When I later located Irene Jóság’s village on a map, I saw that it was quite near to Čachtice, where the Bloody Countess had lived and in whose looming castle she had carried out her many torture-murders, her life and crimes the subject of Julian’s fourth book, The Tigress.
The countess was born in Nyirbator, Hungary, in 1560, the daughter of one of that country’s ruling families, and according to Julian, nothing in her early life suggested the monster she would become. Rather, she was quite studious, and by the time of her marriage, she had mastered Latin, German, and Greek, and had read a great deal in science and astronomy—learning that Julian portrayed as part of her perfect disguise.
At the age of fifteen, she married the son of another equally favored family, and in 1575, the presumably happy couple took up residence at Varanno, a small palace, before moving to a larger one at Sárvár, and finally to the castle that was her wedding gift, the looming, often fogbound Čachtice.
The war to defend Europe against the Ottoman encroachment would last until 1606, and during all that time it fell to Elizabeth not only to manage but to defend her holdings against the ever-threatening Ottomans. This she did with great skill and vigor. But it was not all she did, for although the outer walls of Čachtice remained strong, something was crumbling inside them; it was during this period that loneliness began to weather Elizabeth’s carefully constructed edifice and, in that weathering, reveal what lay beneath. With her husband at his studies in Vienna, Elizabeth now, for the first time in her life, had real power, that is to say, power on the scale of a man’s. She was the lady of the estate, her authority absolute, and like Ilse Grese at Ravensbrück, she began to wield a whip.
It was a weapon she could use with complete impunity, as it turned out, because her husband had by then become chief commander of Hungarian troops in the western war against the Ottoman Empire, a campaign that removed him for months at a time. Thus, with no one to stay her hand, she began first to berate and then to slap her servants, each attack fueling the next, until at last she drew blood and later found that where this drop had fallen on her cheek, the flesh beneath had seemed to bloom. In the blood of servants, she had miraculously discovered youth’s eternal fountain.
More of this restorative blood was easy to find, of course, and in the coming months and years, Elizabeth found plenty of it. Enough first to taste, then to sip, then to drink. Enough first to dot her finger, then to cover her face, then to coat her body.
But even the walls of Čachtice were not thick enough to hide what was going on there. The first rumors began to circulate as early as 1602, and by 1604, when Elizabeth’s husband died, they could no longer be dismissed, for they were not rumors of infidelity or even of odd sexual practices, both of which were common among the nobility of the time.
It was a Lutheran minister who finally raised his voice so loudly that the authorities were forced to hear it. Even then, however, they were slow to act, and it was not until 1610 that an investigation was ordered, which resulted in Elizabeth’s being caught in the act of beheading a teenage girl.
Elizabeth, being of such high birth, was put under house arrest, where she remained until her death in 1614.
During those intervening years, the investigation continued and more than three hundred victims were discovered, Julian reported, though the exact number of young girls who lost their lives in the secret chambers of Čachtice could never be known.
Julian had not been reticent to detail the horrors of Čachtice. There’d been whippings and mutilations. Elizabeth had bitten off parts of her victims’ faces and other body parts. She’d taken some of the girls out into the snow and watched them freeze to death. She’d performed surgery and other medical procedures upon them as well. She’d observed the stages of starvation before death. She’d used needles and hot irons. There seemed no end to her cruel ingenuity.
But in Julian’s account, the countess’s crimes, horrible as they were, were in some sense less cruel than her deceits, her great show of piety, her many gifts to the Church, the changing aspects of her mask. For Julian, it seemed, of all creatures great and small, it was the chameleon that should be most feared, particularly—I thought of both the Terror, La Meffraye, and the Tigress, Countess Báthory—when deceit took the shape of a woman.
On the map, a jagged road led from the countess’s castle to what I imagined to be the far more modest abode of Irene Jóság, and I found myself imagining Julian driving down it, bleary-eyed from another sleepless night, his head spilling over with the horrors of Čachtice.
I could have simply corresponded with Irene Jóság, of course, but by then I’d come to think of myself as something of a detective, and in that guise I entertained the hope that by actually talking to her I might learn something that would clear up the great bramble I’d stumbled into, a thicket of intrigue in which identities changed as well as motives, where I could no longer tell what Marisol had been or whether Julian had ever guessed that she was something other than she seemed.
“You’ll miss Paris,” Loretta said when I told her that I was heading for Hungary. “Everyone does.”
I told her that I was going to Hungary because my father had given me the name of someone who was at Casa Rosada when Julian was in Argentina. Now I added, “Julian went to Casa Rosada looking for Marisol.”
“Why would he have gone there?” Loretta asked. “I thought Marisol had nothing to do with politics.”
“That’s not so clear anymore,” I said, then related what Hendricks had told me in London, along with my subsequent conversation with my father, the result being that I was now quite uncertain about who Marisol had been.
“So she might have been anything,” Loretta said at the end of my account.
“Yes,” I said.
For the first time, I felt a turn in the narrative I’d been living through.
It was clear that Loretta had noticed a dark undertow in my answer.
“Do you think Julian ever knew any of this?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
For a moment I felt that we were both fixed in a space no one else could share.
“Philip, are you still there?” Loretta asked.
Her tone was troubled, and I realized that I’d been silent for a long time, and the silence alarmed her.
“Yes,” I said.
There was a brief pause, then Loretta said, “Would you mind if I joined you, Philip? Could you use a traveling companion?”
It struck me that Julian had never had such a companion, and that perhaps this, too, had served to doom him.
Might it doom me, too?
With that question I felt myself curiously imperiled, like a man moving down a river, into a darkness, now afraid that at the end of the journey there might be revelations as fatal to me as they had been for Julian, terrors that he had faced in solitude and isolation but that I had not the courage to face alone.
“Yes,” I said, like a man reaching for a life rope. “Yes, I could.”
She arrived in Budapest a week later, dressed in a dark red blouse and floral skirt, glancing swiftly here and there, until she saw me in the waiting crowd.
“Welcome,” I said when she came over to me, and meant it.
Even so, she looked at me doubtfully. “Really, Philip?”
“Yes, really,” I assured her. “As you guessed, I could use some company.”
“But you’ve always seemed quite self-contained.”
“We’re not always how we seem,” I said.
“Almost never, in fact,” Loretta said.
Something in her gaze took hold of me so that I felt exactly as Charles feels when he sees Emma Bovary, how dark her eyes are and how marked with fearless candor.
The intense feeling that swept over me at that moment had to be diverted, so I nodded toward where I had a car waiting.
On the drive into the city, Loretta kept her eyes keenly fixed on the new surroundings. In that keenness, that hunger for things she had not seen before, I glimpsed the young girl she had once been, the one who had traveled with Julian, two brilliant children facing their father’s camera as they stood at the bottom of the Spanish Steps or at the Eiffel Tower, pictures she’d framed and hung in the Montauk house. There’d been other pictures, too, those same children walking through the butterfly house in Salzburg or along the shaded trails of the Vienna Woods. They had also strolled Barcelona’s Ramblas together and paused to marvel at Sagrada Familia.
In each photograph, they appeared splendidly happy, children endowed with as much good fortune as anyone could wish.
Those two bright young faces had changed quite a bit over the years, but it was Julian’s that changed the most, and at our last meeting I’d gotten the feeling that it was not just exhaustion that plagued him but some tumorous mental growth that had at last broken through the surface.
When I said this to Loretta, she considered it a moment, then said, “You know, he said something quite disturbing a couple of days before he went out in the boat. He was sitting by the pond. I went out to him. He had that look in his eye, like he was deep in thought. Just as a matter of conversation I said, ‘So, how are you doing, Julian?’ I expected him to answer the way he usually did, something like, ‘I’m fine, Loretta, how are you?’ But instead he quoted that line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. You know, the one where he says, ‘A thousand slimy things lived on and so did I.’ I took it for a little joke and made nothing of it. Julian often said things like that. Self-deprecating things. But this time, I should have known that he was in a very bad place.”
“We let a lot go by, didn’t we?” I asked. “There were signs we didn’t read.”
She nodded. “Yes, there were.”
When we reached the hotel, Loretta stepped out of the car and looked at its ornate facade. I could see that she recognized it.
“Julian mentioned this hotel,” she said. “I remember it from his letters. ‘It has beautiful Zsolnay tiles,’ he said.”
“They’re in the bathhouse,” I told her. “In the old days, it was used by the Soviets. It’s where they met their agents. Or at least that’s what the hotel manager told me. In any event, it gives the place some history.”
Seconds later we were in the lobby. I nodded toward the bar. “Maybe a drink before you go up?”
“Yes, that would be nice.”
We were soon seated at a small table in the bar, drinks in hand, Loretta casting her eyes about the room with what still seemed like a hint of childlike wonder.
“Very dark here,” she said. “Thick curtains.”
“It looks like a place where ‘certain documents’ might have been exchanged,” I said, rather as a joke.
“Julian described it in one of his letters,” Loretta said. “He said that it looked like an old man still concealing his crime.” She took a sip of her drink. “Do you think he came upon this hotel by accident?”
I shrugged. “I suspect the bullet holes near the door and around the first-floor windows might have gotten his attention,” I answered. “The manager here speaks English quite well, so I’ve listened to his history of the place. I asked him about the bullet holes. They’re from when the Arrow Cross—the Hungarian fascist party that collaborated with the Nazis—defended the city against the Russians. The Germans had abandoned it by then.”
Loretta reached into her bag and retrieved a single photograph. “I thought you might want to see this,” she said as she handed it to me.
In the photograph, Julian is seated at the little office alcove on the second floor of the Montauk house, a large window behind him, the pond shimmering in the background. He is holding a book whose title I can’t make out, but which seems as battered as the man holding it. His hair is slightly mussed, as it often was in the morning, and he is wearing the blue robe I gave him as a welcome-home gift upon his return from Russia.
“Why this picture?” I asked.
“I thought of it after I talked to you,” Loretta said. “It’s the last picture of Julian. He set up the camera and took it himself.”
“It’s an odd self-portrait,” I said. “Not very flattering.”
“I didn’t know he’d taken it,” Loretta said. “But when I started to put the camera away, I noticed it and printed it out.” She drew the picture from me and looked at it very intently. “It’s a warning, a picture like that: ‘Don’t end up like me.’” She handed the photograph back to me, then looked toward the window, out at the busy street life. “I’ve often thought that if life were fair, we’d be given a picture of where we’ll end up if we continue down the road we’re on.” She turned, and the smile she offered quickly faded. “That might be enough to save us.”
For a time, she was silent, then she said, “So, what’s your theory about Julian at the moment, Philip?”
“I don’t have one,” I admitted.
“I don’t either,” Loretta said. “I simply think Julian was a condemned man, a man who was sentenced to some sort of inner life imprisonment.”
“But for what crime?” I asked.
“That would be the question, wouldn’t it?” Loretta asked. She took another sip from her drink. “The crime of Julian Wells,” she added. “Still unsolved.” She seemed suddenly to shuffle off the weariness of her long flight, perhaps even some part of the long aridity that had marked her life since Colin’s death. “So,” she said, “where do we begin?”