Woman in the Fifth

in prison after it was revealed he was an agent working for the CIA. There is no mention in any report — either police or in the press — of the incident you describe, in which Madame Kadar was forced, as a seven-year-old girl, to watch her father’s hanging. Then again, the Hungarian police in 1980 would never have shared such information with us. Instead, in their reports — and in the State press — Madame Kadar was depicted as a mentally unbalanced woman who, having recently lost her husband and daughter in a tragic accident, was on a rampage of revenge. The State newspaper printed all the French reports about Dupre’s murder. They also intimated that the attacks on Bodo and Lovas were savage ones.’

‘Did the Hungarian police let you know how she tracked the two men down?’

‘Of course not. According to the inspector’s report at the time, the police in Budapest only nominally cooperated with us. And no, they didn’t inform us that Bodo and Lovas were members of the security services — though in all the Hungarian press reports, they constantly referred to the two men as “heroes” who had “given their lives to protect the security of the homeland” … which is usual State doublespeak for members of the Secret Police.’

‘And Margit killed herself after murdering the two men?’

He opened the file and found a document, glanced at one page, then turned to those stapled beneath it.

‘This is a translation of a telex — remember the telex? — sent to us from the police in Budapest. First victim, Bela Bodo, aged sixty-six, was found dead in his apartment in a residential district of Buda on the night of September 21, 1980. He was found bound and gagged to a chair in front of his kitchen table. His hands had been taped to the table using heavy duct tape, of the type generally employed for patching leaky pipes. The victim’s ten fingers had been severed from his hands, his eyes had been gouged out, his throat cut.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ I whispered.

‘There was nothing frenzied about such an attack. One must surmise that the murderer was very slow and deliberate in her maiming of her victim, in order to inflict maximum pain and terror on him. The coup de grace when his throat was cut must have been a desperate relief to him.’

‘Did the police tell you how she had managed to bind and gag Bodo in the first place?’

‘No, but like us, they too intimated that she must have entered his apartment carrying a firearm — thus forcing him to “assume the position” at the kitchen table while she bound and gagged him. Had he known what was awaiting him, I’ve no doubt he would have tried to escape. Being shot to death is so much cleaner than the torment he suffered.’

‘And Lovas?’

‘The same treatment. Only in this instance, a neighbor heard Lovas scream something — probably before Madame Kadar gagged his mouth — and decided to call the police. They took their time arriving — maybe thirty minutes after the call. When they got there, they banged on the door and announced themselves and insisted whoever was there should open the door immediately. There was no reply. So they got the concierge to open the door. As the door swung up, a spray of blood hit the officers. Madame Kadar had just cut her throat … and judging from the blood still pumping from Lovas, Madame Kadar had sliced his jugular right before her own.

‘They tried to save them both. They both died.’

He reached into the file, pulled out two aging black-and-white photos and pushed them across the table to me. The first showed the bloodied head of a man lying limp, his torso also covered in blood, his hands taped to a table and so mutilated that they appeared to be gory stumps.

The second showed a woman sprawled on a linoleum floor, lying in a pool of blood, her clothes sodden, a kitchen knife in one hand, a gash across her throat. I studied the face. Without question, it was a younger version of Margit. I looked at her eyes. Though frozen, they seemed to glow with an exultant rage — the same sort of heightened fury that I saw in her eyes when she talked about the death of her father, or the accident that took Zoltan and Judit from her. I stared at her post-mortem eyes again in the photograph. It was as if Margit had taken this rage with her from the past life into eternity.

The past life? But she was here, in this life. Now.

I pushed the photograph back toward the inspector. I bowed my head, not knowing what to say, what to think.

‘Given the monstrousness of the attacks,’ Coutard said, ‘it is obvious that the murderer was not of sound mind. Yet she might not have committed suicide if the police hadn’t shown up while she was slowly maiming Lovas to death.’

‘But she is not dead,’ I said.

He tapped the crime-scene photograph of Margit.

‘You insist that the woman shown here is alive?’

‘Yes.’

He handed me another document from the file. It was in Hungarian and looked official. Toward the top of it was a space in which Margit’s name had been written.

‘This is the death certificate from the medical examiner in Budapest — signed after he performed the autopsy on Madame Kadar. The investigating inspector in Saint-Germain-en-Laye closed the case on the murder of Monsieur Dupre upon receiving this certificate from the Hungarian authorities, as he had proof that the individual who perpetrated this crime was dead. But you still insist that Madame Kadar is alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you understand the seriousness of your position, Monsieur Ricks?’

‘I didn’t kill Omar. I didn’t kill Yanna’s husband.’

‘Even though all the evidence points to you. Not just evidence … but motive as well.’

‘I had nothing to do with their deaths.’

‘And your alibi — at least in the case of the murder of Monsieur Attani — is that you were at the apartment of the woman whose death certificate you have just read?’

‘You have heard me tell you, in detail, essential aspects of her life—’

‘And these details could have been easily researched by you using a search engine …’

‘Ask yourself, Inspector, please, the same question you posed to me: Why would I be interested in such an old murder case? How would I have found out about it in the first place? And how would I know more intimate details of Madame Kadar’s past than you do?’

‘Monsieur, I have been doing this job for over twenty years now. And if there is one thing I comprehend about human behavior, it is this: the moment you think you can predict its pattern is the moment when it changes, and you discover that other people’s realities are often divorced from the one you exist in. You say a dead woman is alive. I say, the man sitting in front of me seems rational and lucid and intelligent. And yet, when shown proof that his lover left this life twenty-six years ago …’

He opened his hands, as if to say, And there it is.

‘So you must understand, monsieur … I am not interested in why you have created this invention in your head, or how you gleaned your facts, or whether or not you embellished the story with tales of your lover being forced to watch her father’s execution. Naturally, I am intrigued by such detail. Naturally, I am curiously impressed by your forceful certainty that Madame Kadar exists. But as a police inspector, such interest is overshadowed by empirical facts. And the empirical facts of the case are profoundly empirical. The facts point to your culpability. Just as the fact that you use a dead woman as an alibi …’

Another shrug.

‘I do suggest that you reconsider your story, monsieur.’

‘I am telling you the truth,’ I said.

He let out a deep, frustrated sigh.

‘And I am telling you that you are either a compulsive liar or an irrational liar or both. I am now sending you back to the cells so you can reflect on your situation, and perhaps come to your senses and end this mad self- deception.’

‘Am I not allowed some sort of legal representation at this stage?’

‘We can hold you for seventy-two hours without contact with the outside world.’

‘That’s not fair.’