He released Zsoska, lifted the shopping bag up to the table and started pulling out gifts: cassettes, Lindt chocolate bars, a sweater for Zsoska, perfume and a bottle of schnapps, which made Grandpa’s eyes light up.
Zsoska got out some small glasses and Rolf poured himself a drink. He had a boxy head under a thatch of thinning, wheat-pale hair and surprisingly small ears. His eyes were blue, not intelligent but not exactly dull either, more like animals in a state of hibernation, surrounded by all that prosperous flesh. If you didn’t mind jealousy, he looked like a safe enough bet. Zsoska removed her old sweater and slipped the new one on over her negligee; she unpinned her dramatic hair, sprayed herself with perfume, and poured everyone schnapps; keeping up a deliberate whirl of activity and laughter, she took Emma by the shoulders and edged her gently in the direction of Archie and Lynn. She hoped, obviously, that Rolf wouldn’t even notice Emma. But there came a moment when Rolf clearly asked Zsoska who all these people were, and then came what I could only guess was something about us being hotel guests from Arcata.
“English? American?” asked Rolf. “I am German,” he said with great pride and, raising his glass to us, downed the schnapps in one gulp. Underneath the tanning-salon brown, a ruddy flush was spreading over his cheeks. After Zsoska poured him another shot he held the glass up to her in the manner of a toast, and made a short speech in Hungarian.
The effect on Zsoska was electric. She rushed to him, her yellow and black mane flying, her gold necklaces jingling, and wrapped her arms around his hefty trunk. Then she surprised us all by bursting into loud, gulping sobs.
Archie asked me frantically, “What’s going on? Is that the boyfriend?”
“Just a wild guess,” I said, “but I suspect Rolf might have asked Zsoska to come with him back to Germany and perhaps even to marry him.”
“But what about…?” Archie whispered.
Zsoska wrenched herself out of Rolf’s arms. Her mascara was running down her high Tartar cheekbones. She lifted up her glass and smiled brilliantly.
“Going Deutschland,” she said. “Going Deutschland tomorrow to live. No more bad times for me. Rolf is missing me!”
Rolf pointed at his chest. “I live Stuttgart since one year. Work Mercedes factory.”
“Congratulations, Zsoska,” said Lynn. “I hope you’ll be very happy.” She raised her glass in a toast, and we all joined her.
“Cathy, put that down,” said Archie. “You’re too young.”
Zsoska’s eye suddenly fell on Emma. The little girl stood, holding her violin, between Archie and Lynn. Did Emma know Zsoska was her mother? Did Emma understand she was being abandoned again?
Zsoska almost opened her arms, then she folded them tightly across her chest and turned back to Rolf. No, she wasn’t going to risk telling him and lose this chance to leave Romania.
Lynn had figured it all out on her own.
“Well, Zsoska,” she said cheerfully. “We’ve enjoyed meeting you and appreciate your hospitality, but it’s time for us to get back to the hotel.”
“But Lynn,” whispered Archie. “We still haven’t decided…”
“Yes, yes,” said Zsoska, herding us towards the door. “You must go, I understanding. Thank you very much. I seeing you another time. You visiting me in Deutschland please.”
“Say good-bye to your friend, Emma,” said Lynn. “You’ll be seeing him again, don’t worry.”
I didn’t really think that Emma had understood, but she went over to the old man and gave him a kiss. Tears came to his eyes and he turned to Zsoska to speak.
She cut him off sharply in Hungarian and practically slammed us out the door.
“Do you think she didn’t want Rolf to know about Emma or something?” Archie asked.
Lynn and I looked at each other. “You know, you might be right, dear,” said Lynn mildly.
“I guess the question’s settled then,” Cathy said, sighing heavily. “Emma’s coming back home with us.” She paused, and took her little sister by the hand that wasn’t holding the violin. “I would have missed you, Emma.”
On the drive back to Arcata, I sat in front with Lynn and Emma. In the crowded back seat Archie regaled his captive audience with information about the diminishing Saxon population of Transylvania.
“They’re all going to Germany now. It’s the promised land. They never lost their German citizenship, after all these centuries—even though the Turkish and Greek immigrants we saw all around us in Munich can never become citizens, not even if they live in Germany their whole lives.”
Bree sat on Jack’s lap and Cathy was noticeably miserable.
I would have liked to tell her something encouraging, but in fact unrequited love never gets any easier.
“What do you think’s going to happen?” I asked Lynn.
“Oh, we’ll figure something out,” she said serenely. It must be reassuring to look at the universe from the perspective of quantum mechanics, to know that even apparent unpredictability and randomness are subject to certain laws and eventually form a pattern.
Lynn reached over and smoothed Emma’s forehead. The little girl was tapping out a polka rhythm on her violin case, memorizing it. “You know, I was a lot like Emma as a child. No one ever heard a peep out of me until I was three. I couldn’t read until I was seven. I tell Archie not to worry, but he can’t help it, you know. Being a writer, words are important to him. But Emma will speak when she has something to say, won’t you, Emma?”
“Igen,” said Emma.
It occurred to me that Lynn, being a physicist, might know something about the properties of electricity.
“Galvanic baths?” she said. “Well, well. Yes… go on.”
I told her everything I knew.
“And you say that as far as you know no one tampered with the voltage meter?”
“Nobody noticed any tampering. After it happened, the place was full of people, and the police apparently came immediately.”
“Was the doctor holding on to any metal object?” she asked. “A copper pipe that could have led into the ground, for instance?”
“Gladys said he put both hands in the water.”
“Hmmm, then it’s a puzzle. You say he was very old. Maybe his heart just gave out. Because otherwise I don’t see how…” Lynn continued to think. “Unless of course … it was just distilled water in the basins? Did anybody check?”
“I checked, Mom,” Cathy squeezed forward from the back and hung over the seat between us. “I tasted it.”
I remembered how several people had referred to the tubs as being drained and washed out between patients. “What if it weren’t distilled water? What difference would it make?”
“Different substances conduct electricity differently,” Cathy said, and Lynn nodded.
“That’s right,” she said. “For instance, even a mild saline solution would conduct the current better than plain H2O. It wouldn’t change the voltage, of course, but it would affect the conductivity, and that might possibly give the solution enough charge to make his heart stop. It’s an interesting proposition. If someone made a mistake and filled the tubs with a saline solution…”
I thought of the brochure Gladys had showed me on the train: “Arcata, well-situated on a salt massif…” I thought of myself floating in the saline baths. They got the water from the lake, Ilona had said.
“How salty would the water need to be?” I asked.
“An interesting question,” Lynn said. “The more the better, I suppose. Water can absorb lots of salt.”
I thought of the hundred dusty linen tablecloths in the restaurant, each with its salt and pepper shaker. They might not have much food in Arcata, but they did have lots of salt.
I found Nadia in the square outside the hotel. She and her brother were washing Eva’s Polski Fiat with water carried in buckets from the tourist office. Nadia looked completely different from last night. Her dark hair was back in its untidy bun, and her oversize glasses were settled firmly on her
pudgy nose. She had on the flowered pink and green dress and the orange polyester suit jacket, and the sharp-toed high heels that made her legs wobble.
Daylight was always a shock, but this could be very awkward.
“Bonjour, ça va?” she said. “Eva’s car is finally fixed. Nicolae has fixed it. Show her, Nicolae.”
Nicolae crammed his big body in behind the wheel and started it up. After a few unimpressive clunks, the Polski Fiat hummed to life.
“You see, Cassandra?” Nadia beamed. “Eva will be happy now, I think. Now you can go back to Budapest.”
She was so cheerful that I wondered if perhaps I’d dreamed the whole thing. I rubbed my neck, where I had seen a slight bruise this morning.
Nadia noticed and winked at me. “The weather has changed very much, hasn’t it? Last night it was wild, rough and wild. Today it is calm, like nothing happened.”
“Oh, a lot has happened,” I said. I told her about Rolf taking Zsoska away to Stuttgart.
“It’s better,” Nadia declared. “She only causes problems here at the restaurant. If possible I would like to eliminate all problems.”
“You eliminate some problems, other problems crop up,” I said. “It’s the way of the world. Dr. Pustulescu was eliminated, but that caused problems for Gladys.”
“Listen, Cassandra,” said Nadia. “When you go to Budapest tomorrow, please take Gladys with you.”
“But Gladys is happy here. Besides, we know that Gladys didn’t murder him.”
“Oh, now you say murder? Not just a heart attack?”
“Murder, Nadia,” I said firmly. “And I believe I know who Dr. Pustulescu’s murderer is. But I don’t know what I should do about it. I don’t want to tell the police and get this person in serious trouble. I can’t help liking this person, and thinking they had a very good reason to kill the doctor.”
Nadia stared at me. “All murderers have a reason,” she said without flinching. “It is still murder.”
“Then you think I shouldn’t protect this person? Shouldn’t give them a chance to escape?”
“You must do what you think best,” she said. “Maybe this person doesn’t want to escape.” She looked over at Jack and Bree, sitting on a bench by the lake, arms entwined.
“I often think of Paris when spring comes,” she said, before turning away to her office to refill the bucket of water. “In the end it is love, not death, that is the important thing in life, n’est-ce pas, chérie?”
Chapter Twenty
DR. GABOR WAS sitting in his office reading his Hungarian political review. Because of the microphones in his walls—and I had no reason to suspect they weren’t there—I asked him to come outside with me and take a short walk.
We started in the direction of the lake. The May sunshine was warm and the air was as deliciously fresh as ever. It was almost impossible to think that anything had ever disturbed the peace of this idyllic spot.
“So, Mrs. Really. How is your health?”
“I’m feeling very sprightly these days,” I had to admit.
“You see? Our Arcata is the best place in the world to live.”
“And to die?”
“No one ever dies here,” he said jovially. “We live forever.”
“Except for Dr. Pustulescu.”
“He already lived long enough. Was he going to make trouble for us for next twenty years?”
“So you’re saying he was murdered?”
“Murder, always murder on your mind,” said Gabor, undisturbed. He really was a very attractive man, except for those demonic eyebrows. “You must be private investigator, I think. You know the clever crime stories of the Czech writer Josef Škvorecký, with his Lieutenant Boruvka? No? But you must read him. He is in exile in Toronto, Canada since many years. He is translated into Hungarian like all important writers.”
Not for the first time I noticed that Gabor never mentioned any women authors from Eastern and Central Europe. What about Christa Wolf from the former East Germany? What about the Croatian novelist, Slavenka Drakulić? What about the Hungarian lesbian Erzsébet Galgóczi? She wrote mysteries too.
“Dr. Gabor,” I said. “I’m not a private investigator, but I do have an interest in making sure that Gladys isn’t punished for a crime she didn’t commit, and I admit I have gotten interested in what happened to Pustulescu. I can hardly blame you for wanting to kill Pustulescu. He sounds like a monster.”
“Yes, he was a monster,” said Gabor, “in thousand ways you cannot begin to understand,” and then he went on softly, “But you know, Mrs. Really, I do not kill him. I am a doctor and I take the vow of Hippocrates. Even to do good, I cannot kill. When one lives in a country that is morally corrupt, one cannot do as they do, think as they think, live as they live. The only sanity is to remember that there are countries not like this, other places where the purpose of life is not to lie and cheat and steal, but to create health and happiness for all.”
“But you had a motive to kill him,” I said. “The two of you had a quarrel and he made you leave your office and took all your patients.”
“That is true,” said Gabor. “We did quarrel. I had found something out, and I was angry.”
“What was it?”
“I am afraid I cannot tell you.”
“I know all about Margit.”
He was quiet a moment. “I have not said anything to Margit about what happened. I will not say anything to her. It is too painful for both of us.”
“You’re protecting Margit, aren’t you? You quarreled about Margit and what he’d done to her, and then Margit killed him.”
“Margit is even less capable of killing someone than I am,” said Gabor. “Yes, I quarreled with Dr. Pustulescu about how he had treated her. But I did not kill him for that reason. You must not think so harshly of us, Mrs. Really. We are survivors of a wicked regime, and we try to keep our humanity. If there is a murderer, you must look for someone with no conscience.”
“I suppose you think that Nadia did it, that Nadia sneaked in and put a saline solution in the galvanic bath. Just because Nadia is Romanian you think she’s capable of murder, don’t you?” It was my worst fear that he would say yes, because if Gabor and Margit were out of the running, Nadia seemed like the obvious choice.
“Nadia Pop, oh no,” he said. “No, as I said, you must look for someone with no conscience. Nadia has a very big conscience—for a Romanian. But I am interested,” he said. “What is it you say about saline solution in the bath?”
We had rounded the small lake and were crossing the road that led up to the fairy-tale house. I could hear the yapping of half a dozen excited dogs.
“Lynn Snapp, Archie’s wife, said that was a possibility. That a saline solution might have been substituted for the distilled water in the tubs, and that such a solution might have conducted the electricity more strongly than otherwise.”
“If that is the case,” said Gabor, “then I apologize. For then it is indeed possible that I have contributed to a crime. But you must excuse me, Mrs. Really, I have now a patient. We will continue to discuss this later, yes? I may have something to tell you.”
I let him go, more confused than ever, and continued up the cobbled road, where I could see Gladys and Frau Sophie. The stray dogs that Gladys had managed to collect over the past week were jumping all around them. Like Dr. Pustulescu’s evil deeds, their number seemed to increase every time you turned around.
Gladys was bursting with energy, throwing sticks for them and feeding them cold French fries. Frau Sophie, pink-cheeked and effervescent, laughed and kept saying, “Jesusmaria, so many dogs.” Her rayon dress was as smooth, her pocket handkerchief as crisp as the first time I’d seen her. She’d be going back to Graz soon, radiant and Ionvitalized. Maybe I’d made a mistake not even trying the stuff.
“There you have it,” said Frau Sophie to me with a proprietary wave.
“What’s that?”
“The villa. My Gasthaus. I have just purchased it.”
With horror I saw she was pointing to the chocolate fairy-tale house, my house. In an instant it was mine no longer and I saw it filled with big boisterous Austrians gobbling wurst and schnitzel, washing everything down with steins of beer served by hefty waitresses in dirndls.
“I think Soph’s got the right idea buying that old house,” said Gladys. “She’s going to bring this town to life again. Between Gabor and Soph, Arcata will be one jumping place. I know I’m planning to come back next year, and I’m going to tell all my pals in Tucson about it. Heck, maybe I’ll even start a home for stray dogs here.”
She tossed the dogs the last of the French fries and then dashed after them up the hill.
I was still reeling from Frau Sophie’s announcement. I wouldn’t even be able to stay at the Gasthaus. In the first place I wouldn’t be able to afford it, and in the second place I wouldn’t be able to eat all that rich, heavy, over-salted…
“Oh my God,” I said. I suddenly saw, in my mind’s eye, Frau Sophie’s hand poised over her food with the salt shaker. “You!”
Frau Sophie looked at me, puzzled.
“Did you really mean to kill Pustulescu, Frau Ackermann, or just scare him?”
Frau Sophie didn’t miss a beat. “It was time for him to go,” she said. “I only helped him along a little. Without some help a man like that might have lived forever.” Her rosy face looked to me for understanding. “We’re all better off with him dead, you know. Many years I’ve come to Arcata, many years I’ve taken the treatment. If I go on living to ninety or a hundred, I’ll be coming here twenty or thirty more years. Dr. Gabor understands that. He has plans for the clinic, plans for Arcata. I want to help him.”
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