The String Diaries (19 page)

Hans yelled, terror in his eyes. He lifted a foot, placed it back down. ‘Please! Whatever you’re thinking, don’t. I’m begging you.’

Looking to his right, the only direction he could go, Jakab checked the wooden jetty. Its planks were stained black from the damp air. He sidestepped towards it, pulling Erna along with him. A single bead of blood appeared at her throat. It rolled down her neck.

‘Well, this
is
interesting,’ the
Merénylő
announced. ‘Bizarre, yet interesting nonetheless. I have to admit I hadn’t expected you to do that.’

The jetty was right behind him now. Jakab backed on to it, dragging Erna after him.

To his left, the second rider emerged from the scrub, guiding his mount over brambles. The man unsheathed a rapier and brought his horse to a halt, waiting for instructions.

Jakab continued to back down the slippery planks of the jetty.

The
Merénylő
reached down. When he straightened he was holding a crossbow, a bolt sitting in the channel before the cocked and latched bow. ‘You know, Jakab, I think that’s far enough. I mean, what can you possibly do next? My grubby associate here is hungry, and he becomes tiresome on an empty stomach. There’s a place in town that serves the most delectable spiced sausage, and I’ve promised him his fill once we’ve finished here. And we
are
finished here, Jakab. There’s nowhere left to go.’

Erna’s husband dropped his axe. He regarded each of them in turn, eyes pleading.

Erna took a breath, and Jakab felt her press herself against him. She leaned back, her voice low and calm. ‘Jakab, listen to me. If you do nothing else for the rest of your life, just listen now. You’ve got this wrong. All of it. When you found me a few days ago, I went home and told Hans what had happened. I’ll admit that. But that’s
all
I did. Hans already knew about you, had known about you for years. My God, you were the reason he found it so difficult to court me in the first place. I thought for so long you were coming back that I—’

‘I
did
come back,’ he hissed.

‘Five years later, Jakab. Five
years
. Maybe a blink of an eye for you but not for me. I thought you were dead. I swear it. A few years ago your people came back, asking questions. I told them nothing – there was nothing to tell – but they explained how we could contact them if you returned.’

‘And when I showed up, the money was just too much of a temptation.’

‘No! That’s just it. I told Hans I had to see you one last time, to talk to you. To say goodbye. At first he agreed. But then he contacted them, Jakab. I didn’t know. He was scared and he contacted them. He was scared of you, of the
hosszú életek
. Scared he might lose me.

‘Jakab, please listen. Hans is a good man. A wonderful man. He loves me and he loves our son, provides for us well. He was just doing what he thought he had to do to protect his family. I’m telling you the truth, Jakab. Five years ago I was in love with you so utterly I thought I might go mad from it. Our time may have passed but I still love you. I always will. I could never betray you. Not for money, not for anything.’

She looked over her shoulder and when Jakab met her eyes he felt himself floundering in the honesty of her gaze. She was telling the truth. Everything had happened exactly as she had described it; he suddenly had no doubt. At the realisation that she had not sold his freedom, had even risked her safety to give him a chance to escape, his emotions churned anew.

He had never had a chance of winning her back. She was too faithful for that. Even though she had moved on, had married and started to raise a family, her love for him had never deteriorated into bitterness. Even now, she was trying to protect him.

His vision blurred – tears of despair, that he would never have the opportunity to share her life. After everything, after all he had done to be here, the cruelty of it was too much to face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he choked, voice cracking with the strain. ‘I mean it. I want you to know that. But if I can’t have you like this—’

‘Oh, how long do we have to wait, Balázs?’ The
Merénylő
shook his head. ‘There are two of us on horse. You’re on foot. Cut the girl’s throat if you must. So what? It’s the same unhappy ending for you whether you kill this fellow’s wife or not. Did I tell you I’m hungry? I don’t think I’ve eaten since last night.’

Even in his agony, Jakab noticed the way Erna’s husband reacted to the
Merényl
ő
’s words. The man’s eyes widened in outrage. Bending to the earth, he retrieved his axe.

Even though Hans stood just outside the
Merényl
ő
’s field of vision, Jakab did not doubt that the assassin
knew
exactly where he was positioned. What the
Merénylő
might not have anticipated was how his casual dismissal of Erna’s life had affected her husband. Hans lifted the axe, rested the haft on his shoulder, and took a silent step closer to the assassin’s horse. Then he switched his attention to Jakab.

Jakab returned the stare with loathing. How could this man, this lowly
woodsman
, have won Erna’s heart? He might have laughed had it not been so tragic. He had sacrificed five years, had taken his own brother’s life, and had returned to Keszthely, prepared to take Erna away with him and lead a far more basic existence than he would have otherwise accepted. In the meantime, this low-bred peasant had happened along and stolen everything Jakab had worked for; worse, he had
polluted
her with his seed so that she had spawned his child.

Jakab inched his fingers around the handle of the knife, switching his grip. The weapon was Austrian-made, fashioned from a single piece of forged steel, and was balanced so that it could be thrown from either end. He had spent so many hours sharpening its blade he preferred to throw it from the handle. Far less chance of cutting himself that way.

While he could not change the fact that Erna was in love with Hans, he was damned if he was going to stand by and let that peasant imbecile steal his rightful place with her. He studied Hans’s face, his long nose, angular jaw and large, frightened eyes. Such an easy face to remember; such an easy face to become. If Jakab had not been caught by the
Főnök
’s man, things could still have worked out. He watched the woodsman take another step nearer the assassin, fingers flexing on the axe.

The
Merénylő
shifted in his saddle and turned his attention to Hans. ‘My boy, please don’t even think of involving yourself in—’

Jakab pulled Erna to his left, drew back his hand and threw the knife. Even as the blade left his fingers he realised he had misread the assassin’s focus. The
Merénylő
was moving before his eyes found the blade’s trajectory. He threw himself back in his saddle as the weapon whickered towards him.

The
assassin
rolled in a fluid arc, the blade spinning through the space he had just vacated. Rising back up in the saddle, he raised the crossbow as Hans lunged for the reins of the horse.

Jakab watched, paralysed, as the
Merénylő
pulled the crossbow trigger. He heard a
thwick
as the sinew bowstring contracted, picked up the bolt and accelerated it down the stock. He felt the impact of the projectile before the pain, the force of it knocking him back a step.

Hans was screaming. The
Merénylő
dropped the crossbow to the ground and drew the sword sheathed at his waist. The second rider shouted, kicking his heels into the flanks of his mount.

Concentrate on the pain
, Jakab urged himself.
Grit your teeth and explore its edges. Force the wound to pucker and kiss. Knit the flesh back together.

He hoped the bolt had not lodged in his body. It would make this far more difficult.

Hans loosed a second wrenching scream, swung his axe and buried the bit deep in the
Merényl
ő
’s spine. The assassin’s eyes bulged.

Erna issued an alien keening.

There’s no pain. None at all.

Jakab turned. The crossbow bolt had buried itself inside Erna’s head, entering her skull just below her right eye. Her cheekbone had imploded from the impact, giving the side of her face an obscene concave look. Her eye was a blood-filled mess, leaking fluid down her cheek.

Only the end of the bolt remained visible. Jakab saw wooden flights attached to its shaft. Erna’s jaw dropped open and a mindless
clacking
sound escaped her lips. She bucked and spasmed, her teeth snapping at the air, and as he released her she pitched forward on to the slimy planks of the jetty. When he saw the bolt’s iron head protruding from the curve of her skull, and the remains of her beautiful mind and her memories dripping from its spike, Jakab felt his diaphragm contract and then he was loosing his own wretched scream that ricocheted inside his head, a tortured sound that would never stop,
could
never stop.

Hans yanked the axehead out of the
Merényl
ő
’s spine and the
Főnök
’s man slid from the saddle, his face hitting the ground with a slap. The woodsman stepped over the body, hefted the axe above his head and brought it down a second time. This time the blade sliced through the soft flesh of the assassin’s
neck and sheared through his vertebrae. Hans let go of the handle, staggered, collapsed to his knees. He raised both hands over his head.

Jakab forced himself to look at Erna, forced himself to retain every awful detail. He had walked away from the
hosszú életek
willingly
,
yet they had followed, sending his brother after him. After forcing him to kill Jani, they had sent this vile creature slumped before him.

And now the
Merénylő
was dead too. But not before he had succeeded in ending Jakab’s life. Perhaps not by stealing his last breath, but he had taken something just as valuable.

It was over. He could not think of what to do.

It was over.

Everything.

Jakab let out the breath in his lungs, hearing its hiss as it passed his lips. An expunging, an outpouring. He lifted his arms until they pointed away from his body, outstretched. A ruinous calm settled upon him.

Nothing left at all now.

He gave the remaining rider a defeated, sickened smile. And then he allowed his body to fall backwards. Momentum took him. He felt an icy shock as he hit the water. The surface of the lake parted, and then it accepted him, coldness flooding him as he sank beneath, drifting, a funereal roaring in his ears.

The mist closed around the diminishing ripples of his wake.

C
HAPTER
13

Paris

1979

Sitting opposite Charles at the small cafe table, Nicole Dubois stirred a sugar lump into her espresso. They were sitting beneath the beige awning of the Café de Flore, on the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Rue Saint-Benoit.

Traffic flowed along the boulevard. Charles watched as a battered Citroën swerved, but did not brake, to avoid a group of tourists negotiating the junction. The car veered around the corner in a black cough of exhaust fumes, its driver holding the wheel with one hand and gesticulating out of the window with the other.

Nicole looked up at him, her expression grim. ‘Later that morning,’ she said, ‘half mad with grief, Hans Fischer buries his wife in a makeshift grave by the side of Lake Balaton.’

‘Erna Novák,’ Charles replied.

Before Nicole had left England, she had given him a translation of the earliest diaries, written by Hans. It had taken him two evenings to read them. He had seen enough of the originals to know that the copies were accurate reproductions. They had left him feeling far more disturbed than he had expected.

Nicole nodded. ‘My great-great-grandmother. It was 1879. She was twenty-seven years old. She’d been married to Hans for just three years. She died because she tried to protect Jakab from the people who were hunting him. After burying Erna, Hans walks back into Keszthely, packs a bag of belongings, says goodbye to his parents and leaves with his son Carl the same morning. That boy, my great-grandfather, is less than two years old. They never go back.’

Whether it was pure fabrication or the result of a single shocking incident twisted by superstition, Charles did not know, but hearing the tale from Nicole’s lips lifted it straight out of the past and into the present. While neither of them could know the complete truth of what had happened in Keszthely in 1879, something terrible had happened to Erna Novák. It had taken Charles some effort to research it, but Gerold Novák, Erna’s father, had reported his daughter missing to the authorities in the spring of 1879. Two months later her corpse was discovered when a local farmer’s pigs uprooted it. She had been shot in the head.

Had Hans Fischer murdered her? Or had she been killed much as the diaries described? Perhaps the trauma of seeing his wife’s murder, coupled with an upbringing couched in superstition, had driven Hans to believe that
hosszú
életek
were responsible. But even if that were true, it didn’t explain the continuation of the family’s beliefs long after he was dead.

Nicole paused as a waiter skirted their table and unloaded a tray of coffee and croissants on to two Frenchwomen sitting nearby. When he retreated, she continued. ‘Hans and Carl eventually settle in the city of Sopron, near the Austrian border. He changes their surname from Fischer to Richter.’

‘When the diaries begin.’

‘Hans writes the first. He starts it partly to come to terms with everything that has happened, and partly to capture all his memories of Erna, so he can pass them on to Carl when the boy is old enough.’

‘He never saw any evidence of the
hosszú életek
’s
abilities
.
Any proof whatsoever.’

‘Charles, this is nineteenth-century provincial Hungary. Hans doesn’t need evidence to accept what he hears about the
életek.
He’s just seen his wife murdered by their
Merénylő
.’

‘I understand that. I just wanted to be entirely clear.’

Nicole stared at him, her eyes narrowing. ‘No, Charles, he never sees any evidence.’

‘Sorry.’ He held up his hands, placed them on the table. ‘They settle in Sopron. Then, for years, no more contact.’

‘Carl grows up, gets a job as a bookkeeper for the Sárközy family, one of the wine-producing dynasties in the region. He does well for himself, very well. In 1906 he marries Helene, Sárközy’s eldest daughter.’

‘Hans must have been pleased.’

‘Immensely. It wasn’t a time of great social mobility. Two years later Helene gives birth to Carl’s daughter and my grandmother, Anna Richter. Life is good. Hans is now in his fifties, watching his son and granddaughter grow up. He continues to keep a diary, although not quite as regularly. Even so, the memory of Jakab and what happened to Erna never leaves his mind. Throughout his life, he collects stories of the
hosszú életek
and records them in the diary’s pages. Despite all my years of research, some of the most useful information I have comes from the tales written down by my great-great-grandfather.’

‘He was certainly meticulous in his record-keeping.’

‘As Hans’s granddaughter Anna grows up, her resemblance to Erna Novák is startling. You’ve read the copies I gave you. In his journal he references the similarity several times, and the poignancy seems as fresh now as it must have been then. In 1926, Anna turns eighteen. It’s not long before she meets a young German chemist named Albert Bauer and falls in love. And it’s not long after that things start to go wrong.’

Charles lifted the lid of the teapot and used a teaspoon to stir its contents. He poured himself a cup. Adding a splash of milk, he glanced back up at Nicole. He could see the strain in her face and it worried him. Two months had passed since she had left England with her mother. He had not heard from her for nearly three weeks before she telephoned him to say she was back in Paris, and safe. He had wanted to come out immediately, but it had taken a while to arrange leave with the college.

He still found it difficult to reconcile the serious, headstrong character she presented with the story she clearly believed. He had spent the weeks in England researching what he could the
hosszú életek.
Beckett had been helpful, lending him a number of texts and pointing him in the direction of those he did not own. The information was sparse: he had found a few mentions in some of the oldest Hungarian texts, but the majority of the material was little more than badly worded ravings. Whereas Beckett made little distinction, Charles was conditioned to remain sceptical of every source. Nothing he had found gave him a reason to believe even a part of Nicole’s story. There was simply nothing, anywhere, to support the fantasy she was wrapped up in.

And yet he loved her. He did not think he was capable of falling in love with someone who was insane, or paranoid, or confused. So where did that leave him?

Nicole seemed to have realised his mind had wandered, because she tilted her head and smiled, lips pressed together. ‘You think I’m crazy.’

He shook his head. ‘That’s just it. I don’t. I don’t know how to explain all this, and I can’t accept what I’ve read as fact. But I wouldn’t be here if I thought you were crazy. You said things started to go wrong not long after your grandmother met Albert Bauer. How old would Jakab have been at this point?’

She shrugged. ‘Who knows? How old was he when he first met Erna? Hans believed she met him when Jakab was still a young man, but there’s no way of knowing. Erna died in 1879. Anna Richter met Albert in 1926. Forty-seven years later.’

‘So if Jakab was in his twenties when he met your great-great-grandmother, he would have been in his sixties or even seventies by the time Anna had grown up and met Albert.’

Nicole looked at him, studying his eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘This is where Hans’s diary ends. What happened next?’

‘Anna had been worried for some time before she finally confided in her grandfather. Albert Bauer was an academic, a fiercely intelligent man. But six months after they started courting she began to notice changes. Subtle things. He would forget the experiences they had shared, the things they had done together. He would question her, ask her to reminisce about how they had met. Anna kept a diary too. She recorded how Albert began to visit her at unusual times of the day, when he should have been at work. They’d have sex. Passionate, rough sex. Finally Anna confided in Hans, who became convinced that Jakab had found them. The only thing he wasn’t sure of was whether Jakab had already supplanted Albert entirely, and the man’s corpse was lying in a ditch somewhere.

‘He wanted Anna to run, but he knew how much she loved Albert, and he promised to find out if her fiancé was still alive. Between them, they worked out a plan. When Anna next received a visit from the Albert they suspected was an impostor, Hans set off for the young chemist’s laboratory.

‘It worked. While Anna engaged the false Albert in conversation at the family home, Hans was talking to the real Albert five miles away in the centre of the city.’

Charles frowned as he listened. For the first time, he could not think of an obvious explanation. ‘What did they do?’

‘That night, just like her grandfather had done forty-eight years earlier, Anna packed a bag, packed the diaries her grandfather had given her, and left Sopron. Albert went with her. It’s not clear from the records they left, but it seems the young man had seen something too, something that scared him enough not to persuade her to stay.’

‘Did they ever return?’

Nicole shook her head. ‘Anna wanted to. She was terribly homesick. Then, a month later, they read in the newspaper that her grandfather, mother and father had been found dead. Hans, Carl and Helene. All three had been tortured.’

Charles felt a twist of unease. Whether it was from Nicole’s story, or the hunted look in her eyes as she told it, he did not know.

She took another sip from her espresso and grimaced. ‘Jakab tied them to chairs in the living room. He savaged them without mercy. We think he was trying to get information, the whereabouts of Anna. He’d been almost ready to supplant Albert, had felt secure enough in his knowledge of the man’s history and day-to-day habits to take on his persona. He was foiled at the last minute.’

‘Of course, you don’t
know
any of that,’ Charles said, then winced at his insensitivity.

Nicole’s eyes flashed with anger. ‘Of course I don’t. But it’s not exactly a wild speculation, is it? The family had no enemies. Even the way they were tortured told its own tale: s
ee no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
I’ll spare you the details.’ She shook her head. ‘Jakab couldn’t find out where Anna had gone because Hans insisted she did not tell them. But Jakab would have found that difficult to believe. It had taken him forty-eight years to trace the family. When he did, he found a beautiful young girl who was the image of the Erna he’d lost all those years earlier. And then he lost her too. It drove him over the edge. And like the sick lunatic he is, he took out his fury on the family that tried to protect her.’

Charles blew out a breath. ‘And then?’

‘You know the rest. I told you before I left England. Anna and Albert ended up in Germany, where they married. Anna gave birth to my mother shortly afterwards. Then the Second World War broke out. Albert was conscripted into the army and lost his life to a sniper’s bullet in Stalingrad. After the war, Anna fled Germany with my mother. They settled in France.’

Charles nodded, remembering the next part of the story and trying to calculate how old Jakab would have been by the time he caught up with Eric Dubois.

‘I was born in ’52,’ she said. ‘Seventy-three years after Erna Novák died. And I remember what happened to my father, Eric.’ Nicole shivered. ‘Come on, Charles. Let’s get out of here.’

He stood, leaving a handful of coins on the table. As they left the Café de Flore he found himself studying the waiters, watching to see if any were taking an interest in him.

They walked the busy afternoon streets of Paris, crossing the Seine at the Pont du Carrousel, turning west at the Louvre and arriving at the Jardin des Tuileries. When they passed the sculpture of Theseus and the Minotaur, Nicole slipped her hand around his arm. Charles was surprised enough by the gesture that he glanced across at her, but she didn’t meet his eyes.

Above them the sky was a polished blue. Autumn sunlight lit the statues from a low angle, painting the milk-white stone with dark shadows. Parisians and tourists filled the gardens. Office workers strode past huddles of young mothers on park benches with prams lined up before them. A party of screaming and laughing schoolchildren followed a trio of sharp-eyed school mistresses. A tramp shuffled by, pushing an enormous wheeled contraption stuffed with clothes and topped by a fluttering tricolour.

Despite feeling foolish, Charles couldn’t stop himself studying the strangers they passed, lingering on faces far longer than etiquette allowed. Some smiled; most ignored him, or frowned as they walked by.

‘How do you do it?’ he asked her eventually, as they passed
La Misère
.

‘Do what, Charles?’

He took a breath of air, exhaled. ‘Live your life like this. Constantly searching faces in the crowd, wondering which of them you can trust, which of them you can’t.’

‘What choice do I have?’

The choice to let go of this insanity, he wanted to say. The choice to refuse to believe in this nonsense any longer, to take back control of your life and leave the superstition and tragedy in the past where it belongs. But he couldn’t tell her that. Not yet. Every conversation was a tightrope walk between her quick-tempered convictions and his disbelief. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.

‘Don’t forget,’ she said, ‘it’s not me that’s in danger here. It’s those closest to me. At this point, that’s you.’

He glanced across at her, hoping to see the trace of a smile, and was depressed to find that her face was serious, distant. ‘Have there been others?’ he asked.

‘I’m not a virgin, Charles, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘I wasn’t. I just wondered whether you’ve confided in others before.’

‘Once. Yes.’ She laughed, a brittle sound. ‘I said I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.’

‘It didn’t work out.’

‘To say the least.’

‘But there was no intervention. What I mean . . . you’ve not encountered this Jakab as a result.’

‘No. I don’t believe so.’

‘So the last time he made an appearance, as far as you’re aware, was when you were living in Carcassonne as a little girl.’