Budapest Noir (25 page)

“No?” asked Irma, casting him a bewildered stare. “No?” she repeated, gasping for breath before she finally snapped. Her tears erupted, again her bosom heaved, and the air at times seemed stuck inside her throat. She tottered over to the divan, leaned against it with her left arm, and, hunched over, sobbed. Within a couple of minutes, though, she’d collected herself once more. She stood up straight. She took a handkerchief from under her sleeve and wiped her eyes. In vain. The tears gushed silently on. Szőllősy now raised his gray eyes to Gordon.

“You . . .” he began, gesturing with a hand toward the door, “you can just get out of here.” Gordon glanced at the woman.

“This man is not going anywhere,” Mrs. Szőllősy declared hoarsely. “He is not going anywhere until we’ve listened to what he has to say.”

“If you have a need for this, then go ahead, listen,” said Szőllősy, rising to his feet. “I’ve got business. I’m waiting for the undersecretary.”

Bowing her head, the woman stared up at her husband from beneath the lock of hair that had fallen over her eyes. She tightened a hand into a fist and stepped before him. “You have no business more important than this,” she said to him softly. “You are not going anywhere.”

The man hesitated for a moment only, for a fraction of a moment, but even that was enough for the suspicion to come over his wife’s face. Szőllősy cast Gordon a stealthy glance. He tried disguising his anxiety by reaching for the cigar case on the writing desk. He removed a cigar, slipped off its paper band, and took out a little knife, with which he cut off the end of the cigar. He then thrust a thick match into the cigar so deep that only its tip was visible. Szőllősy stuck the cigar between his teeth and raised a lighter from the case. He lit the cigar and blew a thick cloud of smoke around himself. The woman now slowly turned toward Gordon and looked at him with anticipation.

“You can correct me if I’ve got it wrong anywhere,” Gordon began. He spoke in a dispassionate voice, looking rarely at the notes on his knee. “Your daughter, Fanny, returned from Paris this past spring. There she’d met Shlomo, Rav Shay’ale Reitelbaum’s son, who was likewise studying in Paris. Fanny announced that she was marrying the boy. You forbade this.” Gordon looked over at Szőllősy, who went on smoking. “Indeed, the same night you got in a car and went to the rabbi. What you did there I do not know, but it isn’t important. I doubt you paid him off; maybe instead you threatened him somehow or, perhaps, promised something.” Gordon cast Szőllősy another glance, but the man’s face didn’t even flinch. “The next day, the rabbi took his son to Hamburg and put him on the ship to New York. And you sat down with Fanny for a talk. It doesn’t take much imagination on my part to figure out what you spoke about and in what tone of voice, for by the end you’d disowned your daughter. Your wife didn’t dare confront you.”

“There’s no confronting you,” the woman hissed.

“So then, Fanny, who thus lost virtually all her friends and acquaintances, wound up out on the streets—on Rákóczi Street, to be precise. There, a petty criminal by the name of Józsi Laboráns, who keeps prostitutes, swooped down on her. Do you want to know how he does it?”

“Go ahead and tell him,” the woman replied. Gordon explained how Józsi Laboráns had terrorized their daughter. “Csuli, the gang leader, denied it, but I suspect that the man gave your daughter one helluva beating. Only then did he put her to work. You knew nothing at all about all this.” Gordon held a momentary pause, then looked at Szőllősy. “All the way up until two weeks ago, that is, when you got wind that a pretty young hooker had popped up at Red Margo’s.” Gordon watched the man’s every breath of air. He’d been certain of everything he’d said up to this point. But, here, he was just guessing. A muscle twitched on Szőllősy’s face. Gordon knew he was on the right track. He continued. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said to the man, who just sat there motionless, swathed in a cloud of smoke. “I see. Then I wasn’t mistaken. You and your politician chums are regulars at Red Margo’s place.”

“Don’t you sit there poker-faced!” Szőllősy’s wife shrieked at her husband, and in one fell swoop she swept the telephone off the corner of the desk. “You think I didn’t know? I even know her name, you wretch. Red Margo. What a lowlife you are.”

“In short,” Gordon continued, “the album—or catalog, call it what you will—wound up in your hands. I wouldn’t even be surprised if you paid a visit to the Parliament building for that very reason. To have a look at this new gal for yourself. Or maybe you saw the catalog not in the Parliament building but somewhere else. It doesn’t matter. You opened it up and saw your own daughter. Naked. Inviting. The way Skublics photographs the girls that come his way. I can’t imagine what you must have felt when you saw your own daughter in a catalog advertising prostitutes.” Gordon looked up at Szőllősy. “You won’t be telling us anytime soon, I imagine, and I don’t want to guess.”

“So that’s where the picture came from,” the woman muttered. Again the blood drained from her face. She staggered over to the divan and sat down.

“That’s where,” said Gordon. “Of course we mustn’t forget that your husband didn’t tell you a thing about this, just as you didn’t tell him you’d met up with Fanny. Not just once, in fact. You gave her money regularly.” Szőllősy only turned his eyes toward his wife. “But you didn’t know what your daughter needed the money for.” The woman shook her head in silence. Gordon continued: “She was saving money for ship fare so she could join Shlomo and so they’d have something to live on until they found work.”

Gordon leaned forward. “By the end of September, then, both of you knew what your daughter was involved in. Maybe even earlier. Only you didn’t tell each other.” Gordon looked at the woman. “You’d hired a private eye to figure out how Fanny was making money. The detective not only figured it out, but he even found a picture to prove it.”

Gordon fell silent, put his notes on the desk, and continued without them. “Both of you knew precisely what had happened to her, what she’d become.” He looked again at the woman. “You tried talking to her, persuading her, appealing to her better side. As for you . . .” Gordon turned back to the man. “You chose another path. You knew full well that if word got out about what your politician chums were using your daughter for, that would have been the end of you. To be more precise, you could have called it a day permanently had it come up whose daughter your buddies were romping about with. I can imagine what sorts of questions you would have been asked. Until now everyone had turned a blind eye to you. About you being a scam. A fraud. A Jew-turned-Christian doing business with the Germans. Not that there’s anything unusual or contemptible about that. But folks chummed up to you, no, not because you were called Valiant Knight András Szőllőshegyi Szőllősy, but because they knew you had to be rich, filthy rich, to get your hands on such a title. What are your merits, after all? What’s made you so worthy of the title Valiant Knight?” Szőllősy listened in silence. “You never took it upon yourself to publicly have a say in politics, and while I don’t know what party you fund, I suspect it’s the National Unity Party. That’s why folks schmoozed with you. Because you have money. You think your politician friends don’t know you’re a Jew? They know. Just like they know that, by now, you’re Catholic. But if someone had gotten wind that your daughter was a harlot, a prostitute to politicians—a girl who, moreover, wanted to reconvert to the Jewish faith so she could marry the son of a rabbi . . .” Here Gordon paused for effect, to let his words fade away in the utter silence of the living room. “And let’s not forget, either, that Mussolini meanwhile invaded Abyssinia. Which surely came in handy for you. No longer did you have to buy coffee from the Negus; you could do so straight from Mussolini. And since you’re on such good terms with Nazi business circles, you might have been able to finagle an even lower price out of the Italians.” Gordon looked at Szőllősy. “You think I haven’t kept an eye on stock prices? You think I don’t know how much you make on a hundred kilos of coffee? If you raise the price by just ten Reichsmarks, you can book yourself one huge profit even then.”

Gordon stood up, stepped over to the drinks, and poured himself another whiskey. Szőllősy’s face slowly began turning red. His wife listened with a broken, uncomprehending expression.

“That’s when you had a word with your private secretary,” said Gordon, sitting back down. “To take action. Your private secretary, isn’t that right?” He looked at Szőllősy. “I take your silence as a yes. Your secretary somehow turned up Pojva, a defrocked boxer and a booze-brained brute, to give your daughter a scare. Not a big scare, mind you, just a small one. Just enough so she’d come home. So the whole thing would be over. Pojva found Fanny on the sixth. I don’t think he was out to kill your daughter, and I have a hard time believing that you wanted that.” Gordon shook his head. “The only problem is that your secretary couldn’t have found a more unsuitable man than Pojva for the task. For him, giving the scare to a defenseless girl is the same as doing so to a strong guy. All you wanted was to have her beaten just a little, to have her robbed, so Fanny would come running on home. Things might even have turned out this way, though I doubt Fanny would have set foot in this house again.

“In case you’re interested, I know almost exactly what happened that night, because that’s how Pojva started off with me, too. Yes, ma’am”—Gordon nodded toward Mrs. Szőllősy—“your husband had Pojva sent after me, too, except that I lived through it. Your daughter didn’t. But Pojva didn’t set out to kill her, let’s make that clear. He wanted to give her a scare. He socked her in the pit of the stomach. I got through it because I knew what to expect. But Pojva caught your daughter by surprise: he made a fist right away and hit.” Gordon turned to Szőllősy. “Of course, you’re a clever man. I figure you didn’t tell your secretary who the girl was whom Pojva was supposed to beat up. As for Pojva, he didn’t have a guilty conscience. He doesn’t have a conscience to begin with, as far as I can tell, but that’s another story. Your daughter died, and Pojva took the money from her purse—almost two thousand pengős. He then went on his way without even looking back. When you found out what had happened to Fanny, you acted fast. You looked up Bárczy, right?” Szőllősy was silent. “Yes, that’s what I figure you did. But what did you tell him that made him call off the investigation? How the hell did he convince Vladimir Gellért not to look into the case?”

Szőllősy said not a word as he tapped the ashes off his cigar.

“Talk, you wretch!” shouted his wife, grabbing the telephone up off the floor. “Talk, goddamnit, or I’ll strangle you with this phone cord!”

Szőllősy cast her a scornful stare. “I told him there was a prostitute who blackmailed me. If I didn’t pay her, she’d proclaim our doings far and wide.”

“And you told him you’d taken care of this girl,” said Gordon, “but you weren’t so sure that the cops wouldn’t land on your trail in the course of the investigation. But that’s not enough in and of itself. Is it big news, after all, that men of your ilk buy pleasure with cash?”

“It’s not,” said Szőllősy. “Bárczy knew that, too. So did everyone. But I wanted him to take me seriously. I told him that the . . .
hooker
”—he practically spit the word out—“didn’t blackmail me only with this, but with something else, too.”

“With what?”

“With me doing it with men,” Szőllősy replied indifferently.

“That you do
what
?!” shrieked his wife.

“Of course I don’t do it.” Her husband looked at her with disdain. “But that would indeed have been enough to blackmail someone. I had to come up with a solid motive, one Bárczy would take seriously. Just because I had a hooker taken out wouldn’t have given him reason to do anything at all.”

“So you sold yourself to the undersecretary,” Gordon slowly said. “You figured it would be better to have Bárczy keep you in check with him thinking you’re a sodomite than for it to turn out that your daughter became a hooker serving the upper crust because she wanted to marry a Jew. You even took the risk of him setting István Cár’s men on you.”

“Who is that?” asked Mrs. Szőllősy.

“Cár is a detective with Unit V. Crimes against decency—that’s his beat. He goes hunting for Uranians.”

“I for one don’t know what ‘Uranians’ are,” said the woman.

“Slang for homosexuals,” Gordon replied. “He’s locked up more than one. In a word, then, you’ve taken on even this risk—that of being sent to a detention camp—so the truth about your daughter doesn’t come out.”

“You could put it that way.”

“Bárczy was more than happy to have Gellért put a halt to the investigation. With this information, which, moreover, you’d freely shared with him, for all practical purposes he could hold a loaded revolver to your head. All the time.”

Mrs. Szőllősy raised her eyes to her husband. “You are a . . .”

“Go ahead,” said Szőllősy, “finish your sentence.”

The woman did not answer. She stared straight ahead. The telephone fell from her hand.

Gordon nodded. “Bárczy got word to Kozma, and Kozma passed along the instructions to Gellért. It’s clear. That’s what they were talking about at Gömbös’s wake.”

“What?” asked the woman.

Looking at Gordon as if his wife was not there, Szőllősy explained, “And on the same occasion, Gellért told Kozma that you were snooping around.”

“And that’s how this information made its way back to you,” said Gordon. “That’s why you set Pojva on me.”

“I had to somehow warn you to keep your distance from the affair,” replied Szőllősy, ever more caught up in the telling of the story, as if proud of what he’d done.

“And yet you couldn’t have a journalist killed, after all.”

“Don’t be so sure about that.”

“I’m not. But I didn’t let what did happen get the better of me.”

“No.”

“That’s why you set Gellért on me, too, right? When I left the Sztambul Coffeehouse. You had him sent there.”

The man nodded.

“But there you miscalculated,” said Gordon, locking his eyes on Szőllősy. “Fundamentally. The chief inspector didn’t scare me off, you see. Indeed, he’s the one who set me on the right path. Had it not been for Gellért, I don’t think I would be here today.”