by Anna Porter
The grey hoodie was partway across the bridge before Helena managed to extricate herself from the Germans.
He picked up speed as he reached the end, turned up the quay, sprinted along the Danube embankment, looked back at Helena, and disappeared behind the Number 2 streetcar near the Parliament buildings. He seemed to be pacing the streetcar as it approached the pedestrian island. She waited on the other side of the tracks, where the József Attila statue had stood when she was last in Budapest. She watched the man run up to the uniformed guard and say something to him. They both laughed.
A few minutes later, he walked casually up to the side entrance of the Parliament block and disappeared inside.
Helena shook her hair loose, unzipped her hoodie, and walked to the guard’s booth. He was young, pimply, and wearing a too-large uniform and a peaked cap.
“Hello,” Helena said with a smile.
“Hullo,” he said, also smiling.
“Could I go in here?” she asked.
He continued to smile and pointed over to the long line of tourists waiting at the main entrance.
Helena shook her head. “My friend,” she said, “just came in here.” She pointed to the side door.
He shook his head. “Only staff,” he said.
“Oh.” Helena affected a worried look. “He left his credit card on the table where we met, and I want to return it to him.”
He shook his head again. “No.” He motioned to the other guard at the barrier a few metres away and, when he approached, started talking to him in rapid Hungarian.
This man was older but no more comfortable with English than the first man. “You leave card,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” Helena said rapidly. “Not safe to leave credit cards lying around and especially not safe here with you guys, whom I don’t know and will not get to know in the few hours I plan to spend in your country. . . .”
Her fast talk had the desired effect. They both nodded, as if in agreement, although neither of them understood what she had said. “I will phone,” she added, still smiling, as she turned to saunter across Kossuth Square. She crossed the streetcar tracks, jumped over the orange railing, and walked across to the Ministry of Agriculture’s imposing colonnade. The two guards were still smiling and watching. Good to know that her ass still had that effect on men.
She stepped behind one of the columns and watched as the younger guard reached for his phone, dialled, and they all waited for the thin-lipped man to appear. Helena checked her watch. He appeared in less than two minutes. His office, if he had one, would have to be at this end of the building, and on the ground floor, or close to it.
Chapter Twelve
The tour of the Hungarian Parliament building was scheduled for 4 p.m. Helena bought her ticket at the Balassi Street ticket booth, returned to the square, and bent over the rose-filled flower bed near Lajos Kossuth’s large bronze statue, sniffed the petals appreciatively, and planted her knife next to the nearest rose bush. The tour would take about forty-five minutes, and tourists had eight languages to choose from. Helena picked French because there was a large, boisterous French-speaking group from one of the cruise ships, and she expected the guide would be busy keeping them under control. A few of them had already expressed a desire to find a toilet but did not want to lose their places in line. They were confident there would be toilets inside.
After a long introductory speech — well-rehearsed but in appalling French — about the Gothic revival architecture, the façcade, the central dome, the statues of Hungarian and Transylvanian leaders, military figures, and coats of arms, the guide led the way past the ornate gates and the two bored-looking stone lions into the wide entrance.
They shuffled through the security check and up the red-carpeted grand staircase. “Le piste à splendour,” the guide announced, and when all the tourists laughed, she changed it to “La route de splendour,” but it was too late: “piste” had reminded some of them of their bodily needs. Still, they managed to look at the hundreds of small statues and heroic frescoes along the walls with due appreciation and made it to the magnificently Gothic, red-carpeted Dome Hall. There everyone circled the bejewelled gold double crown under its glass dome and its two immobile uniformed guards. There were other, less grandiose guards around the walls and near the exits. After a requisite time of open-mouthed admiration (the French could always be moved by jewellery), the group proceeded to the Old Upper House Hall with more statuary, ornate tapestries, and fewer guards.
Two of the French women began to grouse about the lack of toilets, and when five more joined the loud demands for a pee break, the guide acceded and said she would take them to the nearest washroom while everyone else waited. There were five elegant red-and-gold settees along the corridor, and they would be allowed to sit while they waited. It was Helena’s chance to slip through a door leading to the back of the building. Her problem was that, as the guide said, there were 691 rooms, 10 courtyards, and 29 staircases. There were also 27 gates or entrances. She calculated that most of them would not be used and the one that interested her would be two floors down and close to the Danube. If she kept the Kossuth Square–side windows to her left, she would likely arrive at her destination before someone noticed her absence. Since the representatives’ hall was lower than the hall open to the public, she had to go down one of the numerous staircases or take the elevator. The advantage, she thought, of the elevator was that no one would expect an intruder to take an elevator. What she needed was a file folder or a stack of papers. She found both on an unguarded table. All the papers were tourist information sheets, and the folder contained lists of booked tours for the next day.
She shoved them under her arm and pushed the down button for the elevator. It opened on a man with an equally large stack of papers. He said something but, luckily, it didn’t sound like a question. Helena nodded agreement, and they descended the rest of the way in silence.
It took her ten minutes to arrive at the building’s entrance that the man she had followed from Biro’s had used. She could see the guard booth through the leaded window. The guard at the door seemed less focused on his job than on the men at the tourist entrance, and she assumed he would be much more interested in those entering than those leaving. In any event, she gave him one of her friendliest smiles and went up the short staircase just past him. She hurried up a flight of stairs, officiously and in close imitation of how the man would have moved when he arrived an hour ago.
Two minutes later, she arrived at a corridor with a series of doors leading off in both directions. Three of them displayed thin metal signs with names. She used her cellphone to take photos of the nearest of them: two to the left, one to the right. All of them had “Dr.” before their names — a wonderful middle European prefix to indicate that the individual was of considerable importance. None of the doctors she had met in the east had medical degrees, though a couple of them in Poland had offered to examine her.
She checked her watch, retraced her steps, and took the stairs two at a time, to estimate how long it took her. She descended and tried one more time to make sure her estimate of his timing was right: just under two minutes. That was how long it had taken the man to get down these stairs, out the security door, and over to the guard booth. She was satisfied that he would have come out of one of these offices. She dumped her stack of brochures on a windowsill, hurried down to the entrance, waved and smiled at the guard again, called out a cheery “Szia,” and left.
Outside, the pimply-faced guard in the small booth looked at her, surprised but not in the least concerned. She waved again and jumped over the streetcar tracks and the barrier, made it to Alkotmány Street and ran down Honvéd Street to Szabadság Square, where there was usually a crowd to be lost in. At the far end of the square some people with placards shouted something about liberty — a nice touch, since the translation of the square’s name was liberty. She pulled up her hoodie
and joined them.
She waited an hour, allowing for plenty of time for her group of tourists to leave the parliament building. Still no police siren and no one in pursuit. The French guide had not noticed her absence.
It was almost dusk when she returned to Kossuth Square to smell the roses again.
Chapter Thirteen
It was not a long walk downhill from the Ruszwurm to Tibor Szelley’s remarkably pretty condominium on the Buda side of the Danube, but Attila didn’t like to leave his elderly car in the Castle area in the late afternoon when the Romanian thugs started to worry about their stolen car quotas. Attila had arrested two of their mob bosses when he was still with the police, but, as it turned out, they were not prosecuted. Back then, the castle elite loved getting deals on Mercs. And back then, the Romanians would never have lifted a Škoda of any vintage. Now, Czech-made Škodas were becoming collectibles since the factory moved to India as part of Volkswagen’s “rationalization” program.
Tibor shared the apartment with his mother and two white, long-haired Persian cats with a tendency to wind themselves around visitors’ legs and shed. Attila was a dog lover, but he tolerated the cats because Tibor was his oldest friend and Tibor’s mother plied Attila with J&B and strudel when he visited. Fortunately, in addition to the strudel, she was rarely without a tempting round of Ruszwurm Dobos torte, and Anna and Sofi loved Dobos torte as much as they loved the cats. Otherwise, after their adventure at the park, it would have been a challenge to bring them here. There had been a long lineup at the Ruszwurm with no hope of getting a table in less than half an hour.
Tibor had always been Attila’s most reliable source of inside information. He had been blessed with a grandfather who was proud of his occupation as a bus conductor, his Party membership, and his ability to get Tibor’s father a pleasant desk job and his grandson the best education that the “workers’ paradise” could offer. As a result, Tibor spoke four languages (none of them well), excelled at maths, and made a smooth transition to the post-Communist world as a banker. He had maintained exemplary connections in the Gothic castle.
On the other hand, Attila’s grandfather’s pre-war occupation as a shoe factory owner proved to be a challenge in the nasty 1950s. That the factory was still turning out quality waterproof boots for the Hungarian army did not help. When the Communist government nationalized the factory and installed a politically acceptable manager, the new boots were no longer waterproof and tended to fall apart after only a few days’ use, so the factory closed. Attila’s grandfather had found work as a sheep wrangler. He had not been very good at it, but no one else was either because the experienced sheep wranglers had been relocated to work in factories.
Being classified as bourgeois counted against the entire family, so Attila’s father found work in a leather goods factory as a machinist, and Attila could make it only to a vocational school, ideal for future factory workers. Had it not been for Tibor, Attila would not have been accepted into the police academy.
Tibor was waiting for them on the landing. He looked much younger than Attila — “all those years of healthy living,” he had told Attila. As usual, he wore a cashmere sweater and light wool pants, his idea of loungewear. Entertaining guests on the landing was his opportunity to smoke one of his heavily scented Turkish cigarettes. His mother admonished him for smoking in the apartment unless he was smoking menthols, and Tibor hated menthols.
He hugged the girls and shooed them in to talk with the cats and try the Dobos torte in the kitchen. “An unexpected pleasure,” he said to Attila. “Does this mean you are cancelling our afternoon at the Király?” They met most Fridays at Király Bath for Scotch, chess, and a soak in the warm pool.
“No. We’ll still have lots to talk about tomorrow,” Attila said. “Just a simple bit of information today.”
“No information is ever simple,” Tibor said, offering Attila a cigarette and the second glass of J&B he had carried out in anticipation of his friend’s arrival.
Attila accepted the refill but declined the offer of cigarettes. He hated Tibor’s scented cigarettes almost as much as he disliked Alexander’s Sobranies. Attila had met Alexander shortly after he was first posted at the Russian embassy. They had developed a bantering friendship over Hungarian sausages, pálinka, and tracking ruble launderers. Over the years, they had shared a few investigations, mutual suspicions, and family secrets but never each other’s cigarettes. “I’m trying to give up,” Attila said. At least that was true. He had been trying to smoke less since he had started spending time with Helena again. “A man called Adam Biro. Lives on Fő Street in the Castle District. You know him?”
“Biro?”
“Yes.”
“I think I may have met him. Why?”
“Is he some sort of art collector?”
“Not that I know. He was only a minor functionary with the ruling party. Why?”
“Do you know which ministry?”
“Industry and Commerce, maybe. And again, why?”
“The guy I’m assigned to in Strasbourg bought a painting from him that could be worth billions of forints. Maybe even millions of euros.”
Tibor whistled appreciatively. “Who is the artist?”
“Some famous seventeenth century painter called Artemisia Gentileschi.”
“If the guy you work for is Vaszary, he is very tight with the current kleptocratic ruling party, and very, very tight with our ruler-in-chief, all of which would be useful if you wanted to serve our great bastion of Christianity at the Council of Europe or, for that matter, any other appointed office our nation offers to those who are close to the centre of power. In other words, if he says Biro sold him a painting, Biro did, for sure, sell him a painting. We mere mortals should not be asking questions about such things. At least, not if we want to keep our heads below the parapet.”
“Well, that is precisely the problem with this whole thing, Tibor. Vaszary says the painting is a copy. His wife says it’s the original, and they are in the middle of a divorce. She wants her share of what the painting would sell for.”
“Didn’t you say just now that you worked for him?”
Attila took a cigarette from Tibor’s well-thumbed package. Without his Helikons and given the direction Tibor’s words were heading, Turkish was better than nothing. “I do,” he said. “But I saw no harm in helping her on the side when she asked me to find her an expert to look at the painting.”
“You did.”
“I did.”
“As I recall, you have just such an expert in your small circle of acquaintances.”
“By happy coincidence,” Attila said with a grin, “and she seems to like the painting for a Gentileschi. She was doing some tests on the paint and the canvas or whatever else people like her do at times like this. Meanwhile, she wanted to know more about the guy who sold it to the Vaszarys. That’s why I went to see Biro.”
Tibor examined Attila’s face for that telltale squint he remembered from their school days, the look his friend had every time he was in some trouble with the teachers, usually at least once a day when he lied about fighting in the corridors or breaking a window, or locking someone in the boys’ toilets. “What aren’t you telling me?” he now asked.
Attila told him about the dead lawyer in Strasbourg and the local police’s interest in Helena, and that he had gone to see Biro an hour or so ago, but the little guy wouldn’t invite him into the apartment, despite Attila’s flashing his old police ID, and that Biro denied he had sold Vaszary a painting. Any sort of painting, let alone a valuable one.
Tibor scratched his short-cropped grey hair, drank a bit of his J&B, and suggested they extinguish their cigarettes and sit down in the living room. “Your simple little inquiry has grown into something quite complicated, and I prefer to deal with complicated matters when I am sitting down,” he said. “Besides, my mother would be delighted to see you. There is
no accounting for taste.”
Tibor’s mother had turned on the lights and stood gazing out at the Danube, while Anna and Sofi played hide-and-seek with the cats.
“She has quite outgrown the company of young children,” Tibor said, “and much of her hearing, which can be a blessing when we have young visitors. Anyu,” he shouted, “look who has decided to grace us with his company?”
Tibor’s mother turned away from the floor-to-ceiling windows and the view of the setting sun dancing red and orange on the waves and on the shiny façades of the hotels on the Pest side. “It’s so beautiful,” she said with a sigh. “I never tire of the view. It is always good to see you.” She offered her soft, powdered cheek for a kiss and led the way into the faux-French-decorated living room with its gilt, chintz, and velvet cushioned chairs that would have made Tibor’s grandfather, the former bus conductor, sneeze and make nasty remarks about bourgeois pretensions.
Tibor’s mother hurried into the kitchen for the cherry strudel, her gold-rimmed plates, and the silver Attila knew she used only for special guests. Now, with fewer visitors, even the children counted as special guests. Attila didn’t have the heart to tell her they didn’t like cherry strudel, only apple strudel (they had already finished the Dobos), and took a very large helping for himself to make up for his children’s lack of good taste. “They loved the strudel,” he said, thinking they probably fed their servings to the cats but, with a bit of luck, Mrs. Szelley would not have noticed.