Invisible Murder Read online

  The woman shook her head skeptically.

  “Do you have the pills the doctor gave you? Did you take them?” Nina asked.

  “Yes,” the man mumbled despondently. “I take them.”

  Nina sat there for a bit. She could get a new job, she thought suddenly. A job that didn’t make her feel the way she felt right now. Mortal fear. That was what was wrong with him. Chronic anxiety that was turning into permanent state of panic. How could she be expected to treat that with a few platitudes and a couple of aspirins? It was wrong. No, it was more than wrong—it was reprehensible.

  Nina forced a reassuring smile. “See you tomorrow, okay? Don’t worry. Everything is just fine.”

  The woman didn’t respond, and Nina knew perfectly well why not. Her husband probably didn’t have meningitis, but apart from that, nothing was fine, or even remotely okay. While Nina went to buy soccer shoes for her son, night would soon be falling over the Coal-House Camp.

  Nina tilted her head in a nod and shut the door a little too firmly behind her as she left.

  HEN THEY ASKED to be driven to Tavaszmezö Street in Budapest’s Eighth District, the cab driver locked all the doors. Sándor could clearly hear the click, and he noticed the look the driver flashed him in the rearview mirror—questioning, sizing him up. Good thing Lujza was with him. In spite of her penchant for weird shawls and flea-market finds—Boho chic, she called it—there was a down-to-earth, Hungarian middle-class respectability in her mousy-haired genes and sit-up-straight manners. For his part, even though he tied a perfect knot in his tie, polished his shoes, and ironed his shirts immaculately, somehow there would always be a question mark hanging over him: the doubt that he saw in the cab driver’s eyes.

  “Good thing you’re here,” he said aloud. But on the other hand, if it hadn’t been for her, he wouldn’t be sitting here. He never took cabs.

  She looked at him in surprise—probably hadn’t even noticed the doors being locked and the driver’s suspicious looks.

  “Why?” she asked.

  He gave up without explaining. “It’s just nice,” he said.

  She smiled, taking that as another compliment. “You’re sweet,” she said, kissing him on the cheek.

  They had been to a baptism—Lujza’s elder sister’s little boy, her parents’ first grandchild.

  It was also the first time Sándor officially met the Szabó family. His nerves were still on edge, although it now felt more like fatigue than the tense stiffness he had experienced on the way there. He wanted to ask Lujza if it had gone okay, but he already knew the answer. It hadn’t. Everyone had been pleasant enough, even friendly. Mr. Szabó had greeted him with a firm handshake and had chatted with him about his studies, about his upcoming exams and about what specialty he was going to choose—Lujza’s father was a lawyer himself and had given criminal law an enthusiastic plug. Mrs. Szabó had been far too preoccupied with her small, screaming, tulle-bundled heir to pay much attention to him, but she had given him an absent-minded smile when he was introduced to her. There was nothing wrong with the way he had been received; it was more his own performance he was dissatisfied with. He had felt his facial muscles freeze, fossilizing with every passing hour. And as so often happened when he felt that way, his voice dropped to a scarcely audible mumble, forcing his conversation partner to lean in and say, “Sorry …?” every other sentence.

  He hadn’t made a good impression. And he didn’t understand how Lujza could sit there next to him, seemingly happy and content, and kiss him on the cheek.

  They pulled onto Szív Street and suddenly had to slow down. A crowd of pedestrians was crossing without looking, as though normal traffic rules didn’t apply. The driver edged the cab forward through the crowd and tried to pull out onto Andrássy Avenue, but that proved impossible. The entrance to the wide boulevard was blocked by a handful of police officers and a temporary barricade, and there were people everywhere, both in the road and on the sidewalks. When the driver tried to back up, it was too late. The crowd had closed around the cab like a fist. The driver opened his door a little and got halfway out.

  “Hey,” he called out to the closest officer manning the barricade. “What’s going on?”

  The officer glanced over his shoulder. When he noticed the taxi sign on the cab’s roof, he raised his hand in a sort of semicollegial greeting between two professionals. “A demonstration,” the officer yelled back. “We’ll open up for traffic once it’s passed.”

  The cab driver sank back into his seat again, shut his door, and re-locked it. “Sorry,” he said. “We have to wait.”

  He rolled the windows down, just enough to let some air into the cab and then turned off the engine. “No point in wasting gas,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere for a bit.”

  Through the open windows, Sándor could now hear the sound of drums and rhythmic chants. He couldn’t help speculating on how much the fare would be. Even though the engine was off, the meter was still running.

  “Maybe we should just walk the rest of the way?” he suggested. “Or take the subway?”

  “I’m wearing heels,” Lujza objected.

  The sound of the drums got louder; the demonstration was approaching. It was coming down Andrássy Avenue from Heroes’ Square, he reckoned. He couldn’t see much from inside the cab, but now he could hear what they were yelling.

  “Save Hungary now! Save Hungary now!”

  Involuntarily, Sándor slid down a couple centimeters in his seat. Jobbik. It had to be Jobbik, taking to the streets again to protest the Jews, Communists, and Romas “ruining our proud nation.”

  “Them,” said Lujza, pursing her lips as though she had found something disgusting on the bottom of her shoe. “God spare us from any more racist, goose-stepping idiots.”

  The driver turned in his seat and gave Lujza the same suspicious look he had given Sándor at the beginning of the ride.

  “Jobbik aren’t racists,” he said. “They’re just for Hungary.”

  Oh no, Sándor thought. Please don’t make an issue of it.

  It was a doomed hope. Lujza straightened herself up in her seat and stared daggers at the driver, 128 pounds of indignant humanism versus 260 pounds of overweight-but-muscular nationalism.

  “And what kind of Hungary would that be?” she asked. “A Hungary clinically scrubbed of all diversity? A Hungary where you can be arrested just because your skin is a different color? A Hungary where it’s totally okay for Romas to have a life expectancy that’s fifteen years shorter than the rest of the population?”

  “If they want to live longer, they can quit drinking themselves to death,” the driver said. “And spreading diseases to the rest of us.”

  “Where do you get that rubbish from? HIR TV?”

  “Well, someone has to tell the truth if the government’s not going to,” the driver said. “I’d like to see you try driving a taxi in Budapest at night—the whole place is controlled by Gypsy gangs. They’ll stab you if you so much as blink. They’re worse than animals.”

  Lujza yanked a handful of ten thousand forint bills out of her purse and tossed them on the seat. “Here,” she said. “We’re getting out right now!”

  The driver obviously agreed. The power locks clicked pointedly open.

  “Bitch,” he snarled. “Get out of my cab, and take your dirty Gypsy dog with you.”

  Lujza flung the door open and jumped out. Sándor remained paralyzed for a few seconds, his skin tingling as though the driver’s words had struck him physically. His throat had closed up, and in any case, he couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Come on, Sándor,” snapped Lujza.

  He fumbled his door open and climbed out into the middle of the street, into a throng of people pushing their way toward the police barricade.

  “But your shoes,” he managed to say. “Your heels.…”

  “I’d rather walk the whole way to Tavaszmezö in my bare feet,” Lujza hissed. And then she burst into tears. He had to inch his
way through the crowd around the now re-locked cab to reach her. He just wanted to get away—away from the yelling and drumming and red-and-white striped banners that were approaching. The shouts rumbled over their heads, from the demonstrators as well as from the scratchy loudspeaker mounted on a car in the demonstration:

  “Save Hungary now! Save Hungary now!”

  Lujza was obviously planning to follow through on her threat. She was standing on one leg, pulling her high-heeled shoe off her other foot. She looked so small and vulnerable in her sleeveless, cream-colored summer dress. Her white silk shawl had slipped down over one shoulder, and her neck looked strangely exposed because she was wearing her long, light-brown hair up with a couple of white silk flowers in honor of the day’s festivities. Sándor wanted to stop her. He couldn’t bear the thought of her small, naked feet among all the stomping, trampling boots and shoes. She had no idea how dangerous this was, and her fearlessness frightened him.

  “Goddamn fascists!” she said, tears streaming down her lightly powdered cheeks. “It’s unbearable that there are so many of them.” She leaned on him as she angrily tugged off her second shoe.

  “Put them back on,” he begged. “What if you step on a piece of glass?”

  She seemed not to hear him.

  “Narrow-minded idiots who get their so-called information from nationalist TV propaganda. How can we let them march in our streets wearing their silly uniforms? Haven’t we learned anything?”

  “Shhh,” he hushed her instinctively.

  “You’re shushing me?” She shot him an indignant look.

  “You never know.…” he began, and then stopped himself. It would only serve to enrage her even further.

  “Are you scared?” she asked. “Are you scared of them?”

  Well, yes, he was.

  “He called you a dirty Gypsy.” She pointed angrily at the cab driver, who luckily had stayed in his cab, entrenched behind the green Mercedes doors. “Just because you have dark hair! You don’t even look like a Roma.”

  He just mumbled, “No.”

  “Well, you can’t let them get away with that kind of thing.”

  “No,” he mumbled, hoping his lack of opposition would end the discussion.

  Suddenly the crowd stumbled in unison—a wave of people falling, people trying not to fall, and people who just wanted to get out of the way. Sándor pulled Lujza in against him, struggling to keep them both upright. They were pushed back against the cab, and that was probably the only thing that saved them from falling. One of the barricades had tipped over, and there was some sort of scuffle up ahead between the police in their neon-green vests and black helmets and a small group of young people trying to get onto Andrássy Avenue. They looked like disaffected teenagers with punk hair, hooded jackets, and torn and saggy pants that revealed too much of their underwear. They were carrying a banner that said, “NO RACISM. FUCK FACISM.” Inside the O and the U, big round holes had been cut through the material.

  Sándor could suddenly see the actual demonstration through the gap caused by the commotion. Long, straight lines of marching men and women dressed in white shirts, black pants and black vests, with red-and-white striped bandanas around their necks and garrison caps with red-and-white emblems on them. They looked oddly like folk dancers, harmlessly candy-striped and chubby-cheeked—not emaciated skinhead fanatics with brass knuckles and eyes brimming with hate.

  “They look so damn normal,” said Lujza, now standing so close to him that he could feel the warmth of her breath against his neck. “So orderly and law-abiding. But those Árpád stripes and double crosses.… Who do they think they’re kidding? Why don’t they just wear swastikas or arrow crosses and be done with it?”

  “That’s not just Jobbik,” he said, with a fresh spurt of foreboding. “That’s Magyar Gárda, and they train with weapons.”

  Maybe a little of his fear had rubbed off on Lujza. Her outraged aplomb subsided somewhat, and she stood there next to him, letting herself be held.

  “Let’s go home,” she said, finally.

  IT TOOK THEM almost an hour and a half. The subway station at Kodály Körönd was closed, presumably for fear the protestors would vandalize its beautiful, historic interior. They had to fight their way through the crowd down to Oktogon and take a tram from there to Rákóczi Square. Lujza put her high heels back on and was quiet and withdrawn the whole way. She didn’t say anything as they walked the last stretch, away from the wide József Boulevard and into the narrower streets of the Eighth District. The afternoon sun burned white against the cracked sidewalk slabs. A Roma family was arranged in their stiffest Sunday best on the stairs in front of Józsefváros Church on Horváth Mihály Street, ready to be photographed.

  “Look,” he said. “They just had a baptism, too.”

  She nodded but didn’t perk up noticeably. Not even when he suggested coffee and poppy-seed cake from the bakery on the corner.

  “I’m tired,” she said. “I just want to go home.”

  Lujza lived with three other students in an apartment on Tavaszmezö Street. He knew that didn’t exactly thrill Mr. and Mrs. Szabó, who would have preferred to keep her at home a little longer in the somewhat more upmarket Second District where she had grown up. “But Lujza does what Lujza wants to do,” Papa Szabó had said, resigned.

  She didn’t invite Sándor up, and he didn’t push. But after he kissed her on the cheek and was about to leave, she suddenly asked: “Don’t you ever get mad?”

  “About what?”

  “Them—those idiots—Magyar Gárda and all those other uniformed jerks.”

  “Of course. I can’t stand extremists either.”

  But he could tell that wasn’t enough. She felt betrayed. He had let her down, in a test that was far more important than making a good impression on her family.

  She unlocked the front door to her building and disappeared into the dark foyer.

  “See you later,” he called loudly as the door closed behind her. But as he stood there outside the dilapidated townhouse, in his best suit and his neatly polished shoes, he had the disorienting sensation that she was slipping away from him, that the world was about to change, and not for the better.

  MAY

  AY HIT BUDAPEST like a sledgehammer. You could practically see the pavement and the brickwork cracking under the oppressive heat. Sándor ran a finger under the collar of his shirt, trying to unstick the damp fabric from his back. He dropped the second-hand briefcase containing his most recent exam notes onto the top step, balancing it between his feet as he fished around in his pockets for his house keys. Then he discovered that a key was unnecessary because the door was already ajar. Home sweet home, he thought. Disgruntled, he pushed the sagging door open.

  Szigony Residence Hall had a nice new sign, but that was the only new thing about the place. The university had taken over a couple of the old properties on Szigony Street, but since the demolition gangs were more or less waiting in the wings, no one saw any reason to waste money on maintenance and repairs. Some blocks had already fallen to the bulldozers, and soon this last, crumbling corner would also be part of the Corvin-Szigony project. Palatial office buildings, educational institutions, luxury condominiums, and exclusive shopping centers would rise from the ruins of what most Budapesti considered a “Gypsy slum.” Unless the recession puts a stop to the whole thing, Sándor thought glumly as he tried to get the front door to close again. He had to lift it up a little and then give a sharp jerk.… There! He heard the click.

  “Waste of energy,” called Ferenc as he came clomping down the stairs. He lived on the same floor as Sándor and was studying music. “I’m going out. You want to try to shut the door behind me?” It was tricky to shut the door from the inside but near impossible from the outside; most people gave up without even trying.

  “Okay,” Sándor said.

  Ferenc bounded down the last worn steps at an uneven canter. His hair stuck out wildly in all directions, and he was wearing his bel
oved double-breasted British blazer despite the summer heat. He had once confided in Sándor that women said it made him look like Hugh Grant.

  “We’re going out for a few beers at the Gödör,” Ferenc said. “Why don’t you join us?”

  Sándor shook his head. “I’ve got to study,” he said.

  “That’s what you always say. Come on, call Lujza. Don’t you think that poor girl would like to get out a bit?”

  Sándor could feel a numbness at the corners of his mouth. Novocaine-like. He had seen Lujza just four times since the baptism, and none of those dates had been particularly successful. He felt like he was under attack. She wanted to talk politics and human rights and fascism the whole time. It was suddenly terribly important for her to know what he thought, what he felt, where he stood. Was she afraid he was some kind of closet fascist? Up until the infamous baptism, they used to hold hands and kiss and chat and make love; now every date was like a damn debate. The mere thought of it made Sándor feel clumsy and uncommunicative.

  “International law is hell,” he said, because he had to say something. “I’ve only got a few more days to prepare, and it’ll be a bloodbath if I don’t know my stuff.”

  “Sándor, for crying out loud,” Ferenc groaned. “You always know your stuff.”

  “Yeah, because I cram. It’s called self-discipline.”

  “Okay, okay. But your dedication isn’t much fun for the rest of us.…”

  Sándor held the door for Ferenc and repeated his door-closing ritual—lift and jerk, and wait for the click.

  Then he just stood there.

  Come on, he told himself. Go upstairs and study.

  It was dark in the high-ceilinged stairwell. One of the windows facing the street was boarded up with sheets of plywood. The other still had most of its colorful stained-glass panes. At one time this had been a beautiful, classic Budapest property, built and decorated by the same craftsmen and artisan metalworkers who had created the mansions in the Palace District by the National Museum. The building had been in a state of disrepair for ages, but in recent years the pace of its decline had picked up as if the building was trying to beat the bulldozers to it. Like a man committing suicide to avoid being murdered, Sándor thought. The plasterwork was peeling off in sheets, and it reeked of dampness, brick dust, and dry rot. The rooms still had four-meter ceilings, but the electricity came and went, the water pipes were corroded and smelled like sewage, and after four months of empty promises and sheets of black plastic, he had ultimately given up and had repaired the window in his room himself.