The Angel Makers (32 page)
‘We’re just making rather bigger angels now,’ Judit says to Sari, with her twisted grin, and Sari can even allow herself to laugh at that, now. It’s only Rózsi who gives her pause. What do you tell your daughter about this way of life, Sari wonders. Do you let her grow up thinking it’s normal, thereby avoiding blame for your own part in it, or do you tell her that things aren’t the same everywhere, and in doing so, open yourself up for the sort of questions that could carve your heart out? Sari whispers things to Rózsi when she’s asleep, ideas and images of Somewhere Else, a Somewhere Else that she can’t quite believe in herself. She is occasionally thankful that a child who doesn’t speak also means a child who doesn’t ask awkward questions.
Sari doesn’t like to think of what her father would say about the way his old house is being used. Sari and Rózsi live with Judit most of the time these days, but since they’ve gone into the murder business, having alternative premises is useful. Should anyone arrive at Judit’s house unexpectedly, no matter how hard they looked, they would not find a thing that did not fit in with the image of Sari and Judit as single, hardworking but honest midwives and nurses. All evidence of their alternative activities is strictly limited to Sari’s house, which is far enough from the centre of the village that it’s unlikely for anyone to stumble on it unexpectedly. Even if a curious stranger came upon it, peering through the ground floor windows would reveal nothing more interesting than a seemingly abandoned, but well-kept old house.
Upstairs, though – that’s a different story. The bed has been pushed to one side to make room for all the bowls dotting the floor, revealing different stages of the process, from sodden messes of soaking flypaper to neat little piles of innocent-looking powder. Sari comes to the house every second day, ostensibly to clean and sweep the leaves off the porch, but in reality to collect some more powder for the endless parade of would-be murderesses. She wonders sometimes why she keeps up the pretence of cleaning the place. Surely everyone in the village knows what’s really going on by now, even if they don’t admit it? But there’s no harm keeping up appearances: unlikely as it would be, you never know when a stranger might wander into the village, and it wouldn’t do to look anything less than totally normal.
Sari has always known that they can’t go on like this forever. In her more optimistic moments, she hopes that it’ll all just tail off of its own accord, that people in the village will run out of people that they want to kill, or that things will quietly implode, with all the poisoners poisoning one another – leaving her and Judit in peace, of course. She’s not optimistic very often, though, and when she’s not, she realises that things are likely to end with their being discovered. No matter how isolated and insular the village is, no matter how beholden everyone has become to one another, something this virulent and peculiar is bound to seep out sooner or later, like a dangerous gas escaping its canister to leak into the pure air outside. Some day, Sari knows, someone in charge will notice the unusually high death rate in the village, or a body will wash up elsewhere, and an overly curious doctor will cut it open to find its insides riddled with poison. They’ve been lucky so far, but luck can’t last. It never does.
In the end, it doesn’t happen the way that Sari would have imagined, but it does happen. A tearful Francziska Imanci turns up at Judit’s house one day. It takes them a while to get the full story out of her, but as soon as she starts, haltingly, to speak, Sari’s heart lodges itself stubbornly in her throat, as if it’s become a tough piece of meat that she’s unable to swallow. Francziska murdered her husband six years ago, and it had been an easy job – he’d lost a leg in the war, and had been largely housebound, and therefore disinclined to make any fuss about being poisoned. At the time, Sari had thought that would be the end of it. Francziska had always struck her as a rather pleasant, straight forward type, unlikely to murder more than the bare minimum of family members. But since her husband’s death, she’d become rather more closely associated with Orsolya (whose dead family members now number six), and had clearly been persuaded to expand her oeuvre somewhat to incorporate her mother-in-law, largely incapacitated, generally useless, and sitting on top of a not inconsiderable amount of possessions that would otherwise go to Francziska. So Francziska had come back to Judit’s a week before, and they had given her what she asked for – with a degree of ill grace, Sari has to admit; she doesn’t much like to support women killing women. And now here she is, back again, saying between sniffs and sobs and gulps that she’d started on her mother-in-law, yes, and she’d given her a couple of doses, and then she’d gone round there this morning, to look in on her like she does every morning, and the old bitch was gone.
Sari looks at Judit just in time to see her draw a weary hand over her eyes, but, as always, she recovers quickly, gives Sari a grim, tight smile.
‘Well, then,’ she says, shrugging. ‘Bound to happen eventually, really.’
‘So, you think she knew what you were doing?’ Sari asks Francziska, who nods.
‘I suppose so. I thought I was doing all right, keeping up the pretence, not acting any differently to normal, but I’ve never been a good actor. I was round there yesterday, making her dinner, and she kept looking at me. Just … just
looking
. I could feel her damned eyes on me even when my back was turned.’
‘Did she—’ Sari frowns. It’s so hard to put this delicately. ‘Did she know about her son?’
Francziska seems to catch her meaning. ‘I don’t know. She suspected, probably, but she never said anything. Never said anything about any of it. You know what it’s like.’
Sari does know. People have drawn into themselves; it’s become a liability to care about anything but one’s own immediate well-being. She can’t help feeling a sudden surge of contempt for old Mrs Imanci, though. How can you sit silently by when you think something’s happening to your child? She shoots an instinctive glance at Rózsi, seemingly oblivious in the corner, head drooping over paper, a pencil curled into her fist. Perhaps it’s different when they’re older, when you know that they should be able to look after themselves. Perhaps it’s different when they’re married. Sari can’t imagine it, though, simply cannot imagine a time where she wouldn’t tear the guts out of anyone harming her child.
‘What was her health like when you last saw her?’ Judit asks. She’s trying to work out how far the woman could have gone, whether it’s safe to hope that she might be dead in the long grass just outside the village.
‘Not perfect, of course, but all right. I was trying to do it slowly. So that she wouldn’t get suspicious.’
Francziska makes a noise somewhere between a sob and a laugh, and sniffs loudly. Absently, Sari passes her a handkerchief – she’s so used to doing this sort of thing for Rózsi – and Francziska dabs her face with it.
‘She has family in the next village,’ she goes on. ‘Her cousin. I think she might be trying to go there.’
Sari calculates; she herself could walk it in two hours, and so even allowing for her age and illness, it seems likely that Mrs Imanci would be there by nightfall, depending on what time she left. Whether or not she would alert the authorities when she got there was anyone’s guess, but she certainly had nothing to lose by doing so with her son and husband already dead (her husband, at least, from natural causes) and her only relation in Falucska having tried to kill her.
‘I’m sorry,’ Francziska ventures. Her eyes are red rimmed and swimming, and she seems well aware of what she may have set in motion.
Judit snorts derisively at her apology, but Sari’s more sympathetic.
It could have happened to any of us
, she thinks. Francziska’s mistake hasn’t come from arrogant stupidity, unlike the women who’ve been trying to fake drownings. Francziska certainly has no reason to believe that she’s invulnerable, and hasn’t acted like it, or no more so than any of the rest.
‘It’s all right,’ she says, her voice weary but steady. ‘Nothing may come of it. But we have to be very careful, now.’ She thinks for a moment. ‘Right. I need you to bring some people here. Orsolya, for one. And—’ she reels off a short list of five women, all strong personalities, all well connected, all with at least one death to their name. They’ll be the best for spreading the word.
They’re back within the hour and when Sari looks at the white, hunted faces, she can’t help feeling a little vindictive. Although her head is on the proverbial block as much as any of the others, she feels that this lot have had it too easy.
Let them worry for once
, she thinks.
Francziska’s obviously given them the gist of what’s happened, but Sari recaps it briefly for the sake of clarity, and she’s barely finished speaking before Zsofia Gyulai bursts out, ‘Well, we must find her, mustn’t we? She might not have reached the village by now. If we’re quick, we could make sure she never gets there.’
‘And then?’ Sari asks.
Zsofia reddens. Sari’s always found it peculiar, how many of these women will happily feed poison to their nearest and dearest, but heaven forfend that their lips should form the words to describe what they’re doing. ‘Bring her back?’ Zsofia suggests lamely, though that clearly isn’t her intention. Sari has a mercifully brief vision of a group of them finishing off the old woman out there on the plain – bashing her head in with a branch, perhaps? No.
‘No,’ she says. ‘To go after her would be idiocy. She’s got hours on us. She may well have reached the village by now, and even if she hasn’t, a group of six women roaming the plain is bound to get noticed. As it stands, there’s always the chance that, even if she does try and tell people what’s been happening here, she’ll just be discounted as a mad old woman.’
All five – six, Judit included – look sceptical. Sari is sceptical too, but continues: ‘It’s unlikely, true, but think how much easier it would be for her to be believed if it’s obvious that us lot don’t want her to get where she’s going.’
The women still look doubtful, but reluctantly they nod. Sari tries hard not to feel a twinge of triumph when she notices Orsolya looking at her expectantly, waiting for guidance. This is not the way that she would have chosen to earn Orsolya’s respect, but she’d have to be made of stone not to derive a slight shiver of pleasure from it.
‘So what do we do?’ Matild Nagy asks sulkily. Sari’s never been particularly fond of her, one of Orsolya’s little acolytes. ‘Just wait here to be arrested?’
Sari sighs, slightly ostentatiously. ‘They can’t arrest us just on Ilona Imanci’s word. Nothing might come of it at all, and even if anything does, there’ll have to be a proper investigation. We need to expect inspectors to arrive here over the next few weeks. We’ll deal with that if and when it happens. Until then, everything stops. This place has to look as much like a normal village as possible. We can’t have people ill if they come; we can’t have any evidence of what’s been happening. Pass the word around to everyone you know who’s been involved in this. I don’t want anyone coming around here asking for extra privileges or special treatment, because they won’t get them. From now on, it’s all over.’
He’s not sure what he expected, but it wasn’t
this
. Géza Forgacs has spent almost all of his nineteen years in Budapest, and in the city, you’re fed images about the beautiful simplicity of bucolic life. While he’d known that they must be false, that life in the villages could be brutal and harsh, he hadn’t expected it to be so immediately evident. The way that the brown wooden houses cluster around the river, as if straining away from or towards something; the suffocating blackness of the nearby woods, and the stark reality of the existence of the village in the middle of the breathless plain – these things combine to make him feel unsettled, ill at ease. He pushes these feelings to the back of his mind, feeling that they are pure superstition.
The older man isn’t so sure. Béla is twenty-four, and he grew up in a household with a cook from the plain, from a village, he thinks now, probably very much like this. She’d been a funny mixture of sweet and sour when he’d been a child, slipping him pastry off-cuts one minute, and scaring him to death with fairy stories the next. She’d been young, casually cruel in the way that only girls barely out of their teens can be, and Béla had adored her with all of his childish heart. She’d had a full repertoire of stories about fairies and demons and incubi but the ones that had frightened him the most were the ones that were closest to the truth, the stories about the women in the countryside who would take in unwanted children from rich city women, which the cook had always presented in the manner of cautionary tales.
‘They’re called the angel makers,’ she’d said, and even now, seventeen years later, Béla can still see the way that her knuckles whitened as she kneaded the dough while she was speaking. Seven-year-old Béla knew what angels were, knew that people became angels when they died, but couldn’t quite grasp how a person could make an angel, and he’d asked, unable to restrain his curiosity, despite knowing from bitter experience that he wouldn’t like the answer.