Up ahead, Sven stumbled into the railing, likely about to vomit over the edge. The bridge provided no cover. To stop and pretend to enjoy the sights of Budapest in so violent a rainstorm would immediately mark me a suspicious character, so with the slightest stutter-step I continued walking across the bridge. I no longer followed Sven; rather, I followed my new idea. That my camera had been stolen posed a serious obstacle. I could borrow a camera from any one of a thousand unwary tourists, but the problems of low lighting and access remained. Perhaps I didn’t need a camera to document Sven’s infidelity. I could write an anonymous note to Monika, describing what I’d seen and suggesting she follow him the next time he visited Gellért. If she caught him with another woman his murder would be unnecessary.
Though this idea involved machinations which could rapidly wheel from my control, I no longer felt completely powerless, and this cheered me so greatly that I temporarily lost track of time and place. Sven bellowed at me from the railing. His peremptory challenge caught me unaware. I hoped he was merely drunk and mindlessly belligerent. He couldn’t suspect, hadn’t made a single gesture or glanced my way all evening. I turned my head aside and quickened my step, hoping to slip past without being identified. I was an idiot not to realize the trap. He came at me from behind with a great springing leap. I waited for him to strike, hearing the scrape of his shoe as he launched himself, the rustle of his coat shifting in the air, the subtle changes in the pattern of rainfall as he passed through space, yet no matter how terrifyingly precise my perceptions I was powerless to dodge or break into a sprint.
As I waited, a terrified thought ricocheted through my cranium: When had he noticed someone followed, did he know who followed or was he merely aware of the fact of being followed, and if he knew precisely who followed would he be as indecisive as I regarding the necessity of murder? A paw on my shoulder whirled me around. The moment our glances struck was exquisitely horrifying. He stared at me with beer-blind aggression, his eyes filmed yellow and face a drunken blotch. Recognition gaped his mouth. He hadn’t known. His life was such that I could have been any of a dozen men—victims, husbands, or cops. But Sven was more man of action than thinker, and even though I knew precisely what to expect I was the one to hesitate and not Sven. He clipped my ear with a mistimed left, and threw a fist slow and heavy at my ribs. No matter how clearly I saw it cleave through the rain, I was incapable of moving aside. The blow popped my stomach like a paper bag. I dropped to one knee, and watched his boot hurtle toward my head. My hands remained idiotically pinned in my coat pockets. Sven was too drunk to kick straight. The boot struck me in the shoulder. I struggled upright and shouted, ineffectual and outraged, “What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?”
The question brought Sven to his senses. We regarded the moment in silence, rain-soaked and adrenaline-charged, deciding to what end this incident would take us. We could have decided to step back, curse each other, and go our separate and living ways. But Sven’s senses were no less murderous than instinct. His eyes closed off like a guillotine, and he threw me against the railing. He meant to kill me, and I could think of no method of stopping him until my fingers closed around an object shaped like a pen in my coat pocket. From that moment on, I don’t recall how many times he hit me or where, the marks upon my body the next morning serving as better documentation than memory. I remember one hand at my throat, another grasping my coat to heave me over the edge of the railing, and the sudden look of surprise on his face as he stepped back and glanced down at my hand fisted at his stomach. A phrase in Danish escaped his lips when he reached down to touch the hole in his jacket. His eyes lifted from the blood on his finger to me, as though not understanding exactly what had happened, and when at last he knew, his stare turned outraged, as though I hadn’t so much stabbed as deeply offended him by so ably demonstrating his mortality. A shudder went through him, and when he leaped at me again I stepped aside and whether I pushed or not his momentum carried him over the railing. He turned once, twice, and without a shout or cry slapped into the Danube a hundred feet below.
I can only describe my consciousness during the next ten minutes as merging either in shock or sympathy with Sven’s. I don’t know if I immediately left the railing or stayed to watch the river take him down. I don’t know whether I saw anyone or anyone saw me. I clearly remember standing in the middle of an empty street near the opposite end of the bridge, surfacing as though from some depth, the knife still gripped in my fist. Anyone walking past would have encountered a deranged man puncturing raindrops with the tip of a knife. When I saw what I held, I dropped the knife and ran.
Some blocks later, collapsed against a doorframe to regain my breath, I realized they would search the streets near the bridge if the body was found. I had lacked the presence of mind to wipe Sven’s blood from the blade or my fingerprints from the handle. I attempted to retrace my steps but in the dark and rain the streets looked disconcertingly similar. In my haste to escape I noted neither route nor landmark. It seemed as though I searched the streets for hours. As I neared the limits of endurance, I ceased to care, like someone lost in a snowstorm who wishes only the warm solace of sleep. I wandered from street to street, imagining the body had already been found and the police calculated time and drift to place his fall from Szabadság Bridge. Perhaps Sven had not died at all and was recounting to police the story of how I had stalked and attempted to murder him. Within hours or minutes every cop in Budapest would have my description. Whether guided by the unconscious mind or blind luck, I stumbled over the knife where it lay in the gutter, kicking it once before recognizing the search had ended. Seeing the knife, its blade extended and washed free of blood by the rain, I felt unaccountably ill and dropped to my hands and knees. Instead of vomit, a single anguished cry escaped me. I retracted the blade and ran.
Though I had been forced into Sven’s murder and had not committed it willingly, I needed to demonstrate to myself that I was capable of tidying up after the crime. The Danube was wide and deep and fast-flowing, the only terrain where a complete search would be impossible. The authorities might correctly guess Sven had been killed and dumped from one of the bridges, and speculate the murderer had chucked the knife over the bridge. They wouldn’t have reason or resources to search more than a hundred yards up- and downriver. I ran along the embankment, conscious that dawn spilled tints of red along the eastern horizon, and when I neared the midpoint between Szabadság and Erzsébet bridges I threw the knife with all my strength into the Danube.
The doorman had yet to report to work and no one waited behind the desk at the Erzsébet hotel when I returned. I encountered no one in the elevator, and the fourth floor hall was empty. I entered my room wanting a change of clothes and remembered that my possessions remained in the small pension I’d rented before finding Monika. In the bathroom, I glanced in the mirror and was immediately overwhelmed by nausea. Kneeling over the toilet, it seemed my entire being exploded from my mouth. When nothing remained in my gut save knots of intestine, I stripped and ran the shower. Even beneath steaming water I shivered uncontrollably. My joints felt pricked by red hot pins. Thoughts became as difficult to grasp as bits of broken shell in egg white. I steadied myself on the sink and saw Sven turn once, twice in the air, before finally I blacked out.
Some hours later, I awoke wound in sheets, eyes pinned shut by a bright blue sky. Several half-conscious minutes slipped past before I recognized that I lived. The events of the previous day strayed into memory like unwelcome guests who, no matter how often I tried to shoo them out, loudly insisted on being served: Monika; Helmut; the attendants at the spa; the pert blonde, zaftig brunette, and young girl from the hotel bar. I turned my back and buried my head beneath the pillow. Sven was the most obstreperous guest of all, clamoring at me like a ghost. I unwound myself from the sheet and sat up. The digital clock on the nightstand clicked 9 A.M. I dialed room service for coffee and a sandwich. It seemed I hadn’t slept more than a few hours.
In the bathroom I found my clothes neatly hanging dry over the shower curtain rod. Unsettled by the presence of the mirror above the sink, I turned on the television and paced the room, but couldn’t screen my mind from images and snatches of sound from the night before. Though I commanded memory away, not to remember was dangerous. The problem of what to do next couldn’t be decided until I remembered exactly what I’d done. I might have forgotten an important detail which if not corrected that morning would hang me. I splashed cold water on my face and, leaning over the sink, willed myself to reconstruct the events leading to and extending past Sven’s death. Contrary to expectation, as the night unreeled its comedy and horror, the scenes filled me with more pride than revulsion. Admittedly, I had been unable to act in the Turkish bath, but it was just possible that instinct had held me back. If I had killed him there, I would have been arrested. Sven’s death couldn’t have been better planned. He attacked me. I killed him. Self-defense, even if I had wanted to kill him all along. I could quibble at not having the courage or determination to act until my life was threatened, but in the end I had acted, and decisively. I lifted my head out of the sink and examined my unshaven face in the mirror, looking for outward signs of an inward change I was certain had transpired. It astonished me to realize that whenever I saw that face in the mirror or in photographs I would be looking into the face of a killer. The notion made me laugh so hard I clutched the sides of the sink for support. Me! A killer! I had completely reinvented myself. I was the freest man on earth.
At the sound of light knocking I slung myself into the bathrobe hanging from a peg on the door and went to answer. Room service, as I expected. A small man with a curiously thin mustache stood anxiously behind a waiter balancing a tray on one palm.
“I am happy to see you are feeling better, Mr. Miller,” the little mustached man said, remaining in the hall as the waiter entered the room to set his tray on the nightstand.
I must have allowed my face an expression of bewilderment, as he stepped timidly across the threshold and announced, “We were all quite worried, you see, because yesterday morning the maid found you on the floor and helped you into bed.”
“Yesterday?” I asked.
“We were afraid you were very ill, and were going to send for a doctor. You said you didn’t need one, that you felt fine, but still, one never knows.”
“But yesterday?” I repeated.
“You don’t remember?”
Of course I didn’t remember. I had slept over twenty-four hours. Sven could have been fished from the Danube. Monika could have gone to identify the body and now be accompanying it back to Copenhagen. I could have lost her. I could have killed for nothing.
The little mustached man said, “Just as I feared. You were really ill. Would you like to see a doctor?”
The waiter brushed past with an empty tray and palm.
“I wonder if you might know a charming Danish girl staying in this hotel, someone I met yesterday”—here I weakly laughed—“day before yesterday, I mean. Do you know whether she’s checked out or not?”
“She’s still here.” He smiled oddly, as though understanding something that had previously puzzled him, and said, “She checked the desk for messages every hour yesterday. Should I tell her you asked?”
I had been an idiot to mention that I’d met her. If she knew I stayed in the same hotel, she might suspect a link between my appearance and Sven’s disappearance. I told the manager that I could not possibly be the one from whom she waited to hear. He said he understood and, again cheering my return to health, left me to my coffee and sandwich.
14
A plan spun out of me that morning as perfectly structured as a scenario by Hitchcock, but had I not become a new man two nights before, I doubt I could have summoned the courage and endurance to play the part the plan required. Early that afternoon, when Monika left her hotel room, I followed. By then I knew her habits well enough to realize by the streets chosen that she intended coffee and pastries at Gerbeaud, and sprinted through alley and side street to seat myself comfortably before she arrived. I had almost forgotten the bullet-through-the-throat effect her beauty could have on me when she swept through the door, fetchingly veiled behind Biagiotti sunglasses and a swirl of black hair. She looked for no one that afternoon, striding through the crowd to rendezvous with the pastry counter. Her sweet tooth gave me time to remind myself, as she deliberated between this chocolate and that strawberry cream torte, that though I desired her I was not in love, and this important distinction made her little different from the many women with whom I’d enjoyed my illicit and erotic amusements. I would not allow myself the sudden sweats and lapses in consciousness she previously had aroused in me. I would not go love-simple in her presence. When, tray in hand, she turned to search out a free table, I jumped from my chair and in mock-astonished voice shouted her name.
Monika stood still as if confronted by a mad dog. I waved energetically and grinned. Nothing in my demeanor suggested I suspected her of anything criminal. Indeed, I must have seemed to bystanders the typical young American, an idiotically friendly type who resembles in human form a Labrador puppy on amphetamines. I bounded across the room, clutching the grin in my teeth.
“My God Monika I can’t believe meeting you here what an incredible coincidence I was just digging into my torte when I looked up and it was really you after that strange brother of yours and that wild last night in Prague and me thinking I’d never see you again you must sit down at my table and tell me how are you?”
A trembling of her tray was the only evidence Monika gave of not being turned into a pillar of salt. To think I had shocked her into a mineral state gave me immense but false pleasure. I had the feeling of being carefully watched from behind the impenetrable dark of her Biagiottis. As I spoke she took cues from my behavior, preparing a role to suit what she thought I knew and wanted. She would have complained loudly in German if necessary, knowing I didn’t understand that language and wouldn’t realize what was happening until the café manager’s restraining arm allowed her escape. It must have been difficult for her to believe that anyone could be as gullible, as blind, as stupidly innocent as I pretended to be. She could not choose the correct role without knowing what scene we were to play, and the character I portrayed was at odds with what she thought she knew about me. I didn’t wonder at her hesitation. When at last she moved and spoke, it was perfect, as I expected it to be. She lowered her sunglasses so that I might see the surprise, the innocence, the wonder in her green eyes as she asked, “Is that really you?”
I wanted to applaud; instead, I offered her a chair at my table. She had little choice but to accept. The clatter of dishes and forks occupied us for a moment, and when her pastries were well arranged I allowed the moment to stretch into uncomfortable silence.
“You got my postcard?” she asked.
“You don’t have to explain. I know everything,” I said.
Calculations turned behind the faux innocence in her eyes. She gripped her fork like a thing of defense. It occurred to her that I might not be as stupid as I seemed, that I played an end game of which she was but dimly aware. The moment her suspicion veered toward the explicit, I leaned earnestly across the table and said, “It was your brother, right? He wouldn’t let you go. He made fine speeches about you being free to live your own life, but in the end he made that life unbearable unless you did exactly what he wanted. Am I right?”
Monika looked away, down at her desserts, away again, and by the time she looked at me again, her eyes had welled with tears. A delicious shiver rippled my backbone. Bergman couldn’t have performed better. “A terrible night. Sven was a monster. I never saw him so angry. We fought on the sidewalk outside. It seemed like hours. He wouldn’t let me go with you. Threatened to hurt you. Sometimes he can be so violent. He frightens me. So I—” A tear escaped and slid down her cheek. She caught it with her little finger and absently dissolved it on her tongue. “I promised not to go away with you. Then
we went back into the club, but—”
“I was gone,” I said.
The character of her gaze turned critical again, as she tried to decide whether I anticipated her story through belief or cynicism.
“Would you believe it, one of those Gypsies put something in my drink, a Mickey Finn they call it in English, or knockout drops. I woke up the next morning in an alley. They stole everything. Even took my keys and robbed my apartment.”
Monika shook her head as though I said something incredible. “No,” she said. “I can’t believe it. It’s all my fault. I took you there.”
“The police were no help at all, of course.”
“What did they say?” Asked in tones of casual interest.
“You’ll laugh at this one. They actually suggested you might have had something to do with it.”
Monika shifted in her chair. I noticed but did not remark that most people naturally position their chairs at right angles to the table at which they sit. Monika had set her chair askew and, with her recent shift in position, sat with her knees only a few degrees off a direct line to the door. I chattered away as though empty-headed.
Gypsy Hearts Page 13
