Cafe Europa (25 page)

I announced to the table, “This hotel is a death trap.”

Zsuzsa, in a trance, glanced up at the sputtering light fixture and roused herself. She grabbed the edge of the table and pulled herself up, one hand resting over her heart. Her eyes flashed and whatever she was trying to say was lost in her swallowed tears. János Szabó, concerned, put his hand on her lower back, coaxing her back into a chair, but Zsuzsa's eyes swept the room as all of us nervously watched her. Her hands flew up in front of her face, fingers spread out, grotesque, as she gripped her face. The old man reached for her hand, but she shook him off. We waited, anxious, as madness enveloped her. A long screech, a raspy sob, then in a labored voice, in choked English, she spoke to the room.

“I murdered them all. I was the one. Me. Only me. It was my fault. I know that now. Death followed me into this café. I murdered them all.”

Chapter Twenty-one

Paris was waiting for me, but I delayed. I ignored a terse telegram from my mother, now arrived in France. She had plans, she announced, and I needed to be at her side. The communication rankled, finally, not only because I could detect her hectoring voice through the abbreviated wire, but also because I was long used to her assumption that her unmarried daughter would be at her side. My sister Fannie was married with a family now, and I was the dedicated spinster.

Simply, Budapest got in the way. Its brisk, sulfurous air, its—well, I'd discovered a wonderful freedom in the ancient city. For me—only for me. A city, I realized, that made you cavalierly dismiss guilt you shouldn't have to begin with, laugh off the piddling shame that others pinned on you, and allowed you to celebrate the baby steps you learn to take on your own.

I'd experienced a sea change during my short time in Budapest, especially traveling with a feisty Winifred Moss. I'd watched her reinvent herself on the arms of two painters. A woman who reached back into her soul to rediscover her own squelched humanity. The encounters with Harold Gibbon and Endre Molnár and the two Hungarian artists had jolted me away from the airtight confines of a punishing mother. I breathed now, drunk with a lightheaded freedom as I moved alone through the wide avenues of Budapest. Sitting by myself in a sidewalk café, a cup of coffee in front of me, reading a French newspaper, I celebrated my own day of independence.

I felt grown up. At thirty it was about time. After all, Lajos Tihanyi, though a scandalous artist, had painted me in red. With a daisy in my hand. Delightful. Really.

A daisy.

My mother, though loved, could wait. The Eiffel Tower would still be in the same place. Moulin Rouge would tantalize with the dark red flowing curtains. The gardens at Versailles would still be in lavish bloom. Paris would still look like the postcard picture I carried in my mind.

Of course, my rebellion was a soft one, lined with velvet. My suitcases were packed and I had a ticket for the long train ride to Paris. But not yet.

First, Winifred and I needed to relish a late-night supper with Endre Molnár and Ivan Farkas, both men filling us in on the events that followed after Markov's spectacular arrest. Zsuzsa's spotting of young György led to a search orchestrated by Inspector Horváth, and the lad was caught boarding a train south to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Apprehended as he settled into a train compartment, his face covered with a fake beard, his head covered with a red Turkish fez, he battled Inspector Horváth's men, a vigorous fistfight, and he unsuccessfully tried to swallow the cyanide capsule he'd slipped into his mouth.

“The anarchists don't leave home without them,” Ivan wryly noted.

“So he was the murderer?” I asked.

Ivan nodded. “Yes. Actually his name is Bogdan Prpić, a Bosnian Serb, and, yes, a relative of Vladimir Markov, though not a nephew. But cherubic György, that skittish, infatuated boy, is really a nineteen-year-old rabid assassin, connected to Serbia's Black Hand and the monster Apis, the man behind so many of the bombings. There are groups of such young boys, fiery, zealous, crazed, trained in bomb-making and murder, ready to sacrifice their lives for the Serbians enslaved by Austria-Hungary. The annexation of Bosnia by the empire was the last straw. Such hatred.”

“He admitted to the murder?”

Again the nod. “And proudly, I might add, the boy puffing up his chest. It seems the news of the marriage had incensed Dragutin Dimitrijević of Serbia, and orders were given. Austria's army is weak, old, its armaments outdated. Howitzers from the Skuda factories, arms from the German Krupp works—not enough to satisfy the warmongers. So the radicals feared any American connection. The marriage had to be stopped.”

Endre looked puzzled. “But I still don't understand Markov's role in this. I mean, he was at the Café Europa for years, a loyal, likeable man, trusted. He loved Budapest.”

Ivan nodded. “All that's true. But from interrogations I gather that he was drawn into the conspiracy, unwittingly at first, the result of his wife's family, radicalized Bosnian Serbians. He hated them—wanted nothing to do with them. He was torn between his family…and Budapest. He was afraid when György—Bogdan—was purposely placed in his kitchen, but he had no choice. Perhaps he was threatened. Or his family was threatened. They would kill him—without question. Reluctantly, he found himself agreeing, and then, I suppose, sympathizing, locking into the rightness of it. A man torn, really. A sad, sad man, jailed now. All he ever wanted was his job at the Café Europa—his pride and joy. He did adore Budapest.” A quirky smile. “How could you not? He
did
love his job.”

“It's just that he found that deadly cause more attractive.”

“It happens.” Ivan shrugged.

Endre spoke up. “So Markov admitted carrying the note to my rooms?”

“Yes, finally. Cassandra liked him, trusted him. He claims he did it as a favor. He never expected a murder
that
night. But when young Bogdan learned of it, the plan for the murder fell into place.”

Endre shook his head. “Seduced into being an accomplice.”

“He should have known it would end in disaster,” I said.

Endre looked contemplative. “But such anarchists willingly give up their lives as long as the cause is won. And it
was
—the marriage with the firearms dynasty was stopped. They did what they wanted to do. Their plan worked.”

The conversation turned to Zsuzsa. “Sad, that story,” I commented.

Zsuzsa's slipping into insanity that night in the café stunned many, though we'd all watched it evolving in the days leading up to that dreadful night. The singer blamed herself for the tragic events, sitting nightly in the café and accosting anyone—even strangers, newcomers to the café—and telling them she was a murderer.

“For a few gold coins,” she said over and over. “Judas Iscariot. I sold an American girl into a marriage, and so they had to kill her.” Then she'd weep. “And then they had to kill my poor Harold, a man who loved me.”

One night Endre and I sat with her, but she resisted our efforts to lead her out of such sadness. It was too late, of course, because her scattered mind, a jumble of memory and desire, had decided her destiny.

“Doomed, all of us,” she whispered, her eyes dancing. “We are melancholy people, we Hungarians. We are forced to sob through our days. We wait to die.”

“No,” Endre had told her, holding onto her wrist lovingly, “that streak of melancholy covers us, yes, but we smile through it all, holding onto a glimmer of hope.”

She'd laughed out loud. “All Hungarian men are beautiful fools and liars.” She winked at me. “That's why we women are so sad.”

Endre rhapsodized about the fields of sunflowers and intoxicating Tokay wine and bathing at Lake Balaton and wild Gypsy orchestras and the way a barge slowly crawled up the Danube under a moonlit sky—a ramble of lyricism that Zsuzsa ran away from with a dismissive growl.

“And beautiful women,” Endre added. “Like you, dear Zsuzsa.”

Zsuzsa faced me. “I told you—beautiful fools and liars.”

That night, alone in her room, that tiny cubicle paid for by the doting János Szabó, Zsuzsa tried to end her life. But it was a feeble attempt, a bit of loneliness sweeping through her, and luckily she reached for the telephone—which, as the Fates had it, decided to work that night. I shuddered at the thought of what might have happened, given the capriciousness of electricity and communication in the ancient hotel.

A day later Winifred and I visited her with chocolate and flowers as she lay propped up in her bed, the door ajar so her admirers would not be inconvenienced, and she teared up immediately. She'd made a decision, she told us.

“I am going back to my grandmother's village where I will live quietly, away from”—her hand trembled as she stretched it out toward the small window overlooking the back alley—“this. Budapest. I will find quiet, and die there. I'll wait out the war there. Harold's war. His prophecy.”

Then, in an abrupt shift, she pointed a finger at me, her voice sharp, raspy. “You thought it was me, didn't you, Miss Ferber? You thought I murdered Cassandra. Yes, I hated Cassandra because she refused to fight her parents. She gave up Endre Molnár. No Hungarian girl would relinquish that man.” She chuckled for a long time. “You've seen him, haven't you? Are American girls that foolish? Hungarian women live for love, not politics.”

When I told him what she said, Endre scoffed at that idea. “She's gone back to that village a hundred times and then returns to Budapest. She'll be back at the Café Europa, singing her songs, the cabaret songs. This city gets into the bloodstream, it intoxicates, it's a narcotic. Once you're touched by Budapest, no other city will satisfy.”

A day later I said goodbye to Bertalan Pór and Lajos Tihanyi in Tihanyi's studio. A sad parting, true, but both men kissed my hand too much, bowed too much, so much so that the moment translated into some comic vaudeville routine, some parody out of a Buster Keaton stage antic. All of us at the same moment suddenly stepped back from the scene, bursting out in laughter.

Bertalan Pór remarked, “When you go back to your country, no one will kiss your hand, Miss Ferber.”

“I may actually miss it.”

“Then you must return to see us.”

Tihanyi revealed the portrait in red he'd been working on, still unfinished but galvanizing, dramatic, something that took my breath away. Yes, there was Edna Ferber, the American, captured on canvas, but of course it wasn't me. Rather, it was a slender woman with a bony face, my black hair cascading over my shoulders, that infernal red jacket over a blue blouse, open at the neck. But the face was elegant, sculpted, with eyes both melancholic and fierce. It startled, quite. And that infernal daisy in my hand. A daisy? I asked again because he didn't answer me last time.

“The beginning of a life,” Bertalan Pór told me, reading from his friend's scribbled note.

I believed him, emphatically.

Bertalan Pór said the painting, once finished and mounted in a gold frame, would be shipped to me in America. “But first we must display it in a gallery window. On the Váci. You are famous here now—people talk of the American woman who solved the murders.” He waited a heartbeat. “Your Hungarian father would be proud of you.”

I choked up, looking away for a moment. “Come to America,” I told them. “See where I hang the painting in my home.”

Both men shook their heads slowly.

“What?” I'd asked.

“If we don't die in the war,” Bertalan Pór said finally.

I shivered. “Oh, God, no. Please don't say that.”

Both men looked at each other. Tihanyi was saying something but he was frustrated. He squeaked out a sentence. His friend translated.

“Lajos has gone to a Gypsy fortuneteller. She told him he would die in Paris. Alone in a studio there.”

“No,” I told him. “No.” Then I turned to Bertalan Pór. “And you?”

“I'll be an old man in my small apartment on Rákóci, the solitary painter. I will die there.”

“Will you marry?”

His voice got solemn. “I was meant to live alone.” Next to him, Tihanyi was laughing. “Lajos is the lover, Miss Ferber. The women chase him in the park. But he tells me women look at me on the street. They want to love me.”

I grinned. “Perhaps you should listen to your friend.” I nodded at Tihanyi. “You see what I see.”

“Maybe.” Pór's word was wistful.

I watched the two men as they left me, and I knew, to my soul, that the fortuneteller was telling them what they already believed.

I said goodbye to Winifred a few days later, and thanked her. She'd taken me from Berlin—and my mother. In that generous act she liberated me, this feisty, dedicated woman who'd been so horribly treated in London. She'd allowed me my own voice. She drifted lazily through her days now, renewed by her stay in Budapest. She'd opened herself up to the friendship of three men, all so different. Lajos the deaf mute, Bertalan the gentleman, and Harold—Harold the gadfly. Maybe four—Endre, too. Within the week she was headed to Dubrovnik for a summer of sun and rest. Then, she said, it was back to London to rejoin the suffrage protests, the battles, and the marches in the streets. The jails, the taunts of narrow-minded subjects of the king, the full ferocity of British intolerance.

“When we next meet, dear Edna, you and I will be able to vote in elections. I promise you that. In England and in America.”

I frowned. “But we have to vote for men who will still see us as invisible.”

She chuckled. “That's why I march in the street. That way they have to see you—step around you.”

“Or run you over.”

“That, too.” A flick of her head. “Another way of being noticed by myopic men.”

We laughed a long time before we hugged goodbye. She watched me climb into a taxi headed for the train station. When I looked back to wave, she was gone from the sidewalk. I felt a chill. I knew to my marrow that I'd never see her again.

***

On June 28, a Sunday, I sat next to my mother at the Grand Prix races in Paris, bored, watching horses trot the circuit, a meaningless redundancy that stultified me. But, according to my mother, an obligatory event, given the weight the Parisians placed on the annual spectacle. Elegant women in pearls and hobble skirts slithered by, demanding that we notice them. But my mind drifted back to Budapest.

“Why are you smiling?” Julia Ferber grumbled, unhappy. “You're staring into the skies.”

I didn't answer her. My world back there, precious, beautiful. Salvation. Mine alone.

At one point we watched French President Poincaré enter his elaborate box, accompanied by a retinue of attendants, and for a moment the crowd gaped, waved. He offered a royal wave. But then the President abruptly rose, calling some orders, and the entire party disappeared. A humming swept the crowd, nervous. Some rushed out, others stood and questioned others. My mother kept nudging me—what happened? Tell me. Unseemly, I assumed, such a departure in the middle of this event.