He drew in a deep breath, inhaling her perfume. “My dear, you smell like the Tokaj of the emperors.”

“I’m sure you say that to all the girls,” she said, pouting.

He looked severe for a moment. “Certainly not,” he said. Then he smiled again. “Only the pretty ones.”

“I bet you knew some pretty girls from Molnár once upon a time,” she said.

He shook his head. “I grew up farther up the Tisza. Nearer Sárospatak. I moved here only in the fifties. Already, no more Molnár. Just rocks and stones and trees. My son, you see, belongs to the generation of the disappointed. A csalódottak. People like me, who survived Béla Kun and Miklós Horthy and Ferenc Szálasi and Mátyás Rákosi—we know when to be grateful. We never had great expectations. So we cannot be greatly disappointed. I have a son who pours beer for Ruthenians all day, but do you see me complaining?”

“We really should be getting along now,” Janson put in.

Jessie’s eyes did not leave the old man’s. “Well, things used to be a whole lot different, I know that. Didn’t there used to be some baron from these parts, some old Magyar nobleman?”

“Count Ferenczi-Novak’s lands used to stretch up that mountainside.” He gestured vaguely.

“Now that must have been a sight. A castle and everything?”

“Once,” he said, distractedly. He was not eager for her to leave. “A castle and everything.”

“Gosh, I wonder if there’d be anybody alive who might have known that count guy. Ferenczi-Novak, was it?”

The old man was silent a moment, his features looking nearly Asiatic in repose. “Well,” he said. “There’s the old woman, Grandma Gitta. Gitta Békesi. Can speak English, too. They say she learned as a girl when she worked in the castle. You know how it is—the Russian noblewomen always insisted on speaking French, the Hungarian noblewomen always insisted on speaking English. Everybody always wants to sound like what they aren’t … .”

“Békesi, you said?” Jessie prompted gently.

“Maybe not such a good idea. Most people say she lives in the past. I can’t promise she’s all there. But she’s all Magyar. Which is more than you can say for some.” He laughed, a phlegm-rattling laugh. “Lives in an old farmhouse, the second left, and then another left, up around the bend.”

“Can we tell her you sent us?”

“Better not,” he said. “I don’t want her cross at me. She doesn’t like strangers much.” He laughed again. “And that’s an understatement!”

“Well, you know what we say in America,” Jessie said, giving him a soulful look. “There are no strangers here, only friends we haven’t met.”