Triptych (23 page)

Chapter Twenty

Gustav and I pause in the doorway of St. Elizabeth's imposing nave. Late afternoon, and the crew is bare bones, scattered here and there, up on the scaffolding and down on their knees, painting, scraping and polishing.

We descend the stairs.

I rap lightly on the door of Tibor's small room. No response. I inch the door open and am assaulted by a wave of sour odor. The glazed window I had noticed on my earlier visit is shut, trapping the stench inside. Sunlight pounding through the window illuminates Attila on his back, the blanket in disarray at his ankles.

I cup my hand over my mouth and nose but my stomach is already queasy from the smell. It lurches when I glimpse Attila's face. Eyes closed, skin sickly white, green-tinged vomit spilling from the corner of his open mouth.

“
Ó Krisztus
,” Gustav whispers next to me.

We step deeper into the room. Gustav kneels down beside Attila.

He lifts a limp wrist, then rests an ear on Attila's chest. “Gone.”

His head comes up slightly, a quizzical look on his face. He leans close again.

“What is it?” I ask.

“The scent. It is something I recognize. Have not encountered for a long time.”

“Vomit?” I ask incredulously before noticing he is sniffing the extensive damp area staining the front of Attila's shirt.

Not vomit. A liquid stain.

Gustav sits back on his haunches. “It is alcohol. Absinthe. I know this from the smell. Anise. No mistake.”

“But absinthe is illegal. How'd he get it? Why? The alcohol content is so high—” I meet Gustav's gaze. Attila was an alcoholic at the end of his rope. Ingesting any liquor whatsoever could have been deadly. “He wanted to kill himself?”

My eyes flick to the mattress, across the floor. Where was the bottle?

My heart stops. Tibor's flask. I grab it. The lid is off, it feels empty. I smell the mouth. Odorless. Maybe a hint of sweat.

“Look at his mouth,” Gustav says.

This is the last thing I want to do, but I had come here to learn what Attila might reveal. Blood taints the green puke coating the skin near a nick in his upper lip. Red, green, white. I shake off the bizarre thought of national colors, look closer. The lip is swollen, especially on the side where the drop of blood has congealed.

“You think someone forced it on him?”

A lift of a shoulder. “I have seen death in many forms. This, I think is murder.”

Another disturbing thought.

“My mother's prayer book….” I crouch, gingerly patting the mattress around Attila. “Where is it?”

Within the coarse folds of the stiff wool blanket, I feel something hard, about the right size. I lift the covering. The prayer book.

“Got it.” I begin flipping pages. “Kati's picture. It's still here.” The photo is face down. I pick it up. Someone has scrawled across the yellowed surface. A name, almost illegible.
A. Hadjok
.

“Can I see?”

“Y-yes, of course. Only…”

“Only what?”

“This writing. It wasn't here before.”

“
Jézus József és Mary
,” Tibor says from behind us. “The stink. What has happened?” Gustav and I are blocking his view of Attila. He moves in beside us, clicks his tongue, tsk.
“Death in a pool of sick. Fitting,” he says. “But how this happen? I have been to our priest's house. Called by the housekeeper for a necessary repair. He is fine when I leave. Sleeping.”

“Alcohol,” Gustav says.

“Nooo. Where he get alcohol? There is no alcohol here. And Attila he have nothing when he arrive. I am sure. I search him.”

“Someone else brought it, made him drink,” I say. “At least that's the way it looks.” I point out the swollen lip, the small cut.

“This is
bolond
, crazy. Who? Just you, Ildikó, Zsófi, and Mariska. We are the only people who know Attila is here.”

“Someone must have followed him here,” I say. “Maybe someone who knew about his past.”

“The stain…” Tibor says uncertainly, eyeing the liquid blotch on the front of his loaned out shirt. “I have witnessed drunks choked to death on their own throw up. They drink too much, pass out, the gag reflex it does not kick in to wake them up. But the green. I have not seen this.”

Gustav explains about absinthe. While he is talking, my thoughts fly back to the investigator who came to the house to tell my father that nothing had come of my mother's case. The man had barely said hello to me, but his mere presence stirred up things I would rather not have remembered. The violent way my mother died. The reality that she was gone, never coming back. That Chicago's finest were stymied by what and how it had happened. The system's failure. I cannot bear another round.

I check my watch. “Tibor, someone needs to call the police. Gustav has to be somewhere else. Do you think you could handle this?”

Tibor's encounters with authoritarian figures have been worse than mine. How could I have asked such a favor? Before I can take it back, he answers.

“Yes, go, please. I am in charge down here. I give Attila this room, let him stay. It is my responsibility. I will take care of this.”

“But leaving a crime scene—” I counter.

“This is not crime scene. We cannot say for certain what has happened to Attila.” He hesitates. “Who can say you two were ever here?” He sees my troubled expression. “Do not worry, if it develops I must tell them, I will tell. For now, go.”

***

Outside, Gustav offers to drive me to
Duna Utca
. With my emotions roiling over witnessing a dead body then leaving a possible crime scene, I agree, but insist he takes me no further than his house. He has an opening to go to; I can catch a bus from there.

Arriving at his place, I decide to call Zsófi, explain the delay.

We navigate the flagstone walkway to the back of the main house and halt. The door on the ground level of the converted garage is ajar.

“My dark room,” Gustav says, jogging toward it.

I rush after him. He is already inside.

Apart from the wedge of sunlight streaming in from the doorway, the space is completely black. Gustav turns on a ceiling lamp. His head whips left and right. Cabinet doors above and below the counter are open; photography paper and upended developing pans litter the floor. Someone has broken in.

“What were they after?” Gustav asks. His eyes grow wide. “Upstairs.”

We sprint up the outdoor staircase. The French doors are shut, the way we'd left them. Inside, a different story. Scattered papers, overturned cushions, gaping drawers, yawning cabinet doors, scattered album jackets. Everywhere, signs of a thorough search.

Gustav heads directly for the workbench. The commercial photographs of brides and babies that had stood along the table's edge lie scattered on the floor, tattered, their surfaces marred with scuff marks as if the person who discarded them ground them with the heel of a shoe.

My stomach drops. Gustav's shadow box. It has been removed from the wall and rests face down, propped on the glass framed front. Almost unbelievably, it is still in one piece.

A paper-thin wooden panel has been removed from the back fitting and tossed aside. The narrow exposed space is empty.

“Gone,” Gustav says. He begins shaking his head side to side.

I place my hands on his face, steadying him. I lock my gaze with his. “What's gone?”

His lips press together so hard they turn white. A second later, “The photo from the Revolution.”

For the second time in less than an hour I make the unpleasant suggestion, “Gustav, you need to call the police.”

He is walking to the open the French doors. Nearby, the black textile piece lies in a heap on the floor. Gustav squats down beside his battered art work. He lifts a jumbled nest of threads. “It will not be necessary.”

“But don't you want to know who did this? Have them arrested? Don't you want the photo back?”

Gustav shakes his head. “No.” His shoulders slumped, he rises slowly. “That was the past. Maybe the person who took it did me a favor. It is time to move on.”

Chapter Twenty-one

On the bus back to
Duna Utca
, my thoughts keep returning to Gustav's casual attitude toward the theft of his keepsake photo. If the intruder had indeed done him a favor, and freed him from the past, then why hadn't he looked relieved? Instead, his face had been clouded with apprehension.

Gustav, man of secrets, and I had thought we were getting to know one another.

***

When I arrive at the store, a customer is just leaving. Mariska has come downstairs to wait for me with Zsófi, but otherwise the place is deserted.

“Please, you must quick, tell us what Attila say,” Mariska says, fanning herself with a magazine. “My blood pressure it goes up by the minute.”

My eyes grow wide. “Auntie…”

“She teases,” Zsófi says. “But come, tell us.”

The news of Attila's death and Gustav's suspicion that he was murdered stuns Zsófi into silence. Mariska's reaction is more offhand. Long ago, she'd had some contact with Attila, but little about those times—or him—had been pleasant. Her concern is for Tibor. She would like to help, but we agree there is nothing to do except to wait for his call. As for my guilt over leaving the scene, she is equally clear: We must leave this to Tibor. It is what he wants. Besides, what could you add to what he will tell the police?

She was right. Tibor knew everything Gustav and I knew about finding Attila's body. Why, then, didn't I feel less uneasy?

It is on the tip of my tongue to tell them about Gustav's damaged flat but decide against it. They had Tibor on their minds. Why give them something else to worry about? Especially when Gustav had so obstinately wanted to play down the incident.

“I have news,” Mariska says out of the blue. “Remember our trip we have booked to Budapest?”

“Of course,” I say.

She explains that an extended trip overseas has been ruled out for the foreseeable future because of her heart incident. But Mrs. Karinthy, owner of Karinthy Travel, the Hungarian travel agency next door, dropped by while I was gone. A client scheduled to leave on a flight to Budapest the day after next had to cancel.

“Know anyone who would like the ticket, she asked me?” Mariska eyes me evenly. Then, “It is a sign. I cannot travel and you must not wait. Go. Visit the place where your mother left her heart. Maybe you will learn something to give you peace.”

The timing is more serendipitous than she could know. I thought of the name
A. Hadjok,
scrawled on the photograph of Kati. “
A
.” for Anikó? The “Anikó” Mariska had vaguely recalled my mother talking about? The friend who had been a cleaning woman at Budapest Communist Party Headquarters while Attila had been working there? The friend we believed my mother would have tried locating on her last trip home? A shiver climbed my spine. A lead, perhaps, to Attila's murder? If indeed he was murdered.

Only by going to Budapest could I possibly learn the answers.

***

“My first trip abroad,” I say loudly, projecting my voice toward the living room while shuffling from dresser to bed where Irina's giant suitcase awaits the small stash of undergarments I've gathered up in my hands.

Edmundo Suave makes no comment. Edmundo, my longtime listening post who has, through the years, stood by, staring stoically with dark wistful eyes while I pour out whatever might be on my mind or in my heart. Today it's decisions of what to take to Budapest.

Light from outdoors seeps through the stained-glass panels of the headboard and bathes the open suitcase in gold. My gaze wanders momentarily to the green opalescent hearts set into the rich golden swirl glass. How such romantic symbols came to be fixtures in the bedroom of one so unlucky in love seems ironic, or did luck play a part at all? That I have had a decades-long string of lovers, each with artistic gifts, a romantic side, and always—as the most vital prerequisite—a “something” that cancels him out as a lifelong mate has been my choice, hasn't it? In Vaclav, his marriage was my safety net. What is Gustav's forbidding flaw?

A band of muted emerald light juts off in the direction of the Louis XV-style dresser I salvaged from a yard sale. The green halo circles the keepsakes I have set aside for my carry-on bag, my mother's prayer book among them.

Yesterday, Mariska and Zsófi had been astonished when I had pulled the prayer book from my purse and showed it to them, along with Kati's photograph. Then, I had turned the photo over.
A. Hadjok
.

Mariska's voice had brimmed with emotion. “Yes, Anikó Hadjok. It is her, your mother's friend. I will make some telephone calls. Get names in Budapest for you to contact.”

“Mariska, please,” Zsófi had interjected, “you must be careful. There is no more AVO, but there is now eyes and ears of KGB.”

“Yes, of course,” Mariska had said.

Afterwards, she had stayed on the phone until late into the evening. Besides contacting local Hungarians, she had called my deceased cousin's daughter, Gyöngyi, in Budapest, who spoke some English. My parents' siblings had all passed away while other close relatives had either moved out of the city or spoke no English. Gyöngyi is now set to act as my conduit once I arrive in Budapest.

Early this morning, I had stopped by Irina's to borrow a suitcase before returning to my condo to pack. I scan the room, deciding what to put in next. On the dresser, the band of soft green light reminds me of a river, of the Two Princesses triptych, of what Gustav thought he saw in the second panel. Not the enchanted kingdom of my imagination, but AVO headquarters, the Danube, a floating head. For the millionth time, I regret not having given my full attention to my mother as she described what she had been doing in Hungary during the last days of her life.

I walk over and pick up the daisy piece. “There is connection here,” I say out loud to steadfast Edmundo, repeating Vaclav's words of long ago. “A bridge to a time in my mother's life, in my life, when things were simple. Innocent. My mother captured that. I wanted to undo this, make it into something that represents the adult, modern me. Vaclav wouldn't let me. I have free will, of course. Still, inside, I knew he was right. How could I remake this to represent my vision when I don't know who I am?”

I press the embroidered linen to my breast. “And now I'm going to my mother's home, Budapest, where she left her heart, where something crushed it. Then she died. And for all these years, I haven't been able to look in a mirror without thinking, ‘You're responsible…'

The door bell rings. No doubt my neighbor curious about the sounds of life coming from inside my place. I had told her I would be gone for another week yet
.

I peer through the peephole. “Gustav—” He is holding flowers.

I open the door. He enters, bringing the perfumy fragrance of roses with him.

“What are you doing here?” I blurt, unable to contain my surprise. Before I can ask the logical follow on question—
and how did you know where to find me?
—he is apologizing for his appearance. Not his clothing—he is wearing a clean gray t-shirt and jeans. He rubs the salt and pepper stubble on his face and finger combs his disheveled hair while explaining he's wired on coffee, he got little sleep last night and didn't have time to shave this morning.

Of course, he had a big night. “So it was a success?”

He looks at me like I'm speaking Martian. “Oh, the gallery show. Yes, it went well. Many people came.” He pauses. We are still in the entry way. He looks over my shoulder, takes in the living room behind me, and turns his attention back to me. “Nice place. You look nice.”

I laugh. My hair is knotted on top of my head and I'm wearing old shorts and a ribbed tank top—the only items of clothing so far I know I'm
not
taking to Budapest. “I'm packing, but now you're here.” I catch a glimmer of what—sadness? pain?—in his eyes. “What is it? Why are you here? And flowers?”

He's holding out an amazing bunch of red and pink roses. The brightly colored bouquet is so generous his hand barely contains the stems. I'm about to add I can't keep them, I'm leaving town, but Gustav speaks first.

“From my garden.” A hesitant smile. “I want to apologize, explain. Yesterday, at my place, I was rude. Abrupt.”

I have to agree. After we'd discovered the shadow box and his destroyed textile piece, he'd ignored me completely, busying himself with cleaning up. He hadn't even said so much as a good-bye when I'd left. Now, looking at the roses, seeing how wrung out he looks, hearing the regret in his voice, I cannot help but melt, forgive him.

I accept the bouquet. “It's understandable. Your apartment had been ransacked. A photograph that's precious to you was stolen.”

He nods. Yes.” He shakes his head. “I mean no. Those are reasons to be upset but not to be rude. I was confused, not myself. I meant what I said. Being relieved of that photo is a kind of symbolic closing of a door to the past. A good thing, but it was upsetting to me, too, to let go. Even when I wanted to. So you see, my emotions were jumbled. I'm sorry if I hurt you. But now…” He looks away.

Too late. I'd seen it again. That look of anguish. Like the deep torment I recognize in Tibor's eyes. From the horrors he has seen and known.

“Come inside.” Holding the flowers in one hand, I grasp his hand with my other, leading him into the living room.

We sit on the white sofa. I place the flowers, their stems secured in tissue, on the coffee table. My heart thumps with anticipation over what he is about to reveal.

“What's happened? You were saying, ‘But now—'”

His shoulders heave. “But now I know. In truth, you do not ever really vanquish the demons from the past. You bring them with you on your life journey, along with the good memories. That's what I need to do. Try to make peace with my demons, make space for them.”

I frown. “I'm not sure I understand.”

“Day after tomorrow, I am going to Budapest.”

My mouth falls open. Words refuse to form.

“Last night, I received this.” He removes a yellow cablegram from his jean's pocket, opening it and holding it so I can read the text. But it's impossible. It's Hungarian. “My only remaining relative, my uncle, is dying. You remember, I told you about him. He gave me my first camera.”

My thoughts are still awhir with the news that he's going to Budapest when I'll be there. I manage a nod. “Y-yes, of course. I'm so sorry.”

Gustav has slouched forward. He straightens up. “He has asked to see me. What can I do? I have decided I must go.”

Behind him, on the narrow table aligned against the sofa's back, my porcelain deer letter-holder holds my airline tickets. I stare at them numbly saying, “Of course you need to go. But I'm going to Budapest. Leaving tomorrow.”

Gustav nods, forces a weary smile. “I know. Of course I did not know this until I went to Karinthy Travel this morning. Mrs. Karinthy told me of the coincidence, and then I visited Mariska and Zsófi. They told me about what is going on, about your mother, what you hope you will find.”

He leans forward again, hands folded, elbows resting on his knees. He contemplates his hands. “Putting the past to rest. It is strange. You are going to Budapest to unravel what happened to your aunt, your mother…” The heels of his palms rub against one another. “At nearly the same moment, the universe has shifted for me, causing me to step into my past. It seems we are on a similar course.”

Mariska told him? Gustav will be in my mother's homeland on a similar mission to mine? I feel a twinge of irritation, then immediately regret it. Mariska and Zsófi are big fans of Gustav's. I cannot deny that my affection for him has been deepening as well. Maybe my luck in love is about to change? In Budapest?

I can feel Edmundo's eyes on me.
You're going there to connect with your mother. Get answers. Peace.

“This is so last minute,” I say. “You got a flight? Isn't there an exclusion list? A list of Hungarians not allowed back into the country?”

Gustav's eyes are bloodshot from lack of sleep. He studies me. “Yes, there is a so-called war criminals list,” he says. “It was extensive in the sixties and seventies. But now, for tourists, Hungarians living abroad, it is easier. In a bad economy, Communist or not, money speaks. The old, hard-line ways they are becoming passé.”

“Oh, I see. Good.” I say hesitantly. “Well, similar courses, but big city, different families, much ground to cover. It's not likely we'll even see one another while there.”

He holds my gaze and, for a moment, my churning thoughts calm. His fingers brush my arm, creating goose bumps, then I feel the weight of his hand on mine. The sound of my own heart, which Gustav's touch has sent racing, nearly drowns out his next words.

“This is not what I hope,” he says, softly. “I hope that while in Budapest we will find much common ground to cover together.”

***

After he leaves, my fingertips linger on my lips, savoring the tenderness in Gustav's hesitant good-bye kiss.

At the French dresser, next to the daisy embroidery and the prayer book, is the final keepsake I plan to take along—the heart-shaped locket that had been clenched in my mother's hand when she died. I pick it up. My thumbnail finds the slit, works apart the two halves. The image of the little girl inside seems familiar. She ought to. I've pondered the determined face hundreds of times.

“It's a complicated knot,” I tell her, “but it's up to me to undo it.”