by Peter King
“Oh, yes,” Malescu said. “They are very clear.”
Kramer must have been surprised at that, but he didn’t show it. “Tell us, Fraulein, what do they say?”
“Well,” she said, “they all concern Rakoczi’s daughter.”
CHAPTER TEN
TO HIS CREDIT, KRAMER didn’t turn a hair at the reply. He was remarkably calm as he asked the predictable question.
“Who is Rakoczi?”
Malescu looked surprised. “You don’t know Rakoczi? Well, I suppose he is not well-known outside Hungary.”
“And his daughter? Is she better known?”
Germans are not noted for their ability to be sarcastic. Sarcasm is not a weapon in their verbal vocabulary. Perhaps that wasn’t derision in Kramer’s tone—perhaps it was merely probing.
Whatever it was, it was wasted on Malescu. “I will have to tell you the whole story,” she said, and proceeded to do so.
“Ferenc Rakoczi is one of Hungary’s heroes. He was the son and grandson of famous rebels. His family was wealthy and powerful, but they detested the terrible acts of the Emperor and his troops. The Rakoczi family led rebel armies against them for generation after generation. When Ferenc came of age, he was a prince of Transylvania, but he was determined to free the people from their oppression.”
As she paused for breath, Kramer said, “Fraulein, I hope you are going to tell us—”
“Of course,” said Malescu, and her imperious manner was returning with each breath. “Ferenc Rakoczi spent time at the court of the Emperor Leopold because of the high position of his family, and the emperor even sent Rakoczi to make a deal with the rebels. Instead, though, Rakoczi found himself supporting the rebels more and more, and soon he became their leader. They gained control of all of Transylvania and most of Hungary.
“Rakoczi fought on. He was captured but escaped before he could be executed. Poland wanted to join his struggle and offered to make him king, but he refused. Still he fought on, but the imperial army was too strong. His rebellion crumbled.
“Rakoczi went to France for support but could get none. He went to Turkey and died there. His two sons died soon after …”
“The history of your country is fascinating, Fraulein,” Kramer commented, “but I fail to see what this has—”
“I am about to tell you,” said Malescu firmly. “A legend arose that he had a daughter. There is no proof of this, but it became a rallying point for the rebels. A woman leader appeared who may have been Rakoczi’s daughter. She was executed, and another appeared immediately.
“Now, we come to today. A Hungarian playwright has written a play called Rakoczi’s Daughter, and I have been asked to star in it. It is a wonderful role”—her eyes took on an anticipatory gleam—“and I would do anything to play it.”
“But,” said Kramer, who had been commendably restrained throughout this recital, “you are now going to tell us what this has to with the threats against your life.”
“Yes, I am. You have heard of the IMG surely?”
Kramer nodded. “Hungary’s independence movement for the northern states.” He looked at me. “It is akin to the IRA in Ireland, the ETA in the Basque area, the Quebec separatists …”
“That is right,” said Malescu. “The IMG are the ones making these threats. They believe that making a heroine out of Rakoczi’s daughter will harm their movement.”
“Sounds as if it should help,” I said. “Make more people aware, bring up more support.”
“The IMG don’t believe that. They believe that fictionalizing Rakoczi’s daughter glamorizes her and turns her into a star of operetta—a sort of Merry Widow of the Resistance.”
“So they don’t want you to play the role,” Kramer summarized.
“Exactly.” Malescu turned the full candlepower of her magnificent eyes on the security chief.
“You take these threats on your life that seriously?” I asked.
“The IMG shot and killed the assistant public prosecutor a year ago in Szeged,” Malescu said indignantly. I took her answer as a definite affirmative.
“Are you suggesting that the IMG murdered Fraulein Svarovina in mistake for you?” Kramer asked.
The question bothered Malescu. She thought, looked away, thought more before she answered, “I am not sure …”
“Have you definitely turned down the role?” Kramer went on.
“No.”
“You told me earlier that you haven’t told the police of the IMG threats.”
“That was true.”
Kramer tried another approach. “So you persuaded your understudy to change places with you.”
Malescu nodded again.
“If you suspected an attempt on your life, wasn’t it cold-blooded of you to expose your understudy to murder?”
“She has replaced me on many occasions,” said Malescu loftily. “She never considered it as being a risk.”
“Unfortunately, we can’t ask her that,” commented Kramer.
“It is an understudy’s job to take the star’s place whenever it is necessary, both on the stage and off. It is not at all unusual in the theatrical world.”
“So while your understudy replaced you in your compartment, you went to the banquet in the city? Wasn’t that exposing yourself to danger?”
Malescu gave him a scornful look. “Of course not. I was not Magda Malescu, I was Talia Svarovina. I was safe.”
“You were certain no one would recognize you?”
“I am an actress,” she said simply.
“Fraulein Svarovina was wearing only underwear and a revealing robe. Does that not suggest to you that she was expecting a man?”
I noted that Kramer’s question did not include the possibility of the visitor being a woman. He was leaving it to Malescu to bring up that alternative.
She did not bring it up though. She gave a careless shrug. “No, it does not. She liked to wear my clothes. Naturally they were better and much more expensive than she could afford.”
“She has done so before?”
“Many times.”
Kramer looked away, then turned back to her with an assault on a different front. “Are you aware that a report appeared in the Budapest Times to the effect that you had been murdered?”
Her lips curved in a slight smile. “That reporter has been telling lies about me for some time. This was another one of them.”
“A lie or a mistake?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know about the story then?”
“Certainly. Everyone at my table in the Hotel Imperial wanted to know what I thought of my mistress—the star—having been described as murdered.”
“Then,” said Kramer, “when we went to your compartment to check on this story, we found it empty. Where was your dead body?”
“I wasn’t dead,” Malescu said contemptuously.
“So where was Svarovina’s body?”
“She wasn’t dead either. She was obviously somewhere on the train.”
“This reporter on the Budapest Times—”
“Mikhel Czerny.”
“Is that his name?” Kramer said. “You know him?”
“No, and I don’t wish to.”
“Why does he harbor such a grudge against you?”
I saw a definite hesitation in Malescu’s reply. Kramer must have, too.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Would you say he hates you?”
Malescu raised her head in a gesture that must have come from a role in one of her plays. “Many people think so. He is a hateful person.”
“Hates you enough to want to kill you?”
“I—I don’t know enough about him to say that.”
“It sounds unlikely though, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know, I suppose so.” Malescu sounded unwilling to debate the issue, and it led Kramer to continue more intensely.
“Surely reporters don’t kill people they hate? Even if their business is persecutin
g personalities on paper, they don’t pursue them in real life and kill them, do they?”
“As you say, it is unlikely.”
“But not impossible. Is that what you are saying?”
She shook her head in a meaningless gesture.
Kramer pursued the investigation with questions about the number of years Svarovina had been Malescu’s understudy, where she had been and what she had done before that, what kind of a person she was, who were her friends, and so on. She replied to them all in a matter-of-fact way, but I could not detect anything of real value in her responses.
Finally, Kramer let her go.
“She is not telling the truth,” was Kramer’s first comment after she had left.
“In the most confusing way,” I said. “Truth is here and there among her statements, the trouble is that so are nontruths.”
Kramer picked up a paper from his in-tray. “Thomas has been busy collecting information for me.” He read through it quickly. “The maid seems to be quite legitimate. She stayed in Munich because her mother was ill. The Munich police have confirmed that the mother is in hospital but will be able to leave next week.”
He read the next item. “Now, this is interesting. I asked Thomas to see what he could find out about this Mikhel Czerny. It seems that his column in the Budapest Times became so popular that the Hungarian television service invited him to appear on a nightly news program. He declined.”
“Unusual,” I agreed. “Any apparent reason?”
“None given,” Kramer said, reading on. “Thomas also contacted a person he knows on the rival newspaper, the Daily Journal. It seems no one knows what this Czerny looks like.”
“So ugly he didn’t want to appear on television?” I queried. “He can’t be on this train then, even under another name. I haven’t seen anyone that ugly on it.”
“H’m,” Kramer murmured, rubbing his chin, “an intriguing thought nevertheless.”
“Worth following up. I had a friend with the London Daily Telegraph, one of Britain’s most prestigious newspapers. It had a gossip columnist for many years, and no one knew what he looked like. Perhaps the same reason as Czerny, he didn’t want to risk some aggrieved victim of his tittle-tattle taking a shot at him.”
“‘Tittle-tattle,’” Kramer said, “I do not know the expression, yet I can see what it means. Yes, as you say, it is worth following up. Herr Brenner is well-known in Budapest and has good connections there. I will see if he has one at the Budapest Times. Someone at the newspaper must know this Czerny.”
“I’d like to meet this Thomas—he sounds like a valuable man.”
“Valuable indeed. And so you shall—but not at the moment. I have schedules to check.”
I rose. “I’ll see what I can learn from some of the passengers.”
Kramer looked at his watch. “The train will be leaving any moment now. We continue our journey. From now on, we will be seeing a lot of the Danube as we progress along its valley. I say progress, but it will be slow. Not only does this so-called Express cover only about seventy kilometers each hour—about forty miles—but we weave along the banks of the river, crossing bridges frequently so as to provide the best views and utilize tracks that are accessible to us.”
Several people were in the corridors and in the lounge and observation coaches. It was dark outside but they presumably wanted to watch the brightly lit city of Vienna by night as we pulled out of the station and “steamed” out through the suburbs.
The strains of that eternal waltz, The Blue Danube, filtered softly out of the invisible speakers, setting the mood. Then a voice announced our imminent departure. From down the platform came the thumps of coach doors closing—an unmistakable sound to any train traveler, and inexplicably unique to trains, quite unlike the sounds of any other doors. A finality was in them and perhaps a sad farewell.
The steam whistle added a final note to that farewell and, without a jerk or jolt, the Danube Express moved from stationary to motion, smoothly as a panther.
The lights of the station faded and were promptly replaced by the city lights, but then they were lost as the track dipped underground to pass beneath the Stubenring, one of the ring roads that comprise the Ringstrasse, a string of roads that run along the old city walls and enclose the inner city.
We exchanged the darkness of the tunnel for the darkness of the night as we emerged to climb onto the bridge crossing the Vienna River, a waterway completely eclipsed by its world-famous companion river. We rolled along, silent except for the muted sound track that reminded us of simpler times, on through the eastern part of the city.
We swooped underground again, under the Danube River, and picked up a little speed—but no more noise—as we headed for Bratislava on the Slovak border.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WE HAD HAD SOME new passengers join us on the train in Vienna. One of them came through the observation coach, introducing himself. He seemed to be a gregarious individual, smiling, chatting to everyone. He was young to middle-aged, with a round, happy face and a habit of bending forward to talk to people. He seemed genuinely friendly, and the smile never left his face.
“Franz Reingold,” he said with that jerky motion that many Germans have. It has always been my opinion that it is all that is left of that heel-clicking motion so common in the Germany of the past, an affectation abandoned because of its association with excessive militarism.
I reciprocated—but without that particular mannerism—and gave him my story about being a food-finder. It was my watered-down version, the one that contains no suggestion of a detective. He listened with interest. “Ach, gut, then I shall call on you when I am in doubt what to order for dinner!”
He looked more than capable of making up his own mind on that subject, and I asked him if he was traveling on business. “I presume you are not a tourist,” I said.
His smile did not waver. “I am not on business and I am not a tourist. I am a Swiss—I live near Bern, the German-speaking part of Switzerland. I am very fortunate that my family has money—quite a lot of money, in fact. You see, my grandfather was clever enough to invent one of the early ski lifts. Of course, they have been changed and improved several times since then, but each improvement just makes them more in demand and brings us in more money!” He beamed with pleasure, and I reflected that he had good reason to do so.
“To answer your question,” he went on, “the one about being on the Danube Express … You see, I am an idle fellow and spend my life indulging in my hobbies. One of those is trains. I have what is possibly the finest collection of model trains in Europe, but I also like the real ones. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the famous Donau Schnellzug is an occasion that I simply could not miss.”
He had the Swiss-German accent that can be difficult for foreigners to understand, even foreigners who are proficient in German. His accent had been refined and smoothed out, though, probably by frequent travel, so I could follow him without difficulty.
We chatted a little longer. He wanted to meet everyone on the train, he said finally, and wandered off, glowing with bonhomie and shaking more hands than a politician.
Farther along in the observation coach, Elisha Tabor, the Hungarian woman in the publishing business, was sitting alone, and I joined her. She gave me a charming smile and wished me a good evening. “Did you enjoy the banquet?” she asked.
“It was excellent. Like everyone else on the train, I wished we could have spent more time in Vienna, but I know this is not that type of trip. At least, it serves as a reminder to us all that we should return soon.”
“I like Vienna, too,” she said. “Naturally, my first love is Budapest, but Vienna is second.”
“And third?”
“Paris, without a doubt.”
“You were born in Budapest?” I asked.
“Yes. I have left it several times but always returned. I have lived there now for some years.”
“You must know it well,” I said, steering the conversation.
“Very well.”
“Tell me something about Budapest-—”
“Of course.” She turned large brown eyes toward me. She was a good-looking woman with a complexion like cream. Her features were regular and might have been ordinary, but the nose was just Roman enough and the chin just strong enough to give her real character. She looked as if she might be a formidable figure in the publishing business and more than able to hold down a responsible position.
“Tell me about Mikhel Czerny.”
Her eyes searched my face. It was a moment or two before she answered. “I’m surprised you know the name. He is famous in Hungary, of course, but not known well in other countries.”
“I’ve heard about him a few times since I have been on the Danube Express.”
“Ah, yes, the story on Magda Malescu.”
“Yes. What’s the opinion in Budapest? Does he have some reason to hate her?”
“Hungarians are a very volatile people. When they love, they love more than any other people. When they hate, they hate more than any other. The blood of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan courses through their veins. They are a very passionate people.”
“So it is nothing personal?”
She shrugged. “If it is, the public doesn’t know about it. You know the story about Leo Szilard, the Hungarian-born atomic scientist?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Szilard was talking to Enrico Fermi, another scientist, and they were having a discussion about extraterrestrial life. Szilard said he thought it was a distinct possibility. ‘In that case,’ Fermi said, ‘they should have been here by now. So where are they?’ Szilard said, ‘They are among us—only they call themselves Hungarians.’”
I laughed. “But that still doesn’t explain Czerny’s attitude toward Malescu—or if it does, why doesn’t Czerny treat every one of his victims that way?”
“He does. His style is always caustic, critical, biting, but Malescu is such a vulnerable target, so easy to attack. She almost makes it easy for him. She hardly makes a move that is not reason for him to write at least a paragraph on her.”