The Appraisal

by Anna Porter

  “What the hell?” she whispered, pulling out the knife. “Why would you do that? Why? I didn’t want to kill you. I didn’t. Damned stupid kid.” She was still panting from the exertion. Fear, her father had said, was a great motivator. If you’re scared enough, you’ll have more strength than you imagined possible. You would be more focused. Damned dumb kid.

  She yanked off the slippers and pressed them against the knife wound to slow the blood leakage. She wound her towel tightly around his neck and draped his right arm over her shoulder, pulled him upright, and dragged him to the chintz chair at the end of the corridor, close to the elevators. He fell into its plush gold pillows, his chin on his chest.

  He seemed younger now than before. Dark, thin skin under his eyes. Bruised knuckles on his right hand. Uneven teeth. The gold incisors, probably extracted and replaced for effect. She quickly rifled through his suit. Five hundred Euros in his breast pocket. No ID. Car keys. A single, large door key. The gun was a Glock 21, a model Swiss & Wesson had stopped selling a couple years ago.

  She crossed his arms, wrists over his testicles, legs out in front. Balanced. She wiped the gun with the damp end of her robe and shoved it, barrel down, into his belt. “Sorry,” she whispered, as she took four hundred from his stack of euros and the door key. “You needn’t have died. Stupid waste. Whatever they paid you, it wasn’t worth it.”

  Whoever had sent him had not told him about her reputation, which she had worked hard to acquire to avoid such a situation. Or he was just too cocky, too determined, to give up.

  Using her airplane handy-wipes, she cleaned up the blood she had been unable to staunch as best she could. But it would show if anyone was really looking. No one came along the corridor. It was a few weeks before the tourist season, so there were not many people booked into the rooms at the rear of the hotel, and it was close to lunchtime. As long as no one discovered him or the blood in the next ten minutes, she would be fine.

  As she opened the door to her room, a man and a woman emerged from the elevator, talking in Croatian. They said hello in English to the motionless young man in the armchair. Coincidence? Or did they know him? They kept walking and talking. They hadn’t noticed he was dead.

  She threw her stuff into the holdall, changed into the black pants, running shoes, sweater, hoodie, and paid her bill with one of her American Express cards via the hotel’s TV channel. On the way to the elevator she had another look at the man in the armchair. Such a bloody waste.

  What she needed to know was who had sent him and why. Azarov knew she was here, but he wouldn’t have booked a seat for her at the opera if he wanted her dead. Had Kis alerted other collectors? If so, how many of them would want to have her killed? Kis had mentioned there could be some Russian interest in the painting, but she had thought that he was inventing the extra competition to raise the stakes, and the price. Even if there were interested Russians, would Kis have let a Russian know she was here?

  She checked with her office for messages, but there were only two relevant ones: no threats, no warnings, no explanation for the attack. Her secretary, Louise, sounded bored. She liked to be busy, and there was never enough to do when Helena was away. One message was from János Krestin suggesting they meet for a meal in a Budapest restaurant. The other was from James at Christie’s. Would she look at an 1872 Corot? The owner claimed to have inherited it, but authenticity was hard to establish with Corot.

  Why would James choose her for this? Had he found out something about her father?

  Simon had been fond of Corots. Jean-Baptiste, he had told her, was so careless about his work, so happy to have his paintings copied by his students, so obliging, or greedy, he even signed them all. What, then, was the harm in continuing his practice? There was such confusion over which ones were really painted by Corot that few buyers bothered to check authenticity.

  She left by the front door, declined the doorman’s offer of one of the hotel taxis. Long after the doorman had lost interest in her, she boarded a tram at the stop in front of the Gellért and rode it across the river to Pest.

  This time, the sturdy policeman (if her guess was correct about him) was not waiting outside.

  CHAPTER 7

  His mother, it seemed to Attila, had never been a happy woman. Given the post-war privations, the lack of choice in grocery stores, the lineups for pretty much everything — milk, fruit, shoes, even fabric for her dresses — unhappiness was one of the few things that remained easy to come by. When she could no longer afford a dressmaker, she had learned to sew her own clothes. Her first efforts hadn’t been successful, but by the mid ’60s, she could make most patterns, no matter how complicated, and she offered her services to richer women. Most of them were wives of Party members. Attila would sit at his mother’s feet with a pin cushion, pressing in pins one by one as she passed them down while feeding the fabric through her sewing machine. It was an old German model, black with metal curlicues and a worn-out foot pedal that sometimes bucked under her foot and, at other times, resisted all pressure.

  She would recite poems to keep him amused while she sewed. He was a small boy, eager to play with his friends in the street, resentful that he had to stay inside, not much interested in poetry or stories. When her clients came to try on their dresses, he was allowed to go out at last and, even in winter, he preferred to stay outside.

  He’d told his mother he wanted to be a peasant. “I want to work with chickens and pigs.”

  “Seems to me you have fulfilled your ambition,” she told him when he signed up for the police force.

  In 1990, she had moved from her old apartment to a more spacious one on Naphegy, but the new lodgings failed to make her happy. But, since her recent acquisition of a boyfriend, she had begun to take better care of her looks, wearing more makeup, dying her hair a rusty red, and buying clothes in the new shopping mall. Her unannounced visits to Attila’s apartment had become less frequent, and she had stopped making him indigestible casseroles.

  “A surprise,” she said, when he opened the door with his key. “Not much crime in the city today?”

  She was sitting on the balcony with a long drink, a grim expression on her face, talking on the phone, while sweeping her hair back with her free hand. Even during the dreadful 1960s, when she was making clothes for Communist Party ladies, she would go to the hair salon a couple of times a month — always before his father had a day off from his job at the Csepel factory. He would come home smelling of oil and grease from handling tractors on the production line, and every time she would pretend to be surprised — but not pleasantly — at his arrival. Whether it was intentional or not, they never managed to make Attila a brother or a sister. He had had no misgivings at the time, but now that his mother was older and indulging her whims with boyfriends, it would be helpful to consult with a sibling.

  At eighty-four, she was still a good-looking woman. She wanted the company of men and liquor, and the single life, all of which had been denied her by the post-war economy and the disillusioning presence of Attila’s father. But now that he was dead, even getting what she wanted had failed to make her happy. She used her dead husband to underscore her unhappiness. He had somehow taken on the mantle of “provider,” a role he’d never managed while he was alive. His loss, which she considered hers alone, opened up a whole field of recrimination, where Attila’s failures flourished undisturbed by his paltry contributions to her well-being. In her view, he had never earned enough money and persisted in disappointing her even after he left the police force.

  He placed the bottle of Olasz Riesling (her favourite wine) in the fridge. She asked whether he would like a glass of vodka, since that was what she was drinking.

  He poured himself a finger, and without much interest, she asked about the girls, his ex, the charming woman down the hall from his apartment (“She’d be good for you, likes cooking, likes dogs, even likes you”), and whether he was looking for a stead
y job. Something more reliable than this. When she said “this,” she spread her hands palms up to indicate she considered his current occupation to be worth nothing.

  They were working on their refills when the new boyfriend arrived with a “mind if I join you,” and lit a cigarette that he said, apologetically, was only his third of the day. He had given up smoking in his forties but took it up again now that he was seventy-eight. That made him a few years younger than his mother, but he had a definite stoop and walked with a cane. She didn’t.

  “You may as well. Not much chance of an early grave,” Attila’s mother remarked, with her customary good humour.

  CHAPTER 8

  After leaving his mother’s, Attila went to the Historical Archives of Hungary’s State Security at 7 Eötvös Street, close to the Franz Liszt Music Academy and south of the former headquarters of both the Arrow Cross and State Security, now retooled as the House of Terror museum. The building was painted a dull, nondescript beige, perhaps, Attila thought, so it would not stand out from its surroundings. He registered his name with the guard, filled out the requisite forms, and walked down the long courtyard and into wide hallway to the far end, where a third storey had been added.

  During the first confusing weeks of the 1989 regime change, the government had retrieved purloined filing cabinets from the laid-off security men and built the extra floor to house them. Every time he came here now, Attila remembered the new Internal Affairs Minister asking parliament what he was supposed to do with the two thousand people employed to spy on their fellow Hungarians. Should he drag them into the cellars for interrogation? Threaten them into co-operating? The new regime could hardly revenge the dead here on these marble steps. What could they confess to that wasn’t already known? Petty secrets? Best let them go and get on with their lives in the brand-new democracy. Plus, he was not a vengeful man.

  Attila opened the door to the waiting room. He knew Magda Lévay well and she was still in charge of the archives. He also knew her personal assistant and the two other lower-level assistants who could, or could choose not to, grant you entrance. They may have been suspicious of his relationship with their boss, but there was nothing they could do about it. Magda was well-connected and didn’t mind using her connections when she felt threatened.

  The assistants would be observing him through the small two-way mirror at one end of the waiting room. He walked slowly to a narrow chair next to the table and squeezed himself between its arms. Difficult to seem comfortable.

  One of the assistants came in. “Same files as before, Dr. Fehér?”

  The “doctor” was a mark of excessive, old-world respect that could sometimes get you a table at a pricey restaurant or help you obtain State Security files. “No,” he said leaning toward her, wanting it to look as if they were about to share a secret.

  “You are not looking for dead men, then?”

  She was an attractive woman, about forty-five, but, judging from her high-necked dress, pulled-back hair, and the way she shielded her body with her hands, she lacked confidence in her looks. Magda Lévay, on the other hand, did not lack confidence in her appearance. Some time ago, when he felt a lot younger and was still smarting from the ex’s departure, he had invited her to dinner at the Kedves and for some Zack Golden Pear back at his apartment. She had been an enthusiastic lover, treating sex as if it were part of her pilates routine.

  “I am not sure. He would be in his eighties if he were alive.” He remembered her name from his last visit, but he had no idea whether she was married and didn’t want to risk offending her by saying either Mrs. or Ms.

  “Not the same file, then,” she said.

  “Not today. His name is Márton. He lives abroad now. Probably a ’56-er.”

  “And your interest in this man?” she asked, a bit archly. Attila was accustomed to women with little power and no self-confidence loving moments like this.

  “It’s a police matter,” Attila whispered. She would enjoy thinking this was something confidential. “We need to know, for sure, that he survived, that it’s the same man we have been tracking. We need to know what he did while he lived here, why — other than it was ’56 — he left, and what happened to him after he left.”

  She nodded and left him alone to contemplate the posters celebrating the government’s decision to turn all tobacco shops into state enterprises and hand out new licences to their new owners. The former owners could, of course, apply for licence renewals, but they had no chance unless they had connections at the highest levels of the gothic palace. There was nothing unusual about the government’s decision to control tobacco sales, his ex had said. Some other countries did that sort of thing with liquor. Here, that might have caused riots in the streets. But tobacco, not likely. And for the new concessionaires, it’s what people here had grown to expect: privilege and punishment.

  Attila noticed that the prime minister’s face had been airbrushed in the official portrait hanging among the posters. He was getting old, like everyone else in the country. The young didn’t like it here anymore. It was easier to find jobs in Germany or the Netherlands.

  The assistant came back with a thick file and a few audio-cassettes. “He didn’t seem to interest them as much as the last one you checked,” she said, her voice apologetic. “One audio is him and his girlfriend planning a trip they were not allowed to take. It was 1953. The rest . . . well, you can use the far table, if you like.”

  Géza Márton had been sixteen when the Russian army replaced the Germans in Budapest and took him off the street, on the Buda side, for a little work — that’s what they called it — in the Soviet Union. He was there for almost three years. No. 442 Vorkuta Gulag.

  That would be the connection with Gábor Nagy, Attila thought. Four years in a labour camp is a long time. It would have marked both men for life.

  Márton hadn’t made it out in the first wave in 1947. He may have been put on a train at the end of ’48. There was no list of the men who had been sent there or of those who were allowed to go home. And no mention of Nagy anywhere.

  Márton had gone back to his family’s house, or what was left of it, on Sashegy, but the whole lot of them, his parents and his sister, were moved in December 1948 to make room for a government television installation. There was a report from one of the neighbours (unnamed) about the Mártons arguing at home, the mother wanting to know whether they could stay in the same area and the father saying they were better off somewhere cheaper. He said they didn’t want to stick out, draw attention to themselves.

  Next, they lived in an apartment near the opera house. Not a bad neighbourhood, although not as pretty as Sashegy. Márton senior had been an engineer. Railways and roads. Not important enough for the post-war Communists to hold a grudge against him. Géza’s older brother had been killed at the Don River bend in 1942. He had been a simple foot soldier in the Second Hungarian Army when it was annihilated by the Soviets. That and Géza’s years in Vorkuta had marked their father as a potential enemy of the state, a man worth watching.

  There was a notation in the file to the effect that Károly Márton, Géza’s great-grandfather had been wealthy but the next generation had squandered the fortune. There was nothing left except the house on Sashegy by the time Géza’s father, also named Károly, was born.

  There were reports from a neighbour in the apartment building that the Mártons listened to Radio Free Europe — a black mark against them, but not enough to get Márton senior fired from the State Roads and Railways Department. A lot of people listened to Radio Free Europe, and Géza’s father seemed to have been good at building bridges. Another handwritten note said he had purchased cheese and cherries on the black market from a farmer who had not yet joined the co-op in the Bakony area. That must have been before the co-ops took over the orchards and the farms, leaving the cherries to rot and downgrading the cheese to state-approved bland.

  After his return fro
m Vorkuta, Géza had finished high school in evening classes where some of the sons of the former nobility eked out meagre marks. He was not admitted to university, although his father tried to pull some strings with the ministry. Another black mark against him. Having been a Soviet prisoner was bad enough, but having a father with no strings to pull who thought he could influence people in office was worse.

  In 1951, he met a woman called Gertrude Lakatos, eighteen, the daughter of farmers from Czechoslovakia, the part that used to be in Hungary. There were some grainy photos of them walking along the Danube, holding hands. After the war, the new coalition government had confiscated her parents’ farm, and the family moved to Budapest. They lived on Rökk Szilárd Street. The father worked on a farm near Pécs. He came home for weekends only. There was reference to separate files on him and on the daughter, but this one noted only that he had been observed secreting corn, beets, potatoes, and apples in a sack and taking it home to his family.

  Géza spent time at the Lakatoses’ apartment. But there was no report on what they talked about or whether they listened to any forbidden radio stations.

  In these years, Géza worked as a plumbing apprentice in a state enterprise that took care of toilets in Pest. There was a long report on his attempt to organize a group of draft resisters. A couple of them were arrested, and Géza went into the army. His superior officer recorded, with an astonishing number of grammatical errors, that Géza was a lazy soldier and had earned two demerits, one for smoking in his bunk, the other for being found with a girl (not named) in the potato field. There was a photograph of Géza in uniform: a thin face with large staring eyes, jug ears (although their size may have been exaggerated by the close haircut and the dumb-looking cap centred on his head). He had thin lips and dark lines down the sides of his mouth.