The Angel Makers (29 page)
Anna looks close to tears. ‘I can’t thank you enough, Sari – and Judit, both of you.’
Sari leans forwards, and gives Anna a brisk, tight hug. She’s still not quite used to casual physical contact, and the pressure of Anna’s body against her is both unsettling and pleasant. ‘Good luck, Anna. If there’s any way that you can let me know that you’ve made it, that you’re safe …’
‘I promise.’
The door clicks shut behind them.
For the next two days, Sari thinks of nothing but Anna, with a mixture of sick anxiety and excitement. She is terribly worried about something going wrong, Anna ending up dead or in prison, but at the same time, if Anna manages to do this right, it will be the escape that she never quite dared to dream of. Sari’s never been very good at waiting patiently and is desperately tempted to go round to Anna’s and find out what’s going on, and by the afternoon of the second day she’s got as far as putting on her coat before Judit asks her where she’s going.
‘Round to Anna’s,’ Sari says defiantly.
Judit shakes her head. ‘No, you’re not. You can’t help her more than you have already. You have to just leave her to it now. She’s a bright girl; she should be able to manage this alone.’
‘But won’t it look suspicious if we don’t call round? If Károly’s ill enough to be on his deathbed, we should be there, trying to help him, shouldn’t we?’
‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it. On one hand, you’re the person who takes care of people when they’re ill. On the other, you’re a woman whose fiancé died suddenly not too long ago. Could be that you visiting that house just before Károly dies could cause suspicion, rather than avert it,’ Judit says.
Sari hasn’t thought of that, and she dithers, one arm half in and half out of the sleeve of her coat.
‘Either way, you can’t do anything by going around there. Just leave it. You can deal with your own curiosity for another couple of days, can’t you?’
But Sari doesn’t have to deal with it for that long. When she wakes up the next morning she can feel the difference in the air. Something’s happened. And when she opens the front door, and finds a small, unobtrusive cherry twig sitting sedately on the front step, she’s taken unawares by the sharp stab of grief she feels. Anna has gone – the one person in the village (Judit excepted) whose friendship Sari could be absolutely sure of. And underneath the grief is a persistent throb of jealousy. Until these past few days, she never would have dreamt that Anna would get away from the village while she, Sari, was left behind. For a moment, she curses the mud and the discomfort and the utter banality of the village before her, before stepping back into the house, twig in hand, and closing the door.
As soon as Judit sees what she’s holding, her wizened face cracks open in a wide grin. ‘Oh, good girl, good girl! She did it!’
They wait a day before going around to Anna’s house, where Anna’s absence is palpable. Károly’s deathbed is not pretty; it’s clear that Anna has done little in the way of nursing through his short, sharp illness, but Sari feels no pity. Nevertheless, she and Judit clean him up as much as possible, before Judit goes to spread the word of his death.
As predicted, no one much mourns Károly. Even the men he would have called his friends, the ones that he would drink and gamble with were not particularly fond of him; his vicious temper didn’t end at Anna, and did nothing to endear him to anyone. He is buried with minimal fuss, Sari writes out the death certificate as usual for the authorities in Város, and nobody even suggests summoning the priest from the next village to conduct the funeral. Anna’s disappearance is far more upsetting to everyone, as she was always well liked, more so than even Sari would have guessed, for even gossip is kind to her.
‘Who can blame her for leaving as soon as he’s dead?’ Sari overhears Matild Nagy saying in the square, voice lowered to give a false impression of confidentiality. ‘Everyone knew how he treated her. Good for her, I say. She deserves a better life.’
The tale of Károly’s sudden death and Anna’s subsequent vanishing act leaps around the village for a few days, and then dies down, leaving Sari with nothing but a feeling of sweet relief, mingled with an ache of loneliness. She thinks of Anna often, tries to follow her imagined steps in her mind – oh, she misses her, so much.
A week later. Anna could be in Budapest by now; Sari tries to imagine her there, her fantasy only slightly hampered by the fact that she has to imagine Budapest too. There’s a knock on the door and Sari bids a hasty farewell to Anna-in-her-head; she starts to lever herself up from the chair where she’s been sitting, sipping a cooling cup of tea, but before she can move too far, Judit shoots past her, moving unnaturally fast for a woman her age.
‘Sit down!’ she snaps, zooming past. ‘Rest! I’ll get it.’
It’s Orsolya Kiss, flanked by Jakova Gersek and Matild Nagy. Judit takes half a step backwards in surprise. There’s no love lost between any of the five women there, and normally Orsolya and her henchwomen would only come to see Judit and Sari when in the direst need, but a quick glance over the three of them doesn’t reveal any obvious illnesses or injuries. Quite to the contrary, Orsolya looks uncommonly well, her pug-like face wreathed in smug smiles.
‘Well, Orsolya, Jakova, Matild,’ Judit says, recovering quickly. ‘What a surprise to see you here. What can we help you with?’
‘Ah,’ says Orsolya, and her smile grows ever wider. ‘It’s rather a delicate matter. Perhaps best discussed over a cup of coffee. You don’t mind putting some water on, do you, Sari?’
‘I’ll do it,’ Judit says swiftly, and heads for the kitchen, while Orsolya and her friends sit down at the table, facing Sari, without waiting to be asked. Every inch of Sari’s body is tensed: she doesn’t trust these three, not in the slightest, and she thinks that she can smell trouble. The other two look slightly discomfited, nervous, and they keep fidgeting as if keen to leave, as if they’d rather be anywhere but here. Orsolya, on the other hand, sits at the table as if she owns it, the embodiment of calm, and turns her unctuous smile onto Sari.
‘Sari. You’re looking well, all things considered.’
Sari tries to smile back – it can’t hurt to try and stay as much on Orsolya’s good side as possible – but her mouth will not obey her and it’s a struggle to get the words out. ‘Thank you, Orsolya. You’re looking very well yourself.’
Orsolya ignores the implicit second half of Sari’s sentence:
so what are you doing here?
‘I
am
well, Sari. Very well.’
The conversation stops there, and by the time Judit returns, Sari is in an agony of awkwardness; Orsolya, on the other hand, looks as though she’s never been more comfortable.
‘So,’ Judit says, as she sits down at the table, passing out cups of coffee. ‘How can we help you?’
‘Well,’ Orsolya says, with another beatific smile, ‘We were hoping that you could share some of your …
expertise
with us.’
Sari freezes.
This is it
, she thinks, but Judit appears not to have understood.
‘Of course,’ she says, frowning slightly in confusion. ‘That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? So what’s the problem?’
‘Ah, no,’ Orsolya says, sounding as if she is choosing every word with careful precision, ‘You misunderstand me. We don’t need your help
curing
anyone of anything. Quite the opposite, in fact.’
There’s a short, punchy silence. Then Judit says stiffly, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Orsolya laughs, falsely coy, in response. ‘Oh, come now! You don’t have to hide these things from us. We don’t blame Anna in the slightest for doing away with Károly, and we don’t blame you for helping her, either. Quite why you saw fit to kill Ferenc, Sari, I can’t quite imagine – he struck me as quite a nice boy, I always thought you did very well to catch him – but then, who am I to question?’
‘What do you want?’ Sari asks at last.
‘Well, I rather thought we’d made that clear. You shouldn’t be selfish, Sari, hogging these things to yourself, only sharing them with your best friends. Things have changed around here since the end of the war, since the men came back, and we don’t really like it this way. We got used to the way things were during the war, and now … now there are a few things that we would like to get rid of, and I think that you can help us with that.’
‘And if we don’t?’ Judit asks. She is remaining impressively calm, but her cheeks have turned a bright, violent red.
‘Oh, I don’t want you to think that I’m threatening you or anything like that. But I do have a cousin who’s a police officer in Város, and I’m sure he’d be very interested to hear about a couple of suspicious deaths that have happened around here.’
‘You have no proof,’ Sari says, her heart hammering against her ribs. Her baby gives a sickening lurch inside her.
‘Perhaps not. But that doesn’t really matter, does it, if Ferenc’s parents get wind of what really happened to him? I mean, I don’t want to sound harsh, dear, but his family’s got rather more standing than the two of you have. No one’s likely to dispute any claims that they make, now, are they?’
‘And if we help you?’ Judit asks.
‘Then it’ll hardly be in our interests to tell anyone about what’s been going on, will it?’
They agree – what else can they do? A series of brisk, tacit arrangements are made; Orsolya and her friends will come back in two days, to give Judit and Sari enough time to prepare what they’re going to need. The words Judit spoke a week or so ago, about this becoming a business, clang through Sari’s head.
We’re in the murder business now
, she thinks to herself, and has to swallow a hysterical giggle.
As Orsolya takes her leave, Sari can’t help but ask:
‘How did you know? How could you be so sure?’
Orsolya laughs again, and puts a hand on Sari’s arm. ‘Oh, dear, no, I wasn’t sure, not at all. But in a lot of ways it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s true or not – there are enough people around here who’ll take my word over yours. I mean, what you seem to forget, Sari,’ and she leans in closer, as if imparting an important secret, ‘is that
you
don’t really matter around here. Neither of you do. Not in the slightest.’
Lilike hadn’t really wanted to leave Falucska. She’d lived there all her life. Her world had been bounded by the flat expanse of the plain and the dizzying sky, and although she’d visited Város once in a while, she’d never really been able to conceive that it was as real as the village, that the streets that brimmed with horses and carts could exist in the same world that held the river and the woods and the marketplace she’d grown up with.
She’s adapted well, though, if she does say so herself. When her mother told her, a year ago, that they were moving to Város to be with her aunt a year ago, Lilike had wept for days, but already she looks back at that sobbing girl with pity and condescension. She had been worried, at first, that her cousins, sophisticated town girls one and all, would shun her and her country ways, and she’d barely built up the courage to speak to them for the first few weeks. But since then, they’d become so kind. Her wardrobe is littered with their off-cast dresses, and when she slips a cool muslin gown over her head in the morning, she reflects that she barely misses the village at all, any more. She had worried, a little, that her time with Umberto would affect her chances of finding a husband in Város, but she’s pleased to find that’s not the case – her cousins, when she awkwardly admits what she’s done, greet her story with congratulations rather than with censure; she understands that, since the war, that sort of thing is, if not acceptable, then at least understood.
She and her mother have never properly talked about why they left, but Lilike has a fair idea. She had tried to keep Umberto a secret from her mother at first, but before too long she had become more lax. After they’d got word that her brother was dead, her mother had barely done anything but arrange and rearrange his old clothes in the trunk at the foot of her bed. Lilike started to go out more and more, staying out later and later. On the occasions she spent time with her mother, she started to notice that her mother was starting to seem happier, but Lilike put that down to nothing more than time passing since her brother’s death until one day, heading to the forest with Umberto, she came across her mother, entwined with an older Italian officer Lilike had seen from time to time.
