The Magyar Venus

CHAPTERTWELVE

September 22

THE DANUBE WAS A DOVE-GRAY RIBBON BELOW ME, AS I sat, hands wrapped around a cup of coffee against the early morning chill. Behind me, Szent Matyas Church towered over the Fisherman's Bastion where once again I sat to greet the dawn. The mist on the river, the stillness of early morning, would be like a painting etched on my memory forever.

They'd be here in a few minutes, all of them, the Divas, Karoly, and Frank. The scene was set, the chairs in a little circle around the table on which Stalin, in his box, lay. I felt the cold of the stone floor beneath my feet edge its way up my body, heading, I was convinced, for my heart.

I heard the footsteps behind me. They were all on time. "Beautiful!" Cybil said. "How did you find this fabulous spot?"

"Frank brought me here," I said.

"What's that?" Frank said, pointing toward the box, and they all went over to look.

"Ew," Cybil said. "Is it real? Tell me it isn't."

Karoly slid the cover off the better to see it and stared at it for several seconds before turning toward me. "It can't be, can it?" he said.

I shrugged. "It's possible," I said. "I found it in the right place."

"Does it have a name?" Morgan said, laughing.

"Stalin," I said.

"Oh, come now," Grace said. "Why have you brought us here? Surely not to see that grotesque thing. Tell us the truth!"

"Truth?" I said. "Now that's an interesting word for you to use, Grace. Or should I call you Dr. Thalia Lajeunesse?" Karoly looked amused.

"What are you talking about?" Grace huffed.

"The author of that article that implies the Venus is a fake?" Morgan said. "Is that who you're talking about? You mean Grace wrote it?"

"Thalia," I said. "One of the three Graces, along with Aglaia and Euphrosyne, companions of the goddess of love. Lajeunesse, French word for youth. Grace Young, disappointed lover of Karoly Molnar."

"Tsk, tsk," Morgan said. "Caught in a lie, are we, Grace?"

"You are in a rather vulnerable position on that score yourself, Morgan," I said, as Grace burst into tears. "You see, I believed your story, at least part of it, about how Karoly was blackmailing you because you had had an affair with him. You knew I'd overheard a conversation that night at the Cottingham, didn't you? I assumed the woman Karoly had broken up with that night was you. But in fact he never confirmed my assumption, when I thought back to the conversation. He was actually very discreet. It was Grace he had just given the old heave-ho to, wasn't it?"

"Twice," Grace blubbered. "He dumped me twice."

Morgan stared at me for a minute. "Okay," she said. "I propositioned him that night. I wanted to get back at my husband for screwing Courtney. A little tit for tat as it were. He turned me down, even when I wrote a generous check to the museum. It was unbearably humiliating for me, so I made up the story. Surely, though, you did not bring us up here to freeze our butts off while you individually chastise us for lies that are essentially face-saving and harmless."

"No, I brought you up here to tell you the story of two exceptional women over a century apart. One of them was named Selena B. Morison. She was a Scotswoman from Edinburgh who decided for some reason, very possibly because of a man she had fallen in love with, to travel to what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire, to Budapest, to wait for someone, again most likely this man, and to carry out some scientific research. She was self-taught in this area, but obviously exceptionally talented.

"While she waited for what I believe to be her lover—she referred to him only as T—she occupied her time in scientific pursuits. She traveled to the Biikk Mountains, explored caves, and in at least one, conducted what we would call an archaeological dig. She was talented, but also perhaps extraordinarily lucky, because she came upon a grave site containing a body adorned with thousands of shells, along with a beautiful mammoth-ivory carving."

I glanced in Karoly's direction. Conflicting emotions— surprise, puzzlement, confusion—passed in succession across his face. "She was, by her own admittance, an amateur, so, conceding she could not do the research necessary, she packed up her account of the work, along with her exceptional drawings of the site, and the skull, and sent them to the Bramley Museum in London for further study. The chief curator of the Bramley at that time was a man by the name of Cyril James Piper."

"You're kidding," Frank said. Karoly just stood there, hanging on my every word.

"I told you there was something the matter with those diaries," Diana said. "But are you saying the Venus is a fake?"

"Oh, get off that, Diana," Morgan said. "Just shut up."

"Piper took the materials Selena had sent to him, and gave a presentation to a group of anthropologists at a pub near Piccadilly in which he seemed to imply that it was he who had found the skull. The conclusion one is forced to make, on careful reading of the minutes of that meeting, is that he presented the drawings and the detailed explanation of the dig, as his own. Whether or nor his fellow members of the Calvaria Club—I'll ask you to remember that name— were complicit in this deception, I do not know. They must have known their colleague had not spent a lot of time in Hungary in the recent past. But this was an old boys' club of the worst sort. Do you know what they used as a gavel at those little get-togethers? A real skull, from a real person. If they knew, they never said."

"That's the story of women everywhere," Grace said, bitterly.

"Not only did Cyril Piper not acknowledge Selena Morison's primary role in the discovery of both the grave and what we've come to know as the Magyar Venus," I continued, "he actively tried to discredit her. I found among his papers in the Bramley archives a letter he sent to colleagues who were considering hiring her, referring to her as difficult to deal with, unstable, and perhaps quite mad. In order to make sure she didn't come to work there, to find out about his deception and expose him to ridicule, he maligned her to his peers. You perhaps missed this letter, Karoly, in your research there. You also perhaps overlooked the fact that Piper is listed in meeting minutes several times when you had placed him in Hungary."

Karoly didn't say a word. I suppose he was quietly watching his career go down the drain.

"In any event, we don't know if T, the person she was waiting for, ever arrived, although it is highly improbable, and she seems to have reached that conclusion herself, nor do we know whether or not she found out about Piper's treachery. We do know that on April 29, 1901, she died, as a result of either falling, or jumping, off a cliff near Lil-lafured." I didn't bother mentioning that the name of the cliff was Molnar.

"Well, Karoly!" Diana said. "A little casual in our research, were we? Perhaps Thalia Lajeunesse will tell all."

"You're a little casual with the truth yourself, Diana," I said. "As I have recently discovered, if you look at something closely, without any hidden beliefs or prejudices, the truth usually comes shining through. In that regard, I have had another look at those files of yours, and I believe you were embezzling funds from the Cottingham, using Karoly's expense claims to do it, were you not?" Diana paled, visibly. "Isn't that right, Karoly?" I said, turning to him. He nodded. "You were trying to get back into the Cottingham that night to remove the evidence, Diana. I really wish you hadn't used my car to do it. What did you do? Shove me into the backseat and then go back and take a run at the window because your key didn't work in the door, anymore? You must have been drunker than I was. As for that claptrap about Karoly being responsible for your not getting tenure, I for one, would be interested some time in what the truth there might be. I suspect you just didn't cut it."

"But she got her PhD and everything," Cybil said. "Didn't you, Diana?"

Diana shook her head. "No," she said.

"Forget tenure!" Frank said. "I want to know what you're saying here. That Karoly was wrong? Surely all this means is that the diaries were misattributed, but the Venus is the genuine article."

"The Venus may very well be genuine. As a matter of fact, I'm almost certain it is. But you miss the point."

"I think I'm missing the point, too," Cybil said. "This all sounds so unbelievable."

"It's completely unbelievable," Frank said. "Lara must be mad."

"So now it's Lara that's being dissed, is it?" Morgan said. "I'd be careful where you go with this, Frank. I smell a lawsuit in the air. What a sad, sad woman that Selena Morison must have been. I mean, forget the Venus!"

"Very sad," I said. "Fast forward a hundred years or so, to another sad woman. Because of a terrible and tragic accident, this woman became trapped in: her own home. Her illness was very specific. She couldn't go out, fearful as she was that something terrible would happen if she did. She lost her children to her ex-husband, her job, her life." They all stood there, rooted to the ground, and silent at last. Karoly, unlike the others, wasn't looking at me. Instead he was staring outward toward the river, the bridges, Margit Island, to take comfort from it, perhaps.

"But she didn't give up entirely. She decided that she would spend her time finishing her master's thesis, something she could do from home, thanks to the wonder that is the Internet. This thesis, as it turns out, was on Victorian travelers, and through that she happened on the name of Cyril James Piper and his discovery of ancient Homo sapiens in the Biikk Mountains of what is now Hungary. She regularly corresponded with a woman by the name of Hilary Edmonds, a librarian at the Bramley. I know that because I met Hilary while I was there, and because I phoned her last night to ask her one very simple question, a question that came to me as I thought about Selena's Morison's betrayal. Did the name Anna Belmont mean anything to her? As it turned out, it did. Hilary had regularly assisted Anna, who had told her she was a shut-in, with copies of documents in the Bramley archives. From her tiny bedroom office in Toronto, Anna was able to write her thesis on the group of anthropologists that called themselves the Calvaria Club. You will recall, Frank and Cybil, that we found that name on a slip of paper caught in her desk.

"Karoly was wrong, yes, for more than one reason. He incorrectly named the discoverer of the Magyar Venus, and of the diaries. What really bothers me, though, is that he, you too, Frank, failed to credit Anna. She gave you her thesis, didn't she? That's why you visited her. She wanted your help to find a publisher. You took it, and you showed it to Karoly. Maybe you were just asking him his opinion as to the quality of the scholarship, whether it was worth publishing or not. I expect that as-soon as he saw it, he remembered the diaries that he had happened upon in Budapest. Without Anna, Karoly would never had made the connection. As with Selena Morison, those who had benefitted unjustly from her work chose to malign her, calling her dishonest, mentally unbalanced, if not downright mad. We do know that, unlike Selena, Anna knew of the betrayal, and that she confronted those responsible.

"How could you think that she wouldn't know, that she wouldn't recognize her work? In this day and age! Did you really think she wouldn't put two and two together? That she would think that Karoly found the diaries quite independently, which he quite possibly could have, when the publisher was you, Frank? Or did you just think if you kept telling everybody she was crazy, citing the fact that her children had been taken from her and she hadn't left the house in three years, that no matter what she said, no one would believe her?"

"You shouldn't have done that, Frank," Cybil said. "Did you chase her onto that bridge?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Frank said.

"I did not," Karoly said, looking at me. "I would not, could not, do such a thing."

"Of course not," Frank said. "This is a simple case of failing to credit someone. It is unfortunate, but we will correct it in the next printing, won't we, Karoly?" Karoly said nothing.

"No, it isn't. But you did go to see her that night, didn't you? One of you? Maybe both of you?" I said. Karoly turned back from his contemplation of the river.

"No," Frank said.

"For God's sake, Frank, tell the truth," Karoly said.

Frank just stood there. "Let me help you, Frank," I said. "You were celebrating that night. You were on the prowl and you were looking for some action. Unfortunately you had to use the drugs you had planned for another purpose to keep me from going to see Anna. Later that night, you went looking for her, and you found her, where, out on the street somewhere?"

"She killed herself, okay? We did go to try to fix things up, but she was hysterical. We drove around in my car for awhile, Karoly in the backseat trying to be charming and persuasive with an hysterical female, and then at the top of the street north of the bridge, she got out and started running. We went after her. Maybe she thought we meant her harm, but we didn't. She ran out onto the bridge. I drove my car into something at the end of the bridge, and then got out and tried to stop her. It was terrible," he said. "But I didn't push her over. Neither of us did. She did it all by herself. She was unbalanced. You can say she wasn't, but she was."

"Please believe me," Karoly said, looking directly at me. "What he says is true. We, I, did not push her off that bridge."

"Poor Anna," Morgan said.

Cybil sobbed uncontrollably. "I think I knew," she said. "In my heart. She told me she'd been working on something and she asked me to find Frank to help her with it. I just couldn't bear to admit something like this could happen. I think maybe I felt if I just kept quiet, it wouldn't really have happened. I called you one night, Lara. I debated about whether to say anything. We were all such good friends back then, the Divas, and Frank and Karoly. Those were the happiest days of my life. What happened to us?"

"Life is what happened," Morgan said. "Just life."

"It's over," Frank said. "We should have attributed Anna's work correctly. It had terrible consequences that we didn't anticipate. But this was unforeseen. If you insist, we will tell the authorities when we get back, but I don't see what we can be accused of. It was all most unfortunate, that's all."

"Perhaps you're forgetting Mihaly Kovacs," I said.

"What about him?" Karoly said.

"He's dead, murdered," I said.

"That's impossible," Karoly said. "I talked to him just a few days ago, before I came to Budapest. He was a little concerned about a business matter we were involved in, but otherwise perfectly fine."

"Not any more," I said. "I'm afraid he's dead, brutally murdered."

"How would you know Kovacs?" Karoly said to me.

"She found out from me," Diana said. "She's been helping us prove the Venus is a fake." A sound escaped from Karoly s lips, something like a groan.

"I've been trying to prove it's real, Karoly. And I did, except there were unexpected consequences," I said.

"Who the hell is Mihaly Kovacs?" Morgan said.

"The antique dealer who is supposed to have sold the Venus to Karoly," I said. "Except that he didn't, because Karoly had it already. His parents took it with them when they escaped from Hungary during the Revolution of 1956. Isn't that right, Karoly? Isn't that the business matter he was a little concerned about? You didn't even know what you had until your parents died, and Anna's thesis almost miraculously fell into your hands. You would probably never have figured it out if you hadn't seen the drawings in her material." He bowed his head.

"And the real reason that you didn't want Anna to tell her tale, was that it would open up the question of the Venus's authenticity, and you really didn't want to do that, because you had essentially defrauded the Cottingham. You paid Kovacs, and he in turn took his cut and paid you. You got a million dollars from Lily Larrington, supposedly paid $600,000 to Kovacs but pocketed most of it, and then what? Gave a whole bunch of it to Frank to publish the book and save his firm? You've both done rather well, haven't you, from Anna's research? Frank gets paid twice to publish the catalog, in a sense, and Karoly gets to take care of some of his debts and more."

"So what? That's the way business is done," Frank said. "Anyway, I'm not the one who had a twenty-five thousand-year-old carving in my garage."

"No, but you're probably the one who killed Mihaly Kovacs when he got cold feet and tried to tell me what he'd done," I said. "I went and scared him very badly by asking a lot of questions about the provenance. I expect he knew he would be in a bit of trouble if anyone found out his part in this. He followed me for a few days, right up the side of a cliff. I had a feeling someone was following me. I have no idea whether or not he knew you were following him. You hit him on the head with a stone, did you not, and then made it look as if he'd fallen and hit his head on it? What would you have done if I hadn't stayed in that cave? If I had come out and seen you? Would you have killed me, too?"

"No!" Karoly said. "Tell me, Frank, that this isn't true."

"Are we talking murder, here?" Morgan said. Frank did not reply.

Karoly took out his cell phone and started to dial. "I'm calling the police," he said, coming to stand beside me. "I will tell them everything. I cannot continue to live this lie. I did not kill anyone, Lara. You must believe that, no matter what else you may think of me."

Karoly had the phone up to his ear when Frank made his move. He stepped forward, reached into the box containing Stalin, and grabbed the gun. The Divas screamed as one. It had never occurred to me that the gun was loaded, nor that it would still work. He pointed it right at me. "Bitch!" he screamed. "You couldn't just let it be, could you?"

As Frank pulled the trigger, Karoly stepped in front of me.