Cafe Europa (15 page)

Chicago. Pulse and throb and roar and scream.

A man and woman brushed past Harold, knocking him to the side. Harold immediately lunged after the man, grappled with him, and adroitly extracted his own wallet from the man's inside vest pocket. The man was bigger than Harold, but not ready for the spontaneous reaction, as Harold pummeled him, spinning him around, cursing him. A kick to the kneecap. The couple fled and Harold, triumphant, held up his wallet as though it were a trophy.

“I've been in Budapest a long time,” he announced. “I'm nobody's fool.”

A midget, round and bald, with a falsetto laugh, set balls of twine on fire and hurled them into the air, laughing darkly as they bounced off the pavement. A band of tough boys, all in shiny black trousers, loose peasant shirts and slough boy caps tight over their boyish curls, threw pebbles and coins at him, aiming for his head. He bowed and caught a fiery ball with his outstretched hand as he lunged for the meager pittance.

Chicago.

I'd had enough, this ill-considered romp as a voyeur, “Let's leave,” I insisted.

Harold, his face aglow, was restless as we walked back to the hotel. He darted ahead, hung back, bellowed, sang, grumbled, disappeared. The two artists watched him closely, and I noticed Bertalan Pór smiling. Lajos Tihanyi, however, looked frightened of Harold.

“Thank you for a lovely evening,” Winifred said to them as we stood on the quay in front of the Árpád. I shook my head.

“You did not enjoy yourself,” Bertalan Pór said slowly. “I am sorry.”

But I spoke up. “Actually, I did. Although I'm enjoying it more now that we are standing in front of the hotel and there is no one hurling fireballs over my head.”

Harold was a hundred yards away, walking back to us.

As I stepped toward the hotel, I heard him cry out, a wounded animal bellow that made us spin around toward him. To my horror Harold was crumpled on the sidewalk, his body twisted with his knees pulled up to his chest, his head flat on the pavement. Two men stood over him, shadowy silhouettes in the dim light, one of them fiercely kicking him in the side. Harold rolled away, screamed, and covered his head with his hands. One of the men swiftly kicked Harold's head.

I was screaming as Bertalan Pór and Lajos Tihanyi ran toward them, but the two men, alerted, dashed away and rounded a corner. Bravely, Pór gave chase, pausing barely a second by the writhing Harold and then disappearing into the next street. Lajos Tihanyi was kneeling by Harold, his hand resting on Harold's shoulder. Winifred and I, both moving like reluctant sleepwalkers, shuffled toward Harold who was now sitting up on the sidewalk, both hands holding a bruised and bloody head. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

“Harold, what?” I asked, but he stared vacantly at us. Then, as though losing power over his body, he sank back to the sidewalk, his legs stretching out before him, his shoulders flat on the ground, his head lolled to one side.

”Are you all right?” Winifred whispered. “Say something.”

At that moment Bertalan Pór returned, panting, out of breath, and he spoke in a raspy voice. “Gone, both of them. Hooligans.”

Lajos Tihanyi was frantic, heaving and making a gurgling sound. His friend watched him closely.

“Austrian officers,” Bertalan Pór told us.

“What?” From me, rattled.

He pointed to his own jacket. “One man was wearing an old regiment jacket. I recognized it.”

Harold was muttering something as he tried to sit up.

“Don't move,” Bertalan Pór told him. “We will get help.”

“Warned me. Cursed me in German. Leave Budapest now. Mind my own business.”

He struggled to stand and Bertalan Pór helped him. “Then they weren't just bandits,” I announced.

Harold was shaking his head. A smear of blood over his left eye, a clump of dirt on his chin. A deep gouge on his neck, dark blood staining his shirt.

Suddenly a smile covered his features. “The murder.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“The murder.” His bruised fingers touched the wetness on his forehead. “Or my remarks about Franz Josef. The end of the empire.” A puzzled look on his face. “Or both. I'm an enemy of the empire.”

“We need to get you to the hospital.” Bertalan Pór tucked his arm under Harold's shoulder. But the injured man shrugged him off, lumbering ahead, wobbly, headed into the hotel. The two Hungarians looked at each other, confused, but both stepped behind Harold, almost touching him, as though to catch him should he topple. Harold moved slowly, dragging his feet, but he never stopped chattering. This conspiracy, that one, this intrigue, this news story, that sensational headline. The hated military stalking him. All nonsense, of course. Bertalan Pór signaled to Winifred to rush ahead into the hotel to call for help.

“Hospital,” he whispered.

As we neared the entrance of the hotel, a porter rushed out, stumbling after Winifred. We were a motley crew—Harold staggering, Lajos Tihanyi's head bobbing up and down, Bertalan Pór's face set in a stern steely look—and my expression one of utter alarm.

“Help is coming,” Winifred announced.

Behind the porter stood some men who'd been lounging in the lobby, one with a cigar bobbing in his mouth. Another still held a newspaper, folded back. Among them was Jonathan Wolf, who stood back at first, but then moved forward, offering his arm to the teetering Harold.

“Tell me what happened,” he said to me as he reached for Harold's arm.

Eyes dreamy now, his speech slurred and lazy, Harold managed to open his eyes to face Wolf. A stark look of recognition. With a trembling hand, he pointed at the man. “Don't you come near me. How do I know they weren't acting under your orders?” With that, he passed out, slipping out of Bertalan Pór's tenuous hold and crumpling up on the steps.

Chapter Thirteen

Early the next evening I sat alone at a table on the terrace. Winifred had spent most of the day in her rooms, ill with a headache and insisting she'd never recover from last night's ill-advised romp through the nether regions of tenderloin Budapest, an unfortunate evening capped off with the brutal assault on the gadfly journalist.

“I'll lie in bed with chocolate and cherries and a cold compress on my head.” She winked at me. “This is all your fault, Edna dear.” But she smiled. “At my age I should only be in the street with a placard for suffrage…in the company of hundreds of other women. That's dangerous enough.” She jokingly pointed a finger at me. “You will always be a woman who steps lively into dangerous territory, Edna.”

“Thank God,” I'd countered.

“I hope you never regret those words.”

So I sat alone and grieved and considered…and thought of Harold…and of Cassandra. But my thoughts kept drifting back to Jonathan Wolf. He was a piece of a puzzle that wouldn't come together. He was like a low-hanging sun in a tropical sky—always there, a brilliant ball of red fire whenever you turned your head.

Idly, I sipped coffee, dipped a spoon into a bowl of coffee ice cream, though I'd lingered so long at the table the dessert had melted. I tried to focus on the newspaper, the
London Times
, but the black-and-white print blurred, swam before my eyes. The headlines alarmed me. So much of the world was focused on the region where I now sat with coffee and ice cream: the futile and desperate balance between the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanov dynasties, each one seemingly hell-bent on its own destruction. Emperor and King, Kaiser, and Tsar. Anachronisms, all of them. Imperial and royal monarchies, failed. Puffery and ego and ceremonial braid.
Kaiserliche und Königliche Monarchie
. The newspaper shorthand:
K.u.k
. Cluck cluck cluck. Barnyard chatter.

Stop, I told myself—my mind wandering. During my recent stay in Berlin, I'd undergone a sea change. Germany had always felt like an ancestral home—from the comfortable distance of Chicago. We spoke German in our parlors, we cooked German food. But close up, Germany swelled and gloated…a land bubbling with sentimentality and gnawing rage. I imagined an unseen voice whispering in my ear. “Come, Edna, come
Julchen
, get out of here. Get out!”

The Romanovs in Russia were cardboard cutouts from a child's book. Grubby peasants looked in on gold and silver, out of reach, blinding them. And Austria-Hungary, the stern though trembling hand pointing at its far-flung regions—from Hungary to Bohemia, to Moravia, to so many other lands, unaware that the edges of the wonderful tapestry were always the first places where the unraveling began. Maybe not unaware—but indifferent. But…so what?

I sat there and asked myself: So what? Yet Harold made it his business to pinch and prick and shove the underpinnings of that Austrian Empire. He held a mirror to its wizened face. Is that why he had been beaten, threatened? Austrian spies reported the annoying American who seemed determined to foment trouble?

Baffling, all of it.

The waiter hovered nearby in a rigid Prussian stance, arrow straight, waiting for me to look up. When I did, he bowed and asked in garbled English whether I wished anything else. He was not Markov or any other familiar servers I'd come to recognize, but a thin blond, blue-eyed young man, boyish, though with a jagged blood-red scar on the side of his mouth that gave his face a peculiarly sardonic cast. I shook my head, no. Another bow, lower, a clicking of heels, and then he left me alone.

I'd spotted the poet István Nagy sitting a few tables away, his profile to me, his gigantic Aubrey Beardsley nose tilted up. As the waiter walked away, the poet turned to me, eyes squinting and then conspicuously dropped back to the sheaf of papers spread out on the table before him. He held a pencil in the air, poised as though waiting for heavenly inspiration, then tapped it against his pale cheek. But his poetic muse seemed absent at the moment, so he sat back and contemplated the Danube. But as I watched, he flicked his head toward me, checking on me, then away—more than once. An unsettling monitoring of my activity. What part did he play in this café drama?

I'd never looked closely at him. A stringy looking man, perhaps in his late forties, maybe older, wearing intricate layers of clothing, despite the day's heat. But dated, even to my American eye—a waistcoat draped over his shoulders, unbuttoned, his arms not in the sleeves, a brocaded vest studded with silver buttons inlaid with flat pearls, a garment that smacked of diplomatic courts of a half-century before. The cuffed old boots, the mocha-colored trousers, the checkered scarf wrapped around his neck as if to ward off chills from the river. That sculptured profile exaggerated his hawk-like nose, very British decadent, a thin moustache lost under its mountainous proportions, and a stubby Van Dyke goatee, carefully manicured. His brown hair, tinged with specks of white, grew over his shoulders, the last refugee from some Bohemian quarter of a distant past. He was an art-nouveau cameo etched against the Danube.

He kept watching me, though furtively.

Inspector Horváth and another man crossed the terrace, headed into the hotel lobby, and spotted me. “Miss Ferber,” he addressed me, bowing.

“Inspector Horváth.”

A slight smile. “You remember my name?”

“Of course. You impressed me, sir.”

He bowed again deferentially. “An honor.”

“You were told about last night's attack?”

“Yes. In fact, I am here to interview your Mr. Gibbon.”

“Well, he's not mine, let me assure you. I gather he's resting in his room. He returned from the hospital this morning, head bandaged, a black-and-blue welt on his chin, but probably filled with the same dogged determination to tempt fate again. His wounds will be battle scars. We'll have to read about it.”

Inspector Horváth's smile suggested he'd not fully comprehended my words.

I'd seen Harold briefly that morning, shuffling in, an attendant leading him to the elevator. Standing in the lobby, I'd called to him, but he avoided me, bending slightly, his head dipped into his chest.

“I don't like it when visitors are so…so assaulted in our streets.”

I frowned. “We don't much care for it either.”

His engaging smile, a bow, and he headed to the hotel.

István Nagy gargled aloud, though he sounded as though he immediately regretted that indiscretion.

“Sir?” I called to him. He refused to look at me. “Sir? You seem to find my brief talk with Inspector Horváth disagreeable?”

He shot a stern glance at me. “You presume too much.”

“Oh, I don't think so, Mr. Nagy.”

“The petty lives of Americans, especially the rich ones who visit our country, do not interest me.”

“I don't think you're telling me the truth. I've seen you inside the café, leaning to the side, fearful that you'll miss some scrap of gossip spoken at a nearby table.”

He bristled, pursed his lips. “I sit quietly and write my poetry.”

“Yet you sit in a café populated by Americans and British.” I smiled. “Are you honing your English-language skills?”

“My English is serviceable, madam.” He offered a sickly smile. “As you can of course hear at this moment.”

“I'll grant you that. Where did you learn English?”

“In England, which is why I speak English. Unlike you Americans who speak…wild Indian.”

I chuckled. “Ah, as a boy you must have consumed Beadle's dime novels. Deadwood Dick and that sort. Cowboys and Indians and Buffalo Bill and…”

“I read Shakespeare,” he interrupted me.

“Another wild man if there ever was one.”

“The American movie sweeps over the young people of Budapest, madam. Sweltering halls with giddy men and women watching your idiotic Charlie Chaplin and galloping Wild West romance, all to the tinkle of a maddening piano.”

“So you sit in that darkened hall and believe you're seeing the real America?”

“I don't go to such movies, madam.”

“But you've become a social commentator on them, no?”

That bothered him. He turned away.

I stood up and walked to his table. “We haven't had a conversation, sir, though you seemed to have listened in on many of mine…and that of my friends.”

He refused to look up. “Nor do I plan to have one now.”

He infuriated me. At that moment, watching the beads of sweat form on his brow, the tendons on the back of his wrists tremble, and hearing a deep intake of breath, I suddenly understood something. Perhaps István Nagy was not a bystander to the tragedies and comedies that happened in the Café Europa. Perhaps he was a player. But what did that mean?

I sat down in a chair opposite him. “May I join you?”

He was furious but spoke in an even, steely voice through clenched teeth. He tugged at the scarf around his neck, exaggerating the movements like some
fin de siècle
British esthete performing for friends—or trying to escape from my intrusion by choking himself to death.

“I rather you not, madam.”

I ignored that. “Perhaps we can…” I stopped because he raised a hand, palm out, fingers spread out. He started gathering his pads, tucking his pencil into a vest pocket.

“Are you aware, Miss Ferber, that in Europe it is considered improper for an unaccompanied lady to do what you're doing—uninvited, you sit with a gentleman. Do you understand how that looks?”

“Of course I do.”

“Perhaps in America where there are no rules of conduct such behavior is acceptable.”

“No, actually it isn't. The unchaperoned lady is a badge of dishonor in most places. So be it. My mother would be horrified at my behavior. She'd
agree
with you. Applaud you, in fact.” I waited a heartbeat. “But, yes, even in America unchaperoned women do not behave so…indecorously.”

“And yet here you are at my table.”

“Sad, isn't it? I've obviously displayed moral lapses in more than one country.”

“You make light of it all.”

“Sir,” I got serious, “I'm deeply aware of the archaic conventions of the day, especially regarding the proper conduct of women as regulated by short-sighted men.” I chuckled. “But I'll let my friend Winifred Moss address
that
issue. She's much more in tune with the ugly strictures men place on women. But, truthfully, I am hoping you can give me some answers.”

“About?”

“About Harold Gibbon and Cassandra Blaine and…and Zsuzsa Kós…the whole…”

He narrowed his eyes into slits. “I'm a simple poet. I write
nouvelle
chanson
about the courts of love. The
Jugendstil
or what you Americans call art nouveau. The slipping of winter into spring. The maiden in a field of summer flowers. The…”

“Very nice, I'm sure. Lovely. Delightful. Yet events are happening that need to be looked at.”

“By you?” His voice broke and his eyes grew cloudy.

“Why not? I'm a reporter.”

He groaned. “Americans in Budapest are always reporters or…rich women in silk and fur.” A rumble from deep in his throat. “Now I see the two can be one and the same.”

A twinkle in his eye, his pale lips turned up briefly, a nod of his head. What was clear to me at that moment was that István Nagy, despite his protests to the contrary, welcomed this conversation. He
wanted
it, naysayer though he was. That baffled me, and intrigued. Something would be said here. He signaled to a waiter who returned with a bottle of wine and another glass, though Nagy had said nothing to him.

My tone was conciliatory. “Sir, you're an habitué of the café. You are obviously comfortable there. You see what happens. You must have opinions on the murder, on the attack on Harold Gibbon, on whatever happens.”

He pointed. “Let me tell you something, Miss Ferber. I adopted the Café Europa years back—long before its unfortunate discovery by the Americans and the British. The old, creaky hotel became a—muse. Yes, a muse for me.” A sliver of a smile. “I'm charmed by its failings, its faded glory. Even though the lights dim too often, and sputter, hiss, making my heart quake. As a young man, fresh from a sojourn in Vienna where my first poems were published in a literary journal, my first poems, I found a comfortable table
here
.”

“Vienna? But you're Hungarian?”

“My mother was from Vienna. An old Austrian family. Von Hofmann. Very respected, moneyed. My father was a professor in one of the university departments. A Magyar who loved Vienna. He died happily there.”

“But you returned here to Budapest?”

He paused. “None of this is really important, Miss Ferber.”

“It's conversation.”

He drew his lips into a thin line. “I've discovered that nothing is ever
just
conversation. Behind your American vernacular is always some nagging question or suspicion or insult.”

I smiled. “Never
just
idle curiosity?”

“Not in my experience. Americans are wily and smug, a deadly combination.”

“Agreed. But such a combination makes for intriguing character, no? Perhaps we all become minor characters in a Henry James novel when we step onto European soil.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What is it you wish to ask me, Miss Ferber? The sun will soon set and I prefer to contemplate the Hungarian sunset on the Danube in silence—the somber, wistful, echoes of a past on this lovely river.”

“Probably a past that never existed.”

A sardonic smile. “It only matters that it lives in my memory.”

“True.” I leaned in. “I've seen you talking with Jonathan Wolf, sir.”

The abrupt shift in conversation registered not one bit. Nonplused, that same smile stuck to his face, he waited a moment. “That man bothered me as I sat alone. Once again, an American who does not wait for an invitation.” He eyed me suspiciously. “I suppose it's a national characteristic. Every plot of land on this earth is his territory, occupied or not. Ever since Teddy Roosevelt presumed to send that mythic white fleet around the globe, insisting it sent the message that America had arrived on the international landscape, well, Americans place their bodies wherever they will.”