“And it will bear the blessings of Allah.” The Libyan bowed. “Come with me now. The stalking horse must be saddled. Mansur awaits you, el Caliph.”

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-six

With supreme reluctance, Gitta Békesi finally agreed to let them enter the decaying farmhouse where she now lived alone with her savage dog. The dog’s reluctance seemed greater still: though it obediently stood back, one could tell from its rigid posture that, at the slightest signal from its mistress, it would throw itself at the visitors in a frenzy of bristling fur and snapping teeth.

The old crone shared the decrepitude of her lodgings. The skin hung loosely from her skull; pale, dry scalp showed through her thinning hair; her eyes were sunken, hard and glittering behind loose snakeskinlike folds. If age had softened what had been hard, it had hardened what had been soft, turning her high cheeks gaunt and hollow, her mouth into a cruel slash.

It was the face of a survivor.

From the many articles Janson had digested, he knew that Peter Novak was eight years old in 1945, when clashing forces commanded by Hitler and Stalin essentially liquidated the farming village of Molnár, his place of birth. The population of Molnár had always been small enough—under a thousand, in the early forties. Nearly all perished. Even aside from her age, could someone have experienced such a cataclysmic event and not still bear the impress of the trauma?

In the large sitting room, a fire burned slowly in the fireplace. On the wooden mantel above it, a sepia photograph in a tarnished silver frame showed a beautiful young woman. Gitta Békesi as she once was: a robust peasant girl, exuding rude health, and something else, too—a sly sensuality. It gazed upon them, cruelly mocking the ravages of age.

Jessie walked over to it. “What a beauty you were,” she said simply.

“Beauty can be a curse,” the old woman said. “Fortunately, it is always a fleeting one.” She made a clicking noise with her tongue and the dog came over and sat at her side. She reached down and rubbed its flanks with her clawlike hands.

“I understand that you once worked for the count,” Janson said. “Count Ferenczi-Novak.”

“I do not speak of these things,” she said curtly. She sat in a caned rocking chair, the webbing of the seat half torn. Behind her, resting against the wall like a walking stick, was her old shotgun. “I live alone and ask nothing more than that I be left alone. I tell you that you are wasting your time. So. I have let you in. Now you can say that you have sat with the old woman and asked her your questions. Now you can tell everyone concerned that Gitta Békesi says nothing. No, I tell you one thing: there was no Kis family in Molnár.”

“Wait a minute—‘everyone concerned’? Who’s concerned?”