Richest Woman

Jogging home in his high wheeled wooden cart, a Jugoslavian farmer boy looked out last week across a field of maize and thought he saw two peasant women tussling in the twilight. "Don't touch me, Milica!" screamed one. Cracking his whip and clucking to his nag, the farmer boy jogged on. Reaching home he mentioned with a shrug the trivial incident.

The field of maize was part of several thousand acres belonging to Baroness Irma Molnar, widowed sister-in-law of Hungary's famed Ferenc Molnar, fat, ironic playwright. Once a noted beauty, the Baroness Molnar grew eccentric after her husband's death in 1900, cut her hair short, adopted peasant garb and, during the War, equipped and mannishly managed a large field hospital. Although often styled "richest woman in Jugoslavia," she recently dispensed with nearly all her servants, then filled the sumptuous salons of her chateau at Starilec with innumerable dogs and birds.

On the night after a woman had screamed "Don't touch me, Milica!" the Baroness Irma Molnar did not return to Starilec. She had left her estate on foot in the morning, peasant clad, without seeing to her dogs and birds as she usually did. The few old servitors at Starilec. humble, discreet, waited several days, then reported their mistress' disappearance. Out rushed eager search parties to comb crag and dale for "the richest woman in Jugoslavia." There was bound to be pots of money in it for the man who found her, perhaps wounded by some wild animal in the rocky woods.

Eventually it was in the maize field that peasant searchers found Baroness Irma Molnar, strangled by a heavy silken cord. Tied to one of the tassels was a crisp card, on which was written in what some thought feminine script:

My Revenge

When shrewd agents of the Jugoslav-Secret Police scurried out from Belgrade they questioned hundreds of peasants, found the boy who had heard someone cry, "Don't touch me. Milica!" Cogitating wisely, the detectives soon evolved a theory. Baroness Irma Molnar, they said with conviction, was strangled by a "woman unknown," probably "named or nicknamed Milica."