“And aren’t you curious even now about what a Jewish streetwalker would have been doing here?” Krisztina fixed her eyes on Gordon. “And as long as we’re on the subject, have you ever seen a Jewish prostitute? If you want my opinion, the question is not how she died, but how a Jewish girl—probably from a respectable, bourgeois family—ended up becoming a prostitute in the first place.”
Three
In the morning Gordon got out of bed quietly while Krisztina was still asleep. He shaved carefully, then went to the closet for a clean shirt, taking care not to step on the creakier part of the parquet floor. In the kitchen, he pulled out a chair from under the table and sat down. He took out the jar of jam Krisztina had cleverly hidden in her purse, removed the cellophane, and dipped in a teaspoon. He’d expected worse. Mór’s jams were more often failures than successes, but this one was decidedly edible. Not that Gordon could have said what kind it was, but it was tasty. Perhaps apple and gooseberry. Or quince and rose hip. Maybe pear and rhubarb. Or else the old fellow had his very own way of conjuring peaches into jam. Gordon shrugged and spooned the contents of the jar into his mouth. In the living room he took his blazer off the chair and paused momentarily in front of the vestibule mirror, where he adjusted his hat before closing the door behind him.
The super was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the building’s entrance. “Good morning, Mr. Editor!” he greeted Gordon, with a smile that stretched from ear to ear.
“You, too, Iváncsik,” said Gordon, and turned in the direction of Nagymezo Street. He might as well board a tram on Kaiser Wilhelm Road, he figured. He bought an 8 O’Clock News at the tobacconist’s and got on the tram. He changed at Apponyi Square and by eight-thirty was at the newsroom, where work was under way full-steam. Nearly every typewriter was occupied by someone feverishly typing away. Gordon glanced about, then walked up a floor to Hungary’s newsroom. There he was greeted by the same spectacle. He turned to the clerk sitting by the entrance. The fiftyish man might have unevenly buttoned his blazer, but he always knew everyone’s business.
“Is Mr. Vogel here?” Gordon asked.
“Even if the pope himself were to die, Mr. Vogel would still start his day in the New York Café with a brioche and a cup of black coffee. Only once did he not take his breakfast there: when the Romanians occupied Budapest. And not because the place wasn’t open. He said he didn’t have an appetite.”
Jenő Vogel had already finished his brioche and was reading the previous day’s French newspapers while sipping his coffee. Gordon sat down across from him.
“Say, Gordon, how much do the Spanish Civil War and the situation in Abyssinia worry you?” asked Vogel, lowering his copy of Le Figaro.
“Each on its own or the two combined?”
“Combined.”
“Not one bit.”
“And on their own?”
“Why should I fret over it?” asked Gordon. “For some odd reason Mussolini needs Abyssinia, and he’ll get it, he will. And if the Spaniards want to slaughter each other, even in the best-case scenario all I can do is take exception to it in principle. Because there’s nothing I can do about it, that’s for sure.”
Vogel knit his brows, nudged his glasses up to his forehead, and took to pulling at his fleshy ear. “You didn’t come by to talk about the Abyssinian situation,” he informed Gordon.
“No,” Gordon confirmed. “You know the inner city’s sex industry pretty well, Vogel.”
“You might say,” said Vogel, casting Gordon a suspicious eye.
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Who isn’t?”
“Not just one someone, in fact, but two.”
Vogel crossed his thick hands over his imposing belly and listened, motionless, his face not so much as twitching, as Gordon described the dead girl.
“I haven’t seen her,” he finally said, shaking his head.
Gordon wasn’t surprised, but he continued. “Who takes nude pictures?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I saw a nude picture of the dead girl.”
“Who is that hooker to you?”
“No one.”
“Then why are you interested?”
“Because I don’t have enough for an article. Have you read the story in 8 O’Clock News?” Vogel slowly nodded. “It was in there, too. It wasn’t enough that I was there on the scene. That’s just half a column on page seven.”
“And you want page two.”
“Or page one.”
“Or page one,” repeated Vogel. “A front-page story is a front-page story.”
“Well?”
“I’m all ears,” replied the rotund journalist. The rims of his wire-frame glasses had splayed out completely over his head.
Gordon sighed. “Next week I’ll be having a word with Gellért about the Róna case.”
“Which you’ll share with me.”
Gordon was silent. “I will,” he said finally.
Vogel summoned the waiter and ordered a coffee and a cognac. “Will you have a coffee, too?”
“Black,” replied Gordon.
“There aren’t too many folks who take such pictures,” Vogel began. “Based on what you told me about the photograph, there’s just one person who could have taken it.”
“I’m all ears.”
“An ugly old lech, a real pig.”
“I really do need more than that,” said Gordon.
“His name is Skublics. Izsó Skublics.”
“And where does this Skublics roost?”
“On Aradi Street. Not far from Hitler Square.”
“I should leave your name out of it, right?” asked Gordon.
“Feel free to say it, but that will just make things worse.”
The waiter arrived with the two coffees and the cognac. Gordon was just about to remove his blazer, but Vogel took the coffee, poured it into the cognac, and downed it all in three even gulps. “Are you coming back to the office?” he asked, springing to his feet.
“No, later on. First I’ll take a look at this Skublics.”
“You won’t like him, but go ahead and take a look if you’ve got the taste for it.”
Gordon knew the Circle and environs well; Mór lived there, too, after all. But he was incapable of calling it—the Circle—Hitler Square. If something is a circle, well then, that’s just what it is, he told Krisztina more than once. Not a square. Especially not Adolf Hitler Square. He’d also heard that the Oktogon would soon be renamed Mussolini Square. He shook his head and started off toward Aradi Street. Before turning onto Szinyei Street, he glanced up at a second-floor balcony door of one of the buildings on the Circle. It was closed. He’d try on the way back; by then Mór would surely be home.
He didn’t even have to go looking for Skublics’s building; he knew exactly which one it was. It was one of the blemishes on Aradi Street: a six-story apartment building with plaster flaking off its façade, a stairwell that smelled of piss, with hungry, stinking dogs in the courtyard and on the inner balconies that circled above it. Every time he’d walked this way, he’d always crossed to the other side of the street.
He stepped over a puddle full of water from someone’s wash, it seemed, and began climbing the stairs toward the sixth floor. On one floor he heard shouting; on another, dogs fighting over something; and on a third, he saw two kids beating up a smaller child. On the sixth floor he walked the length of the rectangular passageway overlooking the central courtyard, but on not one door did he see the name Skublics. Finally he knocked on a window, from behind which came the smell of thick brown soup made with lard-fried roux. A woman of indeterminate age, wearing a kerchief, pulled aside the curtain. “Whadayawant?” she asked with a toothless mouth.