Written in the Blood (25 page)

With barely a glance at his driver, Ivan Tóth slid onto the Range Rover’s back seat. As soon as Joó was inside, the vehicle pulled out into traffic.

Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, Tóth blotted his face. He snapped out directions and sank back in his seat, loosening his shirt. ‘Arrogant
sertés
!’ he spat.

Joó glanced at him. ‘He’s stubborn, I’ll grant you, but hardly arrogant. You offered him power and he rejected it. Politically, he still holds all the cards.’

‘Not for much longer, he doesn’t.’

‘You have a plan?’

Already Tóth’s anger was fading. Now he began to smile once more.

C
HAPTER
23

Snowdonia, Wales

A
s Leah Wilde drew closer to the place where she had once experienced so much loss the light began to fade, as if the day read her memories and chose to slink away.

The mountains of Snowdonia slumbered beneath a granite sky that bled away their colour and left a landscape painted in ash. Leah did not recognise the road she drove upon, but she recognised the hill in front of her and knew what lay behind it. Her limbs felt heavy. A weight pressed her down in the seat.

She slowed the car as she approached the summit of the hill, and where the forest revealed a patchy clearing, she glimpsed – or thought she did – the old whitewashed building, waiting for her at the bottom of the valley.

Leah turned her eyes away. She would not look at it. Not yet.

Cresting the top of the rise, she took a turning and found herself negotiating a steep slope, its stones wet and slippery beneath the Mercedes’ tyres.

Trees on either side formed a dense canopy, and inside it seemed as if the night had already come.

She gripped the steering wheel tight, knuckles whitening. Fifteen years of thinking about this place, attempting to exorcise its ghosts; and now, finally, she was here.

Leah had not wanted to return but she’d always known she must. She needed to say goodbye, needed to wash off the years of grief that even now still clung to her.

Below, the track flattened out, breaking free of the trees and curving towards the crumbling stone bridge that crossed the river.

There, beyond it, pale in the leadening light, stood the old farmhouse itself.

Llyn Gwyr.

She had expected it, like many of the revisited places of childhood, to look smaller than she remembered. But the building defied her expectations. If anything, it appeared larger than before: more formidable; more unyielding. Although the ground-floor windows had been boarded up, the plywood slimy with mould, the upstairs windows remained untouched. They watched her like a row of dead eyes, and she felt an itch break out across her skin, as if she’d brushed through a stand of nettles.

You’ve come this far. Don’t back out.

Leah brought the Mercedes to a halt. When she switched off the engine, the mountain silence flooded in. She opened the door and climbed out.

Immediately the wind dragged at her, its fingers damp and insistent. She pulled up the collar of her jacket, folded her arms and walked towards the bridge.

How long since anyone had been here? A decade? Longer? She knew her mother still held the freehold to the property and its land. Before their arrival here all those years ago, her grandfather’s friend Sebastien had maintained a watch over the place. But the old man was dead and gone, and whether anyone still communed with Llyn Gwyr’s ghosts, Leah did not know.

Although the house appeared firm, the bridge looked more decrepit than when she had last seen it. One side had collapsed entirely, as if some river creature had reared up and taken a bite. In the rushing waters beneath, the half-submerged stones were moss-slicked and cold.

She would not risk driving the car across what remained, but she thought it would bear her own weight without too much complaint. Leah crossed it hurriedly nonetheless, boots kicking up little storms of gravel.

A shriek shattered the stillness, and her feet nearly slid out from beneath her. But it was only a barn owl marking its territory. She would have laughed, had the landscape not oppressed her so heavily.

Safely across the bridge, she followed the track towards Llyn Gwyr, hugging herself tighter with every step. This close, the house seemed enormous, a colossal mass of abandoned stone. Vegetation grew in the guttering and a collection of bird’s nests clung beneath the eaves. She noticed that a downpipe had cracked; water had poured down the wall, blackening the whitewash.

A memory surfaced, sudden and sharp: she stood inside Llyn Gwyr’s dining room, nine years old, lining up a row of shotgun cartridges for her mother, and knowing that something was out there. Knowing that something was coming for them.

Shivering, she passed the front of the house, and now she recognised the outbuildings, and the patch of gravel beside the kitchen windows where Gabriel had arrived one morning with horses. The three of them had ridden up to Llyn Cau, where he had told her stories of lake-dwelling dragons and spectral hounds. Hannah had laughed and told Gabriel not to scare her, that such things could not exist. But worse things than those existed in the world, far worse.

Ahead, the lake was a steely depression in the land, wind-ruffed and bleak. Close to its shore, she saw the reason for her return: two graves, side by side: one belonging to her grandfather, the second to her father. Leah tucked her chin inside her jacket and walked towards them.

When she’d been here last, only her father’s remains had lain beneath this hard-packed ground. Leah remembered Sebastien dragging Nate’s body over the lip of the trench he had dug. She recalled the old man’s voice as he read from the
Book of
Common Prayer
, remembered the grains of earth falling on her father’s face and the letter she had written him, clutched in his hands. Even now, she could recite the words it had contained:
Wherever you are, Daddy, one day I’ll follow. I’ll make you proud here first, and then I’ll see you again. I promise.

Where once a simple hammered cross had marked a mound of turned earth, now she saw a pair of neatly gravelled-in graves and two black headstones.

She had not expected to find this. Nor had she expected to see the pots of flowering plants, red petals trembling in the mountain wind.

At the nearest grave Leah stooped, reaching out to the slab of polished granite with its inlaid gold inscription. She hesitated there, no words coming to her lips, thinking of the times she had shared with Charles Meredith, his love and his warmth, his fierce intellect. She recalled their conversations and laughter, how her grandfather had taught her about the Romans, the Vikings, the Celts; how he’d inspired her love of books, of learning.

For twenty minutes or more she sat with Charles, and only after she had dredged every last memory of him could she turn, at last, to the gravestone belonging to her father.

This time she sank to her knees, heedless of the mud that soaked through her clothes. ‘Oh, Dad,’ she said, and her voice, out here in the wilderness, seemed bereft of strength. ‘How have you been? Has Grandpa been entertaining you with his stories? You must have heard them a hundred times or more by now. I’ve a few of my own I could tell you.

‘Can you hear me?’ she asked, daring at last to reach out and touch his headstone. ‘Have you been watching us?’

Nothing but the wind sighing in the trees and whispering through dead leaves.

‘I went to meet the
kirekesztett
. I wasn’t meant to, but I did. A few of them want to be a part of this. And if others do, too, then we might still have a chance.

‘I just . . . I don’t know what will happen now. The
tanács
– I can’t understand the way they think. Even the ones who support us, you could hardly describe as progressive. And the others . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Some of them, they’d rather see us fade away on the wind than contemplate any kind of dilution.
Poll
ution. It’s been hard. Bloody hard.’

She heard the whine in her voice, and bottled it. She had not come here to do that. ‘I miss you, Dad, but I’m OK. It’s good to finally see you again. I don’t even know, now I’m here, why I—’

The sound, when it came, was so slight that it was more a feeling, or a thought, than a pressure in her ears. It wasn’t the crack of a twig snapping, or a scuff of gravel, or a rasp of breath.

Leah wasn’t sure it had even been a sound; perhaps, simply, the absence of one. Had the birds been singing before? The air was silent now.

Ten yards to the left of the graves stood the edge of the forest, the ground inside it choked with bracken, rotten logs and leaf mulch. The trees grew in thick ranks all the way up the slope. Beyond the first few trunks, the darkness was absolute.

She heard it again. A vague, whispery, dragging sound: as if something large moved deep inside that impenetrable gloom, bending the branches of saplings and stripping their leaves as it passed.

The sound ceased, and the silence returned. Heart pounding now, each beat thudding like a fist against her chest, Leah rose to her feet.

Her first instinct was to run. But her feet were planted firm, and she knew enough to remain still. She felt the wind pressing at her legs.

Now, the papery crunch of twigs. A larger branch, snapping. And then the forest was alive with movement – a crashing, pounding crescendo of sound.

Leah leaped back from her father’s grave, eyes scanning the forest’s edge. She could see nothing moving beyond the nearest trees, could not tell from which direction the noises came.

Whatever made them was closing fast, racing towards her.

She had retreated another few steps when she saw an explosion of leaves twenty yards in front. From out of the forest crashed a stag. It lurched to a halt beside the lake, so close to the water’s edge that its hooves sank into oozing black mud. The animal was huge: broad-chested and powerful, the largest she had ever seen. Its antlers swept out from its skull, a candelabra of bone, pale at the tips, dark and woody on the stems. When it dipped its head they pointed straight towards her, a lethal array of arrowheads.

Condensation blasted from the stag’s snout. It tossed its head, flanks quivering. Leah took another step back, unable to control her feet, and then she forced herself to a halt.

Ahead, the stag sidestepped, hooves sucking clear of the mud. Gouts of steam rose from its flanks. It shivered, as if an effort of pure will kept it standing there, as if it was unsure whether to charge or bolt.

There was something wrong with the way it studied her, she thought; something not quite right about the way it rolled its head away one moment, unwilling to look at her, turning back a moment later to regard her with liquid-black eyes.

It lifted a foreleg. Planted it back down in the mud.

Leah heard another twig snap, echoing like a pistol shot across the valley floor. This sound came not from in front, where the stag stood, but from behind.

That was when fear almost paralysed her.

She didn’t want to look back, convinced that if she turned from the stag for even a second it would charge, gouging her on that nest of spears. But turn she must, and when, finally, she gathered the courage, she saw, standing perhaps twenty yards away, in the centre of the gravel track, a man’s dark shape.

Leah’s breath froze in her throat. She heard the stag snort, and glanced over her shoulder. The animal had not moved.

She blinked, swallowed. Then she turned once again to confront the newcomer.

Tuomas
.

That was what he had called himself when she’d met him at Etienne’s mansion in London. She doubted it was his real name.

The light was dimming faster now. Tuomas stood silhouetted against a darkening sky.

He had followed her here, to Llyn Gwyr. All the way from London.

Behind her, the red stag roared.

C
HAPTER
24

New York, USA

1929

I
zsák was at work behind the counter of the Ready Eat Lunch Wagon, repairing the huge dome-topped Pavoni coffee machine, when he noticed Emil Otto in difficulty at the far end of the diner.

At nine a.m., the day’s breakfast crowd had already stampeded in and out, leaving a wake of coffee rings, grease spots and tobacco smoke.

This was Izsák’s favourite part of the morning. With no one else inside the Ready Eat except Otto and his daughter, the three of them could concentrate on readying the place for the lunchtime rush. Sometimes, while they worked, Otto would sing them old German hunting songs. Sometimes Izsák would turn up the wireless and, during a break from washing cups and plates, he would dance with Lucy. She had taught him the Black Bottom and the Charleston, and he had choreographed a polka that left them breathless with laughter.

Emil Otto had purchased the Ready Eat – a pre-fabricated steel box modelled on a railroad car – five years earlier, before cancer claimed Lucy’s mother. The family had arrived from Hamburg in ’twenty-one, and when Otto saw the explosion of skyscrapers rising heavenwards on Manhattan Island he spotted the opportunity to make a living serving low-cost food to the army of riveters and catchers, carpenters and bricklayers, electricians and derrick men who made their homes in the Lower East Side. Tower-building was gruelling and intensive, and Otto’s menu of ham, eggs, hamburger sandwiches and chilli, mixed with a few signature dishes from his homeland, scored an instant hit.

Despite that, over the last few years the Ready Eat had suffered an inexplicable decline in profits. Until Izsák had started to help out, Otto had been manning the diner’s grill morning, day and night. He no longer had the money to pay staff, and the strain showed on his face. Always a heavyset man, with a physique thickened by grilled cheese and frankfurter rolls, his skin had recently developed an ashen cast, and he mopped constantly at his brow with a kitchen cloth.

Izsák had been working in the Ready Eat’s kitchen for three months. He’d never had a particular love for cooking, but he had fallen in love with Lucy Otto. When she had brought him back to the diner one day to meet her father, and Izsák had grasped the seriousness of their situation, he’d taken off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and by the end of the day had brewed somewhere in the region of two hundred cups of coffee, and had fried half that number of beef patties.

Otto called him his
Lebensretter
, and Lucy named him her
Liebling
. He worked like a dog: running the fryer and the grill, taking orders, fetching groceries, and battling daily with the steaming metal monster of a coffee machine that Otto had imported from Milan back when times were good. The only job Otto hadn’t entrusted to him was the accounts, and Izsák suspected the old German’s pride alone prevented him from sharing the stark misery lurking within the Ready Eat’s ledger.

He hadn’t noticed the man Otto was talking to come into the diner, but he noticed him now. The stranger reminded him of a pug dog; eyes wide-set, nose a squashed afterthought on a face that looked like it had been squeezed from wet clay. His dark hair was horribly over-oiled, so thick with grease that even his ears shone with it. He wore a tailored brown suit over a double-breasted vest and cap-toed shoes. His hat sat on the counter in front of him.

Izsák was too far away, and the Pavoni blasting out too much steam, to follow the conversation between the two men. Although Otto was talking animatedly, he was keeping his voice low.

The stranger glanced over at Lucy, who was mopping the floor at the opposite end of the diner, and made a comment. He grinned, revealing teeth stained yellow from too much tobacco.

For a moment, Otto’s eyes went dead. Then his shoulders slumped. Reaching under his apron, he passed something across the counter. The pug in the suit pocketed it, and then shook his head. Otto opened his mouth but before he managed to speak, the pug turned and left. Outside the diner, the man slid onto the bench seat of an Oldsmobile idling against the kerb, which pulled away immediately into traffic.

Izsák put down his rag, moved to the entrance and locked the door. He went up to Otto. ‘So,’ he said quietly, keeping his back to Lucy. ‘That’s why you keep me out of the way on Monday mornings.’ He’d only been at the Ready Eat at this hour because the Pavoni had broken down again. ‘Suddenly a lot of things make sense.’

‘I didn’t want you to see that,’ Otto replied, keeping his eyes on the counter.

Izsák glanced along it, checking that Lucy was still busy with the mop. ‘There’s no shame in it. How long has it been going on?’

‘About a year.’

‘How much do they ask?’

‘More than I can afford. And the last two months . . . it’s gone up.’

‘How much did you give him, just then?’

‘Half of what I owe.’

Izsák nodded. ‘So he’ll be back.’

‘He’s always back.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘No, Izsák. I’m grateful, really. But you have no idea—’

‘Emil, please. I’m going to marry your daughter. Who is he?’

The old German closed his eyes. When he opened them, Izsák realised just how tired his future father-in-law appeared. ‘I know it’s not even noon,’ he said, ‘but I have a bottle of whisky hidden out back. Let’s close up properly. I’ll send Lucy over to the apartment.’

‘Sorrentino’s his name,’ Otto continued, once they’d shuttered the windows and retired to the diner’s only booth. The whisky stood uncapped between them, two glasses filled. ‘But it doesn’t really matter what he’s called. Sometimes it’s him, sometimes it’s another guy. Sorrentino’s the worse of the two.’

‘But they’re just the collectors.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So where does the money go?’

‘You ever heard of Frank Fischetti?’

‘No. Should I?’

‘Believe me, if you own any kind of business around here, Izsák, then you’ve heard of Fischetti. Some call him the Throat. Because that’s what he does. He swallows everything up. Every
one.
You’d think he’d be making too much money from his easies and his whores to bother folk like us. But he wants a hand in everything, and if you don’t pay up . . .’ Otto shrugged. ‘That butcher’s shop up the street? The one that’s all burned out? Used to be owned by Marcus Septire. Nice guy. Well, one day Marcus didn’t pay up.’

‘Where does he live, this Fischetti?’

Otto shook his head. ‘I said no. I’ve trusted you with this much. But you don’t get involved. I’m not asking, I’m telling you. Do you understand?’

‘You can’t expect me to sit here and—’

‘You want to marry Lucy?’

‘Of course, but—’

‘You want to be part of this family, you want to marry my daughter, then you obey me on this. My restaurant. My rules.’

‘If this keeps up, there isn’t going to be a restaurant.’

Otto bashed the tabletop with his fist. ‘
Izsák!
’

He flinched, shocked. Never before had he seen the man so agitated.

What do you think you’re doing, anyway? Trying to impress your future father-in-law? You don’t have the stomach for this. Nor the will. You know it and he knows it. Come on. Look for the easy way out, like you always do. Find the excuse. Grab it.

Angered by that voice, haunted by it, even as he held up his palms to placate the man, Izsák said, ‘Emil, I understand. Your place, your rules. I didn’t mean to upset you, truly. You know I care about you. About the diner. It’s hard for me to sit here and do nothing.’

See? Wasn’t difficult, was it? Congratulations.

‘I know you want to help,’ Otto said. ‘You’ve a good heart. You’ll make a good son. We’ll work this out together, you and I. But for the moment, you leave things to me. Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

‘I want your promise. Your word.’

He found the man’s eyes. ‘I give you my word, Emil. I’ll leave things to you for now. But soon we’ll talk. Will you agree to that in return?’

‘I will. Now, let’s shake on it, and then you can get back to fixing up that old metal monster. There’s life in her yet. Just like me. Mind she doesn’t scald you.’

Izsák smiled, but when he recalled that mocking voice inside his head, he found he could no longer meet Otto’s eyes.

He was working in the Ready Eat’s cramped kitchen, slicing cabbages for Otto’s sauerkraut dish, when Sorrentino next paid a visit. The breakfast crowd had just cleared out, and Lucy had disappeared back to her father’s apartment to collect some laundry.

Izsák heard the rattle of the blinds as someone came into the diner, but at first he paid it no attention. Only when he heard Otto’s cry did he slam through the kitchen door into the restaurant. It took him a moment to understand what he was seeing.

Sorrentino stood in the middle of the Ready Eat, a savage smile on his face. He turned when he heard Izsák crash through the door, but he showed no fear, only surprise.

Otto was behind the counter, sweat coursing down his face. His right hand was palm-down on the countertop, pinned there by a knife. A line of blood, thicker than Izsák’s finger and as dark as gravy, seeped from underneath and crept along the laminate. When it found the edge of the counter, it dripped onto the floor.

‘Who the fuck is this, Emil?’ Sorrentino asked, staring at Izsák. ‘You told me you were broke.’ The man’s voice became a whining parody of the German’s accent. ‘“I can’t afford a cook, Mario. I don’t have any money, Mario.” If that’s true, who’s this monkey?’

‘Mario, please,’ Otto moaned. ‘Take it out.’

‘Gladly.’

Sorrentino lunged at the counter and yanked at the knife. It defied him, stuck firm; he had to lever it back and forward several times before he managed to pry it loose.

Otto screamed, collapsing against a rack of crockery. He dislodged cups and plates, sending them crashing to the floor.

The front door of the Ready Eat jangled and Lucy walked in. For a moment, nobody moved.

She saw Sorrentino standing in the middle of the diner, and Izsák hovering behind him. She saw her father slumped against the crockery rack. A moment later she noticed Otto’s bloodied hand, and the blade held in Sorrentino’s.

Izsák was utterly bewitched by how serene Lucy appeared at that moment, how pure. She didn’t scream; didn’t panic; didn’t run.

Instead, she walked up to Sorrentino, mouth set rigid, so invested with power that the man actually took a step backwards. ‘You’ve done your work,’ she whispered. ‘Now get out of here.’

The pug laughed, eyes hard. But Izsák would never forget how the man had backed away as Lucy approached.

Sorrentino returned his attention to Otto. ‘I’ll come by tomorrow. With others, if that’s what you want. You’ll pay me what you owe, you Kraut fuck.’

When Izsák heard that, he felt something pop inside his head, a gasket blowing. For the first time in his life his rage ignited, so all-consuming that his legs shook from its effects. Images rushed at him, like cards dealt by a shark: the soles of his father’s boots inside the Citadella; Katalin’s hair as it burned; his uncle’s body staked out on the floor of his study; his flight from Budapest; the years of wandering; the fear; the pain; the solitude. And, finally, this place in which he now stood; the sanctuary of simple love and humanity he’d found inside a German immigrant’s catering business deep in the heart of one of New York’s poorest districts.

His voice trembled when he spoke. ‘You come back here tomorrow,’ he told Sorrentino. ‘And you’ll get what you’re owed. All of it. I give you my word.’

The thug stared. Raising his knife, he pointed the tip towards Izsák’s face. ‘See, Emil? This is what you lack. Business sense.’ Cackling, he picked up his hat and swaggered out of the diner.

The moment he was gone, Lucy and Izsák scrambled behind the counter. Together, they helped Otto to the booth.

‘I don’t feel good,’ he said.

‘Get him some water, ’Sak,’ Lucy told him. ‘Bandages, too.’

‘No,’ Otto wheezed. ‘Not yet. Don’t go, Izsák. I think . . .’

His face was the wrong colour; in fact it lacked any colour at all. The sweat pouring off him was greasy and cold. He held out his good hand and Lucy gripped it.

Suddenly understanding what this was about – the knowledge hitting him with baseball-bat certainty – Izsák placed his hand over theirs, linking their fingers together. Otto panted for breath, once, a huge lungful. He clenched his teeth. The muscles in his jaw tensed, relaxed. And then he died, slumped in the booth between his daughter and the man who would marry her.

The Ready Eat was closed the next morning when Sorrentino came back. The shutters were down and most of the lamps were dark, throwing the diner’s interior into deep shadow. The old Pavoni breathed no steam. The fryer remained unlit. The wireless was silent and the griddle was cold.

But the door was unlocked. Izsák sat alone in the single booth, his head bowed.

Sorrentino pushed open the door and walked in, noticing both the shadows and the silence. A moment later he noticed Izsák. ‘What the fuck is this?’

‘Take a seat.’ Izsák said. He indicated a brown paper bag to his left. ‘I have what you’re owed.’

‘Where’s Emil?’

‘You wanted to conduct business. So please; sit down, and let’s work this out.’

‘Business, yeah,’ Sorrentino muttered, eying the bag. He slid into the booth. ‘Who are you, anyway? I never seen you before.’

Izsák flicked a wall switch beside the booth. Above them, a bulb in a frosted shade winked on. He raised his head. ‘I’m you, Mario. That’s who I am. I’m you.’

The effect on the man was immediate and extreme. Blood drained from Sorrentino’s face as if someone had pulled a plug. His eyes widened, so large they lent him an almost comic intensity. ‘
Che cazzo
,’ he whispered, tongue flicking out to wet his lips.

‘Do you believe in God, Mario?’ Izsák asked.