A Frail Thread
A Nádasdy Short
At thirty-three, Máté Nádasdy had already lived a full and conflicted life during the time the Habsburgs ruled Hungary. After a troubled childhood, he served his country in battle, lived abroad in Paris, and now found himself the owner of a popular coffeehouse on the Champs-Élysées of Budapest, Andrássy Avenue, where he hopes to live out a peaceful, if mundane, life as a café proprietor. Despite his efforts to leave the past behind, he’s drawn to helping others with their problems and set things right.
1890. 19 February. Wednesday. Budapest.
11:32 a.m.
I sprinted the five blocks from my coffeehouse to the address the police officer had given me. He said only that a woman was asking for me, and she was in trouble. The new apartment building stood four stories, with a coffeehouse and Tóth Szárazáru, a dry goods store, on the street level. István Tóth had been an imposing force among Pest’s mercantile elite, accumulating money and influence for himself and his wife until his fortunes began to sour a few years back. All were shocked when Tóth, still a young man, collapsed dead in the street, his dear wife, Cili, on his arm. Rumors swirled about the city that the weight of debt killed him. After that, the holders began calling in the loans, which now fell on his widow.
The Tóth Szárazáru, still open despite its debts, occupied the ground level. Two uniformed officers stood at the building’s entrance, blocking my way to the apartments above.
“I’m Nádasdy. Someone sent for me?”
“She’s up the stairs in bed with the dead man. A straightforward case. But be careful. She’s got a gun aimed on the doorway.”
I took the steps two at a time and met another officer at the top. “We evacuated the apartments on this floor. The girl’s holed up in the room at the end of the hall with the dead chap. We’re waiting for Detective Petrik before we go in after her.”
I’d only have a few minutes before the detective arrived and ordered the officers to shoot her. The Budapest police didn’t negotiate with suspects holding weapons.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“Room’s rented to the woman, Miss Krisztina Kovács. Paid for a month’s rent in cash just a few days ago. So says the building proprietress from the shop below.”
I nodded and walked carefully toward the open door at the end of the hall. Some of these new apartment buildings provided a flat like this on each floor—no windows, no bath, just a bedroom and sitting room combined—for bachelors, widows, or others who needed just the most modest appointments.
“Miss Kovács—Krisztina. I’m Máté Nádasdy. You asked for me.”
The room was dim, the only light coming from a gas lamp on the wall that had been trimmed back. Despite the darkness, I saw the glint of metal, the barrel of a pistol, shaking from the shadows behind an armchair.
“The other girls say you help people … people like us.” Her voice was weak, almost a whisper. She was right. I had helped someone a few months ago, someone quite defenseless, someone who might have disappeared and no one would have noticed.
“I’m coming in, and I’m going to turn up the lamp.”
With careful movements, I entered the room and went to the dimmed lamp. Once I opened the valve, I could see all I needed to see. There was little in the room, a bed, a desk and chair, and an armchair. Everything had a gray neutrality that threatened to strip all humanity from the room. And there he was, face down on the bed, his bare back white as alabaster, and where his head should have been, well. The weapon lay next to him, a poker from the stove in the corner, covered with blood. The stove was not lit, leaving the room as frigid as the February outside, and yet a single coal glowed inside its grating, making a futile attempt to throw some heat.
Now I could see her quivering arm extending from behind the chair. “Come out. We need to talk if I’m to help you.”
She slid from behind but didn’t rise, and thus revealed herself a little at a time, like a timid puppet in a sidewalk show. She was beautiful, about twenty years, but perhaps older. Her face was composed of perfect angles, classical almost, but unadorned with makeup, her complexion sallow as a corpse. And she had a dreamy countenance, her eyes half closed, but still an iridescent blue, her crescent irises subsuming all. She had pulled a blanket to the floor to cover her naked body except for her thin pale shoulders that curled in on her chest. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
Her lips parted, as if to speak, but instead she inhaled a raspy breath, and a cough sputtered from her lungs. She put a pink tinged cloth to her mouth in an absentminded gesture. The vapor of her cough billowed in the cold air before it dissolved.
Consumption.
“Did you kill him?” I asked.
“No—I mean, I don’t know. I was … asleep. I don’t know him.” She fought another spell of coughing, trying to hold the wheeze within her chest.
“But he’s a client?”
Her face turned red and she coughed again into the cloth. It was a handkerchief of fine linen, so white the stains seemed to almost glow in contrast. It held my gaze even after she started speaking again. “I’m not like that. I’m just a … flower seller, from down by the train station.”
A flower seller with such a handkerchief? A piece that didn’t fit quite right. She tried to rise, but she was weak and slid back down into a semi-reclined pose against the armchair, defeated. “I’ll shoot you—if you come near.”
“I don’t doubt you.”
I walked to the other side of the bed. The man wore a crested ring on his finger. A noble. I picked up his wallet from the side table. No money. His coat was draped over the desk chair. Checking the pockets, I found some calling cards. Baron Ferenc Vörös. I knew of him. Powerful. Political. He had a reputation for usury, lending to nobles and others without liquidity.
“How did you turn up here then?” I walked back around the bed. The mattress still showed the girl’s imprint, and the pillow betrayed her illness, showing flecks of brown blood. A small amber bottle lay on its side on the floor, the cap lost. I picked it up and examined it. The scent was heavy, warm, but with a hint of bitterness. Black Drop. Unmistakable. In a drugged state, she might have done anything. The situation for Krisztina was moving toward hopeless. Even if she were innocent, who would believe the word of a poor consumptive flower seller with a laudanum habit? Even more, I felt my sympathy slipping away with any hope of helping her.
“My head is so heavy, full of fog,” she said, pressing the cloth to her forehead. “She—Katalin—asked me to stay in her room. She wanted me to … watch it for her.”
The girl paused, as if losing her place. “We’re friends now, new friends we are.” And then, her breath seemed to run out, like a candlewick smothered by its own wax.
She took another breath and began again. “I’ve not any friends—since I came here. I shouldn’t have come, leaving family … Now I’m so poorly, I can’t go back.” She began to cry, the tears streaking down her cheeks in a rush.
“How did you meet her?” I asked as an icy draft blew in from the hallway and a chill ran through my body.
Krisztina pulled the blanket up over her shoulders, then scrunched her eyes closed, trying to remember. “At the station. She buys flowers from me. And she gets me my medicine.”
Krisztina paused and turned her head left as though looking through her closed eyelids, trying to reimagine what happened. “She loves my name and said it all the time. ‘Krisztina, I love your flowers.’ But yesterday—or the day before—she just walked up. Asked if I’d help her.”
Her memory seemed less than perfect, and I wondered where the truth was in it. Yet it was all I had. “And she offered you money?”
She nodded slowly. “I think she was rich because of her finery, but she wasn’t high and mighty like the lot of ’em. She had to go out of town—in a rush. Left me another bottle of … Black Drop to sooth my cough. A true friend she is.”
“May I see your bag?”
She pointed with the pistol to the dressing bench at the foot of the bed. The bag was fashioned from a crude cloth, the color of earth, but it was embroidered with an intricate floral pattern common in the Magyar countryside. Inside, among a few withered flowers, I found a piece of stale bread wrapped in a rag, a roll of forints, and a piece of paper, folded over many times.
I stepped to the desk and smoothed out the paper. It was a note of hand, showing a debt of one hundred forints, a queenly sum for a flower peddler. At the bottom was the debtor’s name, Krisztina Kovács, signed in a well-schooled script. Another piece of damning evidence. There was nothing I could do for this girl, for I can’t help the guilty ones. It appeared she owed a weighty debt to the baron.
Yet, there were things that didn’t fit. And Petrik would be here any moment; he and his officers would enter firing their sidearms.
Walking to the bed, I looked down at the baron. I found it hard to feel anything for him, but even so, he didn’t deserve to die like this. The girl surprised him from behind. That was obvious. I rolled him onto his shoulder, revealing his front side. His skin was cold as marble; he’d been dead for some time. But he wasn’t old, perhaps forty years. His face showed no evidence of trauma. Indeed, it was even placid with the hint of a smile, and on his neck, some marks. I pulled his beard aside to get a better look. Smudges of crimson, lip rouge, kisses.
I let him roll back onto his stomach.
Then a thud came from next to the girl. Krisztina’s right hand had dropped to the floor and the pistol lay a few centimeters away on the carpet.
“Krisztina!” I went to her and shook her arm but she didn’t respond. She had fallen into a stupor.
And yet, she still clutched the bloodied cloth in her left hand, a dainty mouchoir brodé, an embroidered handkerchief. French, I’m sure, for I’d seen many like it in the hands of the Paris elite. The mademoiselles relished waving such frippery to summon waiters in the cafés.
“Krisztina!” I yelled, and she opened her eyes, but her mind was no longer there. She had drifted away, escaped to somewhere.
“Krisztina, I need you to think. Where did you get the handkerchief?” I looked at her hand holding the cloth, the fine fabric stained with blood, gripped in the girl’s grimy hand.
She looked at it and shook her head. “It’s not mine.”
“Then where did you get it?”
“Somebody … uh … put it in my hand. He was so kind.”
“He?”
“No … no. Maybe ‘she’?” Now her whole body shivered, and her lips took on an ashen blue tint.
“When?” I pressed her, even knowing we were descending into confusion, but her eyes had closed again. I gave her another gentle shake. Nothing. Just the steady wheezing from her lungs. It was useless, for the details I needed would be out of her reach for hours now, maybe forever. Then the final ember popped within the stove and died, releasing its last puff of ash and smoke.
Afraid to touch the handkerchief, I flipped open my folding knife and used it to pull the cloth from her hand and spread it on the floor. This one was the work of an artist, the fabric exquisite, finer than any I’d seen in France, and the designs in the embroidery were unusual but balanced. It was a custom piece for someone of wealth.
I stared at the pattern, desperate to see something that would reveal the truth of what had happened. And then I saw it. One of those images that once seen cannot be unseen. The embroiderer had hidden letters in the filagree. They overlapped one another and blended expertly with the vines and leaves of the design, at different times melting into them altogether. They repeated over and over around the entire circumferences of the cloth.
K T V F K T V F
K. Krisztina. It made little sense. Why would her initial be on such an expensive handkerchief? And the V and the F seemed to imply Vörös without a doubt. But what if it wasn’t hers? What if it was a gift, a secret gift, encoded to remind the recipient of their discrete love, perhaps all contrived to avenge a crushing debt?
My pulse raced as the answer fell into place: KT—Katalin Tóth, hiding behind her endearing nickname, Cili. Krisztina was framed, an almost perfect trap, and it was begun many months ago. She had been used to accomplish a vile revenge, targeted because of her vulnerability, her naïveté even, the assumption being she was expendable, invisible. And chosen because she shared an initial, K. She loves my name and said it all the time.
Just then, from the hall, the jarring sound of men talking all at once. Orders and admonitions being shouted. Petrik had arrived. Ignoring my aversion, I seized the handkerchief and ran to block the doorway, catching Petrik and his men with their revolvers drawn.
I held up the bloodstained cloth and shouted, “Stop! The girl’s innocent. She needs a doctor, not a firing squad. You’ll find your murderess below in the store.”
This story is a work of fiction. Except where explicitly identified in the afterword, the names, characters, and incidents herein are a product of the author’s creation and any resemblance to actual persons or events is entirely coincidental.
A FRAIL THREAD. Text copyright © 2024 by Mark Mrozinski LLC. All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in retrieval systems, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.
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