by Ed Ifkovic
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.”
“How do you know we’ll show up?” Winifred asked.
Harold was standing now, already stepping away. “Because I see Miss Ferber’s face. A hungry look, yon writer Edna Ferber. Lean and hungry. She wants answers to things.”
“And you’ll provide the answers?”
“Yes. Tonight. Definitely.”
Bowing grandly, he disappeared out through the terrace.
***
At seven o’clock Winifred and I descended into the cool depths of Budafók, a wine cellar in the Buda hills. We expected to see Harold Gibbon waiting for us at a table, but the dark, cavernous room had a few men in working clothes hunched over bottles of wine. Two were playing a noisy game of checkers. A stark room, to be sure, seemingly cut out of granite eons ago, jagged rock and damp walls. But two American women stepping into its depths startled the proprietor, who had no idea what to do with unchaperoned women in summer dresses and flowered hats. We spoke in German, telling him we expected a third person. His rapid nod was not happy. He kept looking at the tables of gaping men, as though for help.
“Mr. Gibbon,” I added.
His face lit up. “Ah, the little rabbit that hops from table to table.”
“Yes, that sounds like him.” From Winifred.
“A wonderful man.”
“The best,” I added.
Winifred wanted to leave, but I insisted we have some dark ruby Bull’s Blood. “We’ll never descend to this rung of Dante’s hell again.”
So we ordered, and for some reason spoke in
whispers as though we were in a monastery, so solemn the cavern, so clammy the walls.
A pretty peasant girl served us, her hair plaited into a long, long single braid interlaced with green and blue ribbons.
“Edna, I read Harold’s latest column in a newspaper this morning,” Winifred was saying. “A copy in the café, doubtless left by the man himself. Inflammatory, war mongering, spiteful yellow journalism. I must tell you—he writes with a kind of bombs-bursting-in-air prose. He’s in love with the exclamation point. He talks as if the war is days away. His writing is all Gatlin-gun sentences, bam bam bam, take your breath away. Serbia sending troops to the borders. Anarchists with bombs on every street corner. He claims he’s seen such rag-tag miscreants running past him as he walked by the Franz Josef Bridge.”
I sighed. “He makes it up.”
“What?”
“He confessed that to me in one of his candid moments. Well, actually he told me that he embellishes the truth that he sees.” But I laughed. “Hearst demands that he employ explosive prose, the fiery anecdote. Why else would they keep him here in Europe? He writes his exposés with the blunt hail-on-a-tin-roof prose of, say, O. Henry concocting an ending for one of his short stories. The punch and thrust at the end.”
“He’s a fiction writer then.”
“He is that.”
“A liar.”
“He is that. But all fiction writers are.”
She smiled. “Where do you go to find truth these days?”
“Not in a Hearst paper.”
She drew her lips into a razor-thin line and spoke softly. “Sadly, I lived through that in London. The hostile reporters covering our hunger strikes, the marches, the protests before the Prime Minister. So much of what was reported was false—and purposely cruel. The same ugliness over and over—smart, dedicated women depicted as sinister fire-breathing dragons once they stepped away from the cozy hearth and their husbands’ rods. Our worst foes were the women themselves, frightened by the news accounts, as if the right to vote would somehow turn them into—men.”
“I know—the Fourth Estate is still a male enclave.” I shook my head. “Yet I admit Harold is good at what he does.”