Trouble in Transylvania (29 page)

“There you have it,” said Frau Sophie to me with a proprietary wave.

“What’s that?”

“The villa. My
Gasthaus.
I have just purchased it.”

With horror I saw she was pointing to the chocolate fairy-tale house, my house. In an instant it was mine no longer and I saw it filled with big boisterous Austrians gobbling wurst and schnitzel, washing everything down with steins of beer served by hefty waitresses in dirndls.

“I think Soph’s got the right idea buying that old house,” said Gladys. “She’s going to bring this town to life again. Between Gabor and Soph, Arcata will be one jumping place. I know I’m planning to come back next year, and I’m going to tell all my pals in Tucson about it. Heck, maybe I’ll even start a home for stray dogs here.”

She tossed the dogs the last of the French fries and then dashed after them up the hill.

I was still reeling from Frau Sophie’s announcement. I wouldn’t even be able to stay at the
Gasthaus.
In the first place I wouldn’t be able to afford it, and in the second place I wouldn’t be able to eat all that rich, heavy, over-salted…

“Oh my God,” I said. I suddenly saw, in my mind’s eye, Frau Sophie’s hand poised over her food with the salt shaker. “You!”

Frau Sophie looked at me, puzzled.

“Did you really mean to kill Pustulescu, Frau Ackermann, or just scare him?”

Frau Sophie didn’t miss a beat. “It was time for him to go,” she said. “I only helped him along a little. Without some help a man like that might have lived forever.” Her rosy face looked to me for understanding. “We’re all better off with him dead, you know. Many years I’ve come to Arcata, many years I’ve taken the treatment. If I go on living to ninety or a hundred, I’ll be coming here twenty or thirty more years. Dr. Gabor understands that. He has plans for the clinic, plans for Arcata. I want to help him.”

“Did Gabor put you up to it?”

“Oh no,” she said proudly. “It was all my idea. I hadn’t met Dr. Pustulescu before. But a few days ago, when I arrived in Arcata for my treatment, he was here.

“I had come to do business as well as take the treatment. I had come to meet with the local authorities about my
Gasthaus
plan and to sit down with Dr. Gabor and figure out how to advertise Arcata to Austrians and Germans so they would come again. And what do I find? Dr. Pustulescu sitting in Dr. Gabor’s office, saying Dr. Gabor does not work here anymore. Of course you can imagine how I felt. My long friendship with Dr. Gabor, all my plans: up in smoke!

“I knew I had to do something, but I couldn’t think what. I was sitting and waiting for my shot, when Gladys came out of the office after her visit with Dr. Pustulescu and I went in. The doctor was laughing. He told me that Gladys was afraid of the galvanic bath, and he was going to meet with her the next morning to show her she had nothing to be afraid of.

“In that instant I thought, Aha, I will just see if I can surprise this evil man!”

“But how did you know that adding salt would increase the conductivity of the water enough to electrocute him?”

“Because once Dr. Gabor had said something to me about an assistant who had given herself a shock by putting saline water in the tubs instead of distilled water,” said Frau Sophie. “It was an easy thing for me to do, to go to the
alimentari
and get a bag of salt. They do not have a great deal in the stores, but they always have salt. Then, that morning I came in early and poured the bag into all four basins. I stood behind the door watching. I was sure the doctor would put his hands in first to show Gladys. I would have stopped Gladys.”

“And afterwards?”

“I was surprised, of course. I thought he would perhaps have a heart attack and be very sick and go in the hospital and Dr. Gabor would come back. But I found I wasn’t sorry he was dead. It was the best thing.”

“And no one saw you?”

Frau Sophie shook her head. “It was easy in the confusion to come in as I would have for my treatment. I saw them check the voltage meter, but they never thought to check the water. I insisted I must have my treatment, and while Ester was looking for another meter, I quietly let the water out, and told her the police had done it.”

“But how could you let Gladys be suspected of his murder?” I looked at Gladys frolicking with her flock of dogs. “She might have been imprisoned for life.”

“First of all, Gladys is American. Secondly, she had no motive. Thirdly: why would she electrocute the head of the clinic in a way that would make her immediately suspect? Believe me, Gladys will never be charged. And neither will I.”

Frau Sophie took my silence for agreement. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, it will soon be time for dinner. I like to have a small aperitif beforehand.” She beamed at me with her accustomed look of goodwill and began to walk back to the hotel.

I stood staring at her portly back. There you had it: Frau Sophie had the simplicity, single focus and self-absorption of the true criminal. She was a murderer, but not so much a murderer without a conscience as one of the goddesses of the underworld, helping a tiresome human being slip his mortal bonds. I could only hope that having once achieved success in removing someone who stood in her way, she would not make a habit of it.

No, Frau Sophie had seen her chance and taken it, and now she’d confessed to me with no expectation that I would report it to the police.

And she was right. It wouldn’t help Dr. Gabor or Nadia if Frau Sophie went to jail. She was one of the clinic’s most loyal patients. Her plans for the
Gasthaus
would be a boon for the local economy. It was hard to dislike Frau Sophie, and easy to hate Dr. Pustulescu. Old Man Coyote had brought nothing but trouble into the world. That didn’t make it right that Frau Sophie had killed him, but it made it easy to keep silent. I wondered what Nadia would say if she knew, or if she would go on suspecting Dr. Gabor forever. He’d played a role, certainly. Dr. Gabor must have realized when I mentioned the saline solution that unwittingly he’d passed on the means for murder to Frau Sophie.

“Gladys,” I said, as she came with her dogs in my direction. “Jack told me that Bree wants to come back to Budapest with us. It might not be a bad idea for you to leave Arcata too. When you come back next year, I’m sure the whole thing will have blown over.”

“You know, Cassie,” she said, “I was kind of thinking the same thing. After all, without you gals and the Snapps, I might be kind of lonely here. So I thought I’d find out more about this cheap fare to China you’re getting. Maybe I’ll run into you somewhere in the Gobi Desert.”

“Gladys,” I said, slinging an arm around her shoulders. “Can I be like you when I grow up?”

After Gladys and her pack of hounds headed down the cobbled road back to the hotel, I lingered a little. Tomorrow we’d be leaving this place. And I was strangely sorry.

I wondered if Emma would become a world-famous child prodigy on the violin, if Grandma and Grandpa would be coming to live in the yurt, if Emma would go on to develop a vocabulary beyond
igen.
It was beyond me why anyone, given the chance, would choose to speak Hungarian rather than English. But if you had to choose one word to begin with—or to end with—it might as well be
yes.

I would miss them all. Nadia and Gabor and Ilona, Mistress of the Waters, and the kind attendants who wrapped me in mud and helped defend the Alamo. I would miss Gladys and the Snapps, and after I left Budapest I would miss Eva and Jack. Jack I’d see again, of course, but who knew when? That’s my way. I miss everyone, even my mother, who said she never wanted to see me again if I persisted in my unnatural desires. That was almost thirty years ago, and still I miss her.

The wind had come up now and the small fresh leaves on the birches fluttered with a thin papery sound. The warm late-afternoon sun bathed the turrets and dormers of the villa in a radiant gingery light, and its windows were like gold bars. I had always wanted to live in a house like this, all my life. But houses like this were always filled with other people, if not rich families, then tourists with money. I longed for a place to belong, and yet I knew I wouldn’t stop traveling, wouldn’t give up the feeling of being a leaf in the wind for stationary walls and ceilings, however comforting shelter could be.

I stood in the middle of the cobblestoned road and looked through the elaborate carved gate to the chocolate fairytale house, the house that had briefly taken me in and protected me. It would stay in my memory, a reminder of having been loved once, of having been warm, safe and at peace.

And then I turned to the other gate, the gate that had no house behind it, and that’s the gate I went through, into the flowering wilderness.

(
From
The Washtenaw Weekly Gleaner)

FROM KALAMAZOO TO TIMBUKTU

CASSANDRA REILLY: PORTRAIT OF AN EXPATRIATE

by Archie Snapp

She’s a woman who makes her words count—and those words come in many languages. Spanish translator Cassandra Reilly, 46, who has seen more of the world than most people, says travel is a way of life for her. “I couldn’t stop now even if I tried,” she admits.

I met Cassandra on our recent trip to the Transylvanian part of Romania. Most of our readers know that while Dr. Lynn was busy with her research in Munich, Eldest Daughter Cathy and I took our little adopted daughter Emma (or as we now call her, Emoke) back to her homeland for a visit. As I mentioned in last week’s story about Emoke’s grandparents, who have come to stay with us for an extended visit, we had a marvelous time and met numerous warm and fascinating people in the small town of Arcata and its spa.

Cassandra Reilly was one.

I asked her about her background. “I started out in Kalamazoo, Michigan,” she explained. “My grandparents were born in Ireland, which is how I got an Irish passport.”

Reilly uses the Irish passport to venture into territories most Americans wouldn’t dream of going to. I often heard her reminiscing over past harrowing adventures with her good friend, Jacqueline Opal, 42, from Australia. The two met in South America in the late seventies, and found themselves traveling companions for almost a year, a period that ended when Reilly missed the boat to the Galápagos Islands.

Jacqueline, or “Jack” as the Australian is nicknamed, has established herself in Budapest where she helps run a secretarial agency. But Cassandra Reilly says it’s unlikely she’ll settle down anytime in the near future, in spite of advancing age.

“I’m on my way to China,” she says, with a faraway look in her hazel eyes. “I don’t know how long I’ll be there or where I’ll go next.”

For all her wanderlust, Reilly still has to make a living. She chose translation as the occupation most conducive to her way of life. Well known as the translator of Venezuelan author Gloria de los Angeles’s magic realism novels, Reilly has also played a role in bringing the destruction of the rainforest to the notice of the British public.

Adept in many languages, including Romanian, she nevertheless is reticent about her personal life. A large family meant little time for Reilly, though her father, Michael Reilly, whom she is said to resemble, was a bon vivant and a storyteller. Spanish was an early interest, encouraged by a favorite high-school teacher, whose example spurred Reilly into a traveling and translating career.

The fact that Reilly was recently widowed may have something to do with her sometimes melancholy air of detachment. Her strong Catholic upbringing has stood her in good stead, however, and given her a concern for the welfare of others and a desire to see justice done. A refreshing sense of humor is also part of Reilly’s traveling portmanteau.

I asked Reilly if she had been born with the name Cassandra and she smilingly admitted that she’d chosen it. “Jane Austen’s sister was named Cassandra,” she said. “There’s also a line in
Troilus and Cressida
that I liked.”

Not being familiar with this Shakespearean play I looked it up when we returned home, and I think I may have found the line:

Pandarus: “And Cassandra laughed.”

Bon voyage, Cassandra!

I
WOULD LIKE TO THANK
Katherine Hanson and Michael Schick for their friendship and for sparking my initial interest in Romania. Many thanks also to the electric Molly Martin and the peripatetic Ines Rieder for detailed, thoughtful readings and galvanizing advice. Faith Conlon was an insightful, supportive editor and Martin Cobb a helpful multilingual copyeditor. Thank you to all at Seal, especially to Clare Conrad for her cover design, and to June Thomas, Carol Seajay and Rose Katz, Friends of Cassandra.