Vilmos Kondor - Budapest Noir

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.