The Angel Makers

by Jessica Gregson

  ‘These men—’ Kornelia blurts. ‘They need somewhere to stay, and I thought maybe you …’

  Sari nods in what she hopes is a gracious manner. ‘Of course. Good evening, gentlemen. My name is Sari Arany. Please come in.’

  They tramp up the stairs, scraping their boots as they do so, and Kornelia dithers, unsure whether she is included in the invitation.

  ‘Sari – should I—?’

  Sari shakes her head. ‘It’s all right. Leave them with me,’ she says, and Kornelia, looking absurdly relieved, vanishes into the gathering darkness. Sari turns back to the men, who are standing politely by the table. The men from the village – the few of them that remain – would be seated by now, feet up on the table; it’s been so long since Sari’s encountered a man with manners.

  ‘Miss Arany,’ the taller one says. ‘My name is Béla Illyés, and this is my assistant, Géza Forgacs.’ Géza inclines his head in what is intended to be an elegant, manly gesture, and Sari feels her lips twitch slightly. ‘We’re from the Police Department in Város, and we’re here to investigate an accusation that has been made against someone in this village.’

  Sari frowns, feigning confusion. ‘Someone here? But – I’m sorry, excuse me. It’s none of my business.’

  ‘On the contrary, Miss Arany, we were hoping that we would be able to talk to you about this matter. Not right now, of course. We will be staying in the village for a few days, and we were hoping that you could help us find some suitable accommodation.’

  ‘Of course, of course! You must be tired, coming all the way from Város. It’s a good thing that Kornelia brought you here. My father’s house is on the edge of the village, and it’s empty. It’s not very large, but it’s clean and secure. You can stay there for as long as you need to. Would you like to go straight there now, or can I offer you some food?’

  Béla shakes his head, much to Géza’s disappointment. ‘Thank you, but no. We had a large lunch, and we wouldn’t dream of putting you to any trouble.’

  ‘Fine, fine. If you can just wait for a moment—’ Sari goes into the kitchen, where Rózsi is preparing the evening meal, with Judit looking on. Judit grimaces as soon as she catches Sari’s eye, and Sari grimaces back, saying out loud, ‘I’m just going to take these gentlemen over to my father’s house. I’ll be back before long.’ She can’t help reaching out and touching Rózsi’s hair; despite her composure, her insides are squirming with fear. Rózsi looks up at her and gives her a glowing smile, and as always, it lifts Sari’s heart, bolsters her spirits. She sometimes wonders whether she needs her daughter more than her daughter needs her.

  When she gets back, twenty minutes later, Francziska is sitting at the kitchen table, visibly trembling, while Judit plies her with szilva, patience clearly dwindling.

  ‘I suppose you heard about our visitors,’ Sari says dryly.

  Francziska nods. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Deny everything, that’s what. No matter what they say, deny it. I think we might still be all right, you know. They’re both young – if they really thought there was something going on here, they would have sent more senior people. We might be all right.’

  Francziska’s mouth is working, her eyes are panicstricken, and Sari can see it coming. ‘Couldn’t we just … just finish them?’

  Judit puts her head into her hands, and Sari takes a deep breath. ‘For God’s sake, Francziska. That really is the most ridiculously stupid idea that you could have come out with.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Think about it. We might be all right as it stands, but what are they going to do, over in Város, if the boys they’ve sent out here don’t come back? They’re all going to be out here, swarming over the village. We simply couldn’t do anything more suspicious. Do you understand me?’

  ‘I – I suppose so.’

  Sari sighs. ‘This is the problem,’ she says, to no one in particular, as Judit already understands, and Francziska never will. ‘This is how we’ve got into this situation. Everyone’s started thinking that finishing people off is the best way to deal with problems, and it’s not. It might sort things out in the short term, but in the long run, it just gets everyone into a far bigger mess than there was to start with.’

  Béla sits at the kitchen table, listening to Géza crashing around upstairs, thankful for some time to himself to think. His reaction to Sari disturbed him, but now that she’s gone, he’s able to put it into a far more acceptable context. Here he is, practically on his own (Géza barely counts as company) in some peculiar little village in the middle of the plain – a village that doesn’t even have a village priest, a fact that upset him more than he would ever admit to himself – and the first person that he’d come across had been decidedly odd. Taking that into consideration, his feelings for Sari had simply been down to relief at finding someone intelligent and collected and – and somehow refined, he thinks, despite her countrified dress and the crude way that her hair had been piled on top of her head, in this strange place. Relief and surprise.

  But then there’s the other thing, the fact that when he closes his eyes he can still see the faint afterimage of her eyes, the fact that it took a couple of moments after she left for his heartbeat to still, the fact that it trips and stutters and speeds up a little when he thinks of her returning the next morning. She’s not beautiful, he tells himself. She’s not. She must be ten years older than him at least. She’s too thin, almost scrawny, with lines on her face and a few threads of white in her hair. Her eyes are startling, that’s all. Béla is a rational man, a sensible man, and he’s tired and anxious and everything will look different in the morning. It’s bound to.

  Sari noticed his reaction to her. He’d hidden it well but she’d noticed the infinitesimal pause when she’d opened the door, the blink of surprise, and she’d certainly noticed that his eyes landed on her whenever he thought she wasn’t looking. Well, Sari thinks. That could be useful. For a moment she wishes that she were more like Lilike or Lujza had been, more like almost anyone, really. After all, she’s only had two experiences of this sort of thing in her lifetime, both of which seemed to happen by accident, rather than by any design of her own, and neither of which she would count as an unqualified success. She wishes she were more aware of how she could use this to her advantage – to all of their advantages.

  He’d seemed a pleasant man, young and polite and she’d found herself, irritatingly enough, wanting to make him and his young companion comfortable, wanting to please them. When she’d taken them to her father’s house, she left them downstairs while she made the beds upstairs, scanning the rooms for any trace of anything they might find suspicious, although she’d already been over all of these rooms several times since Francziska’s mother-in-law disappeared. When she came back downstairs, the younger one – Géza, was it? – was sitting at the table, looking morose, but Béla had been standing by the bookshelf, running his fingers along the rainbow of spines. He turned as she entered.

  ‘Have you read all of these?’ he asked. She suppressed a shrug.

  ‘All of them, several times.’ She smiled at him. ‘It’s very hard to get books out here. I could probably recite all of those to you. Backwards.’

  He laughed. ‘Perhaps when I get back to Város,’ he said, haltingly, ‘I could send some books to you. To say thank you, for—’ He spread his hands, ‘for all of this.’

  She wishes that she didn’t like him. It would make things so much easier.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Béla passes a bad night, but when he comes downstairs the next day, he finds to his surprise that things do look better in the morning. The sun shines in through the kitchen windows, there are blessedly normal sounds of village activity coming from outside, and it would be silly to read anything into the bad dreams anyway; they were just down to being in an unfamiliar bed.

  Géza is already up, sitting downstairs, poring over notes that he must have read a hundred times already, but Béla notices that his
face has relaxed; the menacing village in his mind has obviously resolved itself into the unthreatening village of reality. Béla sits down and smiles at Géza encouragingly. Everything’s fine, then. The village is odd, of course, but only because it’s so isolated, and because he’s looking at it through his citified eyes. They’ve come here because Emil is thorough, but there’s bound to be nothing seriously amiss here. Béla prides himself on being a rational man, and feels a little sympathy for the weary, uneasy man that he was last night, but doesn’t spare him much thought. It’s time to get on with work.

  There’s a knock on the door and Sari puts her head around it, smiling.

  ‘Good morning! I brought you some food, for breakfast. I would have come around earlier, but I didn’t want to wake you, as I was sure you must have been tired after your journey.’

  She brings light with her into the kitchen; her head is haloed with it. Béla gulps, almost imperceptibly.

  ‘Thank you very much. Would you join us?’

  Sari reddens a little. How could I have thought she was ten years older than me? Béla asks himself. She looks no more than a teenager now.

  ‘Thank you, but I couldn’t possibly,’ she responds politely.

  Béla nods. Géza watches their exchange with a touch of confusion and consternation, head swivelling back and forth.

  ‘You mentioned yesterday that you wanted to talk to me about …’ she pauses slightly, ‘… about the reason that you’re here. Would you like to do that today?’

  ‘Please. But first, we need to talk to – ah—’ He stretches a hand out towards Géza, who passes the documents to him. ‘To – ah – Francziska Imanci. Do you know her?’

  ‘Of course. It’s a small village. Everyone here knows everyone else. I can take you to her after breakfast, if you like.’

  ‘That would be perfect, thank you.’

  ‘Do you remember where I live? Good. Just come when you’re ready and I’ll take you to Francziska.’ She opens the door. ‘I’ll see you in a little while, then.’

  After she’s gone, Géza looks at Béla, frowning. ‘She didn’t seem very curious about why we’re here, did she?’

  Béla clicks his tongue disapprovingly. ‘She was just being polite, that’s all.’ Instinctively, he looks over to the patch of floor by the door where Sari had been standing a moment before, then shakes himself mentally, and gets to his feet. ‘Come on, Géza. Breakfast.’

  When Francziska lets Sari in, she looks terrified.

  ‘Thank God it’s only you. I thought—’

  ‘I know what you thought,’ Sari cuts her off, ‘and they’ll be coming in an hour or so, after breakfast. I can’t stay long.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ Francziska looks as if she’s going to vomit, but thankfully doesn’t. ‘What am I going to do? What am I going to do?

  ’ ‘You’re going to calm down, to start with,’ Sari instructs firmly. ‘And then when they come here, you’re going to answer their questions as truthfully as you can, without landing us all in it. Let’s see …’ Sari thinks for a moment. ‘How ill was your mother-in-law when she left?’

  ‘She’d had a few headaches and some stomach trouble, but she was no worse that. She can’t have been,’ Francziska’s face reddens in fury, ‘or she wouldn’t have been able to make it all the way across the damn plain!’

  ‘True. You’re in luck, then. I doubt that she was showing any symptoms that would look like she’d been poisoned. All that counts against you are her accusations, and, of course, any accusations that she might be making about the death of her son.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Francziska moans.

  ‘Would you stop that,’ Sari demands, irritably. ‘All you can do is just deny everything. When they ask about your mother-in-law, tell them that you never got on, that she was going a bit mad in her old age, and that probably made her a bit suspicious of you. If you can muster up a bit of anger, so much the better. Something like: how dare she accuse me of this, after all the time I’ve spent looking after her! Do you think you can manage that?’

  Francziska nods with enthusiasm. ‘Oh, yes, I certainly think I can manage a bit of anger.’

  ‘Good. And if they ask you about your husband, tell him that he was weakened by the injuries he took in the war, so he died of influenza. Try and squeeze out a couple of tears, if you can.’

  Francziska looks doubtful. ‘I’m not sure …’ her voice quavers.

  ‘Either way, it doesn’t matter. Anyway. No matter what they ask you, don’t deviate from those answers. Whatever you do, don’t try and make up any sort of clever story. Keep it all as simple as possible.’

  Francziska nods. ‘All right. But—’ She stops, looking awkward.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘What if they ask me about the – the others? You know, it must be pretty obvious that – that more people have died here than is normal …’

  Sari sighs. There’s no easy explanation for it, really, no matter how hard she’s tried to think of one. ‘Tell them that we’ve been unlucky. Tell him that a lot of men came back from the war weak, and that we’ve had a lot of ill-health here.’ She grimaces a little. ‘It won’t hurt to mutter darkly about a curse, something like that.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Look, they’re men from the town, and we’re women from the country. They’ll happily believe that we believe in things like that.’ She adds, wryly, ‘In fact, they might even suggest it themselves.’

  Géza doesn’t know quite what to think. It’s not that Francziska wasn’t convincing, but more that he doesn’t know what convincing is supposed to be for a woman in her state. Is it normal for a woman who’s been accused of murder by her mother-in-law to rant and rave, alternating between sobbing with distress and snarling with rage? All in all, it’s been one of the hardest hours he’s spent in his life, and he’s rarely been so glad to leave somewhere. The air tastes fresher than normal, and the sun is brighter. Béla’s face is as impassive as ever, and Géza indulges himself in a small spasm of hero-worship. One day, he thinks, one day.

  Meanwhile, Francziska makes herself a cup of coffee, and congratulates herself on a job well done.

  Béla knows that he shouldn’t be as open as this with Sari, but he’s relying on that much-lauded instinct that Emil’s always been going on about, and so he knows, knows instinctively rather than factually, that if anything odd has been going on in this village, Sari has nothing to do with it.

  ‘I knew her mother-in-law had disappeared, of course,’ Sari is saying, ‘Francziska was very worried about her, because she hadn’t been well. She mentioned that she hadn’t been herself, for a few days before she left.’

  They are walking through the village, back towards Sari’s house. By coincidence, Béla and Géza bumped into her as they were on their way out of Francziska’s house, and she invited them back for lunch.

  ‘If you have to speak to me anyway,’ she’d said, with that glinting smile of hers, ‘you may as well get fed at the same time.’

  Beguiled by her smile – it’s her intelligent mind he likes, nothing more, Béla keeps reminding himself – he finds himself telling her all about the conversation they’d had with Francziska, ignoring Géza’s disconcerted expression.

  Sari reacts with surprise and concern, a concern that Béla is finding hard to interpret. He knows a little about female friendships, mainly from books, but he imagines that Sari is above such things, and not inclined to protect Francziska through some arcane bond of womanhood.

  ‘Welcome,’ Sari says, as she pushes open the door to her house. ‘Judit? Rózsi?’ she calls. A tall, red-haired girl appears, poking her head around the door – her eyes, Béla notices, are just as startling as Sari’s, but green rather than blue. ‘Béla, Géza, this is my daughter, Rózsa. We call her Rózsi.’

  Béla starts. ‘I – I’m sorry, I assumed that you were unmarried …’

  ‘Oh, I am,’ Sari says, smiling a little.

  Béla dithers. Should he assume that she is
a widow, or could she have …

  She answers his silent question. ‘I’ve never been married. I’m sorry if that shocks you. I was engaged once, to Rózsi’s father, but he died before we could marry.’ She shrugs a little. ‘I know that it’s not the way that things are supposed to be done, but out here, people don’t mind so much.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Béla says, trying to recover his composure. It’s not so unusual, really, for a woman to have a child out of wedlock, he tells himself. Rózsi seems entirely unmoved by this conversation, and as he sits down at the table, he turns to her, tentatively. He’s never been quite sure what to do with children. ‘Hello, Rózsi!’ he says, with false cheerfulness.

  ‘Oh, she doesn’t talk,’ Sari explains, her hand on Rózsi’s head, as Rózsi smiles up at her. ‘We don’t know why. She understands when people speak to her, but we think that she’s got nothing she really wants to say, yet. And this is Judit.’

  Standing by the table, Béla jerks in shock at the sight of the angel maker of his imagination, come to life.

  Judit grins toothlessly. ‘Hello, boys,’ she says.

  ‘Judit and I work together,’ Sari explains. ‘I’ve lived with her since my father died, when I was fourteen.’

  Over lunch – prepared by Rózsi, Béla notices to his surprise – they make small-talk, about the weather and the village and the work that Sari and Judit are doing at the moment. Béla can’t take his eyes off Sari, and he still can’t work out quite why that is, as he passes much prettier girls on his way to and from work every day. She’s just … there’s something magnetic about her, he thinks, something that Géza doesn’t see (evidently, otherwise he’d hardly be sitting there munching so contentedly), something that no one all the way out here in this isolated village can see, surely? She seems so out of place here, a fact that is becoming increasingly frustrating to Béla. He finds himself wondering what she would be like elsewhere, what she would do if she were somehow transplanted to Város or Budapest, rather than sat at a rickety table in a muddy village in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a mute, red-headed child and a hag. He tries to hide his distaste for Judit – distaste, and yes, a certain amount of fear as well. She’s harmless, of course; to think otherwise would be rank superstition – and she can’t have noticed, can she, the way that his eyes keep tracing the line of Sari’s neck, the slippery curve of her waist? But she’s been grinning at him in a most unpleasant manner, and he’s hugely relieved when she leaves as soon as lunch is over, taking Rózsi with her.