Budapest Noir (5 page)

“I’m looking for Skublics.”

“You can keep looking, but I don’t know who that is.”

“Supposedly he lives here.”

“No one told me,” said the woman, shaking her head and pulling the curtain shut. Gordon reached inside his pocket, pulled out a two-pengő coin, and with that knocked on the window once again.

“Whadayawant?”

“I found this under your window,” he said, showing her the coin in his palm. The woman reached out for it, but Gordon pulled his hand back.

“What is that name you said, sir?” asked the woman, her eyes on Gordon.

“Skublics.”

“Aha! Now that’s different. I don’t know what goes on in his place, but I’m not even interested, I’m telling you.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“And I don’t know what sort of girls go to him, morning and night.”

“Which flat is his?”

“See the attic door?” The woman pointed. Gordon nodded. “Well, if you open that, you’ll see another door first thing on the right. Knock on that.” The woman reached her sinewy, crooked hand out the window. Gordon dropped the coin into her palm and went to the attic door.

In the dark he could barely make out the door, it blended in so much with the wall. At some point it had been painted terra-cotta red, like the building’s bricks, but now both it and the wall were grimy. He knocked. No answer. Again. Still no answer. He pounded. Nothing.

Gordon was just about to leave when a skinny girl with alarmingly white skin stepped out from the darkness. Her thin strands of greasy hair were woven in a knot, and her big eyes shone of fear. Even her pleated skirt was not enough to hide her spindly legs and bony hips. Her white blouse with its worn embroidery hung loosely on her frame, but even so, Gordon could see her sunken chest, her flat breasts. With a long finger she anxiously fiddled with a stray lock of hair.

“Please don’t make noise,” she requested.

“And who are you?”

“I’m . . . Mr. Skublics’s . . . cleaning woman,” came the girl’s faltering reply.

“Then what are you doing out here?”

“I came early,” she explained. “Mr. Skublics is never home in the morning, sir. He’s always at the thermal bath, and I got here early.”

“When did your train get in?”

“Six,” the girl blurted out without thinking, but then it hit her, and wringing her hands, she continued: “Oh, please don’t tell anyone, sir! There’s no work to be had in Debrecen, which is why I’m here. And I don’t even have a servant’s license.”

“You don’t need a servant’s license for what you’re preparing to do,” said Gordon, looking her square in the eye.

“You sure do need one for cleaning!” the girl protested.

“All right, kid. For that you do. But take it from me, this sort of cleaning doesn’t lead to any good.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Forget it, kid. I’m not going to the police.”

The girl dropped to her knees and clutched Gordon’s left hand, which she proceeded to smother with kisses. “God bless you, sir! May the grace of the good Lord be with you! There are six of us siblings, I’m the oldest, and . . .”

“Don’t go explaining it to me,” said Gordon, pulling his hand away. “I’ll be back later. After lunch. Will Skublics get home by then?”

“The others said he would.”

G
ordon reached the Circle in a couple of minutes. He saw that his grandfather’s balcony door was now open. Every morning the old man would roam about the neighborhood markets—come rain, sleet, or snow—looking for fruit he was ever determined to turn into jam.

The building entrance was open, and so Gordon walked up to the second floor and opened the apartment door. Mór couldn’t get it through his head that he no longer lived in the provinces, that locking the door was a good idea. From the sounds coming from the kitchen, Gordon could tell he was pottering about in there even now. The clatter of pots and pans mingled with the sound of the old man’s cheerful cursing.

“Wonderful, wonderful!” he said, his face lighting up on seeing Gordon. He wiped his hands on the blazer that was buttoned askew over his round belly. Gordon had bought him at least three aprons, but the old man wouldn’t hear of using them. He was like those veterans of the Great War who proudly wore their injuries. He wanted everyone to know that he was cooking jam. Not that he could have denied this had he wanted to: bits of fruit skin were stuck to his gray beard, and the jam of the day had even found its way to his bushy eyebrows. Opa was willing to make one concession only: although he didn’t remove his blazer, he did roll up the sleeves along with those of his shirt. Of course, even if his shirt cuffs came away clean—he wore a clean shirt every day—the sleeves of his blazer provided a fairly accurate picture of his recent culinary experimentations.

“Son, I bought some marvelous grapes on Lövölde Square, I did!” He smiled broadly. “Simply dazzling. And just thirty-eight fillérs for a kilo. For the rhubarb I had to go all the way to the City Market, but it was worth it, boy, was it ever worth it. Just look at these nice hard stems.” Reaching into one of his baskets, he pulled out five plump rhubarbs. Gordon shuddered; he didn’t even like them stewed.

“What are you working on now, Opa?” he asked.

“Ha!” The old man’s face lit up again, and he continued triumphantly. “Not even the Gastronome has heard of this! I thought of it a couple of days ago: grape-rhubarb jam!” He stirred the mixture bubbling on the stove. “If it works, I’ll send him the recipe immediately. Immediately, I say!”

Gordon nodded. Mór was obsessed with getting his name into the Gastronome’s column in the Sunday issue of the
Budapest Journal
. It was as if his decades of healing others had vanished from his memory banks without a trace. He knew a great many people in the capital, so when he decided after his wife’s death to move up to Budapest from his hometown of Keszthely, hours to the south on Lake Balaton, he could easily have resumed his medical practice or even taught. But no. The old man seemed bent on devoting his final decades to creating a jam the Gastronome would find worthy of publication.

“You didn’t eat what I sent with Krisztina, did you?” he asked sullenly.

“I did, Opa,” said Gordon. “What sort of jam was it?”

“Chestnut,” replied Mór with a dismissive wave of the hand, “but I’ve figured out how I ruined it. As soon as I find really nice chestnuts at the market, I’ll try it again.”

“I thought it was good. Not that I could have said it was chestnut, but it was tasty.”

“Well, you’ll like this a whole lot better,” Mór claimed, reaching into the pantry and taking out a small pot, which he proudly set down on the table. He took a brioche from the bread basket, spread a slice with some butter he took from the refrigerator, and applied a thick layer of the stuff from the pot.

Gordon was in no position to resist. But he would have liked to. While he couldn’t stand anything sour, the old man, who found classical jams—strawberry, apricot, peach—gauche, experimented with more hair-raising recipes. Gordon took a deep breath, and then a bite of the jam-covered brioche. He watched Mór’s ruddied face. Slowly Gordon nodded, quickly forcing down the whole slice.

“Well? Well?” asked the old man.

“I’m just asking, Opa, but shouldn’t you have removed the seeds from the grapes?”

Mór threw a hand to his forehead. “For the love of God! I forgot. That one thing.”

“And the sugar, too,” Gordon mumbled, but the old man didn’t hear, for he was back by the stove, stirring the simmering jam. “Opa, I’ve got a question,” he continued louder.

“Question?”

“Yes.”

“And what would that be?” asked Mór, his back still to Gordon.

“Well, two nights ago they found a dead girl on Nagy Diófa Street. She had no superficial marks, only her face had turned a bit blue. I’ll go by the coroner’s office, but what do you figure she could have died of?”

“Son, you’re not asking me seriously,” said the old man, turning around. “So many things that it’s not even worth listing them all. Was it suicide?”

“I don’t know.”

“And why do you want to know?”

“Because I was on the scene, and I want to write an article about it, only there’s nothing to write. Besides, something’s not quite right about this girl.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Mór. “In that neighborhood there aren’t too many upright ladies.”

“This was no run-of-the-mill prostitute, Opa, but a Jewish girl who was probably from a bourgeois family.”

“Is Dr. Somkuthy still the chief coroner?” asked the old man.

“Yes.”

Mór stepped over to the telephone and had the operator connect him to the Institute of Forensic Medicine. Within a few minutes he was talking to Dr. Somkuthy.

“They’ll be doing an urgent autopsy on the girl,” he told Gordon after putting down the receiver.

“You didn’t have to do that, Opa,” said Gordon. “Really. I only asked you what the cause of death might have been.”

“Son, since you’ve been working for the
Evening
, this is the first time you’ve asked me a question concerning an article of yours. So it must be important to you. I’ll add that your question is foolish, for if anyone should know, you certainly should, that unless someone has a knife sticking out of their heart or has just been pulled out of the Danube, it’s practically impossible to say what did them in without an autopsy. You can go to the coroner’s office this afternoon.”

M
eanwhile it had begun to rain in big, swollen drops. Gordon hugged the buildings as he walked quickly along Aradi Street without an umbrella. Silence now reigned in Skublics’s building; only the stink accompanied Gordon up to the sixth floor. He opened the attic door and glanced around but didn’t see the girl anywhere. He knocked on the inner door. In a minute a hoarse, smoke-saturated voice called out: “Get lost.”

Gordon began pounding on the door. Again came the voice: “What do you want?”

Gordon said he’d gotten his name from Vogel and that he wanted a word with him. Finally, Skublics let him in. All Gordon could make out in the dark hall was a stunted old man with an idiotic goatee. Skublics went on ahead, opening up another door.

Gordon found himself in a living room furnished with exceptional taste: carved furniture, leather armchairs, Turkish carpets, a crystal chandelier, and paintings on the walls. Just one thing was missing: a window. Gordon was beginning to suspect they were in the heart of the building, and he was certain that this flat was entirely windowless; yet it might well have a separate exit to the attic. Suddenly he found it hard to imagine he could be in the right place. This was not how he’d imagined the apartment of a black-market photographer. Just what he’d expected, he couldn’t have said, but not this. Moreover, he saw nothing that so much as suggested that Skublics even had a camera.

“What do you want?” Skublics shot out his question once again. Gordon was now able to get a good look at him. The short old man was wearing a good quality suit, complemented by a gold-chained pocket watch. His hands were bony and his fingers long, like the feet of a sparrow hawk. He’d let his nails grow, and this only strengthened Gordon’s impression that he was talking with an aged bird of prey. His sunken eyes topped off a face of baggy and pale parchment-like skin. He spoke fast, as if spitting out his words. “What do you want? I don’t want to ask again. I don’t care whether Vogel or someone else sent you, out with it!”

Gordon momentarily dropped his head and took a deep breath. He was just about to reply when a door sunk deep in the wall opened up, and out stepped the scrawny girl. She was buttoning her blouse. When she saw Gordon, her eyes turned away and she quickly went back where she’d come from.

“What do I want?” Gordon now asked in a quiet, menacing voice.

“What you saw here is none of your business,” the old man proclaimed. “You can get going, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Not until you answer my question. You took a picture of a young girl barely over twenty with slightly curly black hair.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Of course you do,” said Gordon, stepping closer to him. The old man did not draw back. “A green-eyed Jewish girl. With a big birthmark on her left arm.”

“I don’t remember any yiddie gal.”

“No?”

“No.”

“And what is that girl doing here?”

“I took her portrait.”

“Full figure, nude?”

“It’s my business who I photograph and how. It’s not me who decides but my clients.”

“Your clients.”

“Them.”

“Does the vice squad know about your little business?”

Skublics turned beet-red. Gordon had gone too far. He shouldn’t have threatened the old man, at least not now and not like this. He couldn’t have proven a thing, and it wasn’t at all out of the question that the vice squad already knew what Skublics was up to. What good would it do to file a complaint at headquarters? Nothing for now. Not until he learned what he wanted could he do a thing. Gordon was certain that Skublics had taken the girl’s picture, and he was also certain that he wouldn’t get anything out of him.

“I advise you to leave,” hissed Skublics.

“I’ll be back again,” said Gordon, turning around and slamming the door behind him.

T
he Grand Boulevard had come alive. True, it wasn’t quite as noisy and full of people as on most Thursdays, but the city was indeed starting to rise from the dead. Temporarily, at any rate, for Gömbös’s wake had begun at three o’clock in the rotunda of the Parliament building, and a good many people planned to pay their respects at the prime minister’s bier before the funeral on Saturday. While riding the tram to the newsroom, Gordon read the
Budapest Journal
’s coverage of the wake. True, the general public would be able to pay its respects, but in actuality, the Parliament building was open only by invitation. He had to be there on duty, and he already shuddered at the thought. He liked neither open coffins nor seeing corpses. Gordon loathed the thought that he’d have to stand there in front of the Parliament building and follow the funeral procession through downtown all the way to Kerepesi Cemetery.