The Appraisal

by Anna Porter

  Géza Márton had made most of his money in Vaughan, a town just north of Toronto, but he didn’t want to live there. Rosedale was a sedate, leafy, midtown neighbourhood, a long way from the subdivisions of Vaughan, where immigrant families lived cheek by jowl with their fellows and could hear every altercation, every lovemaking, child’s cry, and dog bark on either side of their new homes.

  He said this place reminded him of his family’s old home in the Buda Hills and that walking through the front door made him feel that he was entering his own small country. Helena had wondered whether his English wife had added her own touches to the décor or just allowed him to recreate a childhood dream.

  ***

  At Bem József Square, she turned up Fekete Sas Street and started to climb Rózsadomb. She was relieved to find that there were few cameras on the hydro poles on this street, the surveillance that was so ubiquitous on the Pest side seemed lax in the Buda neighbourhoods. She walked on, savouring the smell of the early acacia blossoms, the broad chestnut trees with their candle-like flowers, the shaded garden homes of the wealthy burghers and politicians who had managed to make money and keep it.

  She found the house easily. It was set back from the street; a low stone wall enclosed the front garden. Roses climbed over its wrought-iron gate. The single camera on the nearest utility pole was angled to survey the other side of the street. A tall stone fountain stood in a pond at the centre of a grassy knoll to the left of the driveway, and four white-painted, wrought-iron chairs and a table were arranged near it. The house was dark except for one bevelled window with wooden foldout shutters near the front door. Two tall ceramic pots flanked the oak door. To the side, the garage door was open, and inside was a turquoise 2014 S-Class Mercedes Benz sedan with white wheel rims and grey-tinted windows. Its body shone. A camera positioned under the roof overhang was aimed at the garage entrance. Easy to avoid if you were not interested in the Benz.

  From where she stood, she could see the electrical box on the inside wall of the garage, next to a door to the house.

  Pretending to look for street numbers, she waited for a noisy couple to pass. They were competing with each other to finish a story that made them both hiccup with laughter. When was the last time she had laughed like that?

  The stone wall was easy to step over. Keeping low to the grass, she crossed the yard and stopped behind the fountain to look into the lighted room. Even from this distance, she could see tall bookcases, a wide desk facing the garden, a straight-backed, unpadded chair. As she crept closer, she saw a thick rug running the length of the room and a man with his back to her, talking to someone through an inner door.

  He had a strong voice. Through the open window, she could hear his tone, if not the words themselves. Imperious. Annoyed. Demanding.

  He turned to a bookcase, picked up a book, and stood it upright with the others. He half-turned to the window. He was tall, broad-shouldered, erect, with short white hair, a long neck, a protruding chin, and a high forehead. All he seemed to have in common with the man in the photograph Géza Márton had shown her was his bearing. The rest must have changed with age. Márton had guessed that the man would be in his late eighties, and he could have lost much of his brawn and his bull neck. Certainly his hair would have turned white. Or this was not the right man. Yet Géza had been so certain.

  A woman entered the room, carrying a round tray with an open decanter and one glass. She could be a servant, but that was unlikely because she was dressed in a well-cut blue suit with large golden buttons, a frilled blouse showing at the neck. He must have married again in the years since Gertrude had left. Perhaps it had not occurred to the Mártons that such a man would marry twice. Still, they do. And the women seem not to mind that their men are monsters. Even Lavrentiy Beria had a wife. The infamous head of Stalin’s secret police was not only a murderer, he was also a sexual sadist, yet his Nina stayed faithful. She enjoyed the material rewards he offered: the Georgian silver, the antique jewels, the purloined Rembrandts and huge Tintoretto that had graced their living room. She had been reluctant to part with any of it.

  The man poured from the decanter as he riffled through papers on his desk, casually, distracted, as if he was making sure something was there but was not interested in reading it. He played with the point of a silver letter opener, then replaced it exactly where it had been, an inch to the right of his leather-bound diary. His hands were thin with long fingers, not the massive meat-hooks Géza had mentioned.

  The phone rang, a clear metallic tone. He pressed a button on the receiver and listened. His lips did not seem to move, and she did not hear what he said.

  It was 7 p.m. They would be gone in less than an hour.

  She stepped back over the wall and continued up Fekete Sas Street, past a block of flats and other sizable houses, to a tiny park. There were a couple of benches, a sandbox, and some downtrodden grass. She sat on a bench and watched the small children playing with their mothers, the dogs cavorting on the grass near the one-way entrance, then took out her well-thumbed copy of the Aeneid.

  The Benz rounded the corner a little too fast, tires whining as it turned onto Margit Boulevard, on its way to the Margit Bridge and on to Pest and the Hungarian State Opera House.

  She waited another five minutes, glancing up from the book at cars passing, in case they had forgotten something and returned. At 8 p.m., she pulled the hood over her head, covered her mouth with the scarf, and returned to the house. The shutters were closed. She scanned the wall with her flashlight, once, then edged her way to the garage, keeping to the side closest to the house. Just outside the camera’s range, she unlocked the garage door with a twist of the knife, then cut the four electrical cables with the wire cutters and pried the connecting door open with her knife. It was too easy. Inside, she disconnected the alarm just as it began its loud whine.

  She had calculated that it would take a car fifteen minutes to get here from the Pest police station. She would hear the siren. She had to be fast.

  She examined the windows for separate alarms and found none. She wedged open the door to his office and surveyed the tidy desk, the letter opener, the orderly bookcases, the round tray still there on the round side table, his crystal tumbler with a trace of his evening drink. His study opened onto a hallway lined with sepia photographs of men and women in formal dress, the women wearing gloves and cradling bouquets. There was a framed portrait of the man in a dark suit, hat sitting low on his head, the rim shading his forehead, dark glasses, hands folded in front, still the long, thin neck and long fingers. There were a few small paintings: an early Poussin, a Raphael with angels and a blue Madonna, something that looked like an Arshile Gorky — a sad-eyed women with scarf — a large, early Monet of boats in shimmering water, and an early Picasso drawing. A dark Velázquez of two overdressed, expressionless children in a chocolate-coloured frame hung above the bar in the dining room. On either side of the door, there were four small paintings by Lajos Kassák that she recognized only because she had seen a collection of his forgettable abstracts at a recent Museum of Modern Art exhibition of Hungarian artists banned during the Communist years.

  The painting Géza Márton had described was in the living room, hanging over a long, florid sofa. It was six feet long and four feet high. She felt its presence even before her flashlight found Christ’s face. It was the sheer size of the gilded frame and the figures blending into the dark resin background. The small grey donkey in the centre left seemed to have been outlined with a brush handle or a sharp palette knife. There were dabs of white and yellow on the faces of the figures looking up at the man on the donkey. The paint was laid on thick and heavy, the artist having used both a palette knife and his fingers where the figures blended into the sombre background. It was a very physical painting, with its big figures, his style freed from his times’ constraint of mirroring every detail. Palma il Giovane had talked of Titian’s vigorous underpainting, the reds, bla
cks, and yellows, and of his predilection for using a palette knife.

  Thin shafts of blue and white emanating from a magenta cloud lit up the back of Christ’s head. His face was just a suggestion of browns and ochres and his eyes were deep holes. His muddy, sandalled feet were scraping the ground. There were splashes of red on his neck and ankles, as if to prefigure the Crucifixion. In contrast to Christ’s purple robe, the ones worn by the men following him were dirty white. Some were holding their arms aloft, their faces shiny with sweat and anticipation. Two women were laying palm fronds on the uneven path in front of the donkey. Mary Magdalene, walking ahead in her signature green gown, looked out of the painting. Her bright eyes and pink-and-white face made her seem at once beatific and accusatory. Another upturned face and a dash of blue by the donkey’s flank depicted the Virgin Mary. Incongruously, two small spaniels in the bottom right-hand corner gazed upward, as if expecting treats. The artist had taken great care in detailing their fur.

  It could be a late work, perhaps as late as 1570, when Titian was well into his eighties. There was a hurried, sketchy quality to some of the figures. It was reminiscent of The Death of Actaeon, but the stormy sky may have been finished by one of his workshop students, perhaps Polidoro da Lanciano, although she doubted Polidoro would have completed any of the late works. Titian hadn’t finished putting on the varnish, but in his final years he often left the varnish off parts of his paintings.

  Alternatively, it could be a study for an early work, a mere sketch, something intended for Philip II, who liked both religious paintings and detailed nudes posing as naiads or some other mythological women who cavort about naked.

  There was no signature.

  Without the right equipment, it was hard for her to tell whether it was a Titian or a good forgery. She had used chromatography and a spectrometer to analyze the paint of a Rubens in St. Petersburg and had determined that it was a late copy. Another time, she had established that a beautifully executed Raphael at the Borghese was an exquisite reinterpretation by the Dutch master-forger, Han van Meegeren. That man could redefine genius. He could imitate the style of any artist, and it would take years of technical examination to identify which paintings were his. She had studied Titian and read all extant documents about his work. There was no mention of this particular painting.

  She took photos from all angles, then close-ups of details, shining her flashlight on each part of the painting.

  When she was done, she knocked over the bottle of whisky and the glasses on the sideboard, tucked the silver cigar box under her arm, broke the window by the front door, pulled the hood over her face, and left.

  It had taken her eleven minutes.

  No serious police officer would be convinced by her efforts to stage a break-in, but the smashed window and missing box would offer an easy diagnosis, and experience told her that one should never overestimate the police.

  She walked back to the little park, dropped the cigar box in the garbage bin next to a man sleeping on a bench, listened to the sirens of police cars climbing the hill from the river, did a few stretches against the other bench, then loped back to the hotel.

  CHAPTER 3

  Attila waved casually at the overdressed doorman, entered the Gellért Hotel by the revolving door, and walked across the marble lobby with the purposeful steps of a guest. No one even looked at him. The stairway led up to the third floor. A “Do Not Disturb” sign hung from the brass handle of the door to Helena Marsh’s room. It took him a full minute to open the electronic lock; less time than an old-fashioned keyed lock would have taken. She hadn’t used the chain. It was dark inside the room. The few lights flickering outside the window illuminated her long blond hair spread out on the pillow. Obviously, she had decided to have a nap. Whatever she was up to, it couldn’t have been much — or she had astonishing sang-froid. Why hadn’t she put the chain across the door?

  He went back down and sat in the bar, which gave him a clear view of both the elevators and the marble stairway. He ordered a Vilmos brandy with a beer chaser.

  He hadn’t intended to wait till nearly 11, but the barman had been telling him a long, episodic story fitted between serving other guests, and Attila’s drinks after the first two had been free. The barman had once been a junior lawyer in the justice department, mostly petty crime but there had been one case of a journalist who had written for a Western paper and was caught, prosecuted, and jailed. He was lucky even to have had a trial. Now, after the advent of democracy, the journalist was a member of parliament and the lawyer was serving Attila Czech beer.

  At 10:45 p.m. he took the tram home to Rákóczi Avenue. The street had been spared some of the 1990s’ construction boom, and, while many old apartment blocks had been destroyed and replaced by condominiums, Attila’s hundred-year-old building, with its small wrought-iron elevator that rarely moved, had remained in its pre-war state. It featured peeling paint, crumbling brick, and uneven floors and was just the way he liked it. His apartment’s tall windows, high ceilings, and balcony made up for the street noise. Most of the year, except in the depth of winter, he could leave the balcony door open for Gustav, about the only thing his ex had allowed him to keep from their marriage. A miniature long-haired dachshund mix, Gustav had an uneven temperament but a keen nose for quality food, and, unlike the ex, he was always pleased to see Attila.

  After a short walk around the block, they shared a couple of salami sandwiches and settled in to watch the latest episode of an American series about a teacher who turns into a drug dealer. Another advantage of democracy was the plethora of utterly mindless television options. This was better than most. There were times he felt nostalgic for the heavy-handed Soviet propaganda films of the 1970s and the occasional cheap Hungarian tragedies of that time, with their disguised messages of protest or exasperation with the system.

  The phone rang at around 1 a.m.

  “What the fuck happened to you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Remember you had a job? You didn’t do it. Fell asleep at the bar? Went to a movie? What the hell?” The voice was rough, spittingly breathy, as if he was holding the phone too close to his mouth.

  “István?”

  “Captain dammit, Detective Tóth to you, never mind the István, and where the hell were you?”

  “Waiting,” Attila said. “She never came out of her room.”

  “Bloody funny, that,” Tóth shouted. “She was in a house on Fekete Sas Street at eight thirty, walking about like she owned the place. She knew the real owners would be out all evening. She knew the opera schedule. No hurry at all. Took her time. The client is not happy.”

  “Impossible. I checked her room and she was lying in bed. Sleeping. I watched the elevators and the staircase till 11 p.m. She never came down.”

  “So, it must have been her ghost.” Tóth harrumphed into his cell phone.

  “Were there no alarms?”

  “She cut the wires.”

  “How do you know it was her?”

  Tóth laughed too loudly. “It was a woman in a black hoodie. About her height and shape.”

  “It could have been another woman.”

  “Don’t be an ass.”

  “Cameras?”

  “One, hidden, by a big painting in the living room. She didn’t try to steal the painting, but that may be because it would be hard to hustle a thing that’s about two metres long with a thick gilt frame out of a house in a residential area.”

  “Did the camera pick up her face?”

  “No. Like I said, she was wearing a hoodie.”

  “Do they have anything else worth stealing?”

  “He may have a couple of other paintings. And he has a safe, but it was not disturbed. He’s retired and thought they had nothing to worry about. Or didn’t. Till now.”

  “Oh.” Even if the guy had nothing to hide, why not install some outside security came
ras, just in case a couple of neighbourhood kids decided to relieve him of a few household items? There were more cameras throughout this city than parking meters.

  “No valuables?” Attila asked, nonplussed. Everyone had valuables, even if it was only bits of rock from a holiday. Anyone living on Rózsadomb would have valuables; it was an elite part of the city. Their address defined them. That so many former Communists and their fellow travellers had held onto their homes here was, he thought, an indication of capitalism’s victory over memory.

  “Anything missing?” he asked.

  “Only a cigar box. Silver. And they do have security,” Tóth said. “Us.”

  “Last night?”

  “You were on the job, last night,” Tóth yelled. “Your job was to check if she went anywhere. You were hired to follow her.” He must have lighted a cigarette, Attila heard the match scrape the phone, then Tóth let out a long breath, as if exhaling smoke. “Tomorrow morning at eight,” he said and disconnected.

  “Son of a bitch,” Attila murmured after he put the phone down. Eight a.m. was just four hours away, and his mouth felt like a pigsty. What did those Czechs put in their beer? It used to taste better in the 1980s, but that might be his age.

  The dog lay on his back at the end of the bed, paws in the air, farting. Salami might not be the best thing to eat just before going to sleep. Too much red pepper.

  If the woman had left the hotel, it must have been through the baths’ exit. He couldn’t see it from the bar, but he had stood on the tram island till after 9 p.m. and had not seen her. What about her blond head lying on the pillow? Was it a set-up? How the hell could she have been on Fekete Sas Street at 8:30?

  He made himself an espresso. The machine had been a gift from a grateful store owner on Váci Street after Attila had ended a two-year protection racket that had each of the high-end stores paying into a “beautify the city” fund that existed only in the imagination of the Albanian gang that had failed to pay its own dues to the local police. The gang had learned its lesson and was now happily beautifying Vienna.