by Anna Porter
“He did convert, didn’t he, Father?” Judith insisted, following him down the steps.
“You’re not a Catholic, are you, Mrs. Hayes?” Father O’Shea asked.
“No.”
“In our faith, you see, some of the things said between a priest and another person remain confidential. One of the basic tenets of our religion. I do thank you for coming by.” He left through the door to the sacristy.
***
Forensics reported that there were minuscule glass shards in the dust they had collected at Zimmerman’s garage, and that they were of the same source as those the pathologist had dug out of Harvey Singer’s chest.
***
At 7 P.M. on March 11, Michael Ward was picked up in Lethbridge, Alberta. He had $5,000 on him in cash and a social insurance card and driver’s license that identified him as Peter Strachan from Vancouver.
They flew him back to Toronto and promised to go easy on him if he revealed where the money came from and what he had to do to get it.
David went one better than that: he told Ward on the way to police headquarters that he would go free, without an additional blemish on his record, if he told him who had paid him to throw the paint can into Judith Hayes’s home.
At first Ward refused to cooperate.
***
Adrian Parker had sat next to Martha Griffiths that night. He had occupied the other end of the host’s table, facing him. Parker was a senior partner at Ross, Wilkinson, the giant chartered accounting firm that had tentacles from London to New York, Paris, and Toronto. Parker himself was based in New York but traveled extensively. He was back in Toronto for the final probate of Paul Zimmerman’s will, staying in the Royal Suite on the top floor of the Park Plaza, a tastefully furnished extravaganza with a grand piano, a peerless view over the chic parts of the city, all the way to Lake Ontario. He had been Paul Zimmerman’s international adviser on new acquisitions—he was proud of having had a hand in all of them, most recently the difficult takeover of Pacific Airlines.
He was a square-shouldered man with a proud paunch, a round face, and a relaxed demeanor that imparted a sense of power. He had found nothing remarkable about either of the dinners, had never heard of Harvey Singer, could think of no reason why anyone would want to murder Paul Zimmerman.
He knew of the rift between Paul and Philip Masters, but didn’t consider it detrimental. He thought Masters would settle happily into the Amco chairmanship and a Senate appointment.
He didn’t believe that Zimmerman had actually fired Philip Masters. One doesn’t just fire a man like Philip Masters, no sir. And as for the veiled allegation that Masters had used illegal means to amass his own considerable fortunes—well, let whoever made that statement come forward and say it to Masters’s face.
He hadn’t much to say about Martha Griffiths’s affair with Paul Zimmerman, other than that Paul was fond of the ladies. Martha hadn’t been the first, nor would she have been the last. She was pretty and willing... “You’re a man of the world, aren’t you, Officer?”
About the night of February 26th: “Chuck Griffiths had had a few difficulties transferring Smelter Financial to the Loyal. Lack of natural integration, management overload, that kind of stuff. Paul and I were giving him advice.”
“Was there much tension between the Griffithses?”
“None, far as I could see. Chuck had more important matters to contend with.”
“Didn’t he care that his wife was sleeping with his boss?”
“Rather crudely put, Officer. But as a matter of fact, I don’t believe Chuck gave it much heed. Martha can be a silly woman, she acts like a child. When she settles down, I figure she’ll return to the warm hearth. She should have had children, that one. Knock some sense into her.”
While Parker had no idea who’d killed Zimmerman, he was sure about one thing: it wasn’t Chuck Griffiths. Chuck had too much to lose. There were unsecured mortgages on several properties he had acquired over the years and Paul had happily financed them because of other common interests. Chuck had turned Loyal into one of the best companies in the Zimmerman group; he had drive and imagination. With Paul gone, it was questionable whether anyone else would extend him the same privileges. Loyal, he thought, might be sold by Brenda. And she did not favor Chuck for the Monarch succession.
Paul hadn’t briefed him on what announcement he was about to make the evening of March 1st. He had asked him to fly to Toronto for the occasion, and to bring Frances if he could. They had known Paul for over 20 years and that sort of request was a bit of a command performance. It had never occurred to them not to come. When he had pressed Paul about the nature of the announcement, he’d been told it was personal. He thought it might have something to do with Paul’s past—an odd assumption, but he knew something had been bothering Paul the past few weeks. In fact, since New Year. “We spent New Year’s together, the six of us...”
“You and who else?”
“The Masterses. It had become a bit of a tradition—we all went to Barbados. The Masterses have a place, near the Colony Club. I remember that two nights in a row Paul had these dreadful nightmares. I heard him shout in his sleep and cry out. We had the next set of rooms, and in an old building like that the walls are thin enough.”
“What was he saying?”
Parker shrugged. “It was Hungarian. Brenda woke him up and walked him out to the living room on the upper floor. She poured him brandy—as if they had done that sort of thing before.”
“Had they?”
“Apparently, yes,” Parker said. “I asked her. She said he’d been having nightmares for years, some fear of being captured and killed. I think it was one of those wartime memories he carried. Jewish, from Hungary, you know.”
“But why did you think he was going to speak about his past the night of March 1st?”
“He said something odd on the phone... How did he put it?” Parker cupped his voluminous chin in his hand as he thought. “About shadows still haunting him from the past. So I asked him about those nightmares. He said they had been getting worse of late. He’d heard from someone he thought was dead long ago.”
“Was he glad this man was still alive?”
“Glad? Glad? Hmm... No. Now that I reflect on it, I think he sounded frightened. That’s odd for Paul. Never a man to scare easily. But there it was.” Parker lumbered to his feet and around the room, thinking. “And in the same context, he said he was going to tell us a story on the Sunday. A long story. And he hoped I’d not have too much of the wine till he got to it. Joking. He was always pulling my leg. So when I asked him what kind of a story, he said, ‘The kind that dispels nightmares.’ Strange, that, don’t you think?”
Thirty-Five
STEVIE SOLVED Judith’s cat problem by moving in for a few days. She had always wanted to try living another person’s life, and opportunities like this rarely presented themselves. She promised not to educate Jimmy in the fine art of grading quality marijuana.
David decided to accompany Judith to Hungary on the spur of the moment, having finally convinced the Chief there was something to the Eger connection. Chuck Griffiths wouldn’t be back from Hong Kong till the end of the week; Masters had left, again, for Bermuda; Arthur had flown back to New York, despite David’s instructions to remain in Toronto for a second round of questions.
Brenda Zimmerman was angry and uncooperative. She didn’t seem to believe that her husband had been poisoned. David knew he would have to fly to Bermuda to see her and Masters, but even if the Chief agreed, David wouldn’t be ready for her till after he had been to Hungary. The last piece of the jigsaw puzzle was in Eger.
They rented a midsize Skoda at the Budapest airport, bought a stack of trilingual maps, and set off through the main thoroughfare of Budapest to find Highway 3, which would, in under two hours, the rental agent promised, take them to Eger. That wasn’t quite the way it happened. They were lost almost as soon as they turned off the road from the airport, and found themselves crissc
rossing the Danube via a variety of ancient and modern bridges before they located the first person who spoke enough English to direct them toward Eger. He was a waiter in a Castle Hill restaurant and a self-declared expert on local history. The price David and Judith paid for the backseat directions was listening for half an hour to the story of the city’s heroic past, particularly that of the defenders of Castle Hill.
It was a cold gray day with occasional flashes of sunshine. At 10 o’clock, the traffic was light—“takes four to five years to save up for a car,” the waiter said—but swathed in blue exhaust. The smell of diesel fuel made Judith gag. The Danube was deep winter green; there were large slabs of jagged ice crashing into the shoreline.
They dropped the waiter off at his restaurant in the medieval heart of Buda, near the Fisherman’s Bastion, where the general drabness of the city’s thoroughfares gave way to arched doorways, Gothic churches, and cobblestones. He was delighted they were going to Eger. Too few visitors bothered to drive into the Bükk Mountains, not only a beautiful part of the country but another monument to heroic battles fought, though, alas, mostly lost.
They traversed the Danube one more time—“promise me it’s the last,” David begged—and set off on Highway 3, direction: Miskolc. Though it’s only 130 kilometers from Budapest to Eger, they were not yet halfway two hours later. They were stuck behind a convoy of slow-moving trucks, and Judith was afraid to pass them on the narrow winding road that only a Hungarian would call a highway.
It was dark by the time they arrived and checked into the Park Hotel, on a narrow lane off Lenin Street, with no visible exit and mountains of snow blocking the sidewalks. The manager showed them to their old-fashioned rooms personally, when he discovered they were from Canada and didn’t speak a word of Hungarian. He was a man of about 40, with brown curly hair and a waxed mustache he had trimmed carefully to curve around his upper lip. He had learned English at university but found little use for it up here. He was delighted to have an opportunity for practice. He made sure they knew of the connecting door between their two rooms and presented each of them with a bottle of the local red wine, a tasty cousin of the Bull’s Blood one could buy in Toronto.
Judith’s polite questions about the differences between wine for export and for home consumption encouraged the manager to launch into an exhaustive dissertation on the relative merits of the wines in the area, followed by an even longer discourse on the seemingly endless history of Eger going back to the first settlements of Magyar tribes—the original Hungarians—when they arrived from God knows where in the 9th century. It appeared the town had been destroyed by a succession of marauding armies, Tartars and Turks, which made it fairly understandable that its proudest moment was a battle the townspeople actually succeeded in winning sometime in the 16th century. The manager took his name, István, from the victorious commander of the 16th-century townsfolk. He would have conducted them to the barely visible ramparts of the ancient fort this evening had Judith not complained of hunger and lack of sleep.
István then insisted on opening the hotel’s huge baroque restaurant to serve them a six-course meal larded with Hungarian hospitality and accompanied by mournful violin music he piped through the aged loudspeaker system. The room itself was designed to hold over a hundred people, and it took both bottles of red wine to warm it up for two. The tourist season didn’t start till May. In the winter, István explained, Eger got mainly old people who came for the baths that claim to treat rheumatism and gout.
After he had explored the possibilities of their having relatives in the area, ancestors they were trying to trace, an insatiable curiosity about central European history, an appetite for wine tasting, or a nasty case of arthritis, István asked directly why they had come to Eger. Before David could say anything about the murder investigation, Judith said she was a writer, looking for background information on the Zimmerman family who had lived here before the war.
“Zimmerman,” István brooded. “No. They don’t sound Hungarian. Not one of the names I’ve heard around here...”
“Before your time, I think,” said David. “They were Jewish. They wouldn’t have survived the German occupation. We were hoping to meet someone who knew them.”
“Those were confusing times, the war years. In ’42, ’43 there was the famine that decimated the population. That’s the right word, isn’t it?” He slapped his knees in obvious enjoyment at having found the right word. “One in ten, right? A lot of the Jews left while they could, the ones that stayed behind were taken off in trucks by the Germans. They never returned,” István said. “Maybe some went to Israel.” He looked a touch embarrassed by this suggestion, but not enough to admit he knew most of them had ended up in Auschwitz.
“Before my time, as you say,” he allowed. “All I know, there aren’t so many Jews here now as there were in my parents’ time. But there are still a lot of anti-Semites. Funny, isn’t that?” When neither guest laughed along with him, he asked if they’d like to meet Józsi bácsi—he would remember more about those years. He had started at the hotel as the hall porter just before the war and never had another job, not even a promotion since. “Some men are happy with their lot from the start. No ambition, no desire to set goals. Not so good for the country,” he told David earnestly. “We need wider horizons, more growth—you know what I mean? We’re the capitalists of the East. We prove you can create wealth without exploitation, all it takes is a bit of know-how.”
Józsi bácsi—“ ‘bácsi’ means uncle; that’s what we call older people we know”—was on duty till 11 every night, which could have been viewed as some kind of exploitation by a woman better versed in political theory than Judith claimed she was. In any event, he was delighted to join the boss and the two foreigners for a glass of wine (or two). His English was limited to “Hello” and “Tank you verymuch,” both of which he used liberally, but he spoke a passable French, not unusual, István said, for people of his vintage in these parts. Judith judged him close to 80 but rolled back a decade when he offered to arm-wrestle David after the second glass of Bikavér.
His black tunic, decorated in gold braid and tassels, displayed an array of silver medals that, on close examination, turned out to be football firsts. In the ’30s, he had enjoyed a flash of national fame as a regional soccer star. Now he coached the high school team in the mornings. He had short-cropped white hair and a thick neck with prominent tendons that tensed when he became excited. This happened chiefly when he talked about soccer to István in Hungarian. István gave up on translating midway into an argument about two goalies vying for selection to play on the national team.
In her best high school French, Judith asked whether he remembered a family by the name of Zimmerman in Eger before the war.
He did remember, although he certainly didn’t know them himself. They were summer and weekend residents only. Lived in a big house on Golya Street, near the Turkish baths.
The baths, István interjected, the most elaborate Turkish baths in Europe, were built in the 17th century by Sultan Valide. He thought David and Judith might like to see the excavations in the morning.
“I’m sorry, we don’t have time,” David said.
“We’d love to,” Judith corrected him. It wouldn’t do to dampen István’s enthusiasm. “We’re tired from the trip now, but tomorrow we’ll be rested. Won’t we, David?”
“I suppose...,” David said uncertainly.
István served a transparent syrupy liquid, called Pálinka, in brandy snifters and encouraged Józsi bácsi to go on about the Zimmermans.
Zimmerman père had been in some kind of business in Budapest, running a factory, or a string of factories, more likely. They were mighty rich for hereabouts. They entertained a lot, but mostly people from the capital. Józsi bácsi remembered the big limousines, American cars. They were scarce between the wars. The locals still used carriages—those who could afford them. As for himself, Józsi bácsi used to travel by oxcart or on horseback. Those were the d
ays—none of the rush of today, wanting to get places faster. Never had understood why everyone was in such a rush, we all get there in the end, whether by horseback, oxcart, or big Yankee cars.
After the war broke out and the Arrow Cross party became powerful in Budapest, the Zimmermans moved to Eger. There had been two children, a boy and a girl. Józsi was already a football hero. Once the boy had asked for Józsi’s autograph for his collection. He had spent a great deal of time in Vienna when he was little and had a book of autographs that included some foreign names, musicians, he thought, as well as Hungarians.
His name was Pali, Józsi bácsi thought. A small boy with glasses, not much good at sports.
“You should talk to Sári Markhot, she would know more about them,” Józsi suggested. “She made clothes for Mrs. Zimmerman. She’s still here, I think. Worked in a shop down Jókai Street. Now her daughter runs it. They live above the store.”
István wanted to know what sort of story Judith was writing and why. When she told him that Zimmerman had become a millionaire several times over in America, he offered to accompany them to the Markhots’. Right now. Why wait till the morning? They would need a translator, and he was busy then. “Very clever, those Jews,” he confided to Judith as she struggled into her winter coat. “Always fall on their feet. The Nazis trucked them away in 1944.”
Eger hadn’t been a particularly friendly place for them, he said. Always a town of Christians. Founded as a home for bishops by a king of the Hungarians made into a saint, Eger’s proudest building was a cathedral that vied for grandeur with Cologne’s. Each time the Turks demolished it, the Christians started it up again with new towers, new adjacent palaces for their priests. Even today, there are eight churches in the town for 60,000 people, “and religion hasn’t had a high profile recently.” István himself wasn’t particularly religious, but he still made the sign of the cross as they passed the ancient Franciscan basilica looming out of the darkness on their left. “One can’t be too sure,” he whispered. “These stones have been here for a long time. Perhaps those old monks were on to something.”
