"How could you think that she wouldn't know, that she wouldn't recognize her work? In this day and age! Did you really think she wouldn't put two and two together? That she would think that Karoly found the diaries quite independently, which he quite possibly could have, when the publisher was you, Frank? Or did you just think if you kept telling everybody she was crazy, citing the fact that her children had been taken from her and she hadn't left the house in three years, that no matter what she said, no one would believe her?"
"You shouldn't have done that, Frank," Cybil said. "Did you chase her onto that bridge?"
"Don't be ridiculous," Frank said.
"I did not," Karoly said, looking at me. "I would not, could not, do such a thing."
"Of course not," Frank said. "This is a simple case of failing to credit someone. It is unfortunate, but we will correct it in the next printing, won't we, Karoly?" Karoly said nothing.
"No, it isn't. But you did go to see her that night, didn't you? One of you? Maybe both of you?" I said. Karoly turned back from his contemplation of the river.
"No," Frank said.
"For God's sake, Frank, tell the truth," Karoly said.
Frank just stood there. "Let me help you, Frank," I said. "You were celebrating that night. You were on the prowl and you were looking for some action. Unfortunately you had to use the drugs you had planned for another purpose to keep me from going to see Anna. Later that night, you went looking for her, and you found her, where, out on the street somewhere?"
"She killed herself, okay? We did go to try to fix things up, but she was hysterical. We drove around in my car for awhile, Karoly in the backseat trying to be charming and persuasive with an hysterical female, and then at the top of the street north of the bridge, she got out and started running. We went after her. Maybe she thought we meant her harm, but we didn't. She ran out onto the bridge. I drove my car into something at the end of the bridge, and then got out and tried to stop her. It was terrible," he said. "But I didn't push her over. Neither of us did. She did it all by herself. She was unbalanced. You can say she wasn't, but she was."
"Please believe me," Karoly said, looking directly at me. "What he says is true. We, I, did not push her off that bridge."
"Poor Anna," Morgan said.
Cybil sobbed uncontrollably. "I think I knew," she said. "In my heart. She told me she'd been working on something and she asked me to find Frank to help her with it. I just couldn't bear to admit something like this could happen. I think maybe I felt if I just kept quiet, it wouldn't really have happened. I called you one night, Lara. I debated about whether to say anything. We were all such good friends back then, the Divas, and Frank and Karoly. Those were the happiest days of my life. What happened to us?"
"Life is what happened," Morgan said. "Just life."
"It's over," Frank said. "We should have attributed Anna's work correctly. It had terrible consequences that we didn't anticipate. But this was unforeseen. If you insist, we will tell the authorities when we get back, but I don't see what we can be accused of. It was all most unfortunate, that's all."
"Perhaps you're forgetting Mihaly Kovacs," I said.
"What about him?" Karoly said.
"He's dead, murdered," I said.
"That's impossible," Karoly said. "I talked to him just a few days ago, before I came to Budapest. He was a little concerned about a business matter we were involved in, but otherwise perfectly fine."
"Not any more," I said. "I'm afraid he's dead, brutally murdered."
"How would you know Kovacs?" Karoly said to me.
"She found out from me," Diana said. "She's been helping us prove the Venus is a fake." A sound escaped from Karoly s lips, something like a groan.
"I've been trying to prove it's real, Karoly. And I did, except there were unexpected consequences," I said.
"Who the hell is Mihaly Kovacs?" Morgan said.
"The antique dealer who is supposed to have sold the Venus to Karoly," I said. "Except that he didn't, because Karoly had it already. His parents took it with them when they escaped from Hungary during the Revolution of 1956. Isn't that right, Karoly? Isn't that the business matter he was a little concerned about? You didn't even know what you had until your parents died, and Anna's thesis almost miraculously fell into your hands. You would probably never have figured it out if you hadn't seen the drawings in her material." He bowed his head.
"And the real reason that you didn't want Anna to tell her tale, was that it would open up the question of the Venus's authenticity, and you really didn't want to do that, because you had essentially defrauded the Cottingham. You paid Kovacs, and he in turn took his cut and paid you. You got a million dollars from Lily Larrington, supposedly paid $600,000 to Kovacs but pocketed most of it, and then what? Gave a whole bunch of it to Frank to publish the book and save his firm? You've both done rather well, haven't you, from Anna's research? Frank gets paid twice to publish the catalog, in a sense, and Karoly gets to take care of some of his debts and more."
"So what? That's the way business is done," Frank said. "Anyway, I'm not the one who had a twenty-five thousand-year-old carving in my garage."
"No, but you're probably the one who killed Mihaly Kovacs when he got cold feet and tried to tell me what he'd done," I said. "I went and scared him very badly by asking a lot of questions about the provenance. I expect he knew he would be in a bit of trouble if anyone found out his part in this. He followed me for a few days, right up the side of a cliff. I had a feeling someone was following me. I have no idea whether or not he knew you were following him. You hit him on the head with a stone, did you not, and then made it look as if he'd fallen and hit his head on it? What would you have done if I hadn't stayed in that cave? If I had come out and seen you? Would you have killed me, too?"
"No!" Karoly said. "Tell me, Frank, that this isn't true."
"Are we talking murder, here?" Morgan said. Frank did not reply.
Karoly took out his cell phone and started to dial. "I'm calling the police," he said, coming to stand beside me. "I will tell them everything. I cannot continue to live this lie. I did not kill anyone, Lara. You must believe that, no matter what else you may think of me."
Karoly had the phone up to his ear when Frank made his move. He stepped forward, reached into the box containing Stalin, and grabbed the gun. The Divas screamed as one. It had never occurred to me that the gun was loaded, nor that it would still work. He pointed it right at me. "Bitch!" he screamed. "You couldn't just let it be, could you?"
As Frank pulled the trigger, Karoly stepped in front of me.
EPILOGUE
IF YOU LOOK CLOSELY AT THE SIDE WALL OF THE MUSTARD yellow apartment building at Thokoly lit 61 in Budapest, you will see a statue of a woman. The sculpture, rather unsettling it must be said, is thought to have been put there by a man as a memorial to his wife who stood on that balcony every day waiting for him to come home from the Great War. If the story is true, she died in the terrible influenza epidemic that swept through Europe at the end of the war—one day before his return.