by Anna Porter
Attila’s phone rang. “Good afternoon, Mr. Vaszary,” he said.
“Not, as it happens, a very good afternoon, Attila,” Vaszary said. “Where are you?”
“In Budapest.”
“Why?”
“I had to check in with police headquarters,” Attila said as cheerfully as he could manage. “Back tomorrow. Early.”
“And it seems you had a little errand to run,” Vaszary said.
“What errand?”
“You went to see someone about our painting.”
“Yes.” No point denying it. Biro must have called Vaszary as soon as Attila left him.
“An errand, then, for my wife, wouldn’t you say? And you don’t work for my wife. I was led to believe that you work for me. Or is that not the case?” His voice was cool, level, controlled. “Did you not understand that?”
“I thought—”
“You were not paid to think, Attila. You were paid to be my bodyguard, in the event that I needed guarding, and so far I haven’t, but now that I do, you are not here. Not only are you not here, you are running an errand for my wife. My wife, whom I am divorcing! You went to see a man at an apartment on Fő Street. That is the errand you were on?”
“Yes.”
“You went there to ask about the painting.”
“Yes. But he told me nothing.”
“You didn’t go into this apartment?”
“No.”
“But you questioned him.”
“He says he didn’t sell you the painting.”
Vaszary was silent for so long, Attila thought he had disconnected. “You will be in my office tomorrow at nine. Sharp,” Vaszary said at last, and now he did disconnect.
“Shit,” Attila said.
“Can we go soon?” Sofi asked from under the Louis XVI–style giltwood settee. One of the cats was testing his claws on the embroidered upholstery above her head.
“Right after I finish Mrs. Szelley’s delicious—”
“Biro,” Tibor interrupted over his second J&B. “You said he was a little guy. Exactly how little did you mean? Or were you just using the diminutive to imply that he was unimportant, a negligible presence, that sort of thing?”
“No,” Attila said. “I meant he is a small person. A short man. You know . . . up to my shoulder maybe. Old. He wore his pyjamas and an old sweater. Slippers. Almost bald. Bit of hair on the back of his skull. Wrinkled. Rimless glasses. He had to peer up at me when we talked. I thought he would be concerned about a police visit, but he wasn’t. Even when I tried to—”
“Biro.”
“Adam Biro.”
Tibor stood up and paced to the window. “Adam Biro would be about 190 centimetres tall. A big guy. Maybe sixty. White hair, ruddy face, big belly.”
“Biro is thin and small.”
“And he died about six months ago.”
Chapter Fourteen
Helena had not planned to stay overnight in Budapest. But then she had not planned to see the killer from Strasbourg here, at Biro’s apartment. And now that she had seen him and he had probably seen her, she needed to understand the connections.
Having seen Adam Biro’s apartment, his sale of a valuable painting made sense. He was, obviously, some sort of dealer. That he didn’t appear on the list of accredited art dealers in Budapest didn’t mean anything other than that he disliked paying taxes. No one likes paying taxes. There were hundreds of unregistered dealers all over Europe and the United States. Her father had kept in touch with many of them and had he not burnt his record book, she could have checked for Biro. “I don’t need it any longer,” he had told her. “I will give up the business.” But of course, he hadn’t given up the business. Had he done so, he may have stayed alive a little longer.
One of the many bits of information he had thrust on her was that unregistered dealers still kept reasonable records of what they bought and sold. Being unregistered would demand an even greater scrutiny of provenance. Her father had been not only a master purveyor of fake art, but also a brilliant creator of long, entirely credible fake provenances.
When she saw Biro’s apartment, Helena was sure he would have kept the necessary papers — real or not — for all the art he had sold. But who was he?
She called James. He was more excited than usual to hear from her. “The Gentileschi . . .” he started.
“Don’t jump to conclusions yet,” she said. “But we know there are at least a dozen Judith and Holofernes paintings by Artemisia, documented in letters and notes, but never found. Only two are in known collections. The Duke of Alcalá had written to the King of Spain about one he had acquired in Naples. He had planned to give it to the King of England in an effort to appease him. He described it as a large canvas with lifelike figures. It has not surfaced in any museums we know of. There may have been another one in the Pighetti collection.”
“None of the paintings she did in England have surfaced yet, though we know from her letters that she was busy with commissions. Can you send me a photo?”
“Could you please see if you can find an unlicensed dealer in Budapest by the name of Adam Biro?” she asked, ignoring his request. “I will call you again tomorrow. Don’t want to stay here any longer than I have to.” Helena had not mentioned where that was. James would, naturally, assume she was still in Strasbourg and that suited her fine. She didn’t exactly distrust him, but past experience told her that his chief driving force was recognition, closely followed by money. A Gentileschi sale could bring both. The auction house had dealt with Azarov and Grigoriev in the past and, wishing to insert himself into a big sale, he could well be tempted to reveal something she had said.
She needed a place to hole up for a couple of nights while she tried to figure out who the man in the hoodie was and why he had killed the lawyer. Was he working alone, or had he been hired for the job? If he had been hired, by whom? On the way to Attila’s apartment building, she checked into the Astoria. It was far from the best hotels in the city, and she thought no one would look for her there. She signed in as Marianne, and prepaid the room, that being all the proof of good intentions that the hotel required to hand her a key. She slipped the knife into its sheath and up her sleeve. She didn’t bother to unpack.
She left a voicemail for Attila on his cellphone: “Please head home.” She left no callback number since she was now using her other burner phone. She bought a bag of groceries — bags of groceries were always a good disguise — and walked along Rákóczi Avenue, a grittier part of the city where tourists rarely ventured and the gentrification that had overtaken much of the downtown core had not yet mounted an offensive. The building where Attila lived still had some leftover bullet holes from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, or perhaps from the war.
No one paid attention to her opening the outside door with the point of a knife poking out of her sleeve. The long passageway to the wrought-iron elevator was dark, damp, and stank of stale cabbage and dog shit. Helena took the stairs to the apartment, settled on the top stair with the grocery bag next to her, and waited.
She could have opened his door in less than a minute, but she thought that would be overly intrusive, and, while their unusual relationship would give her the licence to intrude, the idea offended her sense of propriety. When she was last here, she had shared Attila’s bed with him and his long-haired dachshund. At first, she hadn’t noticed the dog at the end of the bed, or the books piled in the corners, the boxes full of dishes, the yellowing curtains, the torn-up couch, his clothes strewn over every surface. The next morning it began to bother her. She had found it all too unkempt, too redolent of disappointment. “Detritus of a recent divorce,” he had explained. An evening that had been romantic, their frantic lovemaking the night before, seemed slightly embarrassing in the morning, her sleeping among the leftovers of his marriage.
Attila and his two daughters arr
ived shortly before eight. Laughing and yelling, the girls raced each other up the steps, and ground to a sudden halt when they saw Helena. “Hello,” the smaller one said in English, panting from the exertion of trying to beat her sister.
The older one studied Helena suspiciously, her mouth turned down, her cheeks flushed, before she said “Szia” and edged past the grocery bag to reach the door to Attila’s apartment. It had been about a year since she had last seen Helena. Chocolate ice cream with whipped cream at the Four Seasons while their father talked with Helena. Anna hadn’t liked the way her father was looking at her.
“You have grown,” Helena said, and continued to sit on the stairs as Attila, dishevelled, panting even more than his daughter, came into view. “I hope you don’t mind my visiting,” she said. “I called to tell you I happened to be in Budapest.”
“Hey,” he said when he recovered his breath. “I didn’t expect you . . .”
“I didn’t expect me either. But there was an art dealer I had to see. . . .”
“Biro?”
“The same.”
“That’s crazy. I went to see him.”
“I know,” she said, “but I need information from him that you wouldn’t know how to get. Or what to look for when you found it.”
Attila told her that Biro, according to his impeccable source, was dead, and that the man she had met couldn’t have been Biro.
“I didn’t meet anyone in the apartment,” she said, “but I did look around, and whoever the guy is, whether he is alive or dead, he is, or was, an art dealer. He had paintings, drawings, some sculpture, all helter-skelter, not well stored, in fact not stored at all, out in the open, displayed like he had been in the process of selling everything. Not a collector: they are much more careful with what they have. This man was not careful. It may not even be all his own stuff. He is perhaps someone else’s agent. And yes, it’s quite possible he sold the painting to the Vaszarys. He may even have a provenance somewhere. I didn’t stay long enough to find out. How long has he been dead? And who lives in his apartment now?”
“He’s been dead about six months, and I have no idea who lives in the apartment,” Attila said. “Yet. But I will find out. I actually met the guy. Would you like to join me and the girls for some supper? I have salami, sausage and bread, and peppers.”
“I don’t think so,” Helena said.
“My place looks so much better than it did a year ago. . . .”
Helena laughed. “I believe you. And I have tomatoes, grapes, croissants, and some sort of chocolate dessert, very Hungarian. I will leave it for you and the girls. I can’t stay. I came only to find out about Biro and a couple of people in your parliament.”
“Not my parliament,” Attila grumbled. “Hasn’t been my parliament for a few years, and I very much doubt it will ever be mine again. My guys do not get elected. Who do you want to know about?” He started rummaging through her bag, looking for the tomatoes. “They would be great in a salad,” he said. “You really have to stay. If you don’t like the salami, I could make you Hungarian eggs, with cheese, paprika, and green peppers. I have become quite the cook since you were here last.”
“Árpád Magyar, Géza Németh. Maybe Zoltán Nagy.” These were names from the doorplates Helena had photographed in the parliament buildings.
“Why would you be interested in these guys? As far as I know they are not art collectors.”
“Perhaps not,” Helena said, biting into a croissant from her bag. “But they may have an interest in Gizella Vaszary’s lawyer or in the painting I was hired to assess. I followed a man from Biro’s apartment all the way to the parliament buildings. Watched him go in at the official entrance. I am fairly sure he went into one of these offices.”
“You tracked him,” Attila said. “How did you get into the building?”
“It was astonishingly easy,” Helena said, “for a well-guarded place.”
“And you picked these three names? How?”
“Five doors on that floor but only three doorplates with ‘doctor.’ I assumed the other two names were assistants.”
“Secretaries,” Attila laughed. “We’re old-fashioned around here. No one calls his secretary an assistant.”
“Anything you can tell me about the doctors?”
Attila sat on the step next to Helena. “Depends on what you want to know. They are all ruling party stalwarts. Magyar has been with the pocket dictator since the day he decided that democracy was bad for the people, that they were too ignorant to be trusted with it. He is the justice minister now, but he has had a smorgasbord of other portfolios. Deputy prime minister, foreign minister. Doesn’t much matter. He is not in charge of anything, the pocket dictator is. Magyar has issued statements backing every one of the government’s dictums. He is not a stupid man; he knows how to benefit personally from such unwavering loyalty. A journalist, working for the last vestiges of our long-gone free press, reported that Magyar now owns a large piece of real estate in — of all places — Canada. Isn’t that where you are from?”
“Born there,” Helena said. “But why ‘of all places’?”
“My intelligence source told me that in Canada, the supervision of who buys land and with what kind of money has been absent for years. Banks don’t ask questions. Sellers also don’t ask, and there is a lot of real estate for sale at the right price. Big country.”
“What about Németh?”
“He is known as the Parrot, reliably repeating whatever he is told by our supreme leader. Used to be a long-haired hippy, but he has shortened his hair and maybe his ambitions. He used to represent us in Brussels; now he owns a bunch of media companies and is in charge of communications on the side. He has avoided being seen as a competitor to our blessed dictator. He is the one most likely to come out with Christian religious guff, though he would know it’s all bullshit. This regime is not interested in religion, except for its possible influence on Hungarians.”
“And Nagy?”
“More of a dark horse. Industry and commerce portfolio. He rarely makes statements. Elected a couple of years ago. He had been flirting with the far right until then. It’s fairly obvious he was offered a lot of forints — or, more likely, euros — to abandon Jobbik. No one knows how much, but it was enough for him to send his sons to school in Germany. He is also not the arty type.”
“Apu!” Anna stood in the doorway, arms akimbo, legs apart, face set in an expression of grim forbearance. “Mi lett a vacsoraval?” What happened with dinner?
Helena pulled out of her bag a drawing she had made of the killer’s face. “Does this look like the man in the Strasbourg police photo?” she asked.
“I think so,” Attila said. “But they didn’t get much of him. The hat, the coat collar . . .”
“Any luck with Vargas?”
“Not yet.”
“Apu!”
“Mindjar,” In a minute, Attila said. “Are you sure you won’t join us?” he asked Helena.
“Not tonight. I have work to do.”
Then, suddenly aware of how abrupt she had been, Helena turned on the first landing. “Could I take you out to dinner tomorrow?”
“In Strasbourg?”
“Wherever.”
Helena went downstairs as Gustav ran up, ears flapping, tongue hanging out, grinning with excitement, short legs pumping, tail held high ready to wag but only when he saw Attila and the girls. He gave Helena a wide berth.
Chapter Fifteen
All three of the men she was interested in lived in Rózsadomb, a green, leafy area of the city with houses far enough apart to guarantee privacy. Since Rózsadomb meant “rose hill,” Helena was not surprised to see gardens full of rose bushes even now, in early October. A few dark red late-blooming roses and clusters of pink climbers were braving the chill of the evening. She wore her black jogging pants and T-shirt, her black running s
hoes, a bandana around her auburn Marianne wig, and earbuds — the perfect outfit for a late evening run, and exactly the sort of look that would not attract attention in a part of the city where joggers would enjoy the challenge of an uphill climb.
The Magyar residence, a three-storey art nouveau wonder with large semi-oval windows, was protected by a dense, high laurel hedge, a uniformed guard, and a wrought-iron gate. The garage door was closed, but the lights were on outside, and there were small cameras attached to the trees near the garage. The guard was on his cellphone. He paid no attention to another late evening jogger. Helena bent over, hands on her knees, hair falling forward, and panted. The guard looked at her, looked away as he kept listening on his phone, looked at her again, said something into his phone, and started to stroll toward her. Helena panted.
“Jó napot,” the guard said.
“Nem beszélek magyarul,” I don’t speak Hungarian, Helena said. “English?” she asked breathily.
“Okay,” he said, scratching his balls with his phone.
“It’s a longer run than I thought,” she whispered.
He nodded, said something to his phone, and clipped it to his belt. “You want something?” he asked.
Helena straightened up and took a good look at the house behind the guard. “What a beautiful house,” she said. “Wow!”
“Villa,” he said. “1900.”
“Must be stunning in the daytime.”
“Stunning?”
“It would be great to see the colours. Yellow?”