Cobblestone

Péter Lengyel, John Bátki

• Publisher: Readers International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781887378079
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Ranging through a history of changing empires, monarchies, countries, regimes, religions, down to the disappearing shop-fronts and street names, Hungary is always there, through the Millennium celebrations over a century ago, amid the exhausted last days of communism, and even under today’s “illiberal democracy”.

“A vast, sprawling novel linking a meticulously plotted jewel theft in 1896 Budapest to the impulsive crime of passion that sinks the plotters – and to the history of modern Hungary, of the anonymous narrator’s family, and of life on earth…. A heroically scaled assault on narrative and causality…. Ulysses -like.” KIRKUS

“More science fiction than a detective novel, not the usual cynical detective novel, but the big story of the early twentieth century throughout Europe, with the streets and brothels of Budapest at its center…. A fascinating mosaic of the underworld of Budapest, as well as a fantastic heist story.” International Noir Fiction

PART ONE THE SETUP

STEEL JIMMY

“You have sixty seconds until the night watchman gets here,” I said to the man with the auburn locks as I stepped out of the shadows by the great strongbox of the Zara (for you, Zadar, Croatia*) First Hungarian-Italian Credit Bank. Prior to that moment I had been absorbed by the delight of watching him lovingly pry open the outer steel plate with a long-handled jimmy. “Gentlemen,” I nodded. I was speaking Hungarian, there by the distant shores of the Adriatic.

The three men stared at me as if they had seen a ghost by the light of their acetylene flare lamp. I grinned at the sight of their dumbfounded faces, I couldn’t help it. It was an hour before sunrise, when night’s silence is darkest, battles are begun and the burgher’s sleep is deepest.

It was on the afternoon of this day that back home, on the Pest side of our city, the first automobile putt-putted past the thieves’ dens of Cemetery Road, turning onto Outer Kerepesi Road (possibly along the lines of the fallen stone walls around King Matthias’ deer park**) where the smoke of puffing steam locomotives floated overhead. Eventually it would reach the traces of the lesser branch of the Danube, dried out in the course of time, already called Grand Boulevard and with good reason; where, as it turned, a guardian of the law, with the feathergrass in his hat, attempted to arrest this suspicious contraption speeding by without the aid of visible horses.

The trees of the Grand Boulevard are still slender and the cobblestone cubes of the roadway have not yet been worn smooth by our feet. In faraway Amsterdam a diamond cutter is examining, through his magnifying lens, a South African stone to determine the direction of the crystal’s cleavage planes. The gem is less than one hundred carats, and it may end up weighing half as much after it is cut and polished. It is a completely transparent, flawless diamond of the finest water, so-called. It is not large enough to be one of the world’s fabled diamonds, but its fate will be worthy of our attention. Blue Blood is its name and a client has been found for it already.

A girl called Bubbles shows up at the infamous Mrs. Tremmel’s brothel on Outer Kerepesi Road, seeking employment as a housemaid. In the evening at this same establishment Special Investigator Dajka’s glance becomes mesmerized by one of the Madame’s protégées who has almond-shaped eyes of a deep fire, and whose former fragile dark beauty shines through her fear-trampled face with a wonderstruck innocence even in the morass of her current environment.

At a later, sensitive point of this story the girl, now star singer at the cabaret Silly Kitty, will testify that she saw the new piano player wash his hands. And her eyes will grow round at the denial, “No, I was not washing anything. Not at all.” After that moment all she will murmur to herself will be, “But why is he saying that? Why?” It is a kind of pre-AIDS era story, and time will tell why that makes a difference.

The first time I heard the name Blue Blood pronounced I was sitting on the box of a hackney coach, and I instantly chose a new profession. Ever since, I have often had occasion to reflect whether the final outcome followed any natural law. After all, there were a few things I did correctly: I kept a secret hideout; I knew how to keep my life private. But there were things I bungled. More than one. Since then I have had occasion to reflect on my ambivalent moral and professional position at that time, on the callous, stupid irresponsibility of youth. My two or three obvious mistakes led to a bloodstain that could have been avoided. And to a medical history at a prison hospital. And to that hot lamp cylinder which I can never forgive myself.

It all started so perfectly.

It was not by chance that I found myself in the vault of that bank at dawn by the shore of the Adriatic. All night long I had walked the quiet streets of the port. Earlier that afternoon at one of the bars of the Porta Marittima I happened to overhear a few casual, softly spoken Hungarian words. Since then I had been looking around and searching for them until this moment. There was no one else about at this dark hour.

At the barred windows of the Hungarian-Italian Bank I heard a characteristic noise of metal scraping on metal. I found them, the ones I had been looking for. I turned into a side street, turned again into a back alley on the right that was faced by the bank building’s barred windows. Next to the hinges of a small iron door the wall had been opened and the doorframe removed. A veiled light filtered out from the direction of the front rooms. I strolled in. Half a minute later I was watching from behind a dusty curtain as the handsome brown-haired man whose beard was blond sweated and wrestled with the side panel of the strongbox. If I know anything about the world, this man was working behind schedule. Another man whose face remained in the dark held the acetylene lamp, and the third, with curly hair, was handing the tools like a surgical assistant. I liked the gesture.

I pulled back without a sound and hurried out into the street.

In front of the building I could hear the footsteps of the municipal night watchman from a distance, and could envision the inevitable: the guard hears the noise, and turns back toward the bank building. Pulling my hat down over my eyes, I set out for him. To gain time I had to confuse him somehow. I timed it so that we would meet beyond the light of the streetlamp. I gestured silently that my cigar needed a light. As I moved off I could feel his gaze on my back, and I could hear him walk on, then hesitate. He was thinking about turning back. At top speed I walked around the block and went into the strongroom again. And then there I stood in front of the three professionals.

“Sixty seconds. If that much.”

They can only stare at this stranger dropped into their midst. It could have been the law. Maybe he is the law. I place my hand on the auburn-haired man’s shoulder.

“Shh... Gentlemen, you better disappear.” Spoken in Hungarian, there by the shore of the Adriatic.

And immediately I committed my first blunder in this affair: I removed the steel jimmy from the man’s hand and put it down. This gesture was to cause me much grief in the course of the years.

“Let’s go, quick,” I propelled my man toward the door.

A heartbeat later I added in a soft but clear voice, “You will find me in the evening at the Porta Marittima.”

Outside, the dawn was russet-red toward the sea. There was no time for them to pick up their tools: lamp, rotary drill, steel jimmy were all left behind.

---

*In 1896 Zara (now Zadar) was part of the Dalmatian province of the Kingdom of Hungary within the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy.

**Matthias I, Hunyadi (1440-1490), King of Hungary, Transylvanian-born son of Janos Hunyadi. Statesman, soldier, patron of scholars and artists; many feel that during his reign the Hungarian state reached its acme. [All notes are by the translator unless otherwise identified.]

THE SIGNATURE

That afternoon at Budapest police headquarters on Franz Joseph Square, Dr. Dajka receives the first brief report of the Zara break-in. The wireless telegraph never sleeps, not even on Saturdays; messages come and go between the law-enforcement authorities of central and southern Europe and our city where the continent’s roads and railways crisscross, meeting place of scientists, artists, aristocrats of high finance and high birth, and burglars.

There has not been an unsolved break-in for over a year within the Doctor’s jurisdiction. The telegram, however, does have its precedents. In recent years there were two instances of safe-crackers leaving the scene without a trace. At the Sonnenschein furniture warehouse on Idol Street the thieves found only a few worthless lottery tickets. At the Péterffy shipping office on New World Street their haul was a hundred thousand forints in cash and securities. At both places they arrived unnoticed and departed without a trace. For a year now Dr. Dajka has been routinely requesting his colleagues abroad for any information about safe-breaks not only in the Dual Monarchy but all over Europe. He considers unsolved cases to be encysted ulcers and intends to do all in his power to keep them from festering.

He rapidly scans the report from Zara, re-reads it more slowly, then leaning back in his high-backed chair he slips one hand into the slit of his vest, the fingers of the other hand drumming a lively tattoo on the desk. Soon he is starting to nod his head, with more and more vehemence. He needs facts, as many facts as possible. He shouts for patrolman Janos Suk, who stands guard outside.

“Suk! Su-ukk!”

At this point we must go back two years, to the time when the Budapest underworld grapevine tingled with an unexpected message at two places on the same day.

A lanky figure wrapped in a dust-cloak knocked at the one-storey house on Bush Street in Old Buda belonging to the well-known fence Rókus Láncz. All he said was:

“The Safe King is out early.” That said, the midnight visitor sped on, but Láncz did not slip back under his warm eiderdown. Just as he was, in his shirt and underpants, he descended into the cellar where he shifted a hundredweight of logs from the firewood stacked by the back wall, to remove a package. He carefully unwrapped the two horseblankets around a yellow pigskin suitcase which, by virtue of its expensive material and fine workman­ship formed a sharp contrast with every other aspect of the environment, Rókus included. One could imagine on it hotel stickers from luxurious spas, but there was no name, address, not one letter that could have provided a clue. The fence, having pulled on a robe, peeked out at the street before opening the suitcase on the kitchen table. From among the clothes, theater props, makeup and wigs he picked out a fat morocco leather wallet, and having made certain of its contents, returned to his bed.

By then the dust-cloaked messenger, this lean foot soldier of the criminal orders, was well on his way, loping along with a thief’s stride toward the far-off Cemetery Road. He had to make a huge detour until he reached the Chain Bridge, and an hour and a half later he was softly, persistently tapping on one of the doors in a row of single­-storey slum dwellings.

“The Safe King is getting out early,” he whispered to the sleep-sodden, tousled face of a woman peering at him from behind the rough-hewn door opened a crack. Then he was gone in the dark. The woman returned to her lair and pulled out, from under a pile of ratty clothes in a corner, a bright package bundled in oily rags. The Special Investigator would have given much to see the sight of the young woman’s hands fondling the gleaming nickel-steel tools, one by one.

In the South African Jägersfontein mining district a nearly naked black man had been standing for five hours in the riverbed next to his tilted board when his searching hands discovered the stone in the alluvial deposit. Never in his life had he seen one this large, never had he dreamed of anything like this. For the past four months he had not found any diamonds at all. It must have weighed a hundred to a hundred-twenty carats uncut; its color and clarity could not be determined as yet. The value of a flawlessly clear stone increased exponentially with size. Until the end of the workday the Sotho man, poorly fed, clad in a loincloth, contemplated swallowing the stone and bolting. His dream was buying a coalblack stallion with shiny new accoutrements.

As far back as he could remember the fugitive’s fate was to be caught or to perish in the wilderness.

When he turned in the as yet unnamed diamond, he received a special bonus of twenty pounds sterling. It was common knowledge that the price of a nobler steed at the Kimberley market started at twenty-four pounds, not including the harness.

Veron Czérna, daughter of a ropemaker from the municipality of Pest, received an orphan’s tuition-free education at the Ursulines, where she learned to embroider and did housecleaning, washing and homework for her more well-to-do classmates.

The youngest judge in the city receives his appointment launching him on a career that was to make such a fateful impact on ours.

In a stone quarry on the north shore of Lake Balaton the basalt seemed to split smoothly by itself under the hammer-strokes of a tall swarthy man. It was volcanic rock, articulated by transverse joints so that you only had to hit it in the right spot and it was a regular hexahedron. Cube. Cobblestone for the new streets of the capital city.

On Rose Square the cabaret Silly Kitty was being built. When Agnes Vad — whose claim to calling herself Baroness was based on unknowable memories and desires and on one very knowable gentleman — when she dreamed of this realm of hers she had envisioned a respectable institution and significant profits. The inherent contradiction was resolved by the uniquely duplicitous construction of the finished building.

The Baroness had arrived at the capital after a strenuous youth in a brothel at Bártfa in the northern uplands (for you, Bardejov, Slovakia) where a stout man, who had a mill at Topolya and who made the girls do filthy things, had loved her — that was the only way she could think of him. He died the way he lived. When he found out that he had only a few weeks left he invested his fortune in gold nuggets and willed it all to the prostitute, strictly observing legal formalities. The Baroness guards these original notarized court documents with her life, just like her gold nuggets. (Among the papers is her certificate of legal change of name; her real name had been Erzsike Csorba.) “I didn’t do this,” the miller panted asthmatically, “for your sake. I did it so they all won’t be glad I died. Because that’s all they are waiting for.” And he grinned from ear to ear: he would have the last laugh on his relations.

Without even waiting for the funeral she made for Budapest to realize her dream: a cozy establishment where the girls did not have to struggle and where the gentlemen did not get overly familiar with her. She soon found a building to her liking in the inner city. Having sketched out her special requirements she began to look for a master builder, and found him on the platform of the Eastern railway terminal in the person of a Bosnian journeyman builder on his way home, along with his whole crew. For good pay they were willing to renovate her real estate. She herself purchased the building materials, getting as much enjoyment as a fishwife out of bartering and getting the merchandise cheaply. She bought bricks, lime, velvet wall paper, from here and there and everywhere. Boards to plank the inner corridor on the first floor, plate glass for the raised cage in the downstairs café that would be her front office.

An Italian opera designer from Vienna came for a week-long consultation. At the Visegrád Street depot of the Gutjahr and Muller metal factory she placed an order for four identical steel doors with peepholes. She had visions of stacked banknotes representing her net daily take, and heaps of gold nuggets in which to invest her money once the business got going. She was anticipating a considerable profit. The service entrance was an inch-thick oak door with a lock. For this back door she would need a reliable man, she thought, when the Bosnians unloaded the four steel doors from the delivery wagon and hung them. Yes, she would need a strong, trustworthy man. And then not even a mosquito could get in here uninvited.

In two months all the building supplies were gone from the front of the house: the four-handled troughs, basins of lime, gravel, every last plank. The Bosnians went back to their godforsaken mountains. The Baroness’ apartment was on the first floor. The rear entrances opened on a neighboring courtyard, and she volunteered to pay for the right of way. As part of the beautification of the whole block a continuous row of new business signs was installed on both facades. A gigantic image of a Thonet chair. A huge hand pointing in the direction of the Sáfrán furniture showrooms around the corner. And at last, on the Leopold Street facade, next to the sign for “Glass-Mirrors-Porcelain” advertising the neighboring store, between the first and second floors there appeared the sign of the Silly Kitty, Café Chantant. She herself wrote in her curlicued hand in chalk on a blackboard posted at the carriage entrance of the back courtyard: WANTED, cooks, waiters, cashier, cloakroom girl, kitchen help, cleaning woman, doorman-factotum. She interviewed each applican...

Table of contents

• PART ONE: THE SETUP
• PART TWO STUDS: AND FILLIES
• PART THREE: ON A NEW JOB
• PART FOUR: CROSS-COUNTRY
• PART FIVE: THE WAY IT WAS
• About the Author
• About the Translator
• About Readers International