Budapest Noir (2 page)

“Don’t say a thing,” said Gellért, faltering out his excuse, “I know we agreed to meet this evening, but the chief of police called us to a meeting.”

“The train carrying the prime minister’s body is arriving tomorrow morning in the East Station,” said Gordon.

“I can’t say we expected him to die, especially since Darányi took over day-to-day affairs. I would have bet he’d resign. But when it comes down to it, it doesn’t really matter.”

“It doesn’t,” Gordon concurred.

“Sure, we had a plan in place for the prime minister’s burial,” explained Gellért, “but even so, we’ve got a million things to do. The chief has called all detectives, police officers, and gendarmes to duty so as to adequately secure the funeral procession from the East Station to the Parliament building.”

“Will the interior minister lift the ban on public gatherings?” asked Gordon.

“Why would he do that?”

“Aren’t the funeral procession and the burial public gatherings?”

“You’re not serious, are you?” asked Gellért, peering out from above his glasses.

“No,” replied Gordon. “Then I won’t bother you anymore. Did you hear that Turcsányi-Schreiber testified for Róna?”

“Sure I heard. Dániel is an intelligent and logical fellow. If you don’t mind . . .”

“Naturally,” said Gordon, stepping away from the window. “No point looking you up until the funeral, I suppose.”

“No,” said Gellért, sitting down in his chair and pushing the drawer back in its place.

“I’ll give you a call. Good night.”

“Under order of Valiant Knight Miklós Kozma, the interior minister, and his secret order of the Council of Ministers, not a single officer of the law will sleep tonight,” replied Gellért. He pulled his typewriter over on top of his calendar and rolled a sheet of paper into it. Blinking behind his lenses, he began to type. Gordon couldn’t decide whether he’d heard a bit of sarcasm in the detective’s voice.

T
here were noticeably fewer people about on Rákóczi Street. Some bars and nightclubs had already closed, and the coffeehouses, too, were slowly emptying out. But Gordon saw an unusually large number of policemen and gendarmes, standing rigidly along the street in preparation for the long night to come. Passing by the Balaton Coffeehouse, he glimpsed a sign hung on the door:
WE WILL BE CLOSED ON OCTOBER 10 DUE TO THE PRIME MINISTER’S DEATH.
Though he wasn’t particularly interested in coffee, he realized the notice hung on the door of every shop, restaurant, office, and coffeehouse.

The city had fallen almost completely silent by the time Gordon reached the editorial offices of the
Evening
. The night-duty concierge gave him a cheerful wave from behind the window of his booth. If it wasn’t the demijohn of wine in his little cabinet that explained his good mood, then perhaps it was the prime minister’s death. “Good evening, Mr. Editor!” he exclaimed with a tip of his hat. Leaning out his tiny window, he watched as Gordon vanished at the top of the stairs.

The newsroom was empty but for the on-duty typist. Ever since Gordon had started working for the
Evening
, this role was filled by Valéria. Even now she sat there at her desk, a sheet of paper rolled into her machine, the lamplight shining on her snow-white hair, dark glasses—her most prized possession—covering her eyes. She proudly showed this rare treasure to everyone in the office: mountain climbers’ glasses equipped with leather side-shields brought home from Bern, Switzerland, by one of her girlfriends. By lamplight she could read only while wearing them, and—she insisted—she hadn’t seen the sun in ten years. “The fate of albinos,” she had once explained to Gordon. “But I don’t mind. Here, everything is calm and quiet, and in the wee hours I can always get in a few hours of reading.” Tonight she raised the volume in her hand: the latest in a series of mystery novels published by Athenaeum Press.

“What’s wrong, Zsigmond?” Valéria asked, having lowered her book. “Can’t you sleep? Has Krisztina sent you packing?”

“I won’t have time tomorrow morning to write the article about that barber from out in Szentlőrinckáta.”

“The dismemberment?”

“Yes.” With that, Gordon went to his desk while Valéria raised the thin little book before her black glasses and went on reading. Turning on the lamp, he pulled his notebook from his pocket. He rolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter and began to type:

Budapest received news today of a shocking crime, a terrible murder in the village of Szentlőrinckáta: Frigyes Novotny, a 46-year-old barber, strangled Erzsébet Barta, the 30-year-old divorcee he’d been living with. After the murder, he dismembered the body, which he then burned. Though the victim was killed in March, her remains were only discovered when new tenants had moved into the barber’s home: János Zombori, a tradesman, and his wife. Mrs. Zombori lit the oven to bake bread. When the fire didn’t take, she attempted to clean out the oven, making the alarming discovery: human bones in the ashes. She immediately ran to the gendarme post, where . . .

The phone rang. Gordon raised his head, but continued typing when he saw Valéria pick up the receiver:

. . . she reported her discovery to the head of the local gendarmes.

“Zsigmond!”

Gordon turned around.

“It’s for you.”

“Who is it?”

“He says his name is Kalmár.”

Gordon ran over to the phone.

“How did you know I was here?” he asked.

“I didn’t know, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to try.”

“So, what is it?”

“The usual. Your beat. We found a girl.”

“What sort of girl?”

“What do you think? A dead one.”

“Who have you told?”

“I always begin with you,” replied the cop.

“That I believe. Were you on the scene, too?”

“No, I’m calling from headquarters. You’ve always paid my five pengős, so why wouldn’t you pay me now?”

“Give me the address.”

“You can be especially grateful for this, Gordon. It’s right in your neighborhood.”

“Don’t go telling me the tram ran down some maid out on the main boulevard.”

“I won’t. You’ll see the cops out front at the start of Nagy Diófa Street. There they are, standing around a very lovely and very dead young woman’s corpse.”

“Did she swallow a bunch of match heads? Jump out the window?”

“How should I know? But I think you should get moving if you want to see her. The coroner left for the scene ten minutes ago.”

Gordon pulled on his trench coat, slammed his hat on his head, and grumbled something to Valéria on his way out.

W
ithin a couple of minutes he’d arrived at Nagy Diófa Street. As soon as he turned the corner from Rákóczi Street, he saw the black hearse and, beside it, a few uniformed officers and two plainclothes ones. Gordon looked at his watch: it was past ten. Usually he avoided murder scenes; he’d seen quite enough of them, and after five years with the
Evening
there wasn’t much that could surprise him. And yet he hurried now, for Kalmár had called him first; the next day—regardless of the prime minister’s death—this is what every paper would write about. But he was the only one on the scene so far, and that was worth more than five pengős.

As the crime reporter at the
Evening
, Gordon knew the countless modes of death better than he would have wished. Maids drank ground-up match heads to poison themselves and flung themselves in front of trams. Barbers dismembered their lovers. Divorcees slashed their veins with razors. Tradesmen’s apprentices leaped off the Franz Joseph Bridge. Jealous civil servants cut their wives to shreds with butcher knives. Businessmen shot their rivals with revolvers. The possibilities were endless, and yet they were oppressively the same, for the end was always identical.

Hastily he went toward the guarded building, but one of the plainclothes officers stepped in his way. Gordon called out to detective Andor Stolcz, who waved to his colleague to make way. Notebook in hand, Gordon stepped over to the body, which was lying facedown right in the doorway like some discarded rag doll. Her face was turned into her shoulder; her black hair was sprawled out over her back.

“When did she die?” asked Gordon.

“She’s still warm,” replied Stolcz. “The coroner hasn’t seen her, but I figure she’s been lying here for an hour. It’s amazing the telephone call came in so quickly.”

“Sooner or later a gendarme or a police officer would have passed down the street and seen her.”

“Assuming no one else would have.”

“What did she die of?”

The squat, veiny detective shook his head. “How should I know, Gordon? We’ve only been here a couple of minutes. I don’t see blood.”

“Nor do I. Who is the girl?”

“Now that’s the thing,” said Stolcz, sticking his hands in his pockets. “We didn’t find a thing in her purse. Just a few shreds of paper and a Jewish book.”

“A what?” Gordon fixed his eyes on Stolcz.

“A Jewish prayer book.” The detective reached inside the open back door of the automobile waiting on the sidewalk. “This,” he said, producing a thick little package wrapped in a piece of white fabric. He unwrapped the book and held it out toward Gordon.

“Is anything particular written inside it?”

“Nothing. A few pages with their corners turned in. That’s it.”

“Nothing to identify her.”

“I’ll look at the list of missing persons back at headquarters,” said the detective with a shrug, “but I doubt she would have been reported. And anyway, we just found her. Maybe in a couple of days someone will report her missing. You know as well as I do that more than one or two girls arrive in Budapest every day who wind up in this neighborhood. This isn’t the first streetwalker to end up in an unmarked grave in this city.”

Gordon nodded. But this was exceptional all the same: a dead Jewish girl on a street with such a dubious reputation. He took another look at the corpse. One of her feet was wedged under her body, and on the other foot he saw an ungainly, cheap, high-heeled shoe. Her skirt had slipped to the side, and there was a run in her brown stocking. Her peach-colored blouse shone from underneath her threadbare but good quality jacket. “She wasn’t overdressed,” Gordon remarked.

“Let’s just say that for the work she was up to,” replied Stolcz, “she didn’t need to be.” The left sleeve of the jacket had slipped above the elbow. Gordon leaned closer in the scant light. Then he squatted down. He took the girl’s wrist and turned it toward the light. Just below her elbow was a birthmark the size of a two-pengő coin. His stomach churned, as if suddenly in the grips of a long-forgotten childhood fear.

Gordon glanced up at Stolcz, who was talking with the other plainclothes detective as the three uniformed officers listened in. He reached inside his pocket and took out a fountain pen. Carefully he reached out toward the dead girl’s hair, and brushed it away from her face with the pen. The girl’s eyes were open, opaque, the irises dull. And green.

For a couple of seconds Gordon stared at those green eyes, the bloodless face, the slightly curly locks of black hair. It wasn’t hard at all to conjure up that sad, defiant smile he’d seen in Gellért’s photographs.

Two

S
ince every coffeehouse had closed, Gordon hurried back to the newsroom. Valéria had begun a new novel, and she raised her head just as Gordon picked up the telephone to dial. He had to wait eleven rings.

“About dinner . . . tonight,” he began.

“That you were late for again? Or did you want to cancel, Zsigmond? At ten-thirty?”

“I had a long day, Krisztina. Don’t be angry.”

“The devil is angry with you, but I could wring your neck. Tell me, why do I cook for you?”

“Because you like to cook. And I like your cooking.”

“It’s not so simple. You know that full well. And if you think flattery will sweep me off my feet, you’re knocking on the wrong door.”

“You think I don’t remember your fits? You’d be the last person I’d try to flatter.”

“But if you’re not out to flatter, then what?”

“To say sorry; I had a rotten day.”

“You’re always having rotten days.”

“Except when I’m with you.”

“Zsigmond, Zsigmond, it’s way too late. The rooster paprikash is much too cold for me to be in the mood to listen to you.”

“Then don’t listen.”

“Don’t you worry, I won’t. And before I hang up on you, I’ll tell you that Mór stopped by this afternoon and brought another jar of jam. I haven’t tasted it yet, but this time it looks edible, surprisingly enough.” With that, she slammed down the receiver. Gordon shrugged and put down the phone. He couldn’t know whether Valéria was looking his way from behind her dark glasses, but he suspected she was. He nodded her way and then headed home.

T
he next morning Gordon woke early and started his day at the Abbázia Coffeehouse on the Oktogon, the bustling eight-sided intersection where the Grand Boulevard met Andrássy Street.

“Good morning, Mr. Editor,” the waiter greeted him before leading him over to his usual table, placing the morning papers before him along with the freshly arrived papers from London and New York. The fellow then hurried off to get Gordon his breakfast. Gordon sat and stared out at the Oktogon for a while. He’d often been asked why he liked the Abbázia, since it was so passé compared to the Japán Coffeehouse barely a block away. Gordon would always shrug and reply, “Their coffee is good.” Not that this was true; the coffee at the Abbázia was average, and for one pengő and sixty fillérs, the breakfast wasn’t exactly filling. Gordon liked it because he was a regular. He could sit at the same table by the window, watching the busy Oktogon in the morning and Andrássy Street decked out in lights at night.

That morning, however, the Oktogon was far from busy. It could have been 6
A.M.
on a Sunday. The noisiest thing in sight was the tram, and he saw far fewer cars and buses than usual. Most shops hadn’t even opened, and two out of the three coffeehouses were closed. The usual surging crowd had vanished: there were no onlookers; no maids headed toward the market on Lövölde Square to shop; no shoe shiners; no kids making a racket. Those passing by were clearly going about their business resolutely.