Cafe Europa (18 page)

Endre Molnár was watching me closely. “We are seen only through Tihanyi's special prism,” he told me. “He aims to catch the soul. Look what he did to me.”

An easel turned away from us held a completed oil painting, oversized, brilliant in royal blues and forest greens, melancholy, sad, yet a spurt of liveliness. So like the Hungarians—weeping made them feel alive. Endre Molnár, posed in a black Prince Albert coat, a diamond stick pin in burnished gold, his untamed moustache a blue-black sweep of color. His rigid jaw line sharp—a geometric slash. Aggressive, Alpine shoulders, pointed. But Tihanyi had purposely exaggerated Endre's one lazy eye, magnifying it so that it gave the portrait a vaguely oriental cast. Utterly and unabashedly charming, the painting. Riveting. I fairly lost my breath. So handsome, so magnetic, so—so enticing.

I struggled to speak. “You posed for…”

He broke in. “Sooner or later everyone poses for Tihanyi.” He locked eyes with mine. “You know that Armageddon our friend Mr. Gibbon announces with some regularity—well, that war is waged in rooms like this. A Hungarian critic has called this art ‘a declaration of war.' The artists are the ones who shatter the comforts of the few.”

Bertalan Pór nodded toward the sketches of me on the table. “Next you sit in the studio here.”

I agreed.

But I found myself wandering back to another table strewn with the sketches the two artists had made in the Café Europa—and, I supposed, other cafés. The work-in-progress for their planned art book. Dozens of sheets, pencil sketches, half-finished, finished, abandoned, labored over. Works by both of them. There were many of Winifred, some so sad it hurt to look at them—the artist caught the pain she carried with her from England. But another showed her laughing in a way I'd not seen—utter joy, vibrant.

“Everyone in the Café Europa?” I asked them.

“The ones that intrigue,” Bertalan Pór noted.

I spread them out, this varied panorama of faces and tables and chairs. Bottles of wine. A lithe waiter with a tray held high in the air. The Gypsy orchestra and the intense violinist. Zsuzsa Kós slumped at a table. Folks I didn't recognize. Many of them. And Cassandra and Mrs. Pelham. Over and over, a sweep of images both flattering and ugly, the sordid personality and the beautiful. I tapped one of them.

“Jonathan Wolf,” I announced.

Endre looked over my shoulder. “Harold insists he's a spy.”

Frustrated, I looked into his face. “Yes, I know. István Nagy told me Mr. Wolf called
him
a spy. He also said Wolf's an Italian anarchist.” Endre's eyebrows rose at that statement. “But for whom? For what purpose?” The drawing showed a man with a Rasputin stare. “Madness, all of it.”

He shrugged. “Harold's fancy perhaps. Maybe Wolf is only a rich American, a lone wanderer through Budapest streets.”

“No,” I said, “there
is
something about that man. He's always near when something happens. Frankly, I don't believe such moments are purely coincidental. He's not what he demands we believe him to be.”

Lajos Tihanyi had been reading my lips, his face concentrating on mine. Finally he said something softly to Pór, but his friend looked perplexed at the stammered words. So Tihanyi jotted something on a slip of paper and handed it to him. He read it and smiled. “Lajos insists Wolf has the face of someone from Gypsy villages in Transylvania.”

Tihanyi was nodding, and Bertalan Pór added, “Lajos watches every face he meets. He sees everything. In one minute he reads your soul. In a second he knows whether he should
like
you.”

“I remember his words: ‘I see what you hear.'”

Tihanyi, comprehending, sputtered happily.

As I peered at the drawings before me, so many focused on the Café Europa, my heart began to pound. There had to be some clue buried in the blunt pencil lines and bold charcoal smudges—something that told me something I needed to know. Cassandra and Mrs. Pelham at that table, a series of drawings, different moods, postures. What? I believed the answer to the murder had been captured by Lajos Tihanyi and Bertalan Pór as they sketched away. I had no idea why I thought that, but it held me. Staring down at the drawings, I had no idea where to begin looking. My mind swam.

“And now,” Endre was saying, “we will go to New York.”

Winifred glanced at me. “New York?”

Endre laughed. “Budapest's New York.”

I rolled my eyes. “We've already been to your version of Chicago, sir. I still have heart palpitations and recurring dizzy spells. Perhaps it is best if…”

He was shaking his head. “New York is the café of choice these days. Not the intimacy and old worn fabric feel of the Café Europa, to be sure. New York is where everyone goes at five for tea or coffee. Or a glass of Tokay. Our table awaits us.”

Bertalan Pór offered his arm to Winifred, who was touched by the gesture. Immediately she began asking about his days studying at the Acádemie Julian in Paris. He mentioned that a short time ago in Munich one of Tihanyi's paintings was rejected from the show—labeled
entartete kunst
, degenerate art—and so immediately Pór withdrew his own paintings.

“The brotherhood of artists,” he told her. “Our Prime Minister István Tisza attacked my exhibit in Budapest.” He grinned. “Expected, yes, but it still is hard to get used to—such dislike.”

Thrilled, Winifred talked in a hushed but lively voice. She looked—softened. Yes, that was the word that came to mind. This hard-bitten soldier of the suffragette wars in England, so bruised and battered by the mocking, scurrilous men on the sidelines of her protest parade—this war-torn warrior of a noble cause had come to own a hard face, especially when men approached her. And rightly so. She understood her enemy.

And yet I'd seen her smile slightly as Harold Gibbon danced around her, teasing, impudent. And now, in the company of the courtly Hungarians, these talented and gentle forecasters of another future, she softened, responded to them. Winifred Moss was being brought back into a loving humanity. Wonderful to watch, I thought, and necessary.

Winifred walked at a brisk clip as we headed to the café.

New York was a modern coffee house connected to an American insurance company. “Not Marcus Blaine's,” Endre quietly informed us.

An intimidating place, this New York, with its Gilded Age abundance. Slick marble floors and columns, huge gilt mirrors, blazing chandeliers, gold leaf trim everywhere and—horror of horrors, a pedestrian replica of the Statue of Liberty under a huge Stars and Stripes. New York, indeed. A palace built to overwhelm, which, of course, had the opposite effect—you cringed at the opulence, the sheer ugliness of unfettered riches. Crowded, a blue haze of cigarette smoke hurting your eyes, steamy, the smell of sweating bodies. The heady scent of thick red wine and too many cigars. Chess, checkers, newspapers, talk, arguments, politics, love, hate, a slap in the face, a hug in the corner, an illicit touching of the Gypsy waitress as she shuffled by with a tray of whiskey and soda. Yes, a celebration of life, I supposed, some usurping of the glitter world of, say, Paris or even New York itself without the carefree, devil-may-care abandon. Here the nagging melancholy inborn in the Hungarian lent the room a wistful, bittersweet beauty.

Delightful though our coffee was, especially in the company of these deferential gentlemen, my mind kept reverting back to Tihanyi's studio, that helter-skelter mess of drawings spread across that table. Scenes from café society. But something else—scenes from the characters in a murder. The dead and the—the what? The killer? A strand nagged at me, rumbled in my head, and, distracted, I found myself staring across the crowded café, hardly paying attention to the casual talk about café life, the globules of caviar slathered on thick black bread, the sumptuous chocolate cream cake called Rigó Jancsi, and even the pleasant Gypsy music.

Endre Molnár hired an open car, rather extravagant, and the five of us went to City Park for an evening of Tchaikovsky, though sitting next to the deaf Tihanyi diminished some of the pleasure for me. When it ended, Endre escorted us to Magyaros, a greenery restaurant at Deák Square, where we had cold sour cherry soup, followed by chicken
paprikás
with
dumplings, eating outside under leafy chestnut trees. A crowded restaurant, a haze of cigarette smoke drifting into a hard blue sky. At midnight the car delivered us home, the two artists choosing to walk the short distance to their apartments. But as the automobile turned a corner, we noticed a sleek black town car parked in front of a villa set back from the street. As the car slowed, Endre nodded toward the occupants, then stepping out.

The countess and her son, Count Frederic von Erhlich—he sharply dressed in his decorated military uniform, she dressed in a black velvet gown with jeweled piping—both paused a moment on the sidewalk. A streetlight made them seem resplendent characters in a Viennese operetta. Attendants bowed and scraped, but the countess, covering her face with a veil, moved through them, never turning her head. In a hurry she called her son's name without turning back to look at him, but the count lingered by the open door of the town car as a woman emerged. A tiny capon of a woman with a plump, round face, she said something to the count. Reluctantly he reached for her hand.

Endre cleared his throat. “The Duchess of Saxony.”

“I don't understand.”

“A widow two decades the count's senior,” he added. “An unhappy woman who has shopped for a husband in the marketplace.”

“You're saying?“

Endre swallowed. “Rumor says that the count is already betrothed to the woman.”

“Money?'

He snickered, but then seemed sorry he spoke. “Lots of it. Tons. But a nasty woman with a profane tongue, unhappy, blistering. Servants run from her, weep, hide. Her cruelty is legendary. She's never forgiven a slight—and everything is considered a slight. But very respectable German aristocracy. A mountain castle. Essen steel money.”

“So everyone wins.” Winifred's words were dry.

“All except poor Cassandra.” I said.

I immediately regretted my words.

Endre's face sagged and his hands trembled.

Chapter Sixteen

Moments later Winifred and I sat on a bench on the quay watching a steamship move quietly up the Danube. Endre Molnár left us in the lobby of the hotel, but we weren't ready for bed. The night had been too lustrous. The company of Endre and the two painters, coupled with that robust supper at Magyaros, capped off with a glass of sherry at a small café where everyone greeted Endre enthusiastically, left us unwilling to end such an evening. So we drifted out through the terrace and sat on a bench over the river, facing Castle Hill, shimmering with light. A glorious night, a slight breeze of the river, the bellow of a whistle from a passing boat, the
clop clop clop
of a two-horse fiacre passing by, and the throaty roar of a lumbering town car's engine. In the distance the whine of a tram's brakes. Anachronistic, this city, like most modern cities—the horse and the machine crossing paths in the bustling metropolis. A night chill made me shiver.

“Time for bed,” I told Winifred, rustling in the seat.

She nodded, yawned.

A few stragglers strolled by, the sound of a woman's voice reaching us.

“Zsuzsa,” I said. “God no.”

Winifred peered through the darkness, down along the railings of the quay. We could see two indistinct figures moving slowly toward us, one silent, one talking loudly with arms gesturing toward the other. Zsuzsa and Harold. Only one voice—Zsuzsa's. Harold walked a step or so ahead of her, as though hoping for separation, but as they neared us, Zsuzsa reached out and tugged at his elbow. He flicked her off.

“Harold,” she cried, louder now. “You run from me.”

He was watching us now, his body turned sideways, facing the hotel. “Tell me,” he said to her.

“But you keep asking questions.”

Winifred frowned. “This cannot be good. I don't want to be here. “

But I watched closely and tried to catch every word.

“You told me you saw something.”

She chuckled. “I see so many things. So many.”

He raised his voice. “Tell me. I hate your infernal secrets. You play games with me, dear Zsuzsa.”

“Men love my games. They…”

“Maybe they
used
to love your…” He stopped. He must have seen something in her face because he stepped back, mumbled what sounded like a feeble apology.

“You want me to…”

“What I want, dear Zsuzsa, is for you to tell me what you saw. In City Park maybe. Somewhere.
Something
. You told me…”

She giggled again and missed a step, rolling against his side. “The night is so chilly.”

He threw his hands up as though to catch her, but no—his movement was one of surrender. Hands up in the air. “All right, all right.”

“It's so late, dear Harold.” A hand reached out in the dark and touched his cheek.

He backed away, darted ahead like a scurrying rabbit, then stopped. He looked back at her, twisted his head left and right. When he glanced at Winifred and me, both of us frozen on that bench some yards away, he breathed in deeply, offered us a half-hearted smile. Helpless, that look, because he didn't want an audience, the Greek chorus of steely-eyed spinsters.

“Please, Harold.” Begging in her voice.

He remained stony, arms folded over his chest. When she approached, she dipped her head into his neck and whispered something. He turned to face her, his body tense, and mumbled something to her that I missed. But I caught the tone—biting, raw.

Zsuzsa let out a choked sob, and then, twirling around, she slapped him in the face and stumbled toward the hotel.

Sheepish, Harold stood over us, waiting. But we said nothing—what was there to say?—and then, bowing dramatically like a rebuffed knight from the ancient Courts of Love, he declared, “Sometimes I don't like myself.” He waited a second. “I suppose you two don't believe me, but it's true. Sometimes I wonder why I do the things I do.”

***

In the morning in the café Winifred remarked that she'd heard Harold's insistent voice in her hallway late last night. “Act Two of that tragedy,” she added. “The bedroom scene. A reprise.”

“Harold is playing with fire, Winifred. He wants information that he assumes she has, though that's questionable. Zsuzsa talks too much and to everyone. That's dangerous these days, but most folks probably believe it's all stuff and nonsense. The aging cabaret singer struggling for attention, slipping into her own fantasy world. A woman afraid to face nighttime—afraid to face the morning sun. Except that Harold believes she has a story to tell. So he's going at it the only way she'll accept—flattering her, wooing her, celebrating her…allure.”

“Allure?” Winifred's eyebrows rose. “Really, Edna.”

“You know, there's something sad when a beautiful woman gets old. For years, back in gay old Vienna, Zsuzsa lived on admiring glances from men. The pretty young singer, heralded, toasted. Lord, some old fool pays her hotel bill nowadays, true? Old camp followers of the sultry singer. A cabaret voice, satin and silk gowns, feathers in her hair. And she
was
beautiful—she
still
is under that powder and dye. But when she looks in the mirror she wants to remember that young girl, stunning.”

“And that's where our scamp Harold comes into the picture.”

“Exactly. A moral lapse on his part, I grant you.”

“Maybe it's fair—each gets what each wants.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “He wants information which he believes she has—but playfully holds back from him. She wants someone to pay attention to her. Or love. She hungers for love. Someone to hold onto at night.”

Winifred shivered. “Really, Edna. The words that come out of your mouth.”

“But both lose in the end because each act is selfish.”

She mimicked Harold. “‘I'm a reporter.'”

“And he is, and a good one who'll use one ruse or another to get his story. Who thrives on getting the scoop. The almighty scoop. You forget that I was a reporter once.”

She smiled. “But you never batted your eyelids or smiled at…William Jennings Bryan to get an interview.”

I smiled back. “How do you know?”

Harold appeared, his morning coat rumpled and his hair plastered down so slickly that he resembled some villain from a Broadway melodrama—Do not hiss the villain, please. Without preamble, he slid into a chair opposite me, and smiled widely, a huckleberry grin that exaggerated the freckles on his face.

“I know what you're thinking,” he grinned.

“I always hate it when someone presumes to understand what is going on in my head.” I smiled back at him.

“You think I'm a cad.”

Winifred nodded. “I
know
you're a cad.”

Harold shrugged it off. “Anyway, here's the plan for the day.”

“What?” I asked, bewildered.

“You know, everything is starting to fall into place, I tell you. Things are cracking. I mean it. It's like electricity in the air. Don't you feel it?”

“Mr. Gibbon,” I stressed, “ you need to be more specific. Isn't that one of the tenets of news reporting? A quick review for you: who what where when—why are you so evasive? Perhaps your boss, Mr. Hearst, failed to properly instruct you.”

He looked at Winifred and winked. “She's a hard nut to crack, wouldn't you say?”

“Mr. Gibbon,” Winifred said sharply. “You assume that the women you encounter fall neatly into easy categories.”

He frowned. “I don't know much about the women, I will tell you, but we men are simple folk. We don't have that much variation.”

“So we agree on something,” Winifred noted, a hint of a smile on her lips.

“I can tell you're starting to like me.” He wagged his finger at her.

“I'd be more concerned with having the world respect you than worry about liking you.”

“I want to be loved.”

“Don't we all,” I interjected.

“I don't.” Winifred startled both Harold and me.

Harold, however, was rocking in his chair. “You do stun a man, Miss Moss.”

“I try.”

“But you're lying.”

Winifred was silent. So was I—the moment was awkward.

I began, “What's this about a plan for the day—one that seems to involve Winifred and me as accomplices to your madness?”

“Things are popping now. I learned something that—well, something that may be the answer to all our questions.”

“The only question I have,” I interrupted, “is what you're talking about.”

His hands reached out, as though ready to embrace the world. “I'm seeing the large picture now. Cassandra Blaine…a dizzy heiress…gone…a minor player maybe writ large…pouf! Like that! Endre Molnár
not
seeing the bigger picture. Not understanding the power he had if only he'd understood what was happening to her.
Around
her. Maybe if you're a native of Budapest, you can't see what is happening in front of your eyes. That's maybe the reason Endre didn't—well…The world around us here in Budapest. The courts in Vienna. In Serbia. In Bosnia. In Russia. Even in France. Everywhere. Even America. Americans don't have a clue. My problem is that I've been looking at the narrow picture. Really. I got sidetracked by the murder of Cassandra Blaine. Not that it isn't important. But the answer is with the count—
that
man. Count Frederic von Ehrlich. In fact, it all ties in.”

“How so?” I wondered. “Mr. Gibbon, you're talking in circles. Either you know something or you don't. Tell us now.”

“I'm still debating that. It
has
to tie in. All of it.”

“How does it have to?” I breathed in. “What are we talking about?”

“There has to be…symmetry in life. Her murder is a petty little happenstance, easily dismissed. A dot on the distant horizon. An outpost on a world map. But it's like a stone, a pebble really, tossed into the churning waters of the yellow Danube. The ripple effect. Budapest to Vienna.”

“Again you answer nothing.”

“Because I'm not ready to tell you.”

“And when will that be?”

“Tonight. We'll meet, the three of us. After I tie up some loose ends.”

Harold was purposely mysterious, which rankled. He tapped his chest. “Evidence here.” He opened his jacket and we saw the dog-eared edges of a sheaf of papers bound with twine.

“Now.” I was determined.

“The real story is Budapest.” He waved his arm toward the river.

“What does that mean?” Winifred asked, exasperated.

“The heartbeat of this great city. Look around you. The United States of Austria-Hungary. Look around. A city impossible to read. The Magyar wanders among a dozen minorities, pushing, shoving. It's easy enough to get lost in Budapest. A Gypsy plays his violin on a street corner for tossed coins. A Croatian peddles straw baskets in the flower market. A Moravian repairs the wheels of a dogcart. A Serbian bakes apple nut roll in the bakery on Drava. The German cobbler watches you from his storefront. The working stiff—that's Budapest—the milling crowds. The Jew manages the monies of the snobbish nobility. Even your artist friends Pór and Tihanyi, Jews, yes, Budapest-born, but I'm thinking of the grubby poor, beggar Jews, gnarled hands outstretched. The Moravian peasant pulling a wagon. The Austrian bankers with their monocles and Altesse cigars. Look around you. The politicians are…
snoring
. All these people”—he got wide-eyed now—“so it's easy to hide here. How can you spot your enemy when everybody around you is different from
you?
”

“And such a motley arrangement leads you to—solve Cassandra's murder?”

“No, not really. Or maybe yes. What I'm saying is that the city—the empire—is rife with difference.
Seething
with difference—resentment, anger, distrust. Strife, lies, a Babel of tongues, odd and primitive customs, people hiding behind shuttered doors, scheming in the long night. The stranger among us. The bomb thrower hands you your morning
Magyar Hirlap
. Watch out! The man who sells you cheap Russian icons on the Corso may be a spy in the pay of—of your enemy.”

“You're talking in circles, sir.” I fiddled with my coffee cup, impatient.

“I am one step away from an answer. This will all be in my book.”

“Ah, the book.
Decline and Fall
,” I announced.

“The end of it all,” he trumpeted.

“And our parts in this puzzle?” I asked.

For a moment he looked deep in thought. “I need to put things in order—to hear
your
take on things. I'm not writing a
word
until you tell me I'm not a fool.”

Winifred started to say something, but stopped, wisely.

“Us?” I asked.

“I need to watch your faces when I tell you.”

“I'm not following you.”

“The world listens in on my conversations. This afternoon I plan to meet with some Bosnian Serbs living at the edge of the city, huddled alongside a Gypsy camp. They will tell me—confirm, I hope—what I have learned. The whispers in the Serbian language newspapers. I've been told the radicals publish hidden coded messages in
Trgivinski Glasnik
. They meet in secret, their members swearing oaths under human skulls hung on crosses. What I just learned last night. A suspicion. A sighting. Dangerous. Formidable. Impossible. Stupendous.”

I laughed. “You sound like a midway barker at the Chicago World's Fair, sir.”

“The town crier.”

“And then what?” Winifred asked.

“Then I write the explosive article and you will treat me to champagne and pastry at Gerbeaud's.”

“Tonight?”

“Meet me in Buda at a wine bar near Mount Gellért, an ancient cave sunk deep in the bowels of the city, ice cold, underground. Seven o'clock. I'll be back in town by then.” He took out his pad and scribbled an address down. “Here. Wander the narrow twisted lanes with the secret gardens and the dark courtyards and the spooky limestone caves, a world once the home to filthy thieves and crazed hermits. You need to experience one of the wonderful secrets of Budapest. The deep cold cellars in the Buda hills.”