Janson recalled the ruins that were visible farther up the hill: all that remained of the vast estate were jagged remnants of walls that rose only a few feet from the ground, barely visible through the tall grass. Eroded brick mounts of once grand chimneys protruded through the scrub like tree stumps. A castle that had stood proudly for centuries was reduced to rubble—not much more than a rock garden. A lost world. The old woman had entered an enchanted garden once. Now she lived in the shadows of its ruins.
The wood fire cracked and hissed quietly, and for a minute no one spoke.
“And what about the scampering of little feet?” Jessie asked finally.
“They had only one child. Peter. Would you like a drop more pálinka?”
“You’re real kind, ma’am,” Jessie said. “But I’m fine.”
“Peter, you said,” Janson repeated, deliberately casual. “When was he born?”
“His naming day was the first Saturday in October 1937. Such a beautiful boy. So handsome and so clever. You could tell he was meant to be a remarkable human being.”
“Was he, now?”
“I can picture him still, walking up and down the long mirrored hallway in his Peter Pan collar and his little plus fours and his sailor’s cap. He loved to watch his reflection reflected back and forth between two facing mirrors, multiplying forever, smaller and smaller.” Her smile drew with it a trellis of wrinkles. “And his parents were so devoted to him. You could understand that. He was their only child. The birth was a difficult one, and it left the countess unable to conceive.” The old woman was in another place, another world: if it was a lost world, it was not lost to her. “One day, just after lunch, he ate some pastries the cook had made for tea, like a naughty little boy, and the cook berated him. Well, Countess Illana happened to overhear. Don’t you ever talk that way to our child, she told her. And just the way she said it—little icicles hung off her words. Bettina, she was the cook, her cheeks flamed, but she didn’t say anything. She understood. We all did. He was … unlike other boys. But not spoiled, you must understand. Sunny as the first of July, as we Hungarians say. When something pleased him, he’d smile so hard you’d think his face would split. Blessed, that child was. Magical. He could have been anything. Anything at all.”
“Peter must have been everything to them,” Jessie said.
The old woman stroked her dog’s flank again, rhythmically. “Such a perfect little boy.” Her eyes lit up, briefly, as if she were seeing the boy in front of her, seeing him in his knickerbockers and sailor’s cap swanning in front of the mirrors on both sides of the hall, his reflections trailing off into an infinite regress.
The crone’s eyelids fluttered and she closed them hard, trying to halt the pictures in her mind. “The fevers were terrible, he was like a kettle, tossing in bed and retching. It was a cholera epidemic, you know. So hot to the touch. And then so cold. I was one of those who attended him on his sickbed, you see.” She put both her hands on her dog’s face, gaining comfort from the creature’s steadfast strength. “I can never forget that morning—finding his body, so cold, those lips so pale, his cheeks like wax. It was heartbreaking when it happened. He was just five years old. Could anything be sadder? Dead, before he truly had a chance to live.”
A heaving sense of vertigo, of utter disorientation, overcame Janson. Peter Novak had died as a child? How could that be? Was there some mistake—was this another family the old woman was describing, another Peter?
And yet the accounts of the philanthropist’s life were all agreed: Peter Novak, the beloved only son of Janós Ferenczi-Novak, had been born in October 1937, and reared in the war-torn village of Molnár. That much was part of the official record.
But as for the rest of it?
There could be no doubt that the old woman was telling the truth as she remembered it. And yet what did it mean?
Peter Novak: the man who never was.
Amid a growing unease, possibilities fluttered through Janson’s mind, like shuffled and reshuffled index cards.
Jessie unzipped her knapsack, took out the picture book on Peter Novak, and opened it to a color close-up of the great man. She showed it to Gitta Békesi.
“See this fellow? His name is Peter Novak.”
The old woman glanced at the picture and looked at Jessie, shrugging. “I do not follow the news. I have no television, take no newspapers. Forgive me. But, yes, I think I have heard of this man.”
“Same name as the count’s boy. Sure it couldn’t be the same person?”
“Peter, Novak—common names in our country,” she said, shrugging. “Of course this is not Ferenczi-Novak’s son. He died in 1942. I told you.” Her eyes returned to the photograph. “Besides, this man’s eyes are brown.” The point seemed to her almost too obvious to belabor, but she added, “Little Peter’s were blue, like the waters of the Balaton. Blue, like his mother’s.”
In a state of shock, the two began the long walk back to the Lancia, one mile up the hill. As the house receded into the overgrowth, they began to talk, slowly, tentatively, exploring the deepening mystery.
“What if there was another child?” Jessie asked. “Another kid nobody knew about, who took on his brother’s name. A hidden twin, maybe.”
“The old woman seemed certain that he was their only one. Not an easy thing to hide from the household staff. Of course, if Count Ferenczi-Novak was as paranoid as his reputation had it, any number of ruses are conceivable.”
“But why? He wasn’t crazy.”
“Not crazy, but desperately fearful for his kid,” Janson said. “Hungarian politics was in an incredibly explosive condition. Remember what you’ve read. Béla Kun took power in March 1919, ruled for a hundred and thirty-three days. A reign of terror. That was followed, once he’d been toppled, by an even more horrifying massacre of the people who helped him gain power. Whole families were slaughtered—Admiral Horthy’s so-called White Terror. Reprisals and counter-reprisals were just a way of life back then. The count might have felt that what comes around goes around. That his association with Prime Minister Kállay could be a death sentence, not just for him, but for his family.”
“He was afraid of the Communists?”
“The Fascists and the Communists both. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in late ’forty-four and early ’forty-five after the Arrow Cross took over. Remember, these Arrow Cross were people who thought Horthy was too lax! True homegrown Hungarian Nazis. When the Red Army took control of the country, you had another round of purges. Hundreds of thousands were killed, again. Enemies of the revolution, right? People like Ferenczi-Novak were caught in a pincer. How many instances are there of that kind of ideological whiplash—a country switching from far left to far right to far left again, with nothing in between?”
“So we’re back to the old question: How do you bring a child into that world? Maybe these guys thought they couldn’t. That any child of theirs would have to be hidden.”
“Moses in the basket of bulrushes and pitch,” Janson mused. “But that raises a lot more questions. Novak tells the world that these are his parents. Why?”
“Because it’s the truth?”
“Not good enough. A child like that would have been raised to be afraid of the truth, to regard the truth as a very dangerous thing—for Christ’s sake, he might not even know the truth. That’s the thing about a child: you can’t tell him what he can’t deal with. In Nazi Germany, when a Jewish toddler was hidden by a Christian family, the child wouldn’t, couldn’t, be told the truth. The risk was too great: he might say something inappropriate to his playmates, to a teacher. The only way to protect him from the consequences of a potentially deadly truth was to keep him in ignorance of that truth. Only later, when the child was grown, would he be told. Besides, if Novak’s parents were who he said they were, this Gitta Békesi would know about it. I feel sure of it. I don’t think they had another child. I think she told us the truth: Peter Novak, the count’s only son, died when he was little.
”
Shadows lengthened into long narrow stripes as the sun dipped behind the distant peak. Minutes later, clearings that had been golden suddenly turned gray. On a hillside, sunset came quickly and with little warning.
“This is getting to be a goddamn hall of mirrors, like the one Grandma Gitta talked about. Yesterday, we were wondering whether some impostor had taken on Peter Novak’s identity. Now it’s looking more and more like Peter Novak himself took on somebody else’s identity. A dead kid, a wiped-out village—and, for somebody, an opportunity.”
“Identity theft,” said Janson. “Beautifully executed.”
“It’s genius, when you think about it. You choose a village that was totally liquidated in the war—so there’s practically nobody around who’d remember a thing about his childhood. All the records, certificates of birth and death, destroyed after the place was torched.”
“Making himself an aristocrat’s son was a good move,” Janson said. “It helps deal with a lot of questions that might have arisen about his origins. Nobody has to wonder how he could be so well educated and worldly without an institutional record of his schooling.”
“Exactly. Where’d he go to school? Hey, he was privately tutored—a count’s kid, right? Why was he off the radar? Because this aristocrat, this Janós Ferenczi-Novak, had tons of enemies and good reason to be paranoid. Everything fits, real tight.”
“Like dovetailed planks. Too tightly. The next thing you know, he’s a big-time currency trader.”
“A man with no past.”
“Oh, he’s got a past, all right. It’s just a past that nobody knows.”
He flashed on the philanthropist’s Gulfstream V, and the white cursive letters on its indigo enamel: Sok kicsi sokra megy. The same Hungarian proverb Novak had repeated on the news segment. Many small things can add up to a big one. It was a proposition that held for benefaction—and for deception. Márta Lang’s words, in that jet, returned to him with a chilling resonance: Novak’s proved who he really is, again and again. A man for all seasons, and a man for all peoples.
Yet who was he really?
Jessie stepped easily over an immense bough that lay in their path. “Thing I keep going back to is why? Why the trickery? Everybody loves him. He’s a goddamn hero of the age.”
“Even saints can have something to hide,” Janson parried, choosing his path more carefully. “What if the man came from a family that had been involved with Arrow Cross atrocities? Again, you’ve got to imagine a country where people have long memories, where reprisal is a byword, where whole families, including children and grandchildren, were killed or deported because they were on the wrong side. These cycles of revenge were a motive force of twentieth-century Hungarian history. If there was evil like this in your past, you might very well want to escape it, leave it behind you, by whatever means necessary. Grandma Gitta isn’t the only person who lives in the past around here. Think about it. Say that this man came from an Arrow Cross family. No matter what he did, it would come up again and again—in every interview, every conversation, every discussion.”
Jessie nodded. “‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set at edge,’” she said. “Like it says in the Book of Jeremiah.”
“The motivation could be as simple as that,” said Janson. Still, he suspected that nothing about it was truly simple. Something—not an idea, but an inkling of one—hovered indistinctly in his mind, just out of reach, but dartingly present, like a tiny insect. Faint, nearly imperceptible, and yet there.
If only he could focus, shut everything else out and focus.
A few moments elapsed before he recognized the sound that drifted up the hill. It, too, was faint and nearly imperceptible, and yet as his senses tuned to the auditory stimulus, he recognized the source, and his heart began to thud.
It was a woman screaming.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Oh Christ, no!
The thorny privet and overgrown vines whipped and scratched at Janson as he raced down the winding hillside path. He was mindful only of his footfalls as he vaulted over boulders and burst through bushes; a misplaced step in the treacherous terrain could result in a sprain or worse. He had ordered Jessie to return to the Lancia posthaste: it would be a disaster if their enemies reached it first. Her trek was uphill, but she ran like a gazelle and would get there soon.
A few minutes later, only slightly winded, Janson arrived at the old woman’s dilapidated farmhouse. The screams had ceased, replaced by something even more ominous: utter silence.
The door was ajar, and inside was a spectacle that Janson knew would be forever etched on his mind. The noble Kuvasz lay on its side; it had been disemboweled, and its viscera spilled from its belly onto the flatweave rug, in a glistening, red mound, steaming faintly in the chilly air. Splayed in the nearby rocking chair was Gitta Békesi, a woman who had survived Red Terrors and White, the annihilating clashes of two world wars, the tanks of 1956, outbreaks and plagues of man and nature both. Her face was hidden by her coarse muslin frock, which had been yanked up and over her head, exposing her flaccid torso—and the unspeakable horrors that had been visited upon it. Small, red-rimmed wounds—each corresponding to the plunge of a bayonet, Janson knew—crisscrossed her silvery flesh in a grotesque arrangement. The blades of her assailants had plunged into her dozens of times. On her exposed arms and legs he could see a cluster of red weals caused by the pressure of gripping fingers. The woman had been held down, and tortured with a plunging blade. Were they seeking information from her? Or merely punishing her, sadistically, for the information she had already divulged to him?
What kind of monsters would do such a thing?
Janson’s face felt frozen, numb. He looked around, saw spatters of the dead woman’s blood on the floor and on the walls. The atrocity had occurred just minutes before. Her visitors had been as swift as they were savage.
And where were they now? They could not be far. Was he meant to be their next victim?
Janson’s heart beat in a powerful, slow rhythm. The prospect of confrontation did not fill him with anxiety, but with a strange sense of transport. The old woman might have been easy prey; whoever had done this to her would find that he was not. A convulsing feeling of rage ran through him, familiar and oddly comforting in its familiarity. It would find release.
The half-taunting words of Derek Collins returned to him: Violence is something you’re very, very, very good at, Janson … . You tell me you’re sickened by the killing. I’m going to tell you what you’ll discover one day for yourself: that’s the only way you’ll ever feel alive.
It felt true now. For years, he had run from his nature. He would not run from it today. As he surveyed the carnage, one thought ran through his mind like a saber. Those who had inflicted such suffering would themselves know suffering.
Where were they?
Close, very close. Because they were looking for him. They would be up the hill. Would Jessie make it to the Lancia in time?
Janson needed elevation if he was to get a proper view of the field of operation. The farmhouse, he saw, was built around a courtyard in the traditional L, with living and working areas under one roof. At right angles to the house was a big portico with a hayloft above and, adjoining it, horse stables. Now he ran into the courtyard and climbed a ladder to the tall hayloft opposite. A hinged door in the rough-planked roof allowed him to clamber to its highest point.
A quarter mile up the hill, he could see, a small party of armed men were making their way toward Jessie Kincaid. Their figures were difficult to make out in the dim light, but broken tree limbs and trampled grass showed their progress. Then Janson saw and heard the flutter of black birds, swooping from the nearby underbrush into the sky, with strident caws; something had disturbed them. A moment later he saw movement in the overgrown trees and bushes surrounding the old farmhouse, and he realized what it meant.
He had fallen into a trap!
The men had been count
ing on his overhearing the old woman’s screams. They had sought to lure him back to the old farmhouse.
They had him exactly where they wanted him—would do to him exactly what they wanted to! Adrenaline filled his veins, brought a terrible icy focus to his perception.
The farmhouse was itself a gated enclosure, but the armed men had it surrounded on all four sides, and now they showed themselves, edging out of the underbrush and into the yard. They must have seen him enter, had probably been waiting for him to dash out. For there was no way Janson could escape undetected. Kincaid would be intercepted on her way to the Lancia; he would be destroyed or captured in a gated compound that was now his prison.