Budapest Noir (20 page)

“Good morning,” she said.

“Good morning.”

“Are we in a hurry?”

“Czövek will be waiting for us at nine in front of the entrance,” replied Gordon. “If you want to have breakfast, it wouldn’t hurt if we hurried.”

By eight-thirty they were already seated in the restaurant. Krisztina ordered scrambled eggs; Gordon, a coffee. They watched the hotel come slowly to life with the guests going to and fro, dressed for the day’s activities. Several wore hiking clothes as they sat at the tables, a few wore hunting outfits, and quite a few of the men were in suits, ready to enjoy the opportunities made available by the hotel, which didn’t even require that they step outside. The billiard room and the card salon would quickly fill up with men, while the wives would converse among themselves in the winter garden, listening to music on the radio and gossiping.

The waiter came to their table to offer them a couple of Budapest newspapers. Gordon waved his hand dismissively. “Thanks, but this morning I’m doing fine without them.” He turned to Krisztina. “Do you want any?”

“Oh, no. But I do want you to tell me what you want me to ask Teréz Ökrös.”

“She should tell you everything she knows about Szőllősy’s daughter,” said Gordon, raising his eyebrows. He and Krisztina understood each other even without words. “I don’t know how much she’ll tell you, but no doubt more than she’d tell me. Just chat her up and find out everything she knows.”

At a couple of minutes before nine they exited through the hotel’s main entrance. Czövek was waiting for them in pretty much the same pose he’d had when Gordon had seen him off the night before: he was chowing down his breakfast while seated on a makeshift tablecloth draped over the Opel’s hood. On seeing Gordon and Krisztina, he broke into a grin.

“Take a bite of this,” he said, extending toward them a chunk of meat he’d presumably bought from the hog-raising family he’d stayed with. “My God, I don’t know when I last had such heavenly head cheese.”

“Endre,” replied Krisztina with a smile, “if I’d have known, I wouldn’t have had breakfast.”

“No problem,” said Czövek, jumping off the hood, “but the rest is in the car.” He opened the door for Gordon and Krisztina, and as soon as they were inside, he got behind the wheel and started the engine. He turned left beside the lake, then began the ascent toward Bükkszentkereszt. Although the Opel handled the incline well, it couldn’t go too fast, leaving them time to admire the view. Looming high above them on the left was the giant boulder called the White Stone Lookout, and they could see two figures on top. Czövek was enjoying the drive a great deal, and he handled the massive car exceptionally well. The road was lined with poplars, and they were fortunate not to encounter a single horse-drawn carriage along the way. They made it up to Bükkszentkereszt in under twenty minutes.

The well-ordered beauty of the mountaintop village surprised not only Gordon but also Krisztina. “It’s as if we’re in the Alps,” she said, “that’s how lovely it is up here.” Smart-looking houses with sparkling clean yards lined the roads; indeed, this might well have been somewhere in the Alps but for the fact that the houses were distinctly Hungarian. Gordon considered the narrow, portholelike windows and low roofs of the longish houses, each of which had a verandah, some stretching right up into the hillside. As the car rolled slowly past the houses, Gordon looked in a couple of windows. His spirits plummeted on glimpsing the low ceilings with their brown-painted rafters. He could not imagine how someone could wake up here day after day, much less for an entire life. No wonder so many people in this country committed suicide, he thought. No, it wasn’t “Gloomy Sunday,” that popular song considered an anthem for suicides, that drove people to take their own lives, but rather the dark, oppressive homes that weighed down upon them.

“Stop right here,” Gordon called to Czövek just as they drove past a woman carrying a milk can—a woman who readily pointed out the house Teréz Ökrös lived in.

They parked in front of the immaculately kept property and got out. Czövek fished a link of sausage out from under the front seat and resumed his breakfast.

Gordon and Krisztina approached the carved wooden gate. All at once, two big, shaggy black dogs—pulis—burst forth from out of nowhere, each, it seemed, barking louder than the other. On hearing the noise, an older man stepped out of the shed and headed toward the gate.

“A fine good day to you, sir!” Krisztina called out. “We’re looking for Teréz.”

Albeit softly, the man snarled right back at the dogs, whereupon they turned around and sat in front of the verandah.

“Do come in—they don’t bite.”

Gordon looked at the pulis with suspicion before opening the gate. The stout, walrus-mustached man wiped his hand on his trousers. “You’re looking for Teréz?”

“That’s right,” Krisztina replied with a smile.

“You can look all you want, because she’s not here. She went into Miskolc to arrange her servant’s license.”

“You’re her husband?”

“I’m her big brother. And what do you want from her?”

“We want to talk with her about her former employers,” Gordon replied.

“Fine by me,” said the man with a shrug. “But she’ll only be home in the afternoon. Not worth trying before three.”

“Then we’ll come back around three,” said Gordon, taking Krisztina’s arm and returning to the car.

“What now?” asked Krisztina.

“I don’t know,” replied Gordon with evident annoyance. “We’ll wait till three.”

“Try not to get carried away—I can see how excited you are to escape the city for a bit and see more than three trees at once.”

Gordon gave a dismissive wave of his hand and got in the car. Czövek quickly packed up his breakfast and slipped back behind the wheel. “Where to?”

“Back to the hotel.” All along the way Gordon stared out the window without a word.

T
raffic had picked up inside the hotel. One luxury car after another stopped out front or headed off, taking guests to and fro. Gordon told Czövek to return at two-thirty, then asked at the front desk if a typewriter was available that he could borrow.

“Of course, sir,” the clerk replied. “I’ll have it sent up to your room along with paper.”

“Don’t tell me you want to work,” said Krisztina in the elevator.

“Not necessarily,” Gordon replied. “But it wouldn’t hurt for me to type up what I’ve learned so far.”

“And what good would that do?”

“So I see the whole thing on paper. Something in this story is out of place.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you in the room,” Gordon replied as the elevator stopped on the fourth floor.

In the room Krisztina took from her suitcase her camera, a pair of comfortable shoes, a knit hat, a pair of gloves, and a warmer jacket.

“You knew you’d have time to go for an outing?”

“No, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to pack just in case. Aren’t you coming with me?”

“No,” said Gordon, shaking his head.

There was a knock. Gordon opened the door, took the Remington typewriter from the bellboy, and placed it on the desk by the balcony.

“Before I leave,” said Krisztina, turning toward him, “tell me what it is about the story that doesn’t click.”

Gordon rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter. “You’ve got this merchant of Jewish stock whose father converted to Christianity and whose Christian daughter falls in love with the son of a Hassidic rabbi. There’s nothing so unusual about this so far, really. Then the girl is found dead at the edge of the red-light district, three months’ pregnant. This is a bit unusual, but not all that much, after all. I’m beaten up by this guy with a crooked nose whose name is Pojva, and rumor has it that he’s a hired thug. It’s not a big leap to suppose he’s probably the one who killed the girl, who, however, seems not to have existed at all, given that not even her own family wants to hear about her. I can see that, too. But not that her father had her killed.”

“Haven’t you heard of this sort of thing?”

“Sure, Krisztina, sure I’ve heard of it. But not even then does everything click. Something’s not in order. I want to type it all down to see if there are any holes in the story. Did something escape my attention?”

“Well then,” said Krisztina, “get to work, put your thoughts in order.” With that, she hung the camera from her shoulder and shut the door behind her. At first, Gordon tried to use his right hand cautiously, but he was surprised to find that it didn’t hurt nearly as much as he’d thought it would. Despite that, he was careful not to overdo it, and by the time Krisztina returned around one, he was using mainly his left hand again.

Krisztina put her camera on the bed as Gordon signaled that he’d be done shortly. On reaching the end of the paragraph, he pulled the sheet of paper from the typewriter and stood up. “Did you see lots of lovely things?” he asked Krisztina.

“Yes,” she replied, “but if we don’t eat right away, I’ll die of hunger, and not even you could want that.” Gordon folded the sheets of paper, slipped them into the inside pocket of his blazer, and they went downstairs to the restaurant.

At lunch, Krisztina’s eyes sparkled with enthusiasm as she recounted her outing. She’d climbed up through the woods to the White Stone Lookout. The mountainside was so steep that the trail was at least five times as long as it would have been had it been straight, on account of all its zigzagging. “Every part of me hurts,” she said with satisfaction. “My legs, my shoulders, my hands.”

“At least you’re happy about it,” Gordon observed. “And did you take pictures?”

“Of course,” said Krisztina with a smile. “Two great big deer plus two fawns, as well as some pheasants.” She went on to describe the woods, the hunter’s lookout towers, the brownish-yellow leaves, and the towering pines.

“So then, did you figure out where the fault is in the story?” she asked after finishing her own account.

“Maybe nowhere,” Gordon replied. “Maybe I simply don’t want to believe what the facts are telling me.”

“You yourself said you can’t argue with facts.”

“That’s right. But I don’t have every fact in my possession yet. Let’s go visit that woman, then.”

T
he Opel parked in front of the house. On seeing them arrive, the mustachioed man, who was again out in the yard, opened the house door and gave a shout inside. A couple of moments later a plump woman came out. Determining her age was all but impossible. She could just as well have been thirty as fifty. But when she spoke, it was evident from her voice that she was somewhere between the two.

“Do come in,” she said, “come in.” The pulis locked their eyes on Gordon and Krisztina as they walked into the kitchen. Two children around ten years old were sitting at the table. Teréz told them to leave, then pulled two more chairs out for her guests. “Please sit down. We can’t go into the sitting room: my mother is sick.”

“I hope it’s not serious,” said Krisztina.

“Past eighty everything is serious,” replied Teréz.

“We heard you make beautiful embroideries,” said Krisztina, looking at the table, which was draped with a dazzling tablecloth.

“Oh, not really,” said the woman, blushing.

“Show me a few,” said Krisztina. Teréz went into the room as Gordon stood up restlessly and went to the door. Suspiciously he took stock of the country stove, the low ceiling, the carved chairs. A couple of minutes later Teréz reappeared with a small armful of embroidered tablecloths, runners, and pillowcases. She set them down on the table in front of Krisztina, who reached inside her purse and rummaged about for quite a while. Finally, Krisztina looked up at Gordon. “Zsigmond, I’m out of cigarettes. Would you get me a pack?”

“Sure,” he replied, now turning to Teréz. “Say, where can I get cigarettes around here?”

“Oh dear, the closest place is Lillafüred. For proper cigarettes, I mean—the sort you folks smoke. Around here we only have shag tobacco.”

“It’ll take at least an hour there and back,” said Gordon. “Can you do without cigarettes that long?”

“Go right ahead. I’ll make do.”

Gordon left the house, gave a nod to the man working at the far end of the yard, and went over to the Opel. “Take me back to the hotel, Czövek,” he said.

In the hotel Gordon bought a pack of cigarettes. He then went to the café, gathered up the newspapers on hand, ordered a coffee, and sat down to read.

T
hey couldn’t have better timed the trip back. Barely had the Opel parked once more in front of the house than Krisztina opened the door onto the verandah, a tablecloth and a pillowcase in her hand. She said good-bye to the woman, waved a hand to the man, and joined Gordon in the car. Czövek turned his head. “Where to?”

“Back to the hotel,” said Gordon. But Krisztina put her hand on his arm. “No, let’s not go there. I’m not in the mood for all those people. Go ahead and start up the car; we can stop somewhere along the way.”

“May I suggest something?” asked Czövek.

“Please do,” replied Gordon.

“At the house where I stayed, the widow Mrs. Károly Glum—which happens to be a name that fits her well—said there’s this roadside diner up in the woods not far from the White Stone Lookout. It’s more of a hunting lodge, she said, but she swore up and down that there’s no better food around here. It’s in the middle of the forest.”

“Go ahead,” said Gordon.

Czövek shifted the car into gear and headed to the far end of the village. Gordon glanced at Krisztina, who seemed lost in thought as she caressed the embroidered tablecloth. At such times, he knew, he must not say a word to her but, instead, wait for her to speak on her own. There was a time when Gordon had tried again and again to get information out of her before she was ready, but he’d gotten nowhere, and so now he let her be. Once they’d passed the last house in the village, Gordon caught a glimpse of a wooden sign whose letters had long ago been washed away by snow and rain. Since the languid October day had already turned toward dusk, Czövek turned on the headlights and pulled over to the side. Having edged his seat forward and pushed his hat farther back on his forehead, he turned around. “Widow Glum said the road is bumpy. So hold on.”