Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  He ambled down the thin, shaded one-way street. The outer part of the sidewalk was lined with parked compact cars whose owners had nowhere else to put them; the inner half was lumped with people trying to squeeze past one another against the paint-chipped buildings. In the road, delivery trucks stopped where they liked; horns blared. Above, the hazy blue sky yawned.

  As he walked, Attila felt his blood begin to circulate. He passed the electronics store and then the private security guard company and finally arrived at an arched portico with a big blue cube hanging over the entrance. eurotours, read the sign. HAVE A HOLIDAY ON THE BEACH; LUXURY TRIPS AND AIR TICKETS.

  Attila pushed open the brass-framed door and was comforted by the sight of two young women behind a long white counter, as the entry in his robbery playbook had described.

  “Yes, hello,” Attila said, putting his briefcase on the counter in front of the cute one. “I’m the marketing director of Malév Airlines.”

  “Oh,” the woman said.

  “I would like to look into a vacation for my flight attendants,” he said. “They work so hard, and I’d like to reward them.”

  He was slurring his words.

  “Couldn’t you book this directly through Malév?” the woman asked.

  “Maybe to the Canary Islands, somewhere nice.”

  “Just a minute,” the woman said, reaching down beneath the counter, “while I get our information on that….” When she looked up again, the Malév marketing director’s feet were on her desk. “Robbery,” Attila said, looking down at her through his Ray-Bans.

  He hopped down onto the floor on the other side of the counter. “On the floor,” he said, pointing his gun at the other employee. “Everything will be fine.” He began grabbing the bills from the open counter drawers, when a terrible clanking interrupted his routine. The front door was opening. He had forgotten to hang the closed sign he’d brought with him in his briefcase.

  An old woman carrying a basket sauntered in as if she were returning from a picnic. “Hello,” she said, approaching the counter.

  Attila thrust his right arm—the one holding the gun—down below counter level and flashed a stare at the women on the floor, quickly floating his left index finger close enough past his mouth to be understood.

  “I’m looking for information about trips to Italy,” the old woman said.

  “That’s very interesting,” Attila replied, sweating whiskey, “because we have an expert on Italy here. But, unfortunately, she’s just stepped out for lunch. Could you come back in half an hour?”

  “Yes, thank you,” the woman said, and she turned and walked out.

  Attila had lost nearly a minute and knew he couldn’t count on getting so lucky with another customer. He yanked open the drawer in front of him. There was a key inside it. He held it up to the employee beneath him. “Let’s go,” he said.

  She got up and walked slowly to a large wooden bureau in the back of the office. Inside, on the bottom shelf was a small black safe. “Give me the key,” Attila said. Then he asked, “Where’s the bathroom?”

  The woman pointed down the hall. Attila waved over the other employee and herded them both into the water closet. Once they were inside, he said, “Now give me the key around your neck,” to the one with a string necklace. She looked surprised. He was drunk but he wasn’t stupid. He knew the key he’d picked out of the drawer, a skeleton, was for the toilet, not the safe. He locked the women inside, then headed back to the money box with the string necklace.

  He was close to getting it open when sirens rang out on the street. Attila looked at the floor under the counter and saw what he faced: it was a foot pedal. The place was equipped with a silent alarm system. As if it needed another reason to score a 5. There was only one exit, out onto a busy street that could be sealed by police with, for instance, training. He grabbed his suitcase and bounded back over the counter. Police HQ was only five blocks away, but the sirens didn’t necessarily mean the police were anywhere close. Cars were virtually useless on such a narrow, congested street. If they were going to have any chance against him, they would have to come on foot—and in that scenario, he liked his odds.

  He pulled the door open and stepped out onto the front stair. To his right, two cops not twenty feet away were barreling toward him. Before he had time to think, the first one ran past and turned into the shopping atrium next door that bore the same address as the travel agency. The other followed. A third came puffing up behind.

  “What’s the problem, Officer?” Attila asked.

  “Robbery,” the cop said, hurrying by.

  Attila wanted to laugh but he was shaking so badly that he felt as if he’d forgotten how to walk. The police would realize their mistake any second.

  He started heading in the opposite direction from where the police had come, brushing by the rubberneckers. As soon as he passed anyone, he tried to weave behind his figure so as to shield himself from view from the other end of the street. But when he got about a quarter of a block from the corner, two police cars screeched up to seal the road. It was the improbable doomsday scenario for which he had no provision.

  Just then, on his left, a man came out of an apartment building. Attila lunged around him and caught the door as it closed.

  He ran to the stairs and up five flights to the top. There was a small door in the corner of the hall leading up another flight. Attila proceeded up the steep narrow stairs to a low-angled attic, which had a small hatch in the ceiling. He shed his suit jacket and pants and stuffed them, along with his suitcase, behind a pile of storage wood and tiles. Then he pushed open the hatch and pulled himself out onto the building’s sloping black tile mansard roof.

  He had stepped into a postcard. The oversize pool-green dome of St. Stephen’s Basilica burst out of the skyline to the west. In the distant north, he could see the Danube River winding its way out of the pollution-ringed city, which, in his immediate vicinity, resembled a multilayered checkerboard of Tuscany red and black roofs. But somewhere below him, the police were scurrying around like blind mice; he could still hear the sirens. At least one of the cops had seen him come out of the plundered travel agency, and at least one other witness—the man who’d eyeballed him as he dove for the apartment building’s door—had seen a similarly dressed man enter the dwelling on which he was now perched. For all he knew, the police were already in the building. His feet slipping on the roof tiles, Attila scrambled toward the closest of several short rectangular brick chimneys. Once there, he wrapped his arms around it and pulled himself upright so that he could shuffle around to the opposite side, where, with some luck, he might remain unseen by a cursory check from the attic hatch.

  Day turned to dusk and still Attila clung to the chimney. The muscles in his chest and arms went numb. There were shooting pains in his back. Around ten o’clock the city grew quiet. Then darkness settled in, leaving only a twinkling of lights from the Buda hills to accompany him until morning.

  The next day

  8:00 A.M.

  Attila sat amid of a pile of newspapers in the waiting area at the Interior Ministry’s Korvin Hospital. After retrieving his car from a subway station parking lot, he had driven himself to this familiar spot in lieu of attending the morning workout session at UTE since he was having a few problems moving his left shoulder. Considering that two hours earlier he had been plastered to a chimney, where he had been unable to move either arm, or wrist, and had only minimal use of his back, he wasn’t overly concerned. He was already able to turn the pages of seven newspapers like a one-armed blackjack dealer. He’d also managed to count the money in the car. That was the greatest agony. Thanks to the fact that he hadn’t had time to funnel anything from the travel agency’s safe, all he’d gained for his rooftop misadventure was 955,000 forints ($8,900).

  “Panther,” said the young bespectacled UTE team doctor, Attila Tóth, appearing in the waiting room doorway. “What is it this time?”

  “Tennis elbow,” Attila said. “I
can’t move my arm.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” Tóth said. “You’re—”

  “I know,” Attila interjected, “I’m a kid with balls.”

  They went to Tóth’s examination room, and Attila hopped onto the table.

  “Out late?” Tóth asked, pulling out his stethoscope as Attila unbuttoned his mangled dress shirt.

  “Igen,” Attila said, managing a smile. Yes.

  After a few pokes and prods, Tóth put away his equipment and sat down. “You have an inflammation,” he told Attila. He gave Panther a shot in his arm and suggested his patient go home and go to bed, which sounded just fine to Attila, who rebuttoned his shirt, went back to his car, and drove off, swearing never to do a 5 again. As soon as he got home, he was going to take his encyclopedia out of the oven and draw an X through Ó Street, he’d just decided when he noticed that a police car was parked on the street in front of his building. He hit the brakes and skidded to a stop. Your nerves are shot, he thought, trying to calm down. There were any number of reasons the cops could be on his block; there were dozens of buildings and hundreds of apartments. He continued around a corner to the super’s spot in the back. He parked and headed through his building’s back doorway, like always. As soon as he stepped inside, he was standing next to two of his neighbors, who were peering down the half flight of stairs leading to Attila’s basement apartment, where his door stood open. Curiosity pulled him down toward his flat—just as a policeman was coming out.

  “Do you live here?” the officer asked.

  “Is there a problem?” Attila responded.

  Igen, the man said. “There’s been a robbery.”

  Attila looked into his apartment. Another cop was standing in his living room. “I’m sorry to say it,” the second cop said as Attila glanced around at the torn-up space, “but they’ve taken everything.” The officer pointed to Attila’s kitchen. “Even the knobs on your oven.”

  Twelve

  It was Lajos’s lucky day. Make that his lucky summer. His experience in the furniture warehouse business back home was finally paying dividends. Several times a day he gritted his teeth and arranged and rearranged boxes of unsolved case files as swiftly as if they were duplicate end tables in his feng shuied showroom. He didn’t need them and he was running out of places to put them.

  Budapest’s once-sleepy robbery division was deluged with more than a thousand cases from January of 1993 through the summer of 1994. The thieves were so intoxicated by their success that they were robbing each other. As a result, Lajos was working seven days a week, sometimes under duress, sometimes under his desk, and frequently delusional.

  He and his men were making plenty of headway, sure. They caught the infamous One Eye, the Cyclops-like gas station robber who knocked off the same filling station seven too many times. And they were hot on the trail of the priest who stormed a money van with an ex–judo champion and made off with more than 50 million forints ($470,000). (The martial artist, found bleeding from a gunshot wound in an apartment hideaway, had divulged to Lajos before dying that his self-righteous accomplice was almost definitely in Romania, Slovakia, Austria, or Ukraine.) As for the Lone Wolf, please. So he’d robbed ten times. Lajos had a handful of cases of guys who took more than the Lone Wolf’s meager 16.3 million forint ($150,000) total with one strike. Plus, the police had already come this close to catching him twice now: at the Nyugati train station last November, and stepping out of the travel agency the previous afternoon. A mere mention of the Lone Wolf in the robbery office would invariably provoke someone to sing out, “Szerencsés csillagzat alatt született,” meaning, of course, that the thief “was born under the star of luck.” And luck, any Hungarian could tell you, never lasted.

  Lajos’s good spirits this day were due to two things. He was blissfully ignorant of the fact that earlier that morning two Budapest cops had stood in the Lone Wolf’s living room, consoling him for being a robbery victim. And he was fully and blessedly cognizant that VI District, in which Ó Street and Eurotours International were located, was not under his jurisdiction, and therefore not his problem. That honor fell to Major János Vigh, who ran the smaller piece of the city’s robbery department that handled just seven districts. And, no doubt, Vigh was being asked to field some questions from his superiors that had no good answers. For instance, What the hell happened on Ó Street?

  The coverage in the daily newspaper Népszava (MILLIONS ROBBED ON Ó STREET) was not flattering. The story noted that witnesses saw the police “pass right by” the thief as they stormed into the wrong building. And the large photograph accompanying the article, taken after Vigh’s detectives eventually stumbled upon the crime scene, looked like an advertisement for a new Pink Panther sequel. It depicted one of Vigh’s men holding an oversize magnifying glass up to his face on the travel agency floor. The detective had apparently discovered an almost innocuous-looking array of pencils scattered across the ground and was attempting to decode the message. It was indeed a toughie:

  was unintelligible even in Hungarian.

  Vigh’s team interviewed every eyewitness to the robbery it could find, including Csilla Serbán, the waitress at the Old Street Pub, who said she had served a man in a double-breasted suit and bad wig four whiskeys plus a beer, which he drank in one gulp. Several wig stores in the area were checked, as was the Ray-Ban shop on nearby Szent István Street.

  At the end of the following day, Vigh compiled everything he’d uncovered and faxed the revelations to every newspaper and the only television station, Magyar Televizsió (MTV).

  SAJTÓNYILATKOZAT (PRESS ALERT)

  The perpetrator of a robbery yesterday at Ó Street is described as about 170–175 cm tall. Brown face but not Gypsy. A little stubble. A thick dark mustache.

  He had a black wig on his head that was bushy and uncombed, under which you could see his straight brown hair.

  If you know anything about the perpetrator, please call the Robbery Unit at 22-550, and after hours the central phone number for the police.

  None of the papers ran a follow-up. On Monday, with new appreciation for Lajos’s plight, Vigh gave up and turned the file over to his colleague to be folded into the larger ongoing investigation. Though it wasn’t easy to admit, Lajos agreed that the Ó Street job sounded like another Lone Wolf special.

  To be fair, it was a perfectly maddening time. In May, Hungary had become the second former Soviet bloc country (after Poland) to vote a former communist back into office. Gyula Horn, a sixty-two-year-old ex–Communist Party bigwig who had reportedly helped crush the 1956 uprising, led the newfangled Socialist Party to victory despite campaigning in a head-and-neck brace (the temporary result of a car wreck). But Horn’s new old-style government was possibly even less capable than that of the former medical museum curator who preceded him. Promised renewed funding for social programs such as unemployment, welfare, and police protection never materialized, and instead, foreign troops did. This time it wasn’t the Soviets but the Americans: the U.S. deployment in 1995 and 1996 of twenty thousand soldiers in Hungary, a staging area for the Bosnian peacekeeping mission, was the largest American military installation in Europe since World War II. And there was one more American invasion on the way. Two months after Horn’s election, the American FBI declared that Budapest would soon be home to its first foreign office, which it was calling an international training center for law enforcement from the allied forces of Eastern Europe. Hungary seemed a logical choice. After all, according to the press release issued by the Hungarian information service, Hungary’s relationship with the FBI dated back to 1937, since which time the FBI had “trained some 27,000 officers, including one Hungarian.”

  Unfortunately, it showed. During communism, investigative police work in Hungary generally meant digging through an underemployed family’s sock drawers for szamizdat, or self-published, materials. The amount of unsanctioned crime that existed in a country where few had anything worth taking was negligible and of scant interest, as
a traditional communist-era Hungarian cop joke depicts: Police find a mugging victim lying in his own blood along the Danube walking path, and ask, “Why were you screaming, ‘Down with Kádár! Down with the regime!’ ” Man replies, “If I yelled that I’d been stabbed, you wouldn’t have come.”

  So the fact that the FBI was heading to town was exhilarating news for cops such as Lajos, whose prior training regimen had consisted of divulging his hat size and withstanding a handshake. But FBI director Louis Freeh, who flew to Budapest with President Clinton’s blessing for the announcement, was quick to manage expectations. “The best internal mechanism [against crime] in the world isn’t going to help if police can’t feed their families,” he said.

  It may have been slim pickings down at Budapest police headquarters, but the summer of 1994 was bountiful for UTE. The team, finally tapping some of the Western investment in the country, signed up a sponsor. After forty-four years of going by the nickname Dózsa, for the Hungarian revolutionary figure György Dózsa (a Székely who led a peasant revolt in the sixteenth century), UTE would now be known as Office and Home—the English-language name of an office-supply chain funded by Western investors. “Brothel and Pub” might have been more apropos, but as Bóta could now confirm, those institutions did not subscribe to the philosophy of investing for the future.

  The financial agreement between the desk purveyor and UTE precipitated a major reshuffling of team personnel. For one, longtime player and coach George Pék, now forty, retired to focus on his more lucrative convenience-store job. Office and Home wasn’t exactly shelling out dough. Other notable transactions included the departure of the two Transylvanian stars—Bubu, regrettably to FTC, where he’d been offered a contract that would enable him to eat several days a week, and Karcsi, midway through the season, back to the fabled Csíkszereda team, where he could be closer to his family. Arriving to take their place were the fighting Szatmári brothers of Canada (Hungarian émigrés who together would hopefully make up for the loss of one Bubu), and a pair of Orbáns, George and Gábor.