by Anna Porter
“You can stand at the back, if you wish,” he growled, holding his hand and wincing. “He told me you may not wish to come with me.”
“You go in first,” she said. A young couple, dressed for a formal occasion swept past them into the elevator. They were smirking at Helena and the tracksuit, as if they had witnessed a lovers’ spat. “It’s been a long day,” Helena said, smiling at them. Tracksuit entered the elevator and stood with his legs apart, his hands in front of his genitals.
He got off at the fourth floor and held the elevator door for her, as a polite man would do, although Helena didn’t like his arm at her side as she exited. And she didn’t much like the burly man with the pockmarked face who stood next to the elevator, or the man with the buzz cut and crumpled brown suit who said he was Mr. Grigoriev’s secretary and that Mr. Grigoriev was waiting inside.
When the secretary tried to follow her in, Tracksuit grabbed his arm. “Ms. Marsh,” he said in Russian, “hates anyone behind her.” He attempted another toothless smile.
How the hell did he know she was Helena, let alone that she didn’t like anyone at her back? It was definitely time to find another alter ego. She would have to stop in Bratislava before this trip was over. The best document thief and forger in Europe, perhaps in the world, lived there, on Michalská Street.
The room was softly lit by a standing lamp near the entrance. A woman in a long dark dress with a loose open back was playing a Chopin nocturne on a grand piano by the window. Grigoriev was sitting on a brocade-covered sofa, ignoring the view of the lit-up Széchenyi Chain Bridge and the Buda Castle beyond. But as Helena entered, he looked at her and then out the window, holding his hands palm up in a theatrical gesture that said, look, isn’t that lovely, and he smiled. “Such a fantastic city, so much like something out of the nineteenth century, don’t you think,” he said. “It’s easy to be fooled by its charms. Not so easy to keep in mind that it was once a Nazi stronghold, that here they shoved Jews into boxcars or dumped them into that picturesque river. No better than the Ukrainians.”
Or the Russians, she thought. She didn’t move from the entrance.
“Please,” he said, “sit.”
She didn’t.
“A glass of wine, perhaps?”
She stayed where she was.
“The last time we spoke, you said there may be another time we would do business,” he said in Russian, “and this could be that time. The Titian —”
“Is a fake,” she said. “Unlike Mr. Dalchev, who was the real thing.”
Grigoriev laughed. “You have kept your sense of humour after all these years.” He got up from the sofa and walked over to the silver drinks trolley. He had less hair on top now, but although he was trying to seem friendly his black button eyes still looked calculating. He was shorter than she remembered, or he had gained some weight and his proportions had changed. Still the overlong arms, the hairy hands, the flashy white shirt with the high custom collar, the long double cuffs, the striped suit with overly wide shoulders, the slightly pointed shoes — crocodile, as before? The years he had spent in the vicinity of the Savile Row’s bespoke tailors so beloved by his compatriots had not changed his style.
“I have promised Olga a new painting for her suite of rooms. She had her heart set on the Titian — she is quite religious you know — but I think I could placate her with something else. Another painting.” He poured himself a couple of inches of vodka and filled up the crystal glass with crushed ice from the bucket. “Stoli Elit,” he said. “They bring it in for people who know what the real thing is — vodka that shouldn’t be adulterated with cheap mixes, but drunk pristine as it was intended. Sure you won’t change your mind?”
Helena shook her head. She walked over to a straight-backed chair near the piano and sat down, Marcia’s switchblade digging into her vertebrae, her feet planted firmly in case she needed to spring up quickly.
“How did your man identify me?” she asked.
“How? Or when? I’ve had you followed since the day you arrived. These childish disguises? Come now, Helena, they are period pieces. From a different period of your life, don’t you think? Seriously?”
“In Nice?” she asked.
“And in Cluj.”
Vladimir said he had hired the driver through an agency. He had denied knowledge of the driver’s attempt to take the painting without pay. Had he been telling the truth?
“You have other paintings for sale,” Grigoriev said. “They may not be as impressive as this one, but Olga would prefer the genuine article to a forgery, if it is a forgery. I have my doubts about your friend from the Accademia, and I suspect his motives. But at this price, I am not going to chance it. I have always preferred to play it safe.”
“I didn’t say it was a forgery. It is a fake. An imitation of Titian’s style.”
“Is there a difference? In St. Petersburg you were talking about fakes and authenticity and provenance. Frankly, I don’t care which. But if this Titian is not the real thing, I am not going to fork over eighty million.”
Helena shrugged. “What do you want from me?” she asked.
“I could settle for a Degas, or a Matisse, maybe a Renoir, something with a bit of colour, and I would prefer it not to have an overtly religious subject. I am reluctant to go home without a gift from this trip.” He gazed at the pianist’s naked back and smiled again.
“She would not have liked the Titian, then,” she said.
“Perhaps not, but she would have liked its value. You know about women. The ones with refined tastes.”
“You know I don’t do the Impressionists,” she said.
Olga would be his fourth wife. Helena remembered seeing her in Vanity Fair only a few years ago. She was blond and willowy, much like his previous three wives. The first one, naturally, was the stolid Russian who had lived with Grigoriev in the years when he made his first million, the one who gave birth to all the little Grigorievs, at least one of whom had been at the Hermitage negotiating the purchase of Old Masters when Helena was there. She had noted after the first year that at least a hundred works in the museum were fakes or forgeries. The fact that so many of them had been acquired from scions of the old Russian nobility was no guarantee of their provenance. Back then, Grigoriev could get excited about a Giorgione and a Raphael, but even then, he had admitted to a particular fondness for Impressionists. Bearing in mind Grigoriev’s inability to tell the difference between a work of genius and a forgery, she was sure she could find him a suitable painting to take home.
Elmyr de Hory had painted some very fine Picassos, a few excellent Degases, and some Matisses so like Matisse’s own that perhaps the master (or his mistress) might have thought he had done them himself. Chances were that Grigoriev wouldn’t check. He would imagine that Helena had been sufficiently cowed she wouldn’t play a trick on him. And it would be lovely to present him with a de Hory, after her warning about de Hory’s work. Then there was that perfectly awful fake that Gertrude had wanted to sell.
She was still smarting from their confrontation in St. Petersberg, and now there was the matter of Dalchev and Grigoriev’s penchant for having her followed.
She would make that trip to Bratislava sooner than expected.
CHAPTER 26
At 6:40 p.m., Attila was waiting at the front doors of the Historical Archives. Arriving a half hour early was a pointed way of letting a woman know that her presence in your evening was important. Especially when you had asked her for a favour that could have, in more stringent times, meant her dismissal. Original files, even when requested by relatives, must never leave the building. He still wasn’t sure how exactly he had managed to persuade Mrs. Lévay to go against her own strict instructions to staff, never mind her instinct for survival, but he had succeeded.
She appeared a sensible ten minutes past the hour. She was wearing black high-heeled shoes and a simple black dress
that managed to cling to her body as she walked, and she was carrying a red purse. The notion of matching shoes and handbags seemed to have entirely bypassed Magda Lévay. That was one of several things Attila liked about her.
Attila leaped from the car with an agility that defied his girth and age, swept Magda up in his arms, and kissed her on both cheeks. “How wonderful to see you,” he shouted. There were always cameras and sound equipment outside the Archives. Wild enthusiasm would distract any observers from the suspicion that they needed to pay attention.
Magda, taken aback at first, responded happily. “I hadn’t wanted to mention it, Attila, but you have been notable by your absence since . . . well, since the last time we spent an evening with Gustav.” She checked the back seat of the car. “Hello, Gustav. Glad you could join us.”
Attila handed her into the front seat and dashed around to the driver’s side. With the door still open (and the windows down), he said, “Why don’t we have a drink on the InterContinental’s terrace, then we can take Gustav for a walk along the Embankment? He’ll have a little frolic, then” — he put up the car window and lowered his voice — “we can go for dinner at Kisbuda Gyöngye. It’s just off Bécsi Street, in the third district, but it’s worth the drive. The food is excellent, and you’ll like the setting.” Of course, he had no idea whether she would like the setting, but it was the best restaurant he could think of where they might be unobserved.
“With Gustav?” she asked somewhat archly.
“Not exactly. The new owner is crazy about dachshunds, and she will take him to the garden in the back.”
They drove across the bridge in silence. Attila wasn’t sure how or when to ask whether she had brought the file. He didn’t want her to think that the file was the only reason he had asked her to dinner. On the other hand, he had to see the file, and the sooner the better. He was quite certain that the past held the key to the identities of the killer or killers. In Hungary, the present was so deeply rooted in the past, it was not even the past. Unless you were born after 1980, in which case you had probably left the country to enjoy the benefits of being a free citizen of Europe.
He was afraid that Magda’s silence reflected her disappointment that he had not followed up on their last evening together. He had still been hurting over the loss of his marriage and his apartment had been little better than a student flat. His shirts had been distributed throughout the apartment, Gustav had used the tatty couch as his personal domain, the bed was unmade, the kitchen sink full of dishes, and several days of newspapers, movie tickets, amusement park brochures, milk cartons, sausage wrappers, and a police-issue Ruger handgun were strewn over the kitchen table. He had been embarrassed that the chaos of his private life was so painfully revealed.
It was not until they arrived at the InterContinental that he broke the silence with, “I am so glad you came.” He handed his car keys to the doorman, as if he were in the habit of having other people park his car.
“I was wondering,” Magda said, “why it took you so long to ask.”
“I wasn’t sure you would be willing to try again.”
Once they were seated on the terrace café, he ordered a bottle of Olasz riesling with a bottle of soda and ice. He wanted to show her he remembered she liked this wine. At first, they talked lightly, about the vast numbers of tourists, the difficulty of finding cafés and restaurants not overrun by visiting Germans and Americans, the recent influx of Scandinavians, the noisy tour boats on the Danube, the drop in the forint’s value, Gustav’s avid interest in every passerby, the astonishing variety of new acts of parliament, the debate over compensation for those forced to move to the country in the early 1950s — pretty much everything other than whether she had brought the file.
It wasn’t until Attila let Gustav off his leash for a run alongside the river that Magda asked whether he was investigating János Krestin’s murder. He said he was working for the police, for Tóth, but not for Tóth alone, because Krestin’s case had been taken over by Homicide.
“You don’t like Tóth much?” she asked.
Attila shrugged. “He’s not bad. No imagination, which makes him ideal for the job, but he is on the take. Nothing major, but he likes to keep his hand in the till. If you want to get away with a major crime in this city, there are always policemen you can bribe. I am of the old school. Tóth is more modern.”
“When you were in the Archives last time, you wanted to know about Gertrude Lakatos?” Magda asked.
“Yes. She was once Géza Márton’s girlfriend, and I was curious about Márton. I still am.”
“She was more than that. In 1957, after Márton left, she became Mrs. Krestin.”
“She did?” Now he knew why he hadn’t been able to get the Gertrude Lakatos file from Magda’s assistant.
“She left him in 1981 and moved to Slovakia. Little place called Dunajská Streda — Dunaszerdahely in an earlier life. That’s where her family had come from. They are all buried in the cemetery there with the other Hungarians. There were a few reports about her in the Czechoslovak state police files by agents of the ŠtB. Nothing major. While she lived here, she went north every year to tend to her family’s graves, on All Saints Day.”
“Children?”
“One son. He makes his living as a house painter, and he took a few art courses. He never finished high school.”
“What were the reports about?”
“Whether she took part in political gatherings. She didn’t. At least not before 1989. The ŠtB was dispersed in ’89. There were no more reports after that.”
“Has anyone else asked to see her file in the archives?”
“A woman called Marianne Lewis. An American. She claimed she was a relative of Mrs. Krestin, but when my office called Krestin, he denied his wife had American relatives. So we didn’t let her in. She came the same day as you.”
Marianne Lewis? Who the hell was Marianne Lewis? And how did she fit into the Márton-Marsh-Krestin picture?
Attila didn’t ask her about the Krestin file till she slipped it into his hand at the end of their drive along Bécsi Street. The file was a lot thinner than Géza Márton’s, but that was not surprising. Krestin had been a stalwart Party member, while Márton was suspected of harbouring ill feelings toward the state.
He read it sitting in the car under an old chestnut tree near the Kisbuda Gyöngye restaurant, while Magda took Gustav for a stroll along the herbaceous border, where other dogs had left messages for Gustav’s enjoyment.
The notes started in 1948 when Krestin was twenty-five years old. He had professed he was a member of the Communist Party of Hungary, a group, the first report said, with its own ideas about the future of the country. There was a single line about his having met Comrade Rákosi when both of them were arrested in 1943. Rákosi served a year in prison, but Krestin did not. That was interesting. In 1944, the government imprisoned card-carrying Communists, even suspected Communists, for as long as possible, or as long as it stayed in power. Perhaps it had other uses for Krestin? In 1948, Rákosi, who had become prime minister and first secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, must have become suspicious of Krestin for some reason and ordered the surveillance. There was no explanation in the file.
The notes recorded Krestin’s meetings with other members of his Communist cell. They met once a week in the old Emke Café, where they drank beer and talked. They had made no attempt to disguise their discussions. The notes had few details — the noise, the note said, was deafening — but what there was read like a bunch of young people debating the fabulous future they were promised under Soviet rule. There was a list of names, with the nicknames they called one another. They had voted on a list of essentials: no more hunger, the ascendency of the working class, voluntary membership in the armed struggle to bring Communist ideas to other countries where workers were still living in the nineteenth century.
One of the nicknames was Bika, the name Helena Marsh had mentioned when he told her that Krestin had been killed. There was a small handwritten note here: “Gulag #442.” Alongside that note: “János Krestin was a model prisoner.” So, perhaps he, too, had been in Vorkuta.
Krestin had read a great deal of foreign literature: Camus, Sartre, Stendhal, de Maupassant. One member of the surveillance team read several passages from one of the books Krestin had talked about by a man called “Dikens.” The writer was unsure of the spelling, but it was certainly a foreign work and, he thought, possibly subversive.
The next surveillance notes were written by a woman with the initials J.S. who had been inside Krestin’s apartment in Újpest and wrote about his morning routines of drinking coffee, exercising, and reading the newspaper. He had seemed particularly interested in the trial of László Rajk, one of the original organizers of the Party and the founder of the state security police. She said she thought he was not actively involved with Rajk, who was later accused of being a Titoist spy. This was in the days when being an admirer of Yugoslavia’s Tito was a crime, although he had been designated a friend in earlier times. Krestin had told several of his friends, many of whom were already working for the state police, that he supported re-education for people like Rajk. The person who had received this particular report had written on the margin: “Not!” Rajk, as Attila knew, had already been slated for execution by then.
He was amazed to learn that the people who had commissioned these reports worked in the same building and for the same organization as Krestin. How could this surveillance have remained hidden from a man of Krestin’s standing in the hierarchy? Had one of the seventeen departments of the ÁVO had special powers that extended to spying on their own?
While in bed with Krestin, J.S. had initiated conversations about Rakosi, then boss of the Communist Party in Hungary; his sidekick Ernö Gerö; Stalin; and even Soviet First Deputy Premier Vyacheslav Molotov. (It must have been a marvelously satisfying experience for both of them, Attila thought and tried to imagine what sexual situation would most readily lend itself to such a dialogue.) Krestin had been fervent in his boundless admiration for all of them. As per instructions, she had installed a number of listening devices in his rooms and assured her handler that no conversations occurred other than those recorded.