The String Diaries (18 page)

‘You said to me you’d wait!’ He was shouting again, and she was backing away. He wanted nothing more than to reach for her and kiss her face. He resisted, clasping his hands together. This was the most precarious conversation of his life. ‘Please. You have to talk to me. I . . . I’ve been away a long time. I hadn’t realised how long, and I don’t know why. Erna, I love you. You know that. I’ve been carrying that with me, undiminished, the entire time I’ve been gone. I know you love me too. Things may have happened since, life may have happened in between, but—’

‘Jakab, I’m sorry, I can’t listen to this now. I really do have to go. I have to feed Carl. I have to cook dinner for my husband.’

That word –
husband
– wounded him more than anything she had said so far – a pair of forge-heated tongs clamping on to his heart. ‘Then meet me later. Tonight.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Erna, I insist—’

Her face darkened. ‘Careful with your tongue, Jakab. You lost the right to insist on anything a long time ago.’

He stumbled backwards, holding out his hands, feeling tears welling in his eyes. He looked up at the sky, shaking his head, then back at her. ‘Please, I didn’t come here to make you angry. I’m making a mess of this. I know it. But I’m half mad from seeing you again. Please, Erna, I beg you, meet me later. Let me explain.’

‘Jakab, I can’t, don’t you see? I can’t just walk out of the house at night to go and meet someone. I told you, I have a family, responsibilities, a man I love.’

‘You loved me.’

She paused, and he sensed that his tears had softened her. She looked on him more gently, although her expression was so close to pity it wrenched him. ‘Give me a few days,’ she said. ‘To arrange something. Then we’ll talk.’

‘That’s all I want.’

She nodded. ‘And Jakab – that’s all you’ll get. I’ve made a promise to someone. I’ve made vows, and neither you nor I can break them. Our time passed. I’m sorry it did. I waited for you for two years. Two
years
, Jakab. No clue that you were still alive, not a letter nor a message. Do you know how deeply I mourned you? No. You never will. To the northeast, a mile along the shore, there’s an old boat shed with a wooden jetty; you can’t miss it. I’ll meet you there in three days. At dawn.’

‘I understand.’

It was a lie. He did not understand at all.

Erna rearranged her son on her hip and walked away. He watched her until she was consumed by the mist.

Back in the town, he bought a newspaper and studied the date on it: 24th April, 1879.

He sat down on a wall and started working back.

Five years.

He had been away
five years.

Jakab dropped the newspaper and moaned, holding his head in his hands. How had he let this happen? How could he have let
five whole years
go by without even realising, without even considering the consequences for his life back in Keszthely? She had said she waited two years for him. If she had met someone shortly after, and wed within the year, it explained the age of her boy.

Erna had a son. A husband. A life without him.

Despite all of that, despite everything she had said, he refused to believe it was too late. A love as intense as theirs came along only once. He would stake everything upon it. He had killed his own brother so that they could be together. When she discovered that, when she understood the extent of the commitment he had made to her, she would see sense.

It had been a shock, that was all. He could forgive her the harsh words she had spoken. He had handled their reunion badly. Once she accepted his reappearance into her life, she would see how hastily she had rejected him. She would regret her words. It would work itself out.

Jakab arrived, just as she requested, shortly before sunrise. So thick was the mist at this time of day he found it impossible to judge from which direction the sun would appear. He sat on a tree stump next to the wreckage of a rowing boat and waited, stomach tossing in anticipation.

The boat shed loomed, a single-storey wooden shell with a sagging roof and two wide doors at its front, one of which had collapsed into the weeds that surrounded it. Paint had peeled from the shed walls, and the suns of countless summers had warped and baked the silvered timbers beneath. Moss and lichen spotted the building’s shaded side like a spreading cancer. The side facing the lake stood open to the elements. Long ago someone had removed the single door that had once slid forth on oiled metal runners. Its opening led to a concrete launch ramp. Next to it, a jetty thrust out into the water.

Erna emerged from the mist, hurrying down the grassy track from the main road. He jumped up as she approached, opening his mouth to greet her, but she shook her head vigorously and held up her hands. ‘No, Jakab, there is no time. You have to go. Now. They’re coming for you.’

He frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘There’s no time to explain. You have to get out of here
right
now
. Please, Jakab. I’m so sorry, I never meant for this to happen. Your people. They know you are here. They’re coming.’

He was finding it difficult to keep up with her. ‘Is this a trick?’

‘A trick? Jakab, do you think I would trick you about something like this?’

He stared, watching her eyes carefully. ‘You seemed keen enough to get rid of me three days ago.’

‘For heaven’s sake, what kind of woman do you think I am?’ She grabbed him by his coat sleeve. ‘Come
on
. Don’t go back to the main road. Follow the shoreline northeast to Gyenesdiás. You’ll find passage from there. Don’t come back to Keszthely. Promise me, Jakab. Do you have money? Look, I brought you this. It’s not much, but it might help.’

Erna delved into her skirts and withdrew a handful of coins. As she tried to press them on him, he flung her arm away, suddenly furious. Coins tumbled from her fingers. Crying out, she knelt in the dirt to gather them up.

‘Do you think I need your peasant charity?’ he snarled. ‘How do they know? How do you know they’re coming for me?’

She snatched up the scattered coins. ‘Jakab, please.
Please
just trust me. Take the money. It’s not a trick, I swear to you. After everything we had, do you think I could betray you? Do you think that badly of me?’ She sobbed. ‘You have no time. They’ll be here any minute.’

‘Balázs Lukács! Balázs Jakab!’

At the sound of his given name, Jakab leaped away from her. The condensation in the air was even thicker now, a shifting veil that roiled around them, obscuring their surroundings and making it impossible to tell from which direction the voice came. Moisture clung to Jakab’s coat, licked at his face and cheeks and hair.

‘Balázs
Lukács
! Balázs
Jakab
!’

A male voice, jarringly effeminate. Jakab sensed the scorn in its challenge. He heard the accompanying bray of a horse. Twisting on the balls of his feet, he faced the track leading from the boat shed to the main road.

A shadow moved inside the mist. It darkened, coalescing into a horse and rider. The horseman wore a black wide-brimmed hat and a leather overcoat spattered with mud. His mount, an enormous grey stallion, blew steam from its nostrils and clattered great iron-shod hooves on the pebbles.

Raising his head, the rider examined Jakab with eyes that were cold yellow pools. Flecks of ivory and malachite sailed upon them. His skin had the pallor of a forest fungus and his albino hair was oiled and scraped into a ponytail. When he smiled, his face folded into cracks like the bark of a tree. Little humanity resided in his expression.

Fear erupted in Jakab, emptying his lungs and wicking the moisture from his throat. His feet anchored themselves to the ground. He knew who this man was, what he was, even though he had never met him.

The
Főnök
’s
Merénylő.

Every seat of power had a creature like this: a beast sent to complete the distasteful assignments, the unpleasant tasks that were nonetheless vital to the maintenance of that power. The workload of this particular specimen seemed to have corrupted its very flesh.

‘And here, then, Balázs,’ the
Merénylő
began, in a high-pitched, sing-song voice, ‘we arrive at the end of your road. You led us a merry dance.’

Jakab searched his surroundings, muscles twitching, mouth as dry as sawdust. Scrubland lay to his left, the boat shed and its wooden jetty to his right. More scrub on the far side of the ruined building, leading north along the shore towards Gyenesdiás. At his back, the rippling waters of the lake, quickly surrendering to mist.

Erna still knelt before him. She stared up at the rider, her mouth hanging open in dismay.

Jakab motioned to her. ‘Get up.’ Then, when she didn’t respond, more urgently: ‘Erna, get
up
. Now.’

Perhaps she detected the anxiety in his voice, his concern for her, because she scrabbled to her feet, backing away from the rider.

‘Touching.’ The
Merénylő
chuckled. He pulled a silk handkerchief from the pocket of his coat and dabbed at his upper lip. ‘I take it you haven’t raped this one yet then, Balázs.’

The scrub to his left provided the most promising escape route. The undergrowth was thick, tangled, and while he could pick his way through, a horse and rider would have more difficulty. He only needed twenty yards of distance before the mist swallowed him up. If he could just let Erna know his intention; he would not abandon her here with the
Főnök
’s
assassin.

A crack sounded from the scrub, a dead branch snapping, just beyond the patch of ground he had been contemplating. As the bank of mist drifted and thinned, Jakab caught sight of a second rider navigating through the bracken towards him.

The newcomer looked up and grinned. His teeth were brown and rotten, his eyes flat. No
hosszú élet
, this one. Although from the look of him, almost as dangerous.

The
Merénylő
eased his heels into the grey’s flanks and the animal took a step towards Jakab, its hooves clacking and scraping on the wet stones. ‘You want to run. I understand that. I do believe you almost found the courage just then, until cowardice unmanned you.’ The flecks of ivory in the assassin’s eyes had faded, but his smile remained. ‘I’m not going to stop you, Jakab. Not right away. This has been a long race. Far too long, and far too dull, most of the time. Let’s make a little sport of it, shall we, now we’re at its conclusion? We both know how this ends. I drag you kicking and screaming and bucking and biting all the way back to Buda, and whatever’s left of you once we arrive we’ll string up, eviscerate, boil, shred and feed to the wolves. How do you like the sound of that?’

‘Erna.
Erna!
’ A new voice, frantic and disembodied, broke through the mist.

Erna moaned, dropping her head. ‘Hans, no. Why did you come?’

Out of the pillowy white crashed a young man. He was taller and slimmer than Jakab. Handsome, had his face not been pale and his eyes wide with panic. He skidded to a halt a few yards from the
Merénylő
, glanced at the riders, at Erna, and finally at Jakab. In his hands he clutched an axe, and now he beckoned with it. ‘Erna, come here. Come away.’

Jakab put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t move.’

Hans turned to the
Merénylő
, his expression accusatory. ‘What is this? You said we would be safe. You said we could trust you.’

The
hosszú élet
assassin never took his mocking eyes from Jakab’s face. ‘What I
said
, woodsman, was that if you both stayed out of the way, you would not see any of us again. Yet here we are and I find first your wife and now you. I must say I hardly describe that as staying out of the way. Do you? Besides, I don’t believe I’ve done anything to risk the safety of either your wife or your good self. I’m simply sitting here, on my horse, passing the time of day with a rapist and murderer who doesn’t know he’s dead yet. Why don’t you go into town and spend some of that coin with which we so graciously rewarded you?’ The
Merényl
ő
’s grin widened, but it never reached his eyes. They burned like twin suns, penetrating Jakab’s mind, anticipating him, deriding him.

Jakab felt as if someone had battered him with an iron bar. Blood drained from his stomach. Tightening his grip on Erna’s shoulder, he whispered, ‘You
sold
me to them?’

She shook her head, trying to shrug off his hand. ‘Jakab, no. That’s not how it happened. Don’t listen to him. He—’

‘You thought you’d exchange me for a few pitiful handfuls of
coin
?’

The rush of emotion unbalanced him, his initial outrage eclipsed by an all-consuming grief. How could she have done this? Out of all the people he had ever known, to be betrayed by her . . . it was too shocking, too devastating, to contain in a single thought. He had thought she loved him, truly loved him, yet all this time she had been capable of betrayal as callous as this.

And what next? After all this was done, with him no doubt bound hand and foot and dragged through the mud behind the
Merényl
ő
’s horse, what was her plan? To return to her life shared with the simpleton standing beside the
hosszú élet
assassin? To return to her baby and her blood money and her snug little life?

Moving almost without conscious thought, as if his body acted of its own volition, his free hand dropped to his belt. His fingers slid along it, ducked inside and pulled the knife from its sheath inside his trousers. As he lifted the weapon in an arc around the front of Erna’s body, he caught a reflection of her lips in the polished steel of its blade: lips he had waited five years to kiss; lips that had laughed with him, that had talked of future plans with him, that had once caressed his skin.

When Jakab placed the knife against her throat she screamed and thrashed, until the point pricked her flesh and she stilled.