Zoltán’s stanza comes a bit earlier, toward the end of Canto 32. Alessandro and Napoleone killed their father, Alberto, and then fought over who would inherit his wealth. They ended up killing one another—”

  “What did you say?” I interrupted him. “They betrayed their father and then they killed each other? That’s horrible!”

  “Things were pretty nasty, back in Dante’s day,” Gray agreed, gratified by the vehemence of my reaction. “Betrayal was commonplace. Take the Borgias: fratricide was the least of it. No telling how many murders were committed by members of th
at depraved family, not to mention adultery and incest. Would you believe it, a couple of them were even popes!”

  “I don’t care about the Borgias.” Was I the only one who realized what Zoltán must have been thinking, when he’d typed out those lines of Dante’s up there in his bullet-spattered office? “He hid those surveillance reports in the very section of the Inferno that’s about family betrayal. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  “It tells me he was paranoid,” said my brother, miffed over my dismissal of the Borgias. “Not that he didn’t have reason, mind you.”

  “Look what he did!” My voice sounded shrill to my own ears. I made an effort to modulate it. “He read the reports. He must have figured out who betrayed him, back then. There were only three of them in that living room. So what does he do next?”

  “He went and tried to get himself killed? That’s taking things awfully literally,” said Gray skeptically.

  “I don’t know why he got involved in a gun battle,” I admitted, “but we know he typed out those lines for us to find after he got wounded. There’s blood on the page.”

  Quick as usual, Jakub saw what I was getting at. “He wanted us to know that his betrayer was still out there.”

  “Yes. He meant for us to find the clue the next morning, when we got to the office.”

  “Would it have changed anything if we had?” mused my husband.

  “I think so. He was trying to tell us that his home wasn’t safe, to warn us off going there. We knew something was wrong when we showed up there with József. He said it, remember: Dr. Szabó was scared to death. We should never have gone there. We’ve led Zoltán’s enemy straight to his front door.”

  “It’s his own fault for not keeping his head down,” my brother insisted self-righteously. “If he hadn’t gotten himself shot at in that office of his, we wouldn’t have had to go bumbling around, trying to pick up his traces. We’d all be eating wiener schnitzel in the Sacher by now, safe and sound.”

  “Is that all you care about?” I was shouting now. “Everyone we’ve met here in Budapest is in danger, thanks to our bumbling around, and you’re talking about wiener schnitzel?”

  “I’m sorry, Cara. I didn’t mean to be callous.”

  “I know you didn’t.” I stopped, aware of the tears flowing from my own eyes, which were not frozen. They were hot with remorse. So much for holding myself together. “József would still be alive, if it weren’t for us. We set the hounds on him.”

  Jakub slid across the seat and took me into his arms. “You shouldn’t blame yourself,” he murmured into my hair. “This thing is much bigger than us, you know.”

  “Of course I blame myself.” I swiped at my eyes with a sleeve, refusing to accept the way out he was offering. “This was our problem, not his. We had no right to drag him into this mess. What will his wife and son do without him?”

  “I imagine they’ll do the same thing they did when he was in prison,” said my husband. “People in this country are experts at survival. But you’re right: his death is on our hands.”

  I appreciated his frankness, cold as it was. This was a side to Jakub that I’d rarely seen, and under ordinary conditions, I might have found it off-putting, his ability to appraise a situation bluntly and move forward, setting his feelings aside. But he too was an expert at survival, and now was the time for action, not regrets.

  “There’s still time to warn her, isn’t there?” I said.

  My husband nodded. “If we hurry, yes.”

  “Warn who?” said Gray.

  “Dr. Szabó could be in danger,” I told him. “Whoever killed József might come after her next.”

  “You don’t seriously intend to go back and talk to that woman, not after she made it plain that she wanted nothing whatsoever to do with us.”

  “After what happened to József, I refuse to leave the country without seeing Zoltán’s wife and, at the very least, putting her on her guard.”

  “I agree with Cara,” said Jakub.

  “Oh, very well.” I heard the hesitation in my brother’s voice. “But how’re we going to find that place again? It was pretty complicated, getting there from the hospital and the Budapest map doesn’t go out that far.”

  “Pesterzsébet,” said Jakub. “That’s the name of the district.” He opened the map to the Hungary side and located it. “The home was near a church, as I recall. And we took Üllői út to get there.”

  “How do you remember these things?” I marveled, although I was fairly certain that this skill was another vestige of his time in the Resistance. The ability to commit various details to memory—names, addresses, landmarks—may well have meant the difference between life and death during the war.

  My husband brushed off the compliment. “My memory won’t be enough. What we really need is a Hungarian speaker. Someone who can handle our negotiations with the garage to start with. Then, when we get to Dr. Szabó’s, someone’s got to be able to explain coherently why we’ve returned. Otherwise, we’ll only have made things worse.”

  Gray sighed dramatically and asked for the car keys. He got out and went around to open the trunk. We couldn’t see what he was doing through the back window with it up, but when he returned, he was holding a fancy bottle of pálinka, one of the Duna’s best.

  “I was bringing it home as a souvenir,” he said sheepishly. “The stuff grows on you.”

  I remembered the rolls that Attila had provided. Fetching the bag from my suitcase, I discovered the waiter had thoughtfully packed hard-boiled eggs, salami, and a hunk of cheese to go along with the rolls, all of which we hungrily consumed in the parked car while Gray got to work on the pálinka.

  “Would you care for a swallow, a chaser to help wash breakfast down?” He proffered the bottle. “No? Cheers, then,” he said, raising it to his lips.

  “Cheers,” we repeated.

  Getting to the garage shouldn’t have been difficult. Even I remembered the name of the street it was on, Rákóczi út, having confused it with the name of the recently deposed dictator. But winding our way back down Castle Hill took us through some damaged areas that rivaled those in Pest, necessitating a series of detours. After crossing the river again, this time on the Liberty Bridge, we passed the first of six upended trolley cars (I counted), followed by a stewed tank abandoned in front of what looked like an army barracks. I tried not to look at the charred remains of the Russian soldiers who had been inside the tank when it blew up, but the smell of their burned and rotting flesh carried with us for several blocks. I wished I possessed Jakub’s ability to remain focused on the way forward, but I couldn’t get past the horror of it all.

  Gray, on the other hand, had found refuge in drink. We could hear him singing softly to himself in the back seat.

  “He sounds pretty jolly,” my husband commented. “How much has he had?”

  I turned around to check the level of the bottle. “About a third, I’d say.”

  “When he gets to the halfway mark, better take it away from him. We should save the rest. It might prove necessary on the way to the border.”

  “Did you hear that?” I asked my brother.

  “Ne aggódj. Minden csodálatos!” came the reply.

  “On second thought, he’s probably had enough already,” said Jakub.

  Eventually, after much detouring, we reached the garage where we’d left the tire. The spare was nearly flat by the time we arrived, and Jakub was concerned we might have damaged the rim. He wanted Gray to ask the mechanic to change the tire, a straightforward enough request and one hard to misinterpret, I’d have thought. The man was clearly expecting us. He’d come out of his office, rolling the tire across the lot, the moment he spotted the Škoda.

  “Szépjóreggelt!” My brother rolled down his window and beckoned the mechanic over. He spoke a sentence or two in Hungarian and motioned to the tire, presumabl
y conveying Jakub’s request, but the mechanic seemed to take his words as a personal affront and showed no inclination whatsoever to comply. Hands on his hips, he regarded the three of us with no small amount of animosity. Had we not needed the tire replaced immediately, I’d have urged Jakub to drive away, fast. I could tell that the mechanic’s attitude was making him nervous too.

  “Maybe a bribe would help,” he said, reaching into the pocket of his trousers and peeling off a few bills from the bundle of forints in his wallet. But it turned out that my brother had not mentioned the flat tire. He’d quoted a line from Marx, something to do with the wage slavery of the laborer.

  I stared at him in disbelief. “Why’d you do that?”

  “We may be representatives of a capitalist society, but we aren’t here to exploit him,” he announced pedantically. “The Hungarian people aren’t looking to overturn the Communist system, you know. They just want to reform it, to make it more humane, which is what Marx had in mind in the first place, I’ll have you know. Stalinism is a perversion of Marxist principles.” He sounded quite pleased with himself after this little speech. Then he slapped his forehead.

  “Uh oh.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  An embarrassed look came over Gray’s face. “I’m afraid I made a boo-boo. I may have called him a stinky slave instead of a wage slave.”

  “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

  “It was an honest mistake,” he protested. “Don’t look at me like that, Cara. I just got bérszolga and büdös szolga confused. Could have happened to anyone. Awfully inappropriate, though. I should probably say I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake!” I got out of the car and approached the fellow. Employing a combination of gestures, smiles, and apologetic grimaces, I communicated our desire to have him replace the flat tire with the one he’d repaired while simultaneously indicating that the man in the back seat was unhinged.