Cafe Europa (17 page)

“But the household staff is gone now.” Endre shrugged. “It's impossible to know.”

Harold was quiet too long. Finally, swallowing, he grumbled, “It's driving me crazy.” Another long silence. “But I do have a suspicion.”

Then, like an apparition, floating and swaying, Zsuzsa Kós drifted in from the terrace, her arms outstretched dramatically, her head thrown back. From her lips a plaintive humming. A stage entrance, I thought, Salome with the gaudy veils and noontime yellow hair. She called out Harold's name, elongating it so that it became a spooky chant. A mourner's keening.
Harrrooollld
. We all started, shifted in our seats. No, that wasn't true. Harold didn't move a muscle, eyes focused on the floating woman. Endre and I—and I think the rest of the café—watched her awful performance. Again, in English, a long wail.
Wooounded my prince
.

Well, her wounded prince was having none of it. An icy stare, chin jutting, fingers gripping the edge of the table.

Zsuzsa had doubtless learned of the assault on her midnight lover.

Dressed in a turquoise-colored gown with a gold shawl covering her shoulders, an enormous hat of feathers and veils atop that golden pompadour, she struck me as a woman from a French melodrama—or a sleepwalking Marie Antoinette headed for the guillotine on that fateful day. A sweep of fluttering arms, a twirling of her body, a tossing of her head—syncopated movements designed to make her a cynosure on the stage. Or, in this case, the dimly lit Café Europa.

She approached the table, stood over Harold, waiting. He refused to look up. Quietly, she reached out, and her fingertips touched the bandage on his head, lingered there for a moment, and then she drifted away, her shawl falling off her shoulders and dragging behind her.

Salome of the seven veils. Or, at least, one veil.

Winifred poked me in the shoulder. “Splendid, no?”

I was speechless.

Then she was gone, disappeared into the warm Budapest night.

We waited.

“As I was saying,” Harold began.

Endre interrupted. “Mr. Gibbon, surely you…” His gaze followed the disappeared Zsuzsa. “What?”

Harold shook his head mechanically, his voice booming now. “As I was saying.” But then he said nothing more.

I smiled at Winifred. Harold Gibbon, suave but bogus
bon vivant
, suddenly bested by the sad cabaret singer. The price, I supposed, he paid for investigative reporting deep in the night.

“Mr. Gibbon, the wages of sin…” I began. His glare stopped me.

A waiter placed a bottle of mineral water on the table. Vladimir Markov, emerging from the kitchen, approached and squinted at Harold. “A bromide, sir?” he asked. “A headache.”

Harold shook his head. “Very kind, sir, but no.”

Markov bowed and stepped away, but Harold called him back. “Mr. Markov, has that Serbian worker returned to your kitchen?”

“Sir?”

“The one who was drunk the night Cassandra Blaine was murdered. The one taken to jail.”

Markov turned pale, stammered. “Of course. A good baker, that one, and…”

“I'd like to question him. Ivo—his name, right?”

Markov bit his lip. Winifred looked at me and shook her head. She raised her voice, “Mr. Gibbon, could you please not terrorize the kitchen?”

“I'm doing my job. I have a few questions for my article. I need an outsider's perspective on the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina—the Serbian point of view.”

Markov spoke up, “But, sir, he's a baker, not a…a politician.”

“Still and all.”

“And he was born in Budapest. He is Hungarian.”

“Yet he speaks Serbian.”

“Most people in Hungary understand it a little bit. Many speak it. You know the Serbian Orthodox Church on Szerb Utca where many devout, good Serbians pray. I can speak the language, sir. A little.
You
speak it, no?”

“Nevertheless.” Harold touched the man's sleeve. “Sit and talk with us a bit, good sir. Indulge me.”

Markov looked toward the lobby, his voice dropping to a ragged whisper. “You would have me fired, Mr. Gibbon.” Breathing in, a rasp at the back of his throat, he shot a look at Winifred and then at me. “Dear ladies, the other day when I spoke with you, that brief conversation, meaningless, but confiding with guests, forbidden, my words, someone tells the owners. Someone listening—though we were alone.” He hurriedly glanced toward the entrance. “I have been spoken to by the man who pays my wages. A violation, such…friendliness. My job is to serve. So I have been warned. My job is in danger.”

“The hell with that,” Harold snarled. “I'll talk to people. I know people.”

But Markov was already backing away. “No, please. My job. This is what I have. Now that my family is back in Russia in a village, my wife is gone…no money…sir.”

He kept backing up, a few steps at a time, until he finally disappeared into the kitchen.

“Mr. Gibbon,” I implored, “could you please leave the man alone? Your quest for information is relentless.”

“It's my…”

“Job,” Winifred finished for him, her voice too loud in the room.

At that moment Mrs. Pelham was leaving, but she paused, deliberated, and then announced in a loud, very British voice, “Americans should never be given passports. They are children, always. And children should never leave their homes.”

Harold burst out laughing, and even Endre, surprised, smiled. Mrs. Pelham barged out of the room, trailed by the Russian who had no idea what had just happened.

Standing, Harold announced he needed to lie down, and Endre offered to escort his friend to his room. Winifred and I were left alone at the table, looking at each other with wide, bright eyes. “My lord,” I began. “Harold does stir up some pots.”

“He started to say he had an idea.”

“Yes, a suspicion about something. But what?”

“The murder?”

“Or the death of the empire?”

She laughed. “Harold on the track of solving something?”

“But he seems not to be able to put the pieces together.”

She nodded. “Is it possible that Harold may have discovered something and not realized its importance?”

“Well, maybe he can't see the whole picture.”

Again, the throaty laugh. “And we can?”

I smiled back at her. Perhaps that will be my task.

Yes.

After all, Harold wasn't the only American reporter in town.

Chapter Fifteen

The garden alongside the hotel's terrace was filled with late-blooming red roses and oleander, so the air was rich with a heady perfume. So potent the scent that I got momentarily dizzy, my eyes watery. I wondered about the night Cassandra was murdered in this very garden—the late night quiet, the bracing cool air, the faraway hum of the Danube, and the intoxicating power of the flowers. Now, in the middle of a quiet morning following a heavy rainstorm at dawn, the garden glistened as if all the green leaves had been painstakingly polished. I sat on a wrought-iron bench and faced the hazy sun hovering over the river.

I also faced Lajos Tihanyi who was standing ten feet from me, his stare penetrating, a sketchbook on a portable easel. He was drawing me. So intense was his concentration that I immediately thought of a classic painting:
Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.
No Homer here, to be sure, but a self-conscious American short-story writer trying to look winsome and fetching. Neither trait I'd ever allowed myself.

Of course, I'd refused to model for him. Over and over. To paint me in red—his redundant plea. I also knew that he and Bertalan Pór had quietly sketched Winifred and me—and, to be sure, everyone else, including that rascal Harold Gibbon—as we lounged in the Café Europa. With no effort made to mask their activities, they peered and stabbed at their sketchpads, then peered again, smiled at each other, squinted, and waited for us to sit still. I suppose we accommodated them, or at least Winifred did, given her joy of being with the pioneer artists, wanderers out of some paint-smeared French atelier that housed Matisse or Juan Gris or…maybe Picasso. We freely let them.

But Tihanyi wanted a longer session, his subject posing in the garden against a backdrop of leafy green branches and gray tree bark. Me, in a red jacket. As I told him, I owned none because such a vibrant color always struck me as too exhibitionist. The scarlet woman, targeted. But on the morning I agreed to sit for an hour, without talking—or with little talking—the hotel clerk handed me a package that contained a gorgeous crimson jacket, deepest red with tints of rose and gold. A little snug in the shoulders, but it did fit. And I had to begrudgingly admit that I felt grand in it, the Chinese emperor's newest concubine. The Jewish slave girl on the Nile, outshining Cleopatra on that lumbering barge.

Alone, the two of us, I was alarmed at first, given Tihanyi's difficulties with speech. He sounded words that were unintelligible to me. I wished that Bertalan Pór were there, and he shortly was, rushing in from the quay as though he'd missed an engagement. But I'd not been bothered by Tihanyi's quirky mannerisms, the two of us somehow finding an easy, emphatic way to communicate. He had a smooth companionability, a gentility I'd noticed in so many Hungarians, a masculine self-assuredness infused with the soft solicitousness a person associated with women. A startling juxtaposition, that combination, exaggerated by the clownish-looking man in the baggy jacket and the slough boy cap, a man who gestured wildly. I read his every gesture perfectly. He understood that. I liked him tremendously.

Bertalan Pór lingered at the edge of the garden, his own sketchpad tucked into his chest. At one point he said something to his friend, coming up close to him, though the words, spoken in Hungarian, were laced with laughter. Tihanyi pointed his pencil at Pór, then winked at me. A little disconcerting, I thought, because I always demanded to know what was being said about me.

“What did he say?” I asked Tihanyi, but I regretted my words. Did I expect him to answer? But, in fact, he did, a mannered pantomime with his hands and facial expressions, even a low hum from the back of his throat, a routine that suggested he was having a wonderful time—that he'd gotten his wish. Miss Ferber, the American short-story writer, was sitting in a garden where the scent of roses and oleander overwhelmed. I smiled.

“I don't like my portrait being painted.”

“Then you are not an egoist,” Bertalan Pór said.

“Oh, but I am, sir. Anyone who dares to put words to paper or oil to a canvas has to be an egoist.” I paused. “Or a downright silly fool.”

He laughed. “We are all fools.”

“Thank you,” I quipped.

Both men laughed.

Bertalan Pór confided, “In 1907 the artist Berény displayed his portrait of me at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. I watched as visitors pointed at me and laughed. A critic called it ‘filth-smeared Gauguinism.'”

I frowned. “I fear the same reaction will greet a portrait of me”—I paused—“in red.”

But Lajos Tihanyi's face suddenly tightened, and he made grunting, unpleasant sounds. He snapped his brush in two. I started but didn't move. Zsuzsa Kós had entered the garden from the side, pausing a few feet from me, staring at me, staring at Lajos Tihanyi, narrowing her eyes at Bertalan Pór. A purplish color rose in her face, and her eyes flashed.

She moved slowly but finally positioned herself between me and Tihanyi, her arms folded over her chest as she glared at the hapless painter.

Bertalan Pór said something in Hungarian, and she flicked her head toward him. Anger there, raw hurt.

“What?” I sputtered.

Zsuzsa spoke to me in English, heavily accented, but her intent mightily evident. “You? You, the muse for the Hungarian painter?”

I wasn't amused by her attack, but kept still.

Lajos Tihanyi grunted. Bubbles of spittle formed at the corners of his mouth as he gargled out some nonsense syllables. He stamped his foot like a pouting child.

“I have been painted by the great Gustav Reich who painted Lola Montez. My portrait hung in the window of a gallery in the Kohlmarket. In Vienna. The Imperial Gallery begged to buy it for their collection. Only the Hungarians ignore their own singer.”

Dressed in a simple periwinkle-blue morning dress with a white lace headscarf covering her golden hair, she twisted around like a dance-hall coquette, then posed, her palms placed under her chin. Then she approached Tihanyi's easel and peered at what he'd drawn. Laughter rose in her throat as she pointed. “This…this is not art.”

“Please.” Bertalan Pór sidled up to her. “This is not your moment, dear Zsuzsa Kós, you who've had so many beautiful moments.”

It was, I thought, a beautiful line, and a moment especially for me as I sat in the perfumed garden.

But Zsuzsa raged, swinging her arms at the drawing, and Tihanyi, appalled, stepped back, his hands in front of his face. Zsuzsa stared over our heads toward the late morning sky and cried, “They are saying it's my fault, the murder of that girl. You think I don't hear the ugly whispers in the café at night. Murder, murder, murder. The folks turn their heads on the street. They point at me with anger. ‘She, our Zsuzsa, the songbird, she led the American girl into murder.' They tell me I am to blame. If I hadn't introduced her to the count, she'd be alive, that girl. Me—blame me.”

“Miss Kós,” I began, but she wasn't talking to us. I realized then that I was watching the aging entertainer slipping away from reason, the frantic, faraway eyes of a prisoner isolated too long in a cell. “Miss Kós,” I began again, “perhaps some coffee?”

She snapped out of her trance. “I know things.”

That jolted me. “What things?”

She laughed rashly as she glanced at Tihanyi's drawing. Her hand reached out as if to tear it to shreds. But Tihanyi pushed by her, blocking the drawing, and Zsuzsa stumbled, nearly toppling into some bushes. She righted herself with the help of Bertalan Pór, and shrieked a torrent of Hungarian.

The effect on the volatile Tihanyi was immediate. Wild-eyed, arms flailing, he barked at her, his body swaying. Bertalan Pór tried to grasp his shoulders, but the painter was incensed now—he breathed fire, his cheeks dotted with red, his hands banging against his chest. Alarmed, I stood up, ready to flee these two impassioned Hungarians, but Zsuzsa suddenly stopped her own fury, backed away from the agitated artist, and stumbled out of the garden. Lajos Tihanyi, exhausted, sank to the ground, his body quaking, his shoulders slumped. He was sobbing.

“Well,” Bertalan Pór nodded at me, “we witness the artistic temperament. The sad old singer acting out her loneliness and…and my good friend…the painter who will someday cut off his ear in the grand tradition of…“ But he stopped. Abruptly Lajos Tihanyi stood up, hastily gathered his easel and canvas, crammed his brushes and paints into his field box, and stormed away.

At the edge of the quay he turned, calm now, his face serene, and he smiled at me, bowing low. He uttered incomprehensible syllables at me, impossible to grasp, though Bertalan Pór understood. “He apologizes for his behavior, but his art is all he has.”

I doubted whether Tihanyi's utterances conveyed that noble sentiment, but I nodded back, content.

“And,” Bertalan Pór went on, “You and your friend Winifred Moss are invited to his studio this afternoon at four to see his work.”

Again, I nodded.

Then he quietly went after Lajos Tihanyi.

Minutes later, sitting in the lobby waiting for Winifred to join me, the desk clerk left his station and handed me a letter. “For the Miss Ferber.” He bowed as I smiled at his English. “It arrives moments ago on the morning post.”

Winifred joined me as I was opening the letter. “My mother,” I told her, “writing me from Berlin.”

“Good news?” she asked.

I frowned. “I rather doubt it. It
is
from my mother.”

Winifred blinked. “Edna, really.”

I read the letter quickly and looked up. “She's not joining me in Budapest.”

“Well, you didn't expect her to, right?”

“True, but she's not happy in Berlin, it seems.” I ran my eyes down the page. “A disagreement with a cousin, though she doesn't go into details. Some nasty words exchanged.” I looked up at Winifred. “I'll hear about it for years to come.” But the last paragraph caught my attention. “A visit to her oldest brother Isadore ended with someone hurling an anti-Semitic slur her way. She says she called his name out in a restaurant, and I guess his name is commonly used by some provincial Jew haters in beer hall comedy skits. Can you imagine that? It really unnerved her. So she was told to whisper his name.” I ran my tongue into the corner of my mouth. “My mother doesn't believe in whispering.”

“That's preposterous,” Winifred said. “I never heard of such a thing.”

“So she wants to leave Germany as soon as possible.”

“Why not come here then?” A chuckle. “The Hotel Árpád will gladly dim the lights for her.”

“No, she's headed to Paris, our final stop, and she wants me to join her there within the week. Three days from now, in fact.”

“But your plans…”

“Are never a concern to her.”

“What will you do?”

I sighed and folded the letter back into the envelope. “I believe we have an engagement this afternoon at the studio of a rather bizarre Hungarian painter whom I've come to like.” I tucked the letter into my purse. “I'm rather looking forward to the visit. Perhaps later on you and I can take in some theater and a late-night supper.”

***

At three o'clock Bertalan Pór appeared in the lobby to escort Winifred and me to Tihanyi's atelier. Dressed in a spiffy formal jacket with an elaborate necktie and carrying a pair of white linen kid gloves, he looked ready to attend a fancy cotillion and not a messy workaday artist's studio. “Afterwards, we go to tea or coffee,” he told me as I greeted him. “And some cake.” He pointed to his clothing. “Afternoon tea in Budapest is a formal occasion. For Miss Moss we drink tea
a l'anglaise
at five o'clock.”

Winifred whispered at me. “And we're dressed for a boat ride on the Danube.”

Bertalan Pór shook his head back and forth. “Of course not. The American women in Budapest dress for dinner when they rise in the morning. They always look like…Paris.”

“Flatterers everywhere,” I commented. “I like it.”

“It is necessary,” he added, a remark I had trouble interpreting. But I followed the young artist out onto the quay. We walked down from the landing and onto the Váci Utca, then turned onto Rákóczi, and finally into a small street that seemed more alley than passageway. Bertalan Pór pointed to the large windows on the second floor of a grim, soot-covered brick building. “Up there.”

“Up there” meant entering a dark stairwell with only a sputtering electric light bulb on the first floor, none too helpful as we climbed the narrow steps, creaky and sloping. I caught Winifred's eye. She was blissfully happy. Of course, she was—she loved those grubby Parisian artists in their gas-lit garrets and their paint-splattered lives.

The door was open, and the stinging assault of turpentine and dried paint wafted into the hallway. But I also heard a man's cheerful voice, laughing loudly at something, the rich rolling Hungarian cadences filling the room. Tihanyi Lajos, it seemed, had another surprise guest. Endre Molnár, also dressed in elegant attire, was leaning against a back wall, contemplating a painting hung there. When he heard us, he swiveled, delighted, and ushered us into the spacious room.

A cluttered shambles of a room, though Winifred scooted about admiring it all. Canvases and pads stacked up against the walls, four or five paint-blotchy palettes hanging off nails, easels holding incomplete canvases. A bank of windows on one side let sunshine flood the rooms, giving everything a lit-by-fire feeling. A comfortable space, I thought, and wholly Tihanyi's. His Expressionistic art assailed you at every turn—staggering geometric angles fused with brilliant hues of primary color. Portraits and landscapes, but of men at their most vulnerable, rolling farm fields at their most fantastic. This was no country other than one that brewed in his fevered imagination.

He bowed at us, excited, and immediately led me to a table on which was a scattered collection of drawings of—me. Yes—me. Me, in various poses, caught unawares in the café or on the street. Laughing, somber, lazy, dull. Me, posed decorously in the morning garden. Me, looking fierce and driven and a little world weary. Me, looking sad and lonely. Or ready to wither an annoying soul. Sketches of me, drawn in red crayon. The red jacket, collar turned up or flattened. Bothered, I said nothing though I was certain my confused expression revealed my astonishment. Try drawing
that
, I thought. He waited and I begrudgingly offered him an anemic smile that satisfied him.