Authors: Ed Ifkovic
Cafe Europa
Caf
é
Europa
An Edna Ferber Mystery
Ed Ifkovic
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright © 2015 by Ed Ifkovic
First E-book Edition 2015
ISBN: 9781464203930 ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
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Contents
To Tibor Trencsényi
who shared his Budapest with me
Edna Ferber, popular short-story writer making the Grand Tour of Europe
Winifred Moss, embattled suffragette from London, England
Harold Gibbon, a yellow journalist in the employ of the Hearst syndicate
Endre Molnár, a rich young scion of an old Hungarian family
Cassandra Blaine, a beautiful American heiress
Marcus Blaine, a wealthy businessman from Connecticut
Cecilia Blaine, wealthy society matron and wife of Marcus Blaine
Mrs. Pelham, British-born chaperone of Cassandra Blaine
Vladimir Markov, Russian-born proprietor of the Café Europa
Count Frederic, an Austrian aristocrat in the Military Chancery
Baron Meyerhold, high-ranking Austrian investigator
Imre Horváth, an inspector with the Royal Hungarian Police
Jonathan Wolf, an American businessman in Budapest
Lajos Tihanyi, a deaf-mute Hungarian artist, a pioneering modernist
Bertalan Pór, Tihanyi's good friend and fellow revolutionary artist
István Nagy, an apologist poet for the old Viennese regime
Cassandra Blaine laughed too much. She tossed back her pretty head so that her golden hair caught the dusty shaft of brilliant sunlight streaming in through the open windows that overlooked the terrace. The Danube River shimmered below. Her delirious laugh broke at the end, so shrill it seemed dangerously close to hysteria. I'd known girls like her whose artificial laughter suddenly ended in collapse, girls who then confessed trivial sins no one cared to hear.
The few late-afternoon folks scattered about the café looked over, some amused, others annoyed, most indifferent. The beautiful heiress, young and privileged and frivolous, demanded all eyes find her, celebrateâ¦smileâ¦applaud. But her careless laughter rankled in the quiet Budapest café where customers whispered as they downed glasses of sherry or bitters. A table of American women, frail spinsters in amber beads and silk Spanish shawls, sipped strong coffee with whipped cream, the only sound the tinkle of spoons against cups. A wizened Hungarian in a black beret rustled the pages of a newspaper he'd taken from a bamboo rack. In the kitchen behind a closed door someone dropped a plate, and it shattered. A man's deep voice swore, a tepid German curse, followed by an English “Damn!”
“Edna, for heaven's sake.” Winifred Moss touched my elbow. “You're staring.”
“I know what I'm doing, Winifred. When people choose to perform, I watch them. I'm
supposed
to.”
Winifred snickered. “You notice that all the wrong people have tons of money.”
“And translucent porcelain skin,” I added. “God's ways continue to mystify me.”
Winifred sat back, pleased with her comment. Both of us watched as Cassandra's chaperone placed a censorious hand on the young woman's elbow and leaned in, whispering. An old woman, this pencil-thin companion, her gray curls worn under a frilly lace bonnet, her black cotton dress trimmed with too many schoolmarmish ruffles across the bodice. She obviously considered her position taxing, if impossible. Cassandra, her laughter abruptly stopped, glared back, her eyes bright with the power she exercised over the hired servant.
Winifred confided, a little too loudly, her brassy voice heavy with sarcasm, “That poor woman wishes she could slap that bratty girl.”
The old Hungarian man, his pinched face buried in a newspaper, slid the sheets down and glared at Winifred, who could have cared less. She stared back, challenging. He grunted and looked down.
Of course, no one in the Café Europa recognized Winifred Moss, the famousâor should I say infamous?âsuffragette, by way of the London battlefront. I'd met her two years ago when she spoke to a women's group in Chicago, invited by Jane Addams and Lillian Adler to address the question of the burgeoning women's suffrage movement in America. A rabble-rouser, this fierce, independent female, she took a soul off guardâat least she did me. Blunt, forceful, opinionated, she narrowed her eyes at a world that defined her asâ¦well, inferior, second class, the drudge in the kitchen.
I saw a woman perhaps fifty, at six feet taller than most men, with a long, drawn, horse face behind thick spectacles, unlovely, but somehowâ¦handsome. It was her eyes, I insistedâgalvanizing, a hard-coal black that held you, froze you in place. Every so often, absentmindedly, she ran her fingers through her rat's nest pompadour, a stand of iron-gray hair that matched the black Mother Hubbard smock she always wore. I'd liked her when we chatted briefly in Chicago, and thought her speech to the settlement house stimulating and relevantâthough I still believed suffrage in America was a struggle impossible to win. I'd seen the red-faced drunken men with their hateful gestures and catcalls when women marched down Michigan Avenue for the cause.
“We have no choice,” she'd told me then. Now, resigned, she sighed. “Such girls”âshe actually pointed at Cassandraâ“defeat our cause.”
I sat back and wondered whether my brief sojourn in Hungary with the redoubtable Winifred Mossâtwenty years my seniorâhad been a wise move. Two nights ago we'd taken the night train from Berlin, arriving early the next morning into picture-postcard Budapest with its fairy lights illuminating Castle Hill, its exotic Moorish architecture, its air redolent with perfume from the beds of lush-blooming roses.
I'd abandoned my mother in Berlin, an act of rebellion I'd doubtless regret, and at times I quaked at my rashness. We'd had a nasty, spitfire spat that left a bad taste in my mouth.
“You can't go gallivanting across Europe by yourself,” she'd screamed. “What will people say?”
So be it. Touring Europe with Julia Ferber required Herculean stamina, patience, and an aversion to cold-blooded murder. In America my popular short stories, happily published in
Everybody's
,
Good Housekeeping
, and
Cosmopolitan
, gave me a name and bags of golden coins, and my mother had suggestedâ¦you and me, the two of us, mother and daughter, Europe. London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Munich, Berlin. Well, she was still in Berlinâand she maintained that I should be at her side. At thirty, I was too old for rebellionâor was I? I knew we would do battle over my behavior. Perhaps I'd been hasty in agreeing to make the trip.
My mother had become suddenlyâand noisilyâfascinated by her oldest brother's family, pleasant enough folks, surely, but smug burghers, plump, red-cheeked, slap-you-on-the-back Berliners who circled Julia Ferber as though unearthing a rare gem. I found the hearty bluster of these Germans trying.
I sat for a portrait with painter Clara Ewald, an engaging older woman with a fiery but delightful tongue. I visited her small cottage nestled in the Bavarian Alps where, one afternoon, I met Winifred Moss, Clara's friend, who was stopping on her way to a holiday in Budapest. My mother had hinted we'd visit Budapest in hopes of connecting with family of my long-dead father, born in Oylso, near Eperye, a village outside the city. We'd received a letter from one of his distant cousins, inviting us to an afternoon visit. But Julia Ferber suddenly balked at leaving the coziness of German hospitalityâat which time Winifred Moss, eyeing my mother with a baleful, unforgiving eye and spotting my own restlessness, suggested that I be her companion for a two-week sojourn in Budapest.
“A woman cannot travel alone without criticism,” she told me. “Men don't realize a solitary woman, even with ostrich feathers in her hair and shiny brass buckles on her shoes, is an Edwardian Amazon.”
Which was why, impulsively, I boarded the night train to Budapest, arriving in the picturesque city along the Danube early in the morning. The Marta taxi took us to the Hotel Arpad, a ramshackle dowager edificeâWinifred's choice, of course. A string of hotels on Maria Valencia Street fronted the Corso overlooking the storied Danubeâthe Hungaria, the Bristol, the Duna, and the Carltonâall sparkly and polished in the early-morning sunshine. Not so the shabby Ãrpád. Winifred often stayed there and found it “homey.”
This ancient hotel of choice for English-speaking travelersâmostly journalists, businessmen, and a smattering of rich Americans on the Grand Tourâthe Ãrpád overlooked the murky yellow riverâthe Danube was not blue, notwithstanding Strauss' lovely waltz. Elegant rooms with heavy but faded damask curtains and worn oriental carpets, creaky featherbeds that sagged in the middle, ancient white enamel faucets that creaked and groaned, and a bathtub so deep I considered requisitioning a fireman's ladder to descend and rise from it. The light fixtures sputtered and hissed, the lights dimmed and then brightened, and I fully expected to be wrapped in a blazing fireball in the middle of the night. But Winifred loved itâworshipped its echoey old rooms. I would come to cherish the place because such faded grandeur was as comforting as an old antimacassar inherited from your favorite grandmother.
Idly, the two of us drifted through our sightseeing days in and out of the threadbare Café Europa on the ground floor of the hotel. Its massive French doors opened onto a terrace surrounded by scarlet roses, acacia trees, and manicured shrubbery.
I understood that Winifred needed solaceâsuccor. She was battle-scarred from her days protesting with Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women's Social and Political Union, a militant suffrage group brutalized by the club-wielding London police. Jailed, one of a group of women on a hunger strike, Winifred had been force-fed by sneering men, a funnel jammed into her throat, beaten, humiliated in her cell, forced to watch a friend sexually violated. During a protest march she'd been knocked to the ground by a policeman on a horse, and witnessed another woman, the sister of a member of Parliament, trampled to death. Stunned and shattered, she'd retreated, but I'd noticed her raw dislike of most of the men she encountered. She'd traveled to Germany and now Hungary to escape their faces.
Sometimes in a restaurant she cringed when a man rudely addressed her.
It broke my heart.
Now Winifred nudged me. “Your dreadful friend.” She pointed to the open French doors.
Harold Gibbon was barking orders at some unseen person behind him, but stopped, flicked his head forward like a jittery woodpecker, and walked toward Cassandra Blaine. Something stopped himâperhaps the chaperone's imperious shudder gave him pauseâso he veered away and slid into a chair at our table.
“Ah, Miss Ferber. Miss Moss. We meet again.”
I glowered. “Sir, you were here at this very table for breakfast. Intrusive, opinionated⦔
“Doing my job, dear ladies.”
“The scurrilous Hearst syndicate⦔
“My bread and butter.” He grinned and withdrew a pad from a breast pocket of his wrinkled seersucker suit. A rose was pinned to his lapel, faded now, with a petal in danger of falling. He removed the summer bowler from his head and placed it on an empty chair.
A skinny, wiry man, shorter than my five-foot height, with jutting bone, freckled parchment skin, a pointy Pinocchio nose, and a Grimms fairy-tale chin to match, Harold Gibbon was that horrid new breed of yellow journalists invented by William Randolph Hearstâa mid-twenties city boy, brash, garish, gossipy, annoying, a second-generation Richard Harding Davis without the sartorial splendor. Harold was a gnat of the Fourth Estate, one impossible to swat. I'd met him two years earlier at the 1912 Republican Presidential Convention in Chicago when I'd covered the event for the George Matthew Adams newspaper syndicate with William Allen White and othersâand Harold, the frisky newspaper reporter, interviewed
us
. Now, meeting him by chance in the Café Europa as we ate chewy bacon
pogácsa
and sipped black coffee laced with whipped cream, he'd assumed we were old friends.
“I scarcely know you, young man,” I'd told him.
That had surprised him, his eyes bugging out, “But we
have
met.”
“I meet many people, young man andâ”
He'd interrupted. “But Americans gotta stick together in a strange land.”
Now, leaning back in his chair, he grinned at us, a simpleton's look. “I'm starting to think I'm not wanted here.”
Winifred had little patience with the pipsqueak. “Is there a reason you keep glancing toward Cassandra Blaine, Mr. Gibbon?”
“A cynosure, I'm sure you'll agree. And her upcoming wedding will be world news. If I can get past that dour guardian, I'll get me an interview.” He beamed. “Another coup for me.” He bowed.
“Is that why you're in Budapest?” I asked.
He leaned forward, withdrawing a packet from his vest pocket. Quietly, his eyes flitting around the room, he rolled a cigarette with one hand while fiddling with the monstrous ginger-colored walrus moustache he sported, so expansive it nearly touched the shaggy muttonchops he'd stolen from Grover Cleveland, though I doubted his knowledge of American presidents went back to the previous century.
“I'm here for
real
news, even though an American marrying into Austrian nobility might be a banner headline.”
Winifred sneered. “How romantic.”
Winifred, I'd noticed, had stiffened when the man joined us, closing up her face, her dislike obvious.
He stared at her, tickled. “Ain't it, though? Folks eat this malarkey up, truth to tell. Yellow-backed dime novel stuff. Graustark adventures in the feudalistic backcountry.”
He leaned in confidentially. “I love itâreally. Tinged with a bit of scandal, this wedding.” He nodded toward the young girl. “Cassandra Blaine, only daughter of Marcus and Cecelia Blaine, wealthy Americans occupying the entire top floor of this fleabitten old hotel, though you rarely see them. Daddy is Connecticut insuranceâvice president of Aetna, and a major stockholder of Colt Firearms in Hartford. Mommy is Newport and yachts and Mrs. Astor's Four Hundred in Manhattan. Living in Budapest for the past year nowâjust as I have, in fact. He's working with Hungarian investors on insurance opportunity, overseeing the construction of a building on Rákóczi.
“And fickle, spoiled Cassandra falls for the handsome Hungarian Endre Molnár until, at Mommy's command, she finds herself betrothed to Count Frederic von Erhlich, Archduke Franz Ferdinand's distant cousin, hunting companion, and all-around gloomy stick-in-the-mud. A marriage orchestrated in the ballrooms of Vienna, though probably not at Hofburg, the Emperor Franz Josef's private castle. End of story.”
“No,” I said, “it seems to me the
beginning
of a sad story.”
“How so?”
I shot a look at the American girl with her elaborately coiffed hair studded with whalebone hairpins. Her arms covered with too many jangling gold bracelets, her diamond earrings glittering. She was dressed in an expensive Nile-blue chiffon day gown that exaggerated her narrow waist and high bust.
“From what little I've seen of Miss Blaineâtwo days now, occupying that same table under the cruel eye of her keeperâshe's none too happy with an arranged marriage.”