The Company

by Robert Littell

  Driving parallel to the Danube, the embassy counselor sped past the green girders of the Szabadság Bridge, then threaded through the yellow trolley cars swarming at the corner and dropped off the New York attorney in front of the Art Nouveau entrance to the Gellért at the foot of the Buda hills. Watching Ebby make his way through the great revolving door into the hotel, Doolittle shook his head. “Another innocent abroad,” he muttered. And he threw the Ford into gear and headed back toward the embassy.

  The small blue Skoda with a long whip antenna attached to the rear fender pulled into the driveway of the Gellért’s outdoor swimming pool and parked behind the hedges, giving it a view of the hotel’s main entrance down the block. The Hungarian in the passenger seat removed a small microphone from the glove compartment and plugged it into the transceiver under the dashboard. He flicked on the switch, let the vacuum tubes warm up for a half a minute, then spoke into the microphone.

  “Szervusz, szervusz. Mobile twenty-seven reporting. The amerikai Ebbitt has entered the Gellért Hotel. Activate microphones in room two zero three. We will stand by and pick him up if he emerges from the Gellért. Over to you.”

  “Viszlát,” a voice said.

  “Viszlát,” the man in the car repeated. He switched off the transceiver.

  For Ebby, the week passed in a haze of wearisome negotiations that went over the same ground again and again and seemed to go nowhere fast. During the long morning and afternoon sessions around a shabby oval table at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Hungarian negotiators appeared to be following a script. Sipping mineral water, puffing on cigarettes mooched from their American counterparts, they read in droning tones from long lists of Hungarian assets that they said were frozen in America fifteen years earlier, and supplied outrageous estimates of the value of those assets. The State Department people, used to dealing with Communist apparatchiki who had no mandate to settle for anything less than their initial demands, treated the whole exercise as an indoor sport. One of the State Department economic experts dryly pointed out that several dozen companies on the Hungarian list had actually gone bust during or immediately after the 1929 stock market crash but the Hungarians, without batting an eyelash, continued to include these companies on their list of frozen assets. On the second afternoon, Ebby finally got to argue his case that any agreement to compensate Hungary for Hungarian assets lost in America must include provisions to compensate Hungarian-Americans—here Ebby hefted a thick pile of dossiers—who lost assets when the Communists assumed power in Hungary. The chief of the Hungarian delegation, a stocky timeserver who picked at his teeth while Ebby’s words were being translated, suppressed a yawn. To suggest that the People’s Republic of Hungary had confiscated assets, he said stiffly, was to distort history. Under Hungarian law, those who fled Hungary after the Communist regime assumed power in 1947 forfeited any claim to compensation for nationalized assets if they failed to file the appropriate forms.

  “Could such claims still be filed?” Ebby asked.

  “The legal deadline established by law expired on December 31, 1950,” the Hungarian responded.

  “Who had passed that law?” Ebby asked.

  “The legitimately elected government of the People’s Republic of Hungary,” the bureaucrat replied.

  “In other words,” Ebby said, “having confiscated assets, your government then passed a law ex post facto denying compensation to those who had fled the country.”

  “We never denied compensation to those who left the country,” the Hungarian insisted. “We denied compensation to those who failed to file claims before the legal deadline.”

  “You need to simmer down,” the head of the State Department delegation, an old hand at dealing with the Communists, told Ebby at an embassy reception that evening. “We’re just goin’ through motions here. The United States is not about to hand over gold ingots to a Soviet satellite so they can build more tanks and planes.”

  Saturday morning Ebby ordered a car with an English-speaking chauffeur and set out (with the small blue Skoda trailing behind him) to see something of Budapest. He roamed the Buda hills, inspecting the Buda Castle where Hungarian Kings and Habsburg royalty had once held court, visiting the Coronation Church that had been converted to a mosque during the Ottoman period; he peered over the ramparts of the Fishermen’s Bastion at the massive Parliament building, a neogothic relic from the Austro-Hungarian epoch that loomed across the Danube in the Pest skyline. At one-thirty in the afternoon he dismissed the driver and ducked into an ornate coffee house on the Pest side of the river for an open sandwich and a beer; he shared a table with a bird-like old woman who wore a frayed fox fur twisted around her gaunt neck and a ski cap on her skull. Sipping a glass of Tokaj, a white wine from the slopes of the Carpathians, she whispered something thing to Ebby in Hungarian. Seeing his confusion, she inquired politely in German if was a foreigner. When he said yes, he was an American, she became flustered. “Oh, dear, you will have to excuse me,” she whispered. Leaving her wine unfinished, she dropped some coins on the table and fled from the coffee house. Through the plate-glass window Ebby could see one of the men in the blue Skoda gesturing toward the old lady as she hurried across Stalin Avenue. On the other side of the street, two men in dark ankle-length overcoats and fedoras approached her. The old woman rummaged in her handbag for documents, which were snatched out of her hand. One of the men stuffed the woman’s papers in a pocket and, with a snap of his head, indicated that she was to come with them. The two men, with the tiny woman almost lost between them, disappeared down a side street.

  Ebby had a pang of concern for the old woman whose only crime was that she had found herself sharing a table with an American. Or was there more to it than that? Obviously a team of AVH men had been assigned to keep tabs on him. But were they following him because they routinely kept track of every American on Hungarian soil, or had they been alerted to his presence—and his identity—by one of the dissidents he had come to meet? Slipping a bank note under a saucer, Ebby pulled on his overcoat and set off up Stalin Avenue, stopping now and then to window-shop—and use the window to see what was happening behind him in the street. The blue Skoda was following him at a crawl but there was only one figure in it now; Ebby spotted the second man walking ahead of him. A younger man in hiking boots stopped to study a newspaper every time Ebby stopped. A middle-aged woman window-shopping across the street proceeded up the avenue at a pace that matched Ebby’s.

  With a tight knot forming in the pit of his stomach—a sensation he first felt the night he parachuted behind German lines during the war—Ebby continued along Stalin Avenue. He hesitated at an intersection called Octagon to consult the fold-out map in his guide book. At the top of the avenue he skirted Hero’s Park, where an enormous statue of Stalin stood on its pink marble pedestal. Off to the left he could see the Fine Art Museum. He stopped to check his guide-book again, then went up the steps; as he reached the top he saw, in the glass door, the reflection of the Skoda easing to the curb in the street below.

  Inside, Ebby queued at the booth to buy a ticket. A sign in English taped to the window confirmed what he had been told back in Washington: there was an English-language tour of the museum daily at 2:30 P.M. Ebby joined the dozen or so English tourists milling at the foot of the staircase. Promptly at 2:30 a door opened and a slim young woman emerged from an office. Somewhere in her early thirties, she was dressed entirely in black—a skin-hugging ribbed turtleneck sweater, a flannel skirt flaring around delicate ankles, thick winter stockings and solid shoes with flat heels—and had a mop of unruly dirty-blonde hair that looked as if it had been hacked off at the nape of her neck by a shearing scissors. As far as Ebby could make out she wore no makeup. Pinned to the sweater over her left breast was a nametag that read: “E. Németh.”

  “Hullo—I am to be your guide,” she announced in the crisp, flawless English of an upper-class Sloane Square bird. A nervous trace of a smile appeared on her face as she let her eyes flit over t
he crowd; they lingered for an instant, not longer, on Ebby before moving on. She said something in fluent Hungarian to the man guarding the turnstile, and he swung it back to let the tourists through. “If you will be kind enough to follow me,” said E. Németh. With that, she turned on a heel and set off into the long hall filled with enormous canvases depicting in gory detail some of the epic battles Hungarians had fought against the Ottoman Turks.

  Ebby trailed along at the fringe of the group, catching bits and pieces of the battles and the painters. Climbing the steps to the second floor, he overheard one of the tourists, a matronly woman who walked with the aid of a cane, ask the guide, “My dear, wherever did you learn to speak English so beautifully?”

  “I am half-English,” E. Németh told her. “I was born in Tuscany but raised and educated in Britain.” She glanced quickly over her shoulder and her eyes grazed Ebby’s. Again the tense half-smile flickered on her face, a flag hoisted to announce the existence of anxiety and her determination not to give in to it.

  “And may I ask how an English woman like you wound up living in Budapest?”

  “I married it,” E. Németh replied.

  “Bully for you, my dear. Bully for you.”

  When they reached the last room in the guided tour, fifty minutes later, E. Németh turned toward her charges. “Here you see six paintings by the renowned Spanish artist El Greco,” she announced. “There is actually a seventh painting but it is currently in a basement workshop for cleaning. The museum is very proud of these paintings—this is the largest collection of El Grecos in the world outside of Spain. El Greco was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos on the Greek island of Crete in 1541. He studied under the Venetian master Titian before establishing himself in Toledo. Over the years his use of vibrant colors and deep shadows, his distorted figures, contributed to his reputation as a master painter of religious ecstasy. Many of the figures you see here were actually Spanish noblemen—“

  Ebby stepped around the side of the group. “Is there any truth to the notion that El Greco’s eye trouble led him to see—and to paint—his figures with elongated faces?”

  Her head angled slightly, several fingers (with the nails bitten to the quick, Ebby noticed) kneading her lower lip, E. Németh slowly focused on Ebby. “I have, of course, heard that theory,” she replied evenly, “but as far as I know it is based on guesswork, not medical evidence.”

  As the group started down the long staircase toward the main entrance of the museum, Ebby found himself trailing behind, alongside the guide. He detected the scent of attar of roses in the air.

  “You seem to know a good deal about El Greco,” she remarked.

  “I am a great admirer of his work.”

  “Would it interest you to see the El Greco that is being restored in the basement workshop?”

  “Very much.”

  They were halfway down the long flight of steps and passing a narrow door on the landing. The guide glanced back. Seeing no one behind them, she stepped quickly to the door, opened it, pulled Ebby through, and jammed it closed behind him. “You were followed when you arrived at the museum,” she informed him. “I saw them through the window. There seemed to be an entire team spread out behind you—a car, at least three people on foot.”

  “I saw them, too,” Ebby said. “It is probably standard operating procedure for them to keep tabs on visiting Americans.”

  E. Németh started down a wooden staircase no wider than her body and lit by weak bulbs on every landing. Under her feet the raw wood of the floor-boards in the little used stairs creaked. At the bottom she pushed open another door and stuck her head through. Seeing the coast was clear, she motioned for Ebby to follow her. They made their way across the cement floor of a vast storage room filled with busts and paintings to a door locked and bolted on the inside.

  “What does the E stand for on your nametag?” Ebby whispered.

  “Elizabet.”

  “My name is Elliott.”

  She fixed her dark eyes on him. “I was sure you were the one even before you spoke the prearranged sentence,” she told him. She grabbed a duffle coat off a hook and flung it over her shoulders as if it were a cape. Producing a large skeleton key from a pocket, she threw the bolt on the door. As they emerged from the basement into a sunken patio at the rear of the museum, she locked the door behind them, then led the way up a flight of steel steps to a door in the high iron fence, which she unlocked with a second skeleton key and locked again when they had passed through it. Crossing the street, she led the way down a narrow alleyway to a beat-up two-door Fiat parked in a shed. Elizabet unlocked the door, slid behind the wheel, then reached across to unlock the passenger door. Gunning the motor, she set off down the alley and melted into the traffic on the thoroughfare at the end of it.

  Elizabet piloted the tiny car through the crowded streets of Pest with utter concentration. After a while Ebby broke the silence. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Arpád and his friends are waiting for you in an apartment in Buda, behind the South Station.”

  “What will happen back at the museum when I don’t turn up at the front door?”

  “They will wait a while and then come looking for you. When they realize you are no longer in the museum, they will return to the Gellért Hotel and wait for you to show up there. We have seen this sort of thing many times—to protect themselves from the wrath of their superiors, they are unlikely to report your disappearance. After your meeting with Arpád I will drop you at one of the bridges and you can make your way back to the Gellért on foot as if nothing out of the ordinary has taken place.”

  “I heard you tell that woman in the museum that you were married to Arpád.”

  She glanced quickly at him. “I did not say I was married to Arpád. I am married to another Hungarian. I am Arpád’s mistress.”

  Ebby winced. “I didn’t mean to pry—“

  “Of course you did. You are a spy from the Central Intelligence Agency. Prying is your business.”

  Gusts of icy wind knifing in from the Danube buckled the mullions and rattled the panes in the corner apartment on the top floor of the house lost in the labyrinthine streets of the Buda hills. When Ebby appeared at the door, a heavyset man in his late thirties, with a mane of prematurely grey hair and the flat forehead and knuckled nose of a Roman Centurion, strode across the room to greet him. He was wearing the heavy lace-up shoes and rough corduroy trousers and worn woolen pullover of a laborer. “I welcome you with all my heart to Budapest,” he declared, burying the visitor’s outstretched hand in both of his, scrutinizing him with dark, restless eyes.

  “This is Arpád Zelk,” Elizabet murmured.

  “It is an honor to meet such a distinguished poet,” Ebby said.

  Arpád snorted bitterly. “As I compose my poems in my native Hungarian, a language spoken by a mere ten million of the two and a half billion people on the planet Earth, my distinction resembles that of a bird chirping at the top of his lungs in a soundproof cage.”

  Arpád turned away to hold a hurried conference in Hungarian with Elizabet and the two young men sitting at the glass-covered dining table. Ebby took in the room: there was an enormous 1930s radio (big enough to house a small dog) on a table, wooden beams overhead, heavy rug-like drapes drawn across the windows, a fireplace stuffed with paper waiting to be burned, two buckets filled with coal, a small mountain of pamphlets stacked against a wall. Elizabet glanced back at Ebby. “Excuse me for a moment—I am telling them about the AVH men who were following you. Arpád wants to be sure they did not follow us here.”

  Arpád switched off the overhead light and went to a window, where he parted the heavy drapes the width of two fingers and surveyed the street below. “It does not appear that you were followed,” he announced. “In any case I have people watching the street from another apartment—they will alert us by telephone if there is danger.” Arpád motioned for Ebby to take the empty chair at the table. He nodded toward the two other men sitting around
it and pointedly introduced them by their first names only. “Meet, please, Mátyás; meet, also, Ulrik,” he said. “They are comrades in the Hungarian Resistance Movement.”

  Ebby reached to shake the hand of each man—Mátyás wore the distinctive short jacket of a university student; Ulrik, the suit and vest and detachable-collar shirt and steel-rimmed eyeglasses of a white-collar worker—and then sat down in the empty chair. Elizabet settled onto a couch.

  Arpád filled a demitasse with a pale liquid and pushed it across the table to his guest. “Are you familiar with our Magyar Torkoly? Ah, I did not think so. It is a brandy fabricated from the skins of grapes after they have been crushed to make wine. Egészségedre,” he said, hoisting his own demitasse.

  “Egészségedre,” the two men at the table echoed, saluting Ebby with raised glasses.

  “Cheers,” Ebby said.

  They downed their cups. The brandy scalded Ebby’s throat. He opened his mouth wide and exhaled and pulled a face. The others smiled.

  “If you please,” Arpád said with great formality, “what word do you bring to us from the United States of America?”

  “I bring you the good wishes of people highly placed in the American government. I bring you their respect for your courage and their sympathy for your cause—“

  Arpád’s palm came down on the glass of the table so hard that Ebby was astonished it didn’t shatter under the blow. Mátyás said something in Hungarian and Arpád answered him irritably. When Mátyás persisted, Arpád nodded reluctantly. He looked back at Ebby. “My friends and I are not diplomats at a tea party,” he said gruffly, stirring the air with his thick fingers. “We do not need your good wishes or your sympathy or your respect. We need your pledge of material assistance if the situation explodes.”