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go all the way to the City Market, but it was worth it, boy, was it ever worth it. Just look at these nice hard stems.” Reaching into one of his baskets, he pulled out five plump rhubarbs. Gordon shuddered; he didn’t even like them stewed.
    “What are you working on now, Opa?” he asked.
    “Ha!” The old man’s face lit up again, and he continued triumphantly. “Not even the Gastronome has heard of this! I thought of it a couple of days ago: grape-rhubarb jam!” He stirred the mixture bubbling on the stove. “If it works, I’ll send him the recipe immediately. Immediately, I say!”
    Gordon nodded. Mór was obsessed with getting his name into the Gastronome’s column in the Sunday issue of the Budapest Journal . It was as if his decades of healing others had vanished from his memory banks without a trace. He knew a great many people in the capital, so when he decided after his wife’s death to move up to Budapest from his hometown of Keszthely, hours to the south on Lake Balaton, he could easily have resumed his medical practice or even taught. But no. The old man seemed bent on devoting his final decades to creating a jam the Gastronome would find worthy of publication.
    “You didn’t eat what I sent with Krisztina, did you?” he asked sullenly.
    “I did, Opa,” said Gordon. “What sort of jam was it?”
    “Chestnut,” replied Mór with a dismissive wave of the hand, “but I’ve figured out how I ruined it. As soon as I find really nice chestnuts at the market, I’ll try it again.”
    “I thought it was good. Not that I could have said it was chestnut, but it was tasty.”
    “Well, you’ll like this a whole lot better,” Mór claimed, reaching into the pantry and taking out a small pot, which he proudly set down on the table. He took a brioche from the bread basket, spread a slice with some butter he took from the refrigerator, and applied a thick layer of the stuff from the pot.
    Gordon was in no position to resist. But he would have liked to. While he couldn’t stand anything sour, the old man, who found classical jams—strawberry, apricot, peach—gauche, experimented with more hair-raising recipes. Gordon took a deep breath, and then a bite of the jam-covered brioche. He watched Mór’s ruddied face. Slowly Gordon nodded, quickly forcing down the whole slice.
    “Well? Well?” asked the old man.
    “I’m just asking, Opa, but shouldn’t you have removed the seeds from the grapes?”
    Mór threw a hand to his forehead. “For the love of God! I forgot. That one thing.”
    “And the sugar, too,” Gordon mumbled, but the old man didn’t hear, for he was back by the stove, stirring the simmering jam. “Opa, I’ve got a question,” he continued louder.
    “Question?”
    “Yes.”
    “And what would that be?” asked Mór, his back still to Gordon.
    “Well, two nights ago they found a dead girl on Nagy Diófa Street. She had no superficial marks, only her face had turned a bit blue. I’ll go by the coroner’s office, but what do you figure she could have died of?”
    “Son, you’re not asking me seriously,” said the old man, turning around. “So many things that it’s not even worth listing them all. Was it suicide?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “And why do you want to know?”
    “Because I was on the scene, and I want to write an article about it, only there’s nothing to write. Besides, something’s not quite right about this girl.”
    “I’m not surprised,” said Mór. “In that neighborhood there aren’t too many upright ladies.”
    “This was no run-of-the-mill prostitute, Opa, but a Jewish girl who was probably from a bourgeois family.”
    “Is Dr. Somkuthy still the chief coroner?” asked the old man.
    “Yes.”
    Mór stepped over to the telephone and had the operator connect him to the Institute of Forensic Medicine. Within a few minutes he was talking to Dr. Somkuthy.
    “They’ll be doing an urgent autopsy on the girl,” he told Gordon after putting down