by Anna Porter
“And red.”
She edged around him for a closer look. “Anybody home?”
“Mr. Magyar came home. Yes.” He moved to block her way. “You can’t go closer.”
“Oh,” she said. “Mr. Magyar must be very rich.” She giggled.
“Yes.” The guard was young, face still erupting in spots, nose florid, prominent Adam’s apple on a very thin neck, ears sticking out under his cap. “He works for the government. Where are you from?”
“Australia,” she said.
“If you come back tomorrow morning, I could maybe show you the villa. It’s on the tours for foreigners.”
“Thank you,” she said, “What time?”
“Oh, around nine. He is flying to Strasbourg early tomorrow. Where are you staying?”
“Hotel,” she said and pointed downhill. There was sure to be a hotel in this area. “I’ll be here, and thank you.” Then, as if it were an afterthought, “How about Mrs. Magyar? Won’t she be here?”
“No. She is gone.”
“Well, then . . .” she waved as she ran up the hill.
Németh’s house was one street away, an odd-shaped white building — flat roof, cupola, tall, thin windows — that glowed in the dark. It was surrounded by a low hedge, some naked statues, more oakleaf hydrangea bushes with late-blooming flowers, a water-feature with running water she could hear and, amazingly, frogs. There was no guard, but the entrance gate was high, and there were cameras mounted on the lamppost across the street. The gate was open and a silver Mercedes sat outside the two-car garage. Someone must have just arrived or was about to leave.
Judging by the angle of the cameras, Helena could see that only the entrance and garage area were under surveillance. She took off the pink bandana, pulled a black scarf over her head, hiding her hair and most of her face, climbed over the fence, landed safely on the other side, and lay still near the pond. No alarm, no shouts, no sirens. She rose and padded softly to the house, flat against the wall, and looked in the first-storey window. Only one small lamp cast an orange light on a lot of heavy furniture, some frames on the walls. She watched as a man came into the room, looked around, and grabbed a briefcase from a table. His face was briefly lit up by the lamp. He had put on some weight around the jowls since his internet portrait was taken, but there was no doubt this was Géza Németh. He opened his briefcase, decided he needed something else, turned, shouted, and waited. A slim-waisted woman appeared with something that looked like a pack of cigarettes, handed it to him, and kissed him on the mouth.
Helena had seen what she could and crept back toward the fence. If the archer was here, he would have to be hiding upstairs. Highly unlikely, given the hour and that Németh was leaving the house. Still, she waited until he had left. The woman stood still inside. Helena pocketed the black scarf, pulled on her pink bandana and left to check out the third residence.
Nagy lived lower down the hill in a more modest two-storey house half-hidden behind some poplars and nondescript evergreen shrubs. Even in the dark with no lights on, Helena could see that it would have been a fine addition to Rosedale, the Toronto neighbourhood where she had grown up. The stone fence was more decorative than effective. A BMW was parked on the street, and a man was sitting in the driver’s seat reading. On closer inspection, the driver turned out to have a round face, low forehead, dark-rimmed half-glasses, a wide nose, thick eyebrows, and stubby fingers that hovered over his iPhone.
Helena knocked on the window and prepared her most disarming smile. It took the man a full minute to look up, and a bit longer to register that Helena was not whomever he had been expecting. “Igen?” he said, as he wound his window down.
“French?” Helena asked.
“Okay,” he said, lowering his window all the way down. He noted her outfit, tried to see her face under the bandana, as she stepped sideways, out of the streetlamp’s light and used her move to encourage him to look up, where she could see his face. It was not Nagy. And not the archer. His features were too thick, mouth too fleshy, cheekbones too high.
“Je viens voir Monsieur Nagy,” she said with a heavy American accent.
“Il n’est pas . . . là,” the man said with an even heavier Russian accent, pointing at the house.
“N’est pas à la maison? Mais ç’est terriblement gênant,” she said very quickly and went on even faster to detail how inconvenient it was because she had a message that couldn’t wait, and she wouldn’t be able to come back later this evening or even tomorrow or any time, really, as far as she could tell because, for God’s sake, she had to go back to Strasbourg.
As soon as she said “Strasbourg,” he opened the door of the car and, emerging slowly, switched to English. “I didn’t understand,” he said fairly clearly with an overlay of Russian. “What did you say?”
“When?” Helena asked.
“Just now, what you said,” he repeated. He had planted his feet on either side of hers and looked at her with some interest.
“About Monsieur Nagy?”
“Yes.” He was becoming impatient.
Helena offered him another of her disarming smiles. “You are not Hungarian,” she said.
“No. What you want with Mr. Nagy?”
“His boss — my boss — wanted to talk with him about his visit to Strasbourg.”
“Who?” He shouted. “Who you work for?” There was no mistaking his tone or the bulge on the side of his jacket, but his right hand was still on the car door and his left still held the phone he had been perusing when she arrived. There were advantages to his feet straddling hers, including the obvious one: he had not yet begun to think that she was a threat.
“Mr. Magyar,” she said. Judging by Attila’s information about the three men, she picked Magyar as the most senior, whose name would mean something to a man in front of Nagy’s house.
“And what else did you say about Nagy?” He pronounced “Nagy” with a zh, the Russian way: “Nazh.”
“I said he was going to Strasbourg,” she said with one last attempt at a sweet smile. “Tomorrow?”
The man shook his head, a gesture that reminded Helena of a dog shaking off excess water.
“He had a visit from a friend today in his office.”
The man tensed. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“I am also wondering why in hell a nice guy like Nagy would need a big gorilla of a Russian thug sitting in his car, guarding his doorway,” she said.
Now he reached for his holster, but not nearly fast enough. Helena shoved her knee into his groin and chopped at his left arm with her own left, and as his iPhone dropped, she positioned her knife at his throat, grabbed his gun with her right hand, and started to pull it from its holster as he lunged at her with his shoulder. A good move, but too slow. She sidestepped and let him belly flop to the ground, his gun now in her hand. She landed on his back, pulled up his head — no easy task, the man had the neck of a bull — and repositioned her knife just under his chin. It would certainly kill him if he moved.
He didn’t.
“Charoshij malchik,” Good boy, she said.
“Yebat tebya,” Fuck you, he said.
‘No, it’s fuck you, really,” she continued in Russian. “You’re the one on the ground with no gun, and I am the one with your gun and a knife. Now, tell me who are you working for?”
“Nagy,” he whispered.
She pushed the knife in a millimetre, just so he would feel it and worry, but not enough to draw blood. Not yet.
“Why you ask?”
“You have a silencer on the gun,” she said. “A Soratnik, they are not easy to buy. FSB?”
“No,” he said.
“What do you want with Nagy?”
“Yebat tebya,” he repeated.
She now pushed the knife in another millimetre so it would draw blood, and he would be aware of it
dripping into his collar. “Wrong answer,” she said.
A dog was walking with its owner along the far side of the street, maybe a couple of houses away. The owner was whistling something from La Traviata, and the dog was beginning to sense that there was something interesting across the street. She could hear his sniffing. The man stopped whistling to tell him to stop.
“You’re out of time,” Helena whispered.
“I was FSB,” he said. “Not now.”
“We can both get up slowly and stand by your car,” she whispered. “Do not grab for the gun, or I will shoot you. What do you say?” For the first time in years, she felt grateful to her father for insisting she learn Russian and, less unusually, to her mother for insisting she take mixed martial arts classes.
“Da,” the man said. “Okay.” She stood over him with his gun pointed at his belly as he began to stand, first his arms straightened, then both legs hopped into a crouch, and he was up, facing her knife now lowered to his abdomen, tip out, ready to plunge. He held his hands palms up. “I am working for someone who wants to know this man’s movements,” he said in Russian.
“Right,” Helena said. “And you sit in front of the man’s house, where he and everyone else can see you. Try again.”
The whistling man and his dog had passed. Remarkable lack of curiosity here about people behaving strangely.
“Complicated.”
“Try me.”
“I am working for Nagy and for someone else as well. That’s all I can tell you.”
“What do you know about this man?” Helena asked. She shoved the knife, handle first, into her sleeve and pulled her sketch of the archer from her back pocket and held it up to the light, without taking her eyes off the Russian.
“Nitchevo,” he said. Nothing.
She eased the knife out from her sleeve and nudged the blade under his breastbone. His breathing didn’t change. The man was a professional.
“Does he work for Nagy?”
“Ne znayu.” I don’t know.
“For Magyar?”
“Ne znayu,” he said, his breathing a little quicker. His upheld hands shivered.
“Don’t,” Helena commanded. “Don’t even think about it.” As she pushed the blade in deeper, its point hit something hard and glanced off the man’s chest. He took his chance and brought his hands down on her arm hard enough to have broken it had she resisted, but she let her arms drop and jumped back as he reached for her. She brought up his gun, pushed it into his face. No protective vest there. He hesitated for a moment too long before he reached for the gun with both hands. She hit down his hands with the knife, a fast chop that almost dislodged it, but not quite. It was pointed down, away from her chest. Suddenly, he was shouting loud enough that it almost drowned the sound of his gun going off into his own groin.
“Shit,” Helena said as the man dropped sideways onto the asphalt, his hands scrabbling for his groin, his mouth open, wheezing, his shoulders shaking, a keening sound from deep in his throat. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she said. “I am sorry. There was no need for that.”
She took his iPhone from where it had fallen and placed it next to his writhing body. “So you can call for help.”
Chapter Sixteen
The girls were willing to spend the evening with Gustav, watching old American movies on Attila’s too small, too old TV. They enjoyed tucking into his and Helena’s grocery items. The only offering they disdained was the carrots. “We have enough of those at home,” Sofi said. “Carrots and cauliflower and celery. Very good for you,” she added in a perfect imitation of their mother’s instructional voice.
Anna made a disgusted face when Attila went to the balcony and lit one of his Helikons, but she refrained from repeating her mother’s comments about Attila’s smoking habits. During the first few months of their marriage, Bea had pretended to like the smell of his tobacco, but a couple of years later, she had started to cough every time he reached for a cigarette. Although he had not smoked in the apartment for some time, when she moved out, she listed the Helikons as one of Attila’s more objectionable traits.
The girls spent the night in his bed, while he shared the couch with the happily farting Gustav. Hungarian salami was not ideal for a dachshund’s digestive system.
Bea was still asleep when he delivered the girls to their apartment the next morning. He used their need to change out of their Sunday clothes to explain the early morning drop-off. He didn’t want to mention that he had to catch the eight o’clock flight to Strasbourg or lose his job. Amazing that even after all this time separated from his wife, he was still anxious not to offend her by displaying concern for his job — concern that she thought ridiculous because he should never have become a private detective. Not that she had ever been pleased with his previous profession, but at least it was steady work. She had rarely mentioned to her friends that her husband was a police officer and tended to agree with his mother that policing was underpaid, ill-defined menial labour with few vacations and even fewer perks. The past twenty years of state-sponsored kleptocracy had offered thousands of opportunities for the men (“Yes, men! But not you!”) with the right connections, and Attila had failed to take advantage of even those that had dropped into his lap. Now, Anna’s jaundiced view of Bea’s current boyfriend suggested that he was more enterprising but less likeable. “A lawyer,” she said, making the word ügyvéd feel slimy, “with all the ‘right connections’” (imitating her mother’s tone of voice). “And, what’s even more important, a very nice car.”
Had there been more time for such discussions, Attila would have told his daughter that the reason her parents no longer lived together was not just her father’s inability to make more money, or to buy a better car, or make the right connections, it had had more to do with having outgrown each other. Whatever had been the basis of their relationship was now foreign territory for both of them. Even their conversations were stilted, each word weighed before it was allowed to slip out. When he saw Bea, he felt like he was looking at a stranger, a lovely stranger but certainly not the woman he had lain in bed with every night for eleven years.
Perhaps there would be time for that conversation when Anna was older.
He barely made his flight and knew he would be late for his command performance at Vaszary’s office, but he felt calm enough about the prospect that he didn’t rush the security process and didn’t run up the long staircase to his Council of Europe offices. Despite his usual abusiveness, there had been something about Tóth’s demeanour that suggested Attila would not be fired. Whoever had insisted that he be sent to Strasbourg was interested in keeping him there. Otherwise, Tóth would have relieved him of the job already for not answering his phone or for any other spurious reason that occurred to him. In hindsight, whoever it was must have some serious clout. Tóth on his own would not have chosen him for something as cushy as Strasbourg. So, why did he?
Vaszary’s offices were on the third floor. His secretary, a Mrs. Gilbert, occupied the small area overlooking a waiting room with grey fake-leather (faux, Bea would have said) seating for five. Only one of the seats was occupied, and its occupant seemed only half here, his ass hanging over the edge of the soft cushion, his feet neatly arranged in front, a folder held up with both hands, as if he were preparing to present it to someone or to run away. He was either smiling or his face had settled into a nervous rictus, it was impossible to tell.
Though there was no need because Mrs. Gilbert knew very well who he was, Attila introduced himself and asked whether the ambassador was already in. It was past ten o’clock. He had been ordered to be here at nine, but, he explained, the plane had been delayed. He didn’t say that he had every reason to expect he would be kept waiting. Vaszary liked to show his displeasure in whatever small ways were available to him, and this time he had good reason to be displeased.
Vaszary came through the door with a stack of files b
alanced on both arms, his briefcase on top, his tie askew, his jacket open, and a big smile on his face. He dumped the files and briefcase on Mrs. Gilbert’s desk and continued to smile as he opened his arms to the nervous visitor.
“Zbignew,” he said, much too loudly for such a small space. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting. A big day for both of our nations. I do hope your ambassador will be in the great hall for the address. Such an important — no, vital — address on the major issues that affect us both. . . .” He grabbed Zbignew and hugged him with such enthusiasm, the smaller man and his folder collapsed against his chest. “We must. We absolutely must show them that solidarity — our solidarity, much like your historic Solidarność — will stand for the principles that have been our guiding stars since, well, since forever.” He was speaking English with a fine Hungarian accent. He let Zbignew escape from his embrace, but he was still holding the smaller man’s shoulder with one hand and kept thumping him on the back with the other. “Middle Europe,” he continued at increasing decibels, “still counts! No! It counts again, after being ignored for decades while Brussels meddled in our internal affairs, after their edicts aimed at destroying our independence, our security, our national independence, yes . . .”
“I was here to talk about today. . . .” Zbignew said, or tried to say, but his words were half-buried in Vaszary’s loud enthusiasm.
“Yes, yes,” Vaszary said. “We are all here, preparing for the moment. My chief is ready. I know Slovakia is waiting for us to begin, and the Czechs are — should be — ready. Poland will be by our side. . . .”
“It is with great respect . . .” Zbignew tried again.
“As it has always been, our two noble nations facing east and west, two great bulwarks of Christianity against the hordes . . .”
Zbignew managed to extricate himself from Vaszary, tried to straighten his squashed folder, and stepped back. “There is a problem,” he said.
“No problem we cannot solve. Together.”