A skorpió I.

A clandestine tram rattles through fog-choked Budapest nights, its windows fogged with secrets; aboard, Claire Lotto’s luminous gambler—part sphinx, part scarab—conceals a scorpion-shaped poison ring beneath black-lace gloves while Viktor Costa’s dissolute journalist, ink still wet on his latest libel, stalks the same aisle hunting the shadowy financier whose empire leans on forged promissory notes and the vanished bones of war orphans. Their trajectories intersect inside the abandoned Royal Velvet Cinema, a baroque husk where celluloid ghosts of Habsburg cavalry once galloped; now its screen is slit like a throat, its projector gutted, its velvet seats hosting orgies of blackmail. Lajos Réthey’s monocled archivist—part Mephistopheles, part Tiresias—presides over a maze of nitrate reels that combust at the whisper of truth, threading fragments of newsreel atrocities into a single damning ribbon he plans to screen at dawn on the city’s main square. Margit T. Halmi’s consumptive medium, eyes opiated and wide, summons the drowned voice of a murdered child whose testimony can topple the regime; her séance is staged inside the candle-drained nave of a deconsecrated church, the air thick with beeswax and treason. Oly Spolarits’s dockworker, muscles rope-taut from hauling crates stamped with pharaoh insignias, smuggles not contraband but memories—tiny glass slides of his vanished wife—each slide a shard of grief he slips into strangers’ pockets so that grief may circulate like currency. When the scorpion sting finally kisses the banker’s powdered neck at the opera’s crescendo, the poison acts less as murderer than as editor: it deletes the only man who knew where the city’s orphans were sold, yet preserves the footage of the transaction now looping inside the dead man’s retina. The surviving conspirators scatter into the pre-dawn whistle of locomotive steam, clutching tin reels that weigh more than coffins; the final shot freezes on a close-up of the scorpion ring—its obsidian claws still twitching—superimposed over the Danube’s mercury surface, suggesting history itself has been stung and is slowly paralysing.