by Anna Porter
She pressed the bell on Zsuzsa’s door.
Zsuzsa took her time coming to the door, and when she did, she still seemed unprepared for visitors. Her face was not made up, her dark hair hung over her shoulders in damp clusters, and she wore pink slippers and a matching dressing gown that seemed to have enjoyed finer days. Without the red shoes and high hairdo, she was a lot smaller than she had first appeared. Her music had switched from Mozart to something maudlin by Schubert. There were children’s voices in the background.
“I have kept them home from school,” Zsuzsa said. “Wasn’t right to send them after we hadn’t slept all night.”
“The police . . .”
“They were here for hours. Emergency vans, a stretcher. All in white overalls like ghosts. They took the body at about eleven last night. You wish to come in?”
Concerned that someone would see her, Helena had already edged her way in but still hovered in the doorway. Though it had been very tempting, she had not wanted to push her way in until she was invited. Now that Zsuzsa opened the door wide, she grabbed Zsuzsa’s hand for an enthusiastic shake and stepped quickly into the comforting warmth of the apartment. The children’s voices grew louder as she approached the living room. A boy around ten and a teenage girl were playing a board game on the carpet. They were both in their pyjamas. Zsuzsa made half-hearted introductions in Hungarian. The children glanced up, then continued with their game.
“They’re very tired,” Zsuzsa said. “It was all so traumatic for us, as you can imagine. They were at the window when the body was rolled out, covered by a white sheet but still the shape of a man’s body. I should not have allowed them to be at the window when that happened, but I didn’t know. So much noise and flashing lights and coming and going, I couldn’t know when they were going to move him. And I could hardly keep them from looking.” She was talking fast, anxiously glancing at the door.
“You are expecting someone?” Helena asked.
“No. No. Just checking. Maybe they are coming back.”
“The police?”
“No. I worry about the man who killed him. The burglar.”
“Did the police say it was a burglar?”
“No. They didn’t know. They said they had to find out if anything was missing, and I told them that Mr. Berkowitz didn’t have much in the apartment. He was a tidy man. Didn’t need much. So they wanted me to tell them how I knew that, and I told them I used to pick up his mail and place it on that table by the door. And they asked me to go over there to show them where I had put it and to see if anything was missing. They thought it was strange that he would give a key to a neighbour.”
“Did you think something was missing?”
“No. The mail was still where I had left it. Even the package I had put on top, the one that had come from France. I told you about that. It was why I thought he was in France.”
“What else did they ask?”
Zsuzsa wrapped her arms around herself. “Is it cold in here?” she asked.
“Just the shock,” Helena said, “and lack of sleep.” She put her arm over Zsuzsa’s shoulder and steered her toward the kitchen. “I could make you some tea,” she suggested. “I don’t know whether Hungarians drink tea, but back where I come from people drink tea to calm their nerves.”
Zsuzsa gave a nervous little laugh. “Americans drink tea?”
“Sometimes,” Helena said. She just realized she had slipped into her own voice and forgotten to be American. “You have a kettle?”
Zsuzsa pulled the kettle and a jar of tea off the top shelf above the stove and asked Helena to plug it in. Her hands were shaking. “The police wanted me to look upstairs, too,” she said. “I told them I had never been up there, but they insisted.”
“Of course, you had never been up there.” Helena dropped teabags into a pot, poured in the hot water and waited. Of course, she would have been upstairs. Who could resist such a temptation? “We have to let the tea take its time,” she said.
“Did the police call you?”
“Not yet.”
“That’s odd, I did give them your number, and I told them you were a friend of Berkowitz’s. You know when the policeman in charge took the phone from my hand, when I was talking with you, he said he had asked you to come to the station.”
“Why don’t we sit somewhere,” Helena suggested after she poured the tea into a couple of translucent white mugs and took them to the table in the living room. “Your grandfather,” she said, looking at the posters and prints, “I wondered whether you had some idea of what he had collected.”
“I know he loved the old masters. My father remembered one drawing that could have been by Rembrandt. Of course, he didn’t know that at the time, but once he started going to the galleries, he was pretty sure it had been by Rembrandt. There was an exhibition of his drawings in Amsterdam we went to, and he said he knew then that what grandfather had on the wall in the bedroom had been a Rembrandt. And he thought there were some Van Goghs. Did I tell you we had gone once to the Kröller-Müller Museum in Holland? He pointed to one of the fields of flowers, and he said he thought it looked just like one of my grandfather’s.” She stopped suddenly, put her tea down. “Why do you ask?”
“Did he ever mention something by Artemisia Gentileschi?”
“I am not sure.”
Zsuzsa’s damp hair had fallen over her face as she picked up her cup again. She swept it back and stared at Helena as if she were looking at her for the first time. Her daughter’s voice had risen to shout at her brother, and the boy swept the figures off the game board and came to stand near his mother. There was no mistaking his angry face or the whiny voice he used to complain. Whatever she said, made him turn around and slouch back across the room and stomp up the stairs.
“Is that the real reason you came to see me?” Zsuzsa asked. “My grandfather’s paintings?”
Helena hesitated.
“Because I already told you I have none of them,” Zsuzsa continued.
“I know,” Helena said. “But I had hoped you would remember your father mentioning them.”
“You are not really a friend of Gyula Berkowitz’s,” Zsuzsa stated.
“Not really,” Helena ventured. “But I know something about him and something about the man who stole your grandfather’s paintings. The man you said had pushed him into the river.”
“Biro?”
“You knew . . .”
“We all knew. But there was nothing to be done then and nothing to be done now.”
“There may be something . . .”
“Biro is dead,” Zsuzsa said, cutting off whatever Helena was about to tell her.
They sat watching each other for a few minutes, then Zsuzsa asked, “What is it you actually do? Buy and sell art? You were hoping I had something of my grandfather’s to sell? I had a visit from another person like that before you. But at least he was honest about his reason for coming to see me. You were not.”
Helena had been trying to decide whether to tell Zsuzsa the truth. It was the kind of truth that could hurt both of them, in different ways. It was difficult to guess what the repercussions of Berkowitz’s murder would be, or even who benefited from his death. But at this stage, it may be more dangerous for Zsuzsa not to know what Helena knew. How do you protect yourself and, in Zsuzsa’s case, your family from something you have no idea about, only a vague suspicion that could do more harm than you realize?
Helena went to the window overlooking the porch where the yellow tape still surrounded Berkowitz’s part of the house. She thought she had heard a noise, but it may have been just a man walking his inquisitive dog. Or it may have been the police returning. “I came to see Berkowitz, as I told you last time,” she finally said. “But it wasn’t because he was a friend. He killed someone in Strasbourg, and I wanted to know why. It was, I am pretty sure, about a painting,
but I still don’t know why.”
“You killed him?” Zsuzsa’s voice rose with the accusation, but she continued to cradle her tea.
“No,” Helena said. “I didn’t. I am an art appraiser. I was hired to study a painting, a baroque masterpiece that could be by Artemisia Gentileschi, and determine whether it’s genuine. I was sitting next to the man Berkowitz killed. He was a lawyer acting for my client . . .” She then told her the story almost from the beginning, leaving out only some of the names. She told her about the art she had found in Biro’s apartment, and how she had followed the man who had turned out to be Berkowitz. Then she showed her the page of the small notebook she had photographed in the archives. The list in that tiny, slanted handwriting that had included a Verrocchio Virgin and a child, a Renoir Girl with Parasol, a Rippl-Rónai, a Rembrandt drawing, a Van Gogh, and a Gustav Klimt.
Zsuzsa studied it for a while. “Not my father’s handwriting,” she said. “It could be my grandfather’s. I have never seen his handwriting.”
“Can you translate what he wrote here?” Helena asked, pointing to the Caravaggio page.
“He says, ‘I bought the painting in Paris. It has no provenance. It has no date. I think it’s by Caravaggio. It is his style and his use of light and dark. The signature is not his, but it may be covering his own. The man who sold it to me had been reluctant to let it go. He said he had bought it himself from a Pole who was down on his luck, living in France, off his inheritance, selling his art. I am not sure he was telling the truth, but I loved the painting, sold two of my own to pay for it and when that wasn’t enough, I added two hundred francs. It was so much that I had to check out of my hotel and take the train home.’ Do you think he had bought a real Caravaggio?”
“It’s possible,” Helena said carefully. “There are still some missing Caravaggios, and in the late thirties and early forties, he was not as highly valued as he is now.” She was tempted to tell Zsuzsa about Andrea’s notion that the painting she had been hired to authenticate was a missing Caravaggio, but would she be able to prove that it had once belonged to her grandfather?
When Zsuzsa asked how she had tracked Berkowitz to this address, she told her about the tailor and about her following Berkowitz to the parliament buildings, where she had guessed whom he worked for. Strangely, that included the men who had sent her client’s husband to Strasbourg.
“Did he own this building?” Helena asked.
“I don’t think so. We pay rent to a numbered company. We used to have a family living next door, but they said they were moving to Pécs. The husband had some amazing offer to work at the university. I thought it was strange that I saw them on the street some weeks later, and when I asked about the job, he said, ‘What job?’ as if they hadn’t told me they were moving to Pécs. Later, I saw the wife alone, and I asked her. She said someone had paid them to move out.”
“Did she say who?”
“No. But then Berkowitz moved in. As I told you before, other than needing help with his mail, he didn’t talk to us much. Not very friendly.”
“Did he come to your apartment at all?”
“He didn’t.”
Helena jumped out of her seat and started touching the electrical outlets in the kitchen, then the light fixtures in the living room. When Zsuzsa asked what she was doing, she said, “In a minute,” and continued to search until she picked up a tiny microphone attached to the underside of the sofa. There was a second one attached to the lampshade over the table where the children had been playing, and a third planted in the pot with the ferns near the windows. She collected them all and switched them off.
“He’s been listening to you,” Helena said, showing Zsuzsa the little gadgets.
“And now?”
“I don’t know. The police may have taken his device. Or not.” She regretted now that she hadn’t done a more thorough search of Berkowitz’s apartment
“He could have listened to everything we said?”
“He could have.”
“Why?” Zsuzsa was still incredulous. “Why would he be interested in us?”
“It has to do with that painting.”
“I just can’t believe he killed somebody in France. Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. But I am trying to find out. It may be important for my client. How often did you go to his apartment? I thought the place didn’t look like anyone lived in it.”
“He said he travelled a lot, didn’t spend much time here.”
“What did you tell the police?”
“I told them everything I knew. Well, almost everything. I didn’t tell them that I went upstairs once. Curiosity, you know.”
Helena grinned. “I do understand curiosity.”
“Not much there,” Zsuzsa said. “But there were some bundles of euros in a drawer. Loose bundles. I thought that was weird. Didn’t tell the police because I didn’t want them to know that I had been snooping.”
“The person you said who wanted to talk to you about your grandfather’s art,” Helena asked, “was that a long time ago?”
“Maybe a month. Or less.”
“Do you remember anything about him?”
“A big guy. I think, maybe Russian.”
* * *
Attila’s visit to the Strasbourg police station was, again, unannounced, but the young woman at reception greeted him as if he had become part of the team. “Why not go tout droit to le bureau de Lieutenant Hébert?” she asked and waved him through the security gate. “You know where it is.”
Attila wound his way along the path between the police desks toward Hébert’s office where the lieutenant was standing by someone else’s computer, studying photos on the other person’s screen. He quickly turned, his back to the screen, and waited for Attila. “What a surprise,” he said. “I have grown to expect to see you unexpectedly, but your country’s customs are still a little strange for us. We are not formal here in France, but your habit of always arriving without warning is still un peu étonnant. I must visit your country soon. Such a joy to find everywhere people who do not make appointments, show up when they feel like . . .”
“I have something for you,” Attila said and led the way to Hébert’s office.
“Don’t tell me, more things discovered by accident . . .”
“It’s a good photograph of the man who shot your lawyer last week.” Attila took the photo out of his pocket and handed it to Hébert with a flourish. It was clipped from one of the group photos taken at an official function with Berkowitz clearly visible in the background. “I may not make appointments, but I am always around when you need me. Trying to help with your investigation.” Attila grinned.
Hébert spread the sheet of paper on his desk, found the photo from the video camera, compared the two and stared at Attila. “I assume you are about to tell me who he is?”
“He was Gyula Berkowitz. He was killed last night—”
“Yes. In Budapest,” Hébert interrupted. “You know who his employer was?”
“Somebody in our government,” Attila said.
“Well done!” Hébert exclaimed and, for emphasis, he hit the desk with the palm of his hand. “I was worried perhaps you were not going to tell me. We small provincial policiers in this far corner of Europe do have a modest budget for looking into this sort of thing.”
“I still don’t know exactly who hired him, but I do know that he had worked, in the past, with some higher-ups in our government.”
“What you do not know cannot bite you on the ass, my friend,” Hébert said with a wide grin. “And what is your own police going to do about this murder?”
“Maybe not much,” Attila said. “The man or men who had hired him to kill Magoci have ways of shutting down investigations. If his murder is connected to what he did here . . .”
“Of that we can be certain. I don’t believe in co
incidences when it comes to murder. Do you?”
“I don’t. Whether there will be an investigation at home depends on whether the people who hired him decided it was risky to let him live. In that case, his murder will remain suspicious but, what with budget cuts, not necessarily solved.”
“Your Lieutenant Tóth is not much for sticking his neck out.”
“Not much. He loves his job. It would not have taken him long to find out who Berkowitz worked for, but he may be waiting to see what he is expected to do with the information. He would usually look for ways to enhance his paycheque. I assume you have no such constraints. That’s why I came to you. Perhaps you will be able to shed some light on the who and the why.”
“You were also désireux de me dire how your breakfast went with the beautiful Mademoiselle Audet?”
“You had me followed?”
“Ça va sans dire, mon ami,” Hébert said. “You are, as they say in police language, still ‘a person of interest.’”
Attila hesitated. He wasn’t sure how much to tell Hébert. He knew now that he had been chosen for this stint in Strasbourg because of his relationship with Helena. The Vaszarys had asked for him specifically because he would be able to bring Helena here. Iván Vaszary was also responsible for Helena’s presence on the tour boat that day, and Berkowitz worked for the same people who had provided this cushy Council of Europe job for Vaszary.
The savvy mademoiselle had told him that Vaszary was planning to sell the Gentileschi painting for a very large sum of money. Since Vaszary had hired Magoci to invite bidders and conduct an auction for the Gentileschi, he would hardly have had him killed before the sale was concluded. Attila could not see how selling a painting, however valuable, would be a police matter, unless it involved theft or some other kind of criminal activity.