Harley, who must have heard her stories many times, listened with a sparkle in his eye and a reminiscent smile that were reflections of Madame Károlyi’s own vivacious expression. Maestro that he was, he knew that his agent’s chatter was just her way of coming to the point.
The point was, she was Lori Christopher’s third cousin once removed. She provided the full genealogy—a Prussian greatgrandfather had married a Hungarian great-grandmother, I think. In 1942 Madame Károlyi had been a twelve-year-old countess named Marie Bathory who lived with her parents, siblings and various aunts, uncles and cousins on the family estate near the Czech frontier.
“The estate is no longer even in Hungary, but in Slovakia, but it was never really of this world,” said Madame Károlyi. “Three thousand hectares of land so poorly managed that not even the peasants could grow enough food to feed themselves. Of course they fed us first because we owned the land, and they worked without pay as servants in the house for the same reason. Their families were as old as ours and had always been in bondage to the Bathory family, so what else could they have done? If they had not done their duty, my family would have evicted them from the land. Social injustice? Unbelievable. But at that time no one, neither master nor peasant, had ever heard of the concept.”
In 1942 Hungary was not yet occupied by the German army, although the country had a fascist government and was an ally of the Third Reich. The Hungarian army was fighting alongside the Wehrmacht on the Russian front and taking ruinous casualties. Marie’s family were trying to isolate themselves from the rightwing Horthy government, whose suspicion of aristocrats was almost as lethal as that of the German Nazis and the communists who came after them. The estate was about seventy miles from Budapest, well beyond the last railroad station, and for the second half of that distance could only be approached over footpaths or wagon tracks.
“No electricity, no telephone, no running water,” said Madame Károlyi. “Once a month all of us children took a bath together in a big wooden tub filled with tepid water heated over open fires by the peasants. On my twelfth birthday I was banned from the tub and after that washed merely my face and hands, crotch and armpits like the rest of the grownups. Time was a blank. Nothing happened, nothing. No card games, no hunting, no charades, no conversation, no walks in the woods except for purposes of incest. I ask you to imagine! The boredom was so intense that one of my cousins became a famous theorist of boredom. As a professor of philosophy in America, he wrote treatises explaining that boredom was the root of all evil, especially politics. In my opinion this was the most brilliant intellectual breakthrough of the present age, but of course no one paid the slightest attention.”
Another éclair? No, thank you. Are you quite sure? They’re delicious. Really, no. But how fascinating all this is.
“Fascinating?” said Madame Károlyi. “You would not have thought so if you never changed your clothes, never tasted a sweet, lived among people who had been perfectly charming in Budapest but were now a collection of sleepwalkers who never laughed and hardly ever even talked. They had lost their money, for them the same thing as losing their souls. It was beyond Chekhov, my dear man. It was pure Kafka! And then, out of nowhere, came this vision. Lori.”
Lori Christopher arrived, on foot, a pack on her back, in the early winter of 1942. No one knew how she had found her way. She had spent a summer on the estate as a child. How could she have remembered the paths through the woods, how had she escaped rape, robbery, murder, being eaten by wolves? Yet here she was.
“‘I have come to you,’ she said, ‘because I have no other place to go,’” said Madame Károlyi. “It was like a novel. She was running from the Nazis, at that time the most dangerous people in the history of the world. Yet she looked beautiful. When they saw the look in their husbands’ eyes the women said, shaking their heads in unison, ‘She is putting us in danger.’ But my mother, who was the highest ranking female on the estate, said, ‘She stays!’”
During Lori’s childhood visit to the estate, she and Madame Károlyi’s mother had become fast friends, and all their lives afterward, until war broke out and the mail stopped, they had corresponded regularly. Long before the war the mother, whose name was Nandine Bathory, and her new husband visited Lori and Hubbard in Berlin. Nandine had known Paul as a toddler. His existence had inspired her to become pregnant with Marie.
“Maman dreamed that Paul and I, who were only a couple of years apart in age, might marry someday, even though he was half American,” Madame Károlyi said. “It was the usual friendship between girls, one beautiful and brilliant, the other, my mother, less so. One the ardent friend, the other politely accepting the situation.”
Lori did not explain to the Bathorys why she was in Upper Hungary in the middle of a war Germany was winning or where she had come from. Actually no one wanted to know; such knowledge was dangerous. From Lori’s letters Nandine knew her political sympathies, but she thought it wise not to make a point of this to her husband or other members of the family.
“Not many of them actually remembered Lori,” Madame Károlyi said. “But everyone knew where she belonged on the family tree, and that, along with Maman’s positive identification and insistence on giving sanctuary, sufficed. Lori told my mother her story—not all of it, not enough to put her in danger in case she fell into the hands of the Gestapo, but enough for Maman to believe that Lori had a right to be very, very sad. However, as I remember it, she was not sad, at least not outwardly.”
Lori had money. “German marks and also gold coins,” Madame Károlyi said. “Naturally this made her very welcome indeed. She purchased little luxuries like soap and sugar. It wasn’t that there was very much one could buy in those times, but it made people feel better to know that in some way things were as they should be again because money was hidden somewhere in the house. She hired gypsy musicians—at this time the Germans had not yet started to liquidate the Roma—and we danced. She was very good at dancing the csárdás, which is a fast Hungarian dance, and the lassú, which is a languorous one. All the men wanted to be her partner.”
Madame Károlyi actually paused for a moment and excused herself. As she disappeared into the bathroom, Harley grinned after her tottering figure, pleased as punch with himself. He had reason to be. In no other operation had I ever been so fortunate in my sources of information as in this one. All of them were old and garrulous. You merely had to put them on the sled and give them a push down the mountain. After that it was Marie, Marie, hold on tight! This did not mean that they were without malice or duplicity or that their memories were always accurate or that they did not strive to please the audience. But at least you had a lot of material to choose from, as long as you kept in mind that they were still the slippery characters they always had been. As aren’t we all?
To Harley I said, “How much of this is the truth, do you think?”
“The parts I already know about are accurate—or at least they jibe with the stories she told me in the first place,” he replied. “The bits about Lori are new to me but they probably have a basis in reality, too.”
“I hope so. What comes next?”
“I’ve got no idea. She knows every ghost in Central Europe.”
Madame Károlyi returned, bearing a tray on which bottles and glasses were balanced. It was four in the afternoon.
“The witching hour,” she said. “Harley, darling, will you do the honors? We have scotch, sherry, and something Hungarian.”
She had freshened her vivid makeup, fluffed her canary-yellow hair. Harley gave her a stiff scotch, neat.
“I’m afraid I’ve been boring you,” Madame Károlyi said to me.
“Far from it, Madame Károlyi. Please go on. I’m fascinated.”
“Not everyone is kind enough to say that. I have lived to be an old bore. Santé! ”
She drank the scotch straight down and held out her glass to Harley for a refill. I must have raised an eyebrow, because Madame Károlyi tapped me on the knee and said, �
�This business of sipping cocktails is something the new people invented. They are very genteel. In my day it was bottoms up.” She drank the second glass.
“So,” I said. “What happened next?”
“Next? After what?”
“After Cousin Lori organized the dance.”
“A terrible winter. There were wolves in the garden. No one had ever actually spent a winter on the estate. It was hell—coughing, sneezing, frostbite, water frozen in the washbowl every morning. A whole generation of our young relations were killed that winter, fighting in Russia. The Bathory were a military family. They had all been reserve officers. Those who survived the war were shot afterward by the Russians. My cousin András, for example, a major in the guards, handsome as a dream, sang like an angel…”
I interrupted. “Actually I’m fascinated by your cousin Lori.”
She frowned, then drank down a third scotch, about three ounces of it. Not a tear in her eye, not a catch in her throat.
“Ah, Lori. Why are you interested in her? She was de passage.”
“Still, a romantic figure,” I said. “What happened to her?”
“You think she was a romantic figure? Of course she was, madly so, but she avoided that impression. She said almost nothing about herself, and of course this heightened the romance, but she meant her silence to be taken for modesty, not mystery. From her I learned that the truly mysterious never behave mysteriously. A valuable lesson to me in later life. Ask Harley.”
She held out her glass. “Another drop, Harley, if you please,” she said. “Let me see. Lori. She bought a horse from a peasant, quite a nice one, a bay gelding, and went for long rides through the snow. On her outings she carried a pistol, and with it she shot a wolf. This wolf and some of its friends were following her through the forest. Scent of blood. She was menstruating. My father fell in love with her. Her shooting the wolf must have excited him.”
“That must have been distressing to your mother,” I said.
“Why should it have been? Men are men. Lori was beautiful, she was exotic, she shot wolves. There was no privacy in the house. Father lusted from afar—not, of course, by choice, but Lori kept him at a distance. Lori and my mother laughed about it.”
I grew impatient with all this twittering sophistication. It showed, and Harley gave me a look that said, Don’t push it, let her talk.
“Eventually the Gestapo came, of course,” Madame Károlyi said as she pointed to her glass while giving Harley another dazzling smile. “They were looking for Jews or Roma or whoever they were shooting that week. By then Lori looked like one of us. Anyway they were not especially interested in women. She had papers. Before Horthy sacked him, my father had been in the foreign ministry. All the Bathory men were civil servants if they were not soldiers. They had no idea of business or politics. To them land was money, even when it was a sinking ship. In any case, Father still had discreet friends in the ministry and he got Lori an identity card under a Hungarian name, so she was all right. The Nazis were only interested in people they wanted to slaughter. Even in rags, smelling like a peasant, no one ever looked less like a Jew or a gypsy than Lori.”
“When was this, do you remember?”
“Nineteen forty-four, probably. The Germans came in fortythree, left in forty-five. Don’t ask me the month. We had no idea of time. It must have been summer or fall because they could not have gotten through the snow in winter or the mud in spring.”
By now she had drunk roughly fifteen ounces of Dewars whisky and was asking for yet another glass, but showed no more effect than if it had been mineral water. Her emaciated body could not possibly absorb all that alcohol. She was skin and bones. She must have had an amazing liver.
“The Germans made it even more inconvenient to live in the countryside because they marched most of the peasants away,” Madame Károlyi said. “But at last the war ended. We were liberated by the Red army. I don’t know why, but no one had any idea the Russians were going to stay forever. By then I was fifteen, longing to live. Lori was my confidant. She advised me to find love in the world because it made sex much more enjoyable. I asked how long that would take. She said three to five years. After that I should live as if I were going to be alone because in one way or another all women ended up alone. ‘Love will come, if it comes, in a form that will surprise you,’ she said. ‘Accept it for as long as it lasts.’ My hope was that it would come several times, beginning very soon. She saw nothing wrong with that even though she seemed to be a fanatical monogamist.”
“She spoke of her husband?”
“Never. One morning in the spring of 1945—the Germans had left and the Russians had not yet found us—I woke up and found twenty Maria Theresa gold pieces, a fortune, wrapped up in a handkerchief pinned to my nightgown. Lori had departed.”
“She left a note?”
“No. And not even my mother had any inkling that she was going to decamp.”
“What about her horse?”
“It was a bay. Its name was Maxel.”
“She took it with her?”
“No. She left it for my mother.”
“Did you ever hear from her again?”
“How would we have heard? Hungary was sealed by the Russians and stayed sealed for almost fifty years. Maman believed that Lori had made it to Shangri-la. But the Red Army was a great fishnet stretched across Europe. She must have swum into it like everyone else. I assume the Russians caught her and killed her, after doing what Red soldiers did to stray women.”
I said, “One question, if I may. Did she have anything with her, any possessions besides the pistol?”
“Her money, of course,” Madame Károlyi said. “Some sort of glass tube, large and heavy. It was precious to her. After the Germans occupied Hungary she wrapped it up in canvas and hid it inside a hollow tree I showed her. God knows if she ever found the hollow tree again. I never could.”
“Tell me,” I said, “did you ever meet Lori’s son?”
“No, of course not,” Madame Károlyi said. “Did he find love in the world?”
“He certainly looked for it,” I said.
5
Madame Károlyi had connected a dot or two. But she had also erased a couple of things. We now knew that Lori had somehow found her way to Hungary after the assassination of Heydrich. There was a certain logic in this. In 1942 Hungary was the only country within walking distance of Prague that was not occupied by the German army. We knew that she had left her Hungarian cousins without notice or explanation just as she had left Norman’s parents and Norman himself and before that, her husband and child. You may ask, What difference does it make? Perhaps none; perhaps all the difference in the world. Knowing her habits as a young woman—the behavior that rose from her fundamental nature—gave us an idea of how she might behave as a nonagenarian. What we now knew about Lori after all our trouble was that finding her was not enough. She might be glad to see us, she might stay the night, she might dance the csárdás, commit kindnesses, or casually shoot a wolf or nine camels. But sooner or later she would be gone in the morning. We heard in Xinjiang that Paul was very near to finding her. Being Paul, he might even have done so. But his mother had left him before and if she ran true to form she would do so again. All of her life since Heydrich she had left everyone, everything, giving no notice. And Paul was just like her.
She had abandoned everything, that is, except the Amphora Scroll. And it was the scroll, not Lori, that we had to have. If we found her, would she hand it over, even if we didn’t tell her we intended to use it as bait for a lunatic who regarded it as a license to blow up Washington and Manhattan and Chicago?
On the day after our exhilarating chat with Madame Károlyi, I waited for Harley in a rundown coffee house that had a fine view of one of the Danube bridges, which through the smeared window glass seemed to be pasted against the Wehrmacht-gray gloom of the wintry afternoon. Harley had taken Madame Károlyi to lunch, a sentimental occasion because it would almost certainly be the
ir last meeting. I kept out of the way. The coffee was instant Nestlé’s with whipped cream in it. In a place where a gypsy should be playing the zither, Nat King Cole sang “Sweet Lorraine” and “Embraceable You” over scratchy loudspeakers. Halfway through “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You,” tall, bony Harley arrived and folded himself like a stick figure into the bentwood chair opposite.
“This is for you, a present from Marie,” he said, drawing a packet from an inside pocket and placing it on the table between us.
The Old Boys Page 17
