Café Europa (2015) by Ed Ifkovic.
GoodReads meta-data is 278 pages, rated 3.68/5.00 by 28 litizens.
Genre: period krimi
Verdict: Nifty.
Edna Ferber (1885-1958) and firebrand, fictional suffragette Winifred Moss are travelling in Budapest in 1914. The trip is R and R for Suffragette after a gruelling period of arrest and torture in London, while Edna is escaping her cloying mother, ensconced in Berlin. From Kalamazoo, Ferber’s parents were Jewish, one Hungarian and one German, thus she travels with the languages for Mitteleuropa.
With its hotel upstairs featuring English plumbing the threadbare but comfortable Café Europa is favoured by English-speaking travellers. It is likewise convenient to the sights and sites of Buda (though few figure in this story apart from the Chain Bridge and the Castle).
In act one The Travellers observe the betrothal of a young American heiress to a sclerotic Austrian count. She previously had been courted by a dashing Hungarian, a scion of a porcelain fortune, but her parents arranged a marriage to the count, who is supremely indifferent to the whole matter, but his mother is the match-maker on that side. The American parents want the marriage to get the lustre of aristocracy, while the mother wants the gelt. The girl does not seem to mind but acts like the spoiled child she is. It is all very Edith Wharton [without her subtlety], until…..
The bratty heiress is murdered in the garden at midnight! Who dun it?
Act two opens with the local plod Hovarth investigating only to be pushed aside by a bumptious, idiot from Vienna who must arrest someone to satisfy aristocratic pressure. Neither the parents nor the match-making mother seem to care about the dead girl, but both parties are embarrassed by her murder. Talk about blame the victim.
Act three sees the murder of another American tourist: Buzzing around from the beginning is an annoying Hearst journalist named Harold. He goes here and there stirring and sewing sensationalism, malice, and half-truths. Think Pox News with energy and there it is. Harold differs from Pox journalism in having a certain puppy charm. Then Harold is shot dead in the street.
Act four: Meanwhile, Edna and Suffragette fall in with some local artists, reluctantly.
After much to’ing and fro’ing the cast gathers, ostensibly, in a wake, but we know the denouement is coming at 90% on the Kindle. We know this because, deus ex machina, while falling sleep the night before Edna and says to herself and the inevitable portrait of Emperor Franz Jozef on the wall in her hotel room: ‘That’s it!’
Act five offers an explanation of sorts: It turns out the murder….. Whoops, Spoiler ahead, take warning! Everything is political. Brat’s father is not only rich, stupid, and vain, he is also the owner of Colt Firearms and a matrimonial union with the Austrian Empire would feed the weapons to its army. Yes, it is a long bow, but there you have it. The best way to scuttle the union is to murder her. Sure makes sense. But then, maybe that sort of thing does to some tiny minds.
Harold of Hearst had begun to figure it out, and so he also had to go. Bang!
Spoiler. In keeping with the great tradition of krimis the murderer is the least likely, the seemingly gawky busboy, who is in fact a thespian terrorist. Another long bow.
The hindsight is thick throughout, everyone knows war is coming, quite how they could be so sure is left to one’s imagination when so many others, including many of the decision-makers, were taken by surprise. It was made fact by repetition. There had many conflicts in the Balkans already and another was perhaps inevitable, but the prescience in these pages anticipates the Great War not another armed border dispute.
The multiple-sclerosis of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is well done. Everywhere is the picture of Franz Jozef, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, and monarch of many other constituent polities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and once President of the German Confederation, yet the regime is comatose. He leads his peoples in clinging to the past. He will not promote to general a soldier less than seventy years old, only if all eight grandparents were themselves nobility may one enter the court circle at the Hofburg, telephones are forbidden in imperial buildings, he has never ridden in an automobile, though aged he ascends six flights of stairs each night to his army cot rather than have a new-fangled elevator installed. Electricity is banned from official buildings. He favours only those who do the same.
Yet in Paris, in London, in Berlin modernity is bursting out in all forms, electricity, automobiles, telephones, jazz, dance, short skirts, women smoking – none of these practices are permitted in the K and K (for King and Emperor) lands. French, English, and German armies are promoting young officers with technical educations and embracing new weapons and tactics, while in K and K the cavalry sabre remains the ultimate weapon.
The descriptions of the modern art as a revolution itself, destroying the old order, are very well done and quite arresting. Even the Hearst hack is conscious of something in the art he sees, though he cannot articulate it and it does not delay him long from the spoor of cheap sensationalism.
While thinking Edna and Suffragette drink Bulls Blood wine. During our recent visit to Budapest, I asked about this very wine, recalling its role in completing the PhD dissertation long ago. The vintner said it was an export label first applied to vast quantities of red wine Hungary traded to the Soviet Union in return for oil in the 1960s. It would seem that the Soviets then bottled it and traded it to Canada for wheat. In turn I traded it for words at the typewriter. Yes, I know, there are extensive entries for it on the web but if read closely, they do not contradict the essence of the intel above.
Edna Ferber had a long and distinguished career as a writer, novelist, playwright, and essayist. This is the sixth in a series featuring her.
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