A thirtyish woman emerged from the villa late that afternoon with two preschool children toddling behind. Old Henrík—he grew older and more infirm the more frequently I remembered him—seemed to have sired a small family to keep him company in his dotage. Monika would certainly be interested in that fact no matter what her scheme. The woman checked the mail, bent over the walk to pull a few straggling weeds, and shut herself inside the house. I debated whether to approach on some pretext—as a lost tourist or claiming Henrík had asked me to drop by when in town—but before I could decide on a suitable approach a late-model BMW sedan sped up the street and smartly whipped into the drive. I craned my neck out the window to catch a glimpse of passengers in the front or back seats, but the windows were too reflective of sky and flora to pierce. A minute later, he emerged alone onto the front walk, carrying a bouquet of flowers. I cursed. Men bring flowers to wives to assuage a guilty conscience.
Henrík burst out of the villa less than an hour after his arrival, careening down the hill as though making an escape. My driver coaxed a perilous speed from his Lada, which, like most things Russian I’d known, seemed designed to run badly but forever. The BMW turned right on the expressway paralleling the banks of the Danube. Though he could have taken that route to uncountable destinations, I knew then where he headed, passing beneath the castle and along the dolomite cliffs to a familiar Budapest landmark, the Gellért Hotel and Spa.
Natural caution warned me to keep a distance as I followed Henrík into the lobby, until I realized that even if Monika had told him about me, he had no idea what I looked like. He didn’t bother stopping at the front desk—another bad sign—but strode directly to the elevators. I waited off his right shoulder, observing with disappointment not only his obvious excitement but a greater than expected youthfulness. Despite his gray hair and lined face, I estimated his age at no more than mid-fifties. He was old enough to be Monika’s father, which might act as an unfortunate stimulant to my depraved beloved, yet not so old that age yet presented an obstacle to potency. When the doors chimed open, I followed him inside the elevator, watched him press the button to the fourth floor, and pressed the same button myself. At those close quarters he reeked of cologne and smug self-satisfaction. I had no doubt he expected an evening of sexual entertainment. His sport coat was silver, matching the color of his hair, and below a rugged chin he wore a splash of yellow scarf, like the throat of a vain bird. The scarf was a pretentious touch—perhaps he had reached that age where his neck had begun to wattle—but the clothes were stylish and his coat-hanger frame wore them well. A tuneless whistle of air passed through his pursed lips. I wanted to smash him. Instead, I held open the elevator doors with a deferential smile, allowing him to exit first, and then followed him down the hall. He stopped at the corner room and knocked one-two, one-two-three. I noted the room number and turned down the stairs. I knew who waited behind that door and had little wish to see her just then.
In the lobby, I debated what course of action to take, from affecting a jaded understanding to venting homicidal rage. Breaking down the door to her room would catch her in the simultaneous iniquities of betrayal and theft. I could approach the clerk and ask him to announce I was on my way up, allowing them a few moments to scramble back into their clothes but not enough time to grant Henrík a graceful exit. With nothing except my indecision to divert me, I imagined Sven standing at the bar across the lobby, chatting up a slatternly blonde in red minidress. He turned midsentence, spotted me, and laughed. His flesh had swelled like a gray balloon with the gases of decomposition. I closed my eyes and decided to do nothing, because had I caught Monika flagrante delicto it would have destroyed me. Henrík was rich, I reasoned. Obviously, she had designs on his wealth to which his cologned presence that night was key. She was expert at exciting and then deflecting men’s attentions, and no doubt Henrík was turning blue with frustrated passion at that very moment. Paranoia had simply outraced reason once again, and for the sake of my sanity I needed to believe that Monika acted with too great an independence but still within the compass of our partnership.
When, after midnight, Henrík emerged from the elevator, I scanned his face for clues to their recent behavior. His step still had bounce, and by the way he allowed his gaze to trace the curved oak banister of the second-floor balcony he seemed not displeased by the course of events but induced to reverie. My mouth ached from the constant grind of teeth. I wouldn’t have characterized him as angry or frustrated. If they hadn’t just enjoyed vigorous sex he was convinced it was near enough to savor. Rather than take the elevator I climbed the floors step by step like the stairs to my own hanging. From thorax to appendix I felt crushed and bleeding. Any display of human feeling would only excite Monika with the smell of blood. I had to play the scene for the money. Jealousy was a weakness with Monika. I reminded myself that I wasn’t a sweaty-palmed, lovesick adolescent. Not to take a hard line would mark me as a sucker. I’d gutted Sven and beaten Zdeněk half to death. Another shocking example of urban violence could just as easily remove Henrík from the scene. Budapest was a dangerous city, and violent crime the smoke that accompanies the genie of economic reform. The police wouldn’t be terribly surprised to find him slumped over the wheel of his BMW one morning, the victim of random violence or capitalist dispute. If he carried any money on him, all the better.
Too great a silence answered my first knocks on the door. I double-checked the room number and knocked again. My anger increased commensurate to the time I was made to wait. I resisted the temptation to pound the door from its hinges. Too obvious an anger would be interpreted as jealousy. In cinematic terms I needed to play the anger as subtext, dispassionate cool a thin crust on the surface of a potentially murderous rage. The door wedged open to a sliver of Monika’s eye, and though I feared she would slam it shut at the sight of me she swung it open as though I had been expected. The hard-pitted splash of a running shower reverberated behind her, and she looked fresh from it, wrapped in terry-cloth towel and her hair dripping wet.
“Oh, Nix, you found me,” she said, in a tone of voice I could not distinguish between disappointment and tenderness.
I opened my mouth to speak, but the words lay as silent in my throat as infants strangled in their bed. Likely she thought I was struck speechless with emotion. The critical piece of evidence was the bed. The room appeared large, even for a hotel as grand as the Gellért. From the doorway I could see the entry hall and part of a large circular room, but no bed. Even if Monika had jumped into the shower to wash away the rank odors of adultery, her bed would reveal the disarray of a romp with Henrík. I ignored the bizarre gleam in Monika’s eyes and stepped forward to bring more of the room into view. A bright flash of terry cloth gave inadequate warning that my perspective was about to be flipped. I imagined someone else in the room had lain in wait—a hallucination that Sven had somehow returned to life turned my stomach counterclockwise to the spin of my body to the floor—but a moment after landing to a stunned view of the ceiling I recognized that Monika had thrown me with the same swift urgency with which she unbuckled my belt and tore the shirt from my chest.
“I came for the money, not you,” I insisted, but her practiced hands discovered that biology betrayed my words. Her mouth silenced my protests. The scene I had carefully rehearsed vanished from memory. When her robe fell away and she sat astride me like a carnal Diana, my anger alchemized to desire, and later, when we lay at arm’s length on the carpet, exhausted, it vaporized to mere petulance.
“You shouldn’t have taken the money,” I admonished.
“I missed you,” she said.
It did not seem possible she really meant it. Perhaps she feared I might harm her and knew passion a certain way to defuse my anger. She might have felt guilty about Henrík and staged an amorous greeting to deflect my suspicions. But she knew I couldn’t harm her, no matter how great my anger, and of Henrík not a word had been mentioned. I entertained the wild thought that in the deviant course of
her emotions, she might have spoken the straight truth.
“I understand. You thought you were being followed, so you ran,” I reasoned. “I might leave a note and take the first train out of town myself, if I thought we were seriously compromised. But I would have left some message where I had gone, which you didn’t, and I wouldn’t have taken all the money, which you did.”
“I knew you’d find me,” she said, reaching across the carpet to grasp my hand.
I sat up, stared down at her, refused to be distracted by her unexpected tenderness and the loveliness of her body, by the thin ridge of breastbone like a delicate necklace below her throat, the jewelry of ribs and nipples and labia majora.
“Then why did you steal the money?”
“You don’t get it. It’s not the money.”
“It is the money. Because now you’ve got it and I don’t.”
Monika rolled over, hunted for the pocket to her robe and a cigarette. I hoped Henrík was paying for the room, because when I got a proper look, I realized it was a corner suite; she had thrown me to the floor of an octagonal sitting room, six-foot windows overlooking the Danube. A half-closed door led to the sound of running water and what I surmised was the bedroom. She cinched the robe tightly around her waist and watched me inscrutably behind plumes of smoke, debating whether to tell the truth or which truth to tell. When she came to a decision her face lit with a radiant smile. “I didn’t steal the money because it meant something to me, I stole it because it meant something to you. I stole the money because I could.”
The admission astonished me. Money had no value to her, except as something to steal. I said, “So you made it up. You weren’t being followed. You noticed the claim token in my wallet, saw an opportunity, checked out the briefcase, and left me flat broke.”
“Not exactly. I took the precaution of borrowing the ticket when I found it in your wallet. I didn’t see any reason to trust you. You didn’t even tell me you hid the money in baggage claim.”
“I tried to give you half and you wouldn’t take it!” I exclaimed.
“I didn’t need the money then. Only when I noticed I was being followed.” Her ambiguous smile could have meant that she knew I had followed her, or that I had offered her the excuse to flee by suggesting she might be followed. “So I did what I felt like doing,” she said. “I took the money and left.”
“Alone?” I asked.
“Stupid question. Of course alone.”
“Do you know how I found you?”
“Sven. You knew I’d come back to look for him.” Monika went through a subtle transformation when talking about Sven, the rigidly classical lines of her face softening, and the defensive glint in her eyes collapsing to a rare vulnerability. The cool hardness with which she regarded the world was a mask, seductive but artificial, and in these moments of vulnerability I thought I glimpsed someone far more innocent than she pretended to be. “I’ve known him forever,” she said. “He wouldn’t leave me. Not like that. Something happened to him. Here in Budapest.”
That only Sven could invoke the vulnerability of genuine feeling enraged me. “And the old guy who visited you this evening, is he helping you to find Sven?” I asked, not without venom.
Monika regarded me without flinching. Her cool was admirable; I could read nothing but a subtle contempt in the smooth mask she presented. She said, “He’s a film producer.”
I laughed. “A Hungarian film producer? What an oxymoron.”
She didn’t get it.
“A useless profession,” I explained.
“Like a Hollywood scriptwriter, then,” she replied.
Insulting but true. I stood and buckled my belt. My crisp blue Oxford shirt was missing half its buttons, and a rip in the sleeve marked it for the rag pile. I wandered to a ceiling-high window, glanced down at the Danube flowing muddy black four floors below, pressed my hand on the door to the bedroom, and pushed it open. The bed linen stretched crisply from head to foot. I smiled, happy that my suspicions were ill-founded, before remembering that beds were not Monika’s erotic style.
“He wants me to act in one of his films,” she announced, brushing past me to reach into the bathroom and shut off the flow of water from the shower.
A prodigiously arched eyebrow expressed what I thought of that.
“You’re the one who gave me the idea I could do it,” she said, “with your talk about the movies you wanted to make.”
“Excuse me for saying this, but aren’t you being just a little bit naive? You don’t even speak Hungarian.”
“The character is German. It’s a German co-production.”
I didn’t dare insult her with the opinion that Henrík was less interested in her German than other oral skills; if he was like his Hollywood compatriots, his notion of a foreign tongue was not linguistic. I said, “You don’t have any experience. You know nothing about cameras, scene work, sight lines.”
She dropped the butt of her cigarette into the toilet, flushed it down, and said, “You taught me those things don’t matter.”
The assertion shocked me. I hadn’t been trying to teach her anything. Unexpectedly, I had been cast into the role of an empowering figure. I said, “I never talked about scene work and sight lines with you.”
“No, but you talked about development deals, Paramount Pictures, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, and what an important Hollywood writer you are.”
I didn’t get it, stared at her, waited for an explanation. She turned off the lamp by the bed and stripped back the covers. Light from the sitting room wedged through the open doorway. She dropped the robe from her shoulders. The light sliced between her breasts and thighs, splitting her body neatly into light and dark halves. The expression on the lit half of her face was impenetrable, but in her shadowed eye I discerned contrasting glints of admiration and contempt. “I learned from you that I don’t need experience or special talent,” she said. “I just need to convince other people I have it. It’s a con. And if there is something I’m good at, it’s convincing others I’m a different person than who I truly am.”
25
If I describe to you the dream I had that first night back in Budapest, it isn’t to encourage the Freudian claptrap of analysis but to explain the anxiety in which I awoke that morning to find Monika going through my pockets. Like most dreams, mine was no doubt caused by direct physical stimuli, in this case a tangle of sheets which cut off the circulation to my limbs. In the dream, Monika cradled my head in her hands as I horizontally occupied a shallow grave. The angle of my head prevented me from seeing any higher than the ragged knees of two undertakers who leisurely spooned earth into the hole. My brain’s frantic messages to jerk and jump turned to static beyond the border of the third vertebrae. Vocal cords strained and lungs wheezed, and combined they pumped out a barely audible bleat. Monika gazed down at me with the tenderest of smiles and covered my mouth with her hands. The trite stuff of a B horror flick, even by the debased standards of dreams, but when the earth blacked out my eyes I bolted awake, gasping for breath, which no doubt caught Monika by surprise as she stood over the chair on which I’d hung my clothes, flipping through the pages of my passport.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
She slipped the passport into the breast pocket of my sport coat and dug into my trousers.
“I wanted to order room service,” she said.
“You needed to check my pockets for that?”
“Tip money,” she explained. “Don’t you have any forints?”
“This is Hungary. Tip him in schillings,” I said, and, liberating my clothes, escaped into the bathroom. The sharp spray of water brought me to full consciousness. That Monika had my passport in hand was not accidental. Perhaps she thought I kept folding money hidden between the pages. I stepped out of the shower and plucked with dripping hands the passport from my coat pocket. My fingers wet-spotted the pages as I flipped them one by one and paused at three rectangular stamps marking my entry, departure, and r
eentry into Hungary. Each stamp bore, amid indecipherable symbols and abbreviations, the date of my transit. The lining in my stomach burned and peeled. She was looking for Sven. The dated stamps in my passport proved I had been in Budapest the night he disappeared, and not in transit as I had claimed. She searched for evidence that would implicate me in his disappearance. I shut my eyes and focused memory on the moment I had awakened. She had been thumbing through the pages, I remembered, glancing but not reading. I stepped back into the shower confident that even if she had glimpsed the offending stamps the shock of being caught would make her unsure of what she had seen.
I opened the door to a spread of coffee, orange juice, eggs, and bread rolls on the sitting-room table; Monika had taken the precaution of actually ordering room service. While I had been in the shower she had changed into a canary-yellow miniskirt, net stockings, and sky-blue blouse. After sweetly pouring me a cup of tepid coffee, she did her lips the color of a stoplight, guided by a compact propped against an egg cup. The smell of food reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since the train. We traded pleasantries between bites of egg and dabs of lipstick—how did you sleep, what do you plan to do today—and in the same light tone of voice I asked to see the case in which I had kept the proceeds from Zdeněk’s safe. She dutifully rose, pulled it from the walk-in closet, and said, “Sorry about the latch.”
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