“Did he?” my father asked softly.
“Yes, and I also remember him telling her about our house,” I added. “He described it pretty grandly, so she might have gotten the idea that you were quite powerful, the center of an influential circle.”
“How ironic,” my father said quietly. “Since I was never anything but-”
“Julian had a picture of Marisol with Emilio Vargas,” I interrupted. “Where would he have gotten it?”
“From someone in Casa Rosada, I suppose,” my father answered. He appeared to run a curious possibility through his mind. “He might have gotten it from my contact there.”
“You had a contact in Casa Rosada?” I asked, surprised that he’d even lightly touch such cloak-and-dagger operations.
“She was only a clerk,” my father added quickly. “She’s in her eighties now.”
“So no longer a Casa Rosada functionary, of course.”
“Not for many years,” my father said.
“Where is she now?”
“Why do you want to know that, Philip?”
“Because this contact of yours might have some idea of who Marisol was, what she was doing,” I answered. “She might know if any of this is true about her, that she was. . a deceiver.”
My father drew in a long, slow breath. “She went back to Hungary,” he said. “You should be aware that hers was not a clean record. You’ve probably never heard of the Maros Street hospital massacre.”
It occurred in Budapest, he went on to tell me, a peculiarly monstrous incident during the last-ditch effort by the collaborationist Arrow Cross to annihilate the few Jews not yet deported from Hungary. Having taken control of the city in the wake of the retreating Germans, the men of the Arrow Cross Party went on a rampage, and among the victims were the most helpless of the city’s remaining Jews. The poorhouse on Alma Street was attacked, as well as the hospital on Varosmajor. But it was the patients, doctors, and nurses at the Jewish hospital on Maros Street who suffered the full brunt of Arrow Cross cruelty, a full day of slaughter that included torture and murder.
“My contact played a part in it,” my father said at the end of this narrative. “She never denied this. At least that was to her credit.”
“What happened to her after she left Casa Rosada?”
“She returned to Budapest,” my father answered. “She got a job with the American consulate.”
“Her reward for being a spy?” I asked.
My father didn’t answer, but I saw the answer in his eyes, all the dirty little deals he’d known about but never approved of, the ratlines and secret bombings and clandestine overthrows.
“Do you know where she is?” I asked.
“She retired and moved into a small town in what is now Slovakia.”
I was surprised that my father knew this, as he could tell from my expression.
“We were. . friends briefly,” he told me. “Your mother died long before.”
“I see,” I said.
“We met in a restaurant on one of my few trips to Buenos Aires,” he added. “Each time I went there, I saw her. It was never love.” He shrugged. “But she worked in Casa Rosada, and so I. .”
“Played the secret agent?” I asked.
My father nodded with the sadness of one who had run out of fantasies, a Walter Mitty no longer inclined to daydream.
“Foolish,” he said softly. “It was all very foolish.”
For a moment he seemed lost in thought. Then, quite suddenly, like one who sensed himself rather under surveillance, he said, “Anyway, since she was my only contact, I sent Julian to her when he was looking for Marisol.”
“It was you who sent him to Casa Rosada?” I asked, surprised that he’d never mentioned this.
“It was a fool’s errand,” my father said. “But he seemed desperate to find this young woman. She’d gotten under his skin somehow. He was really quite determined. I thought my contact might help him solve the mystery of her disappearance.”
“Would she talk to me, this contact of yours?” I asked.
“I’m sure she would,” my father said. “For old times’ sake, as they say.”
“Who did this woman work for?”
“A colonel by the name of Ramirez,” my father answered. “Juan Ramirez. He ran a few of the junta’s escuelitas.”
He saw that I didn’t understand the word.
“The ‘little schools,’” my father said. “There were a great many of them in Argentina at that time. They were places where the enemies of Casa Rosada were taken to be reeducated. That is to say, where they were tortured.” He appeared to consider his next move with a strange seriousness. “I could write to her if you like. I’m sure she’d been willing to talk to you.”
“Yes, do that,” I said. “I’ll follow up with a letter of my own.” I reached for a paper and pen. “What’s her name, your contact?”
“Irene.”
“And her last name?”
“Josag,” my father answered. “It’s Hungarian, of course. It means ‘goodness.’”
Goodness.
How bright a word, I would later realize, to have given so dark a new direction to my tale.
20
When I later located Irene Josag’s village on a map, I saw that it was quite near to Cachtice, where the Bloody Countess had lived and in whose looming castle she had carried out her many torture-murders, her life and crimes the subject of Julian’s fourth book, The Tigress.
The countess was born in Nyirbator, Hungary, in 1560, the daughter of one of that country’s ruling families, and according to Julian, nothing in her early life suggested the monster she would become. Rather, she was quite studious, and by the time of her marriage, she had mastered Latin, German, and Greek, and had read a great deal in science and astronomy-learning that Julian portrayed as part of her perfect disguise.
At the age of fifteen, she married the son of another equally favored family, and in 1575, the presumably happy couple took up residence at Varanno, a small palace, before moving to a larger one at Sarvar, and finally to the castle that was her wedding gift, the looming, often fogbound Cachtice.
The war to defend Europe against the Ottoman encroachment would last until 1606, and during all that time it fell to Elizabeth not only to manage but to defend her holdings against the ever-threatening Ottomans. This she did with great skill and vigor. But it was not all she did, for although the outer walls of Cachtice remained strong, something was crumbling inside them; it was during this period that loneliness began to weather Elizabeth’s carefully constructed edifice and, in that weathering, reveal what lay beneath. With her husband at his studies in Vienna, Elizabeth now, for the first time in her life, had real power, that is to say, power on the scale of a man’s. She was the lady of the estate, her authority absolute, and like Ilse Grese at Ravensbruck, she began to wield a whip.
It was a weapon she could use with complete impunity, as it turned out, because her husband had by then become chief commander of Hungarian troops in the western war against the Ottoman Empire, a campaign that removed him for months at a time. Thus, with no one to stay her hand, she began first to berate and then to slap her servants, each attack fueling the next, until at last she drew blood and later found that where this drop had fallen on her cheek, the flesh beneath had seemed to bloom. In the blood of servants, she had miraculously discovered youth’s eternal fountain.
More of this restorative blood was easy to find, of course, and in the coming months and years, Elizabeth found plenty of it. Enough first to taste, then to sip, then to drink. Enough first to dot her finger, then to cover her face, then to coat her body.
But even the walls of Cachtice were not thick enough to hide what was going on there. The first rumors began to circulate as early as 1602, and by 1604, when Elizabeth’s husband died, they could no longer be dismissed, for they were not rumors of infidelity or even of odd sexual practices, both of which were common among the nobility of the time.