The Angel Makers (38 page)
‘But—’
At that, Béla’s last remaining nerve, already painfully frayed, decides to snap.
‘Géza! I am ordering you! Stay here. Subdue Mrs Kiss, and take her to the church. Then go and collect Mrs Nagy and Mrs Gyulai and take them to the church. I’ll meet you there.’
For a moment, their eyes lock, Béla’s wide with feigned innocence, Géza’s narrowed with suspicion. Then Orsolya Kiss gives a final, desperate lurch, like a landed fish, demanding Géza’s full attention, and Béla slips away.
He doesn’t knock this time, just leaps up the steps three at a time and pushes open the door, and …
‘Ah,’ says Sari. She is holding Rózsi with her right hand, she has a cloth bag in her left, and looks remarkably calm, all things considered. ‘Ah,’ she says again. ‘Well. It was worth a try.’
For a moment he can’t summon any words at all, and then only banalities. ‘We’ve arrested Mrs Nagy, Mrs Gyulai, and Mrs Kiss,’ he says lamely.
She nods, smiling. ‘Well, that’s something, at least. They’ll probably be able to give you some other names – I doubt they’ll need much persuasion, really.’
‘Sari,’ he says, tasting her first name for the first time. Bittersweet, it stops up his throat and he can’t go on. Instead, wordless, he tosses her the small leather pouch he has in his right hand.
‘What’s this?’ she asks, puzzled, and he makes an aggravated gesture with his hands:
open it
. She does. Pearls, gold jewellery, money. She suppresses a gasp, biting her lip swiftly, and then looks up at him through narrowed eyes.
‘Orsolya?’ she asks, and he nods. She takes a deep breath, once, twice. ‘Why?’
Finally, he finds words. ‘I could ask you the same thing,’ he says, damning his voice for trembling, and then relents. ‘You said that you needed money. To get to the city.’
She shuts her eyes for a moment, and Béla wonders whether this is the first genuine emotion he’s seen pass over her face. ‘Thank you,’ she says.
‘I hate myself for doing this,’ he bursts out. It’s true; he’s not sure whether he hates himself or her more. He used to be proud of his behaviour, particularly with regard to his job. He used to be proud of his ability to read people. Now he questions everything. There’s a smile on her face that seems faintly sympathetic, but how can he possibly start to interpret her?
‘I’m sorry for that.’ She flicks her eyes nervously to the door.
‘Don’t worry, there’s time. Géza is taking the other three down to the church.’
‘Very well.’ She trains her implacable eyes on his face, anticipating the question before he asks it.
‘How did this all happen? Why did you …?’ he can’t finish the sentence. There’s no way he can sum up all he feels, or even if he could, there’s no way that he could bring himself to say it to her:
how could a woman like you, a woman I thought I could love, have done all of this
?
She seems to understand though, and raises an eyebrow. ‘I chose to put myself first,’ she says simply. ‘Myself and my child. Just as you’ve chosen to help me. You probably want to hear that I was treated badly by my fiancé, some nice, neat, explicable reason why I’ve done the things I’ve done. It’s true.He did treat me badly. But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is what I chose to do about it. I was tired of just letting things
happen to me
, and I imagine that many of the other women here feel the same way.’
She hefts the bag in her left hand. ‘And now we’ve got to go. Judit—’
Béla turns. He hadn’t even noticed the old woman sitting there, grinning her manipulative grin, hands neatly folded in her lap.
‘Ha!’ she crows, seeing his surprise. ‘I’m the consolation prize. As a matter of fact, I was the one who gave Sari poison in the first place, so really, I’m more culpable in all of this than she is. Not a bad bargain, me for her, wouldn’t you say?’
She turns away before he can offer an answer, fixing Sari with a gimlet stare. ‘Get going, both of you,’ she says roughly. ‘And for the devil’s sake, be careful.’
Sari nods once, and Rózsi stretches out a hand to Judit, who grips it fiercely before letting it go. The two of them move towards the back steps, and Sari gives Béla one last glance. ‘For what it’s worth,’ she says, ‘I would have found this all a whole lot easier if I didn’t genuinely like you.’
You’ve got to take consolation where you can find it
, Béla tells himself. He watches out the window as Sari and Rózsi cross the back garden, as Sari lifts Rózsi over the fence and follows her, as they move swiftly towards the wood, staying carefully in the shadow of the houses. Their silhouettes get smaller and smaller, vulnerable stick-figures against the vastness of the plain. Béla shudders, and jumps when Judit puts her gnarled claw on his shoulder, in a gesture evidently meant to be comforting. He hadn’t even noticed her move beside him.
‘They’ll be all right,’ she says. ‘Don’t you worry about them. They’ll be just fine.’
Together, they stand and watch until the tiny shadows of Sari and Rózsi are swallowed up by the large, looming shadow of the woods.
‘Right then,’ Judit says, her voice bright and brittle. ‘Let’s go.’
I watched from the woods, when they went to get men from the nearby villages to guard over the church, while Géza made more arrests, and Béla went to Város for reinforcements. They looked for me, naturally, combed the forest, but that forest has been my playground since I could walk; I know every leaf and every tree, and evasion was simple. There were twenty-five women in the end, led away from the village in a way that was almost processional, and I heard afterwards that eight were hanged. I never heard which eight. I hope that Judit was right when she guessed that she’d be dead before she stood on the gallows.
Now, we walk. My main aim is to put as many miles between ourselves and Falucska as possible. My secondary aim is not to get caught, which involves detours and decoys and occasional backtracking, but generally we walk west. I know this plain like the back of my hand, the inside of my own eyelids; that’s how I’m able to move through it without being seen, and that’s why I want to leave it as far behind as possible. I’m sick of the
whishawhisha
of dry grass in the wind, the ominous smudge of a pine wood at night, the fat, complacent moon. I tell Rózsi that we’re ready for somewhere warm and fragrant. Maybe somewhere by the sea. She doesn’t answer, but sometimes she smiles. She knows, as well as I do, that we’ll be all right.
We walk west, tracing our steps in the deepening snow.
