Cafe Europa (3 page)

Winifred held up her hand. “Stop, Mr. Gibbon. Please.”

Harold arched his voice. “The avant garde, them two.” He whispered. “Like everyone else, they're waiting for the death of Franz Josef.
Der alte Herr
.”

“Sir,” I began, “you impugn…”

“We're a circus act for them, truth to tell.”

I glanced at the two young men, both absorbed in their sketching, glancing up now and then toward the open doorway, their chalk rolling over their pads.

Suddenly, grunting, Harold jumped up, twisting his body like a wobbly top. Eyes wide and flashing, he stammered, “Guess it's time to question the lovely damsel.”

With that pronouncement, blurted loudly enough to turn heads, he rushed to Cassandra's table. He stood so close to her that it caught her chaperone off guard. The old woman nearly toppled back in her chair. She squawked and put an iron grip on Harold's forearm. Harold, purposely ignoring her and half-bowing to Cassandra, blithely introduced himself—“Harold Gibbon, Hearst syndicate, reporter”—and requested an interview. Every eye in the café found him.

Cassandra, sputtering, looked to her chaperone and squeaked out a feeble, “Mrs. Pelham, you—”

But at that moment the redoubtable Mrs. Pelham, doubtless a veteran of caring for innumerable charges, deftly retrieved a summer parasol conveniently hidden, and jabbed Harold's side. He yelped like a recalcitrant puppy and backed away. Mrs. Pelham spoke through clenched teeth. “How dare you, you brutish mongrel?”

At which Winifred let out an unfunny laugh.

Harold slunk back to our table, slumped into a chair, and offered a grin to the audience he'd gathered. “You gotta try, no?”

“Mr. Gibbon,” I began, “perhaps you should—”

But the giddy, ridiculous moment ended abruptly as a group of men entered from the terrace and stopped. Harold sucked in his breath.

“What?” I demanded.

“Endre.” One word, hummed softly.

“Who?”

“Cassandra's lover. Her
old
lover. The man she abandoned after her horrible mother contracted her out to Viennese aristocracy and a pathetic, worthless title. A friend of mine. Endre Molnár.”

The young man stood in front of his band of friends, all of whom had stopped their chatter, his eyes resting on Cassandra, who self-consciously touched her exquisite hair. Silent now, Endre watched her. He was tall and lanky and dark-complected, his black eyes set under a high forehead, his black hair swept back and down his shoulders—very Heathcliff, I thought. A swashbuckling moustache over razor-thin lips. A granite face, strong, rigid, shadowy. His smoldering stare radiated melancholy. Dressed in polished high black boots, blue trousers, and a white linen shirt that contrasted with his bronzed skin, he dominated the room, ruled the space. Every eye turned to him. Even Winifred, frowning at the melodramatic moment, stared.

One of the men with Endre leaned into his neck, but Endre shrugged him away, and spoke loudly in Hungarian.

“What?” I asked Harold, my linguist at hand.

“He said he belongs here—his friends come here.”

Mrs. Pelham sputtered unhappily as the room watched Endre's rigid body. Even the two artists laid down their sketchpads, and waited. Cassandra Blaine, perhaps not realizing what she was doing, had stood, one hand gripping the table, her body swaying. Mrs. Pelham reached out, demanding the girl sit down, but Cassandra, a catch in her throat that we all heard, pushed her away. She sobbed out loud. Cassandra was staring at Endre, and he at her. It was marvelous, I thought, and melodramatically beautiful, this moment out of, say, an Offenbach operetta. Or even Franz Lehár's
The Merry Widow
, all the rage a few summers back. Or
The Gypsy Baron
. I expected to hear a plaintive Gypsy violin, maybe, a drumbeat, a wail from an unseen singer. A stage curtain, dropped.

But then, the spell broken, Endre turned away sharply, his face mournful but dismissive. A coldness there, calculated. And, in a flash, he disappeared back out onto the terrace into the late-afternoon shadows and golden sunlight glinting off the Danube. We stared, all of us, mesmerized, at the empty space.

“Well…” Winifred began.

Harold's head was twisting around like a dervish, unable to focus.

Turning, I spotted György standing by the kitchen door, dripping water onto the floor from the pitcher he seemed unable to control. I followed his startled gaze. In the shadowy entrance to the café, near the corridor that led to the hotel lobby, stood a tall, burly man with a dark beard, a derby on his head, arms folded over a barrel chest. I jumped. Though everyone else was gazing at the empty doorway to the terrace, the man was fiercely focused on Cassandra. My throat went dry, my heart pounded. The boy looked scared, which I understood because the man reeked of menace, danger.

When I looked back at the entrance, no one was there, just shadows and dim light. The man had disappeared. And for a minute I doubted what I'd seen there. But a shaft of fear passed through me as my eyes drifted back to the hapless Cassandra, crumpled over her table.

Chapter Two

Late afternoon in the café, we watched Markov switching on lights, lighting the fat candles on the long tables banking the open French doors, a woman in a housemaid's smock sweeping the steps leading to the terrace. A slight wind blew in the sweet scent of roses from the garden, mixing with the raw whiff of river sludge. A lazy hum from the strollers along the promenade on the Corso, the occasional piercing laugh, someone yelling to a friend across the way. Winifred and I were loathe to leave the room, caught by the narcotic rhythm of a café readying for nighttime—the tinkle of unseen glasses and dishes, blackbirds sweeping across the terrace and onto the locust trees, György plucking dead blooms from a basket of blood-red Jacqueminot roses on the sideboard.

Winifred and I passed into companionable silence. From my seat, shifting a bit, I could watch the lights popping on up on Castle Hill across the Danube, the grand Royal Palace gleaming, the sweep of burnished gold and Italian marble on buildings high in the Buda hills. A boy in a green canvas jacket shuffled in and placed copies of
Le Figaro
on a table. At a nearby table an old man closed his eyes, a smile on his face. Nighttime was arriving in Budapest.

Vladimir Markov, hovering, put a platter of rye bread on our table, each slice bearing a chunk of opaque lard speckled with paprika and salt, an unappealing morsel Winifred and I ignored. As we watched, three short men ambled in, instruments slung on their backs. One man with close-cropped side whiskers wore a short jacket over an embroidered vest with silver buttons. Another, carrying a cimbalom, was laughing, a cigar stuck to the corner of his mouth. They began setting up on a small platform in a back corner. Dressed in a homespun jacket with white linen sleeves bunched at the wrist, the old violinist frowned as he tuned his instrument. A tzigane music man smoking a long pipe. Gypsy music.

Cassandra sank into her chair with her eyes closed. Winifred and I quietly sipped our wine.

Adjusting her shirtwaist, Mrs. Pelham stood, whispered something to Cassandra, and then left the room, headed into the lobby. She glanced back over her shoulder as she passed by our table, her face tight and lined, eyes steely. A supercilious woman, a sprig of white carnation pinned to her chest—a decorative accent that clashed with her steel-girder demeanor. But in that face I spotted something else: her unmistakable dislike of her petulant charge. Doubtless willful Cassandra, notoriously spoiled, was not what she expected when she assumed control. Mrs. Pelham looked like an American—though Harold informed us she was a British subject—because her stony face bore an old-time New Englander's puritanical resolve. That was probably why Cassandra's parents had employed her. Rockbound Calvinist, taskmaster, the frightening warden at a woman's penitentiary.

Who, I now believed, was failing at her appointed task.

Her raised voice drifted back from the lobby, a precise voice one uses on the telephone. She quickly returned to Cassandra's table, her jaw set, but flinched as the Gypsy violinist suddenly ran a tentative bow across his instrument, the discordant chord jangling. With exquisite timing, the overhead lights dimmed, flickered threateningly, then popped back on, and Mrs. Pelham drew her lips into a thin, disapproving line. But then so did I, believing the hotel would become a ball of fire as I slept unsoundly on the second floor.

Cassandra had crossed her arms defiantly, and Mrs. Pelham hissed at her. Two men sipping brandy near our table were frowning, and one smirked and told the other in German, “
Sie ist nur ein Fratz!
” She is a brat.

Within minutes, however, the room stiffened as a phalanx of six or seven men, shoulders touching, boots stomping, moustaches vaguely identical, dominated the doorway to the lobby. Near us Vladimir Markov gasped, tugged nervously at his scarlet necktie, and looked at a loss. His solution amused me—shrugging, he simply backed into the kitchen. A nervous hum swept the room. A table of old Hungarian women, resplendent in summer hats with peacock feathers, stood up, tittered for a moment, then lapsed into silence.

Harold, who obviously missed little, his eyes flitting here and there—the roving journalist on the prowl—bit his lip and beamed. He stuck his head between Winifred and me, like a bobbing puppet in a Punch and Judy street revue. “Lord! Count Frederic von Erhlich. Himself.”

The count hesitated a moment, directed something to one of his aides—the moustache twittered—and strode forward. As he moved, people rose, nervous, stood at uneasy attention. Only the foreigners remained in their seats. I certainly wasn't called to military attention. His men blocked the entrance. Cassandra, watching her future husband approach, sat upright, ashen, but as if on cue, manufactured a little girl's obligatory smile, something done to please a demanding parent. Mrs. Pelham, already standing, seemed at wit's end, her fingers gripping the table.

The count stood before Cassandra. I saw a thick, stubby man, an oak tree stump whose ramrod stance made him appear taller. A wide, florid face, large dark eyes under bushy eyebrows, a small mouth with thick lips. A shaved round head. What startled was the moustache, salt-and-pepper, grandiose, a lacquered and twisted and manicured affair so slick and scalloped it looked like a pasted-on exaggeration worn by a vaudeville villain. A man in his late thirties, a veteran of some military frontier, he wore the regalia of an Austrian army man: high black boots so polished they seemed shellacked, belted brown trousers under a dark brown jacket emblazoned by a rainbow of celebratory ribbons and braids, and gaudy epaulettes bulky on his shoulders.

A strutter, this man, I thought, an overgrown boy looking for a parade to join.

Harold, always the gadfly, bounced up and sidled nearby, as one of the count's aides, watching from the entrance, made a loud, clicking sound, a warning. Harold froze, a sheepish grin on his face.

The count leaned into Cassandra's table, his back to fussy Mrs. Pelham, and said something to her. Belatedly, Cassandra stood up, performed a feeble curtsy, nodding at him. Like that, his mission done, the count swiveled like a child's mechanical wind-up toy, and left the room. Seamlessly, the aides separated as the count moved through, looking straight ahead, and immediately closed ranks behind him. The Hungarians in the room who'd stood up slowly dropped back into their seats. One woman fanned herself with a lavender-colored parchment fan.

Harold rushed back to his chair next to me and announced in a voice loud enough for the room to hear, “The count has to catch the night steamer to Vienna. Some crisis. He can't have dinner with Cassandra and her parents. He offered…no regrets.”

Hearing his booming voice, Mrs. Pelham turned and glowered.

“Harold, please,” I implored, “a little decorum, no?” I stared into his wide-eyed face, another little boy excited to be at the grown-up table.

“I've never
seen
him before,” Harold blubbered excitedly. “This—this was unexpected and…and, well, unheard of. Titled folks don't hobnob in the Café Europa. They send their aides.” A reflective pause. “Maybe the man has a bone of humanity in his body after all.”

Winifred said snidely, “Well, I'd hardly call it hobnobbing, young man. He looked like he was dismissing his troops.”

Harold burst out laughing and wagged a finger at Winifred's icy glare.

When I glanced back at Cassandra, now seated, she wore a relieved look on her face. Her pretty features softened, the wispy smile gone. She sat back, folded her arms across her chest and surveyed the room, as though for the first time realizing where she was. She stared at our table and then whispered to Mrs. Pelham, whose baleful eye deliberately dismissed us. Yet, stunning me, Cassandra locked eyes with mine—and for a second she smiled at me, as though we were old friends suddenly come upon each other in a strange country. Confused, I nodded back. She offered me a half-wave before looking away.

“Tell me about the marriage, Mr. Gibbon,” I began quietly.

Winifred groaned. “Really, Edna. Gossip?”

I ignored her. “Of course. People fascinate, no? Don't you read my short stories in
Everybody's
?”

She didn't answer and chose to glower at Harold. I knew Winifred didn't like him, a man constantly at our elbow, very much the irritant, but there was about him an innocence, the slack-jawed farm boy happy to be in the big city. I might enjoy his company, I realized—such a new American concoction: brash, confident, demanding, yet with that trace of Peck's Bad Boy, the neighborhood lad who steals an old woman's crabapples but makes sure she has firewood in the snowy winter.

“Well,” he began, sitting back down, “it's one of the transcontinental marriages we've read about for years now, largely started in 1895 by Consuelo Vanderbilt and her imperious mother, Alva. American socialite, too much money, too few brains, unbridled ambition. A mother who feels she is
lacking
something—European certification. That is, a coveted title to emboss on your stationery. Royalty. Aristocracy. Looking back to good old Europe where the thrones are stored. So Alva finds an impoverished bit of nobility to marry, the Ninth Duke of Marlborough, and like that, her family is aristocracy. Rich and titled, though in a loveless marriage. The Duke gets railroad stock worth millions, courtesy of a matchmaker named Lady Paget. Everybody's happy because a struggling European noble can stay in the cold castle and look down on the rest of us. Of course, he now has a crass American countess at his side.”

“Sham,” Winifred muttered.

“Exactly, but Consuelo's marriage just got the international wheels rolling and spinning. A dozen such marriages that year alone. Since her marriage, it's been high season on the Atlantic. Lord, there's even a magazine called
The Titled American
that lists eligible but poor noblemen—bachelors. Winaretta Singer of the sewing machine magnates married a French nobleman.”

Winifred was fidgeting in her seat. “What?” I asked her.

“In Britain today, in the House of Lords, probably one-quarter have American connections. Worse, when the American socialite Jennie Jerome roped in Lord Randolph Churchill, we ended up with the current Home Secretary, a rearguard politician named Winston Churchill.”

“Why? What?” I asked.

She trembled, her eyes moist, which alarmed me. “He's notoriously anti-suffrage. If I may quote the powerful man: ‘Women are well represented by their fathers, brothers, and husbands.'”

Harold snickered. “Well, no one said such mercenary unions produced children we could be proud of.”

“But why Count van Erhlich?” I asked, puzzled. “If he's part of Franz Josef's family, the—”

Harold cut me off. “A family scandal, my dear lady. And the countess mother lacking hard cash. You see, the count's father, a cousin to Franz Ferdinand, was involved in some nefarious business dealings a while back and was caught embezzling funds. Red-handed. The story got into the press. Handed a revolver, his was a necessary suicide in his mountaintop cabin. So the haughty countess, struggling, a little bit stunned, maneuvered her only son—a confirmed bachelor—back into the good graces of Hofburg.

“Now he's a force in the Military Chancery, the
Militorkanzlerei
, a severe martinet whose military service—hence the uniform he always wears—gave him cover for his incompetence. But, I gather, old Franz Josef, tottering these days toward death,
likes
him. The old All-Highest doesn't like the heir apparent, Franz Ferdinand, with his marriage to Sophie from Bohemia. The emperor lives in the past—a man who won't ride in a motorcar and refuses to use an elevator, climbing six flights of stairs to his bedroom nightly. Currying favor, the count told Franz Josef that man was meant to ride horses—or to walk. The countess has always been an indulged favorite. Sycophants, both mother and son.

“Of course, her son will never be allowed in court with Cassandra, who must be relegated to a castle in Moravia, but the marriage is condoned because, well, his mother needs the cash to appear regal at the pre-Lenten balls in Vienna. And the count is…a shadow in the empire. He could never be admitted officially to court functions anyway because you need the quartering—unbroken descent from eight paternal and eight maternal ancestors.”

“Cassandra doesn't appear too happy with it all.”

“She has no say, although I understand she says a lot. A little outspoken, the Gibson Girl with the tennis racket.”

I laughed. “You know, Harold, I wonder how you know so much.”

He blinked rapidly. “I gotta know
everything.
It's my job.”

I shook my head. “It's a sentimental tale out of some nineteenth-century romance by The Duchess. Rich American girl involved with cold-hearted European royalty. Humdrum bathos.”

Harold's eyes became pinpoints. “Yeah, well, an American tragedy, really.”

“I don't follow you.”

Harold was wound up now, his voice rising. “Simple, really. I'm a romantic and there ain't nothing romantic about it. Think about it.
Nobody
ends up happy. And when the war comes, as it will, and shortly, trust me—you'll have an American girl left stranded in a cold mountain castle.”

“Are you saying the count will die in war?”

“Of course not. Yeah, he
is
a part of the war—he
is
war, given his position—but the war will end ancient feudalism, shatter the royal houses, and crush empires. The Romanovs, the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns. Gone, gone, gone. One, two, three. No, the count will never be in battle, though he'll rattle his ceremonial sword when he leads parades and thunders praise on dead poor boys, but he'll just be a man stripped of his precious identity.”

Winifred smiled. “But he'll still be rich, courtesy of American industry.”

“But without a title he won't be—loved.”