Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  There was no other physical evidence to go on, since the forensics team that had just been trained by the FBI hadn’t managed to stumble over a single fingerprint suited for identification (again), even though the video showed the Lone Wolf robbing with his bare hands (again). Too embarrassed to ask the FBI for help, Keszthelyi shipped the videotape to England’s Scotland Yard in a package marked urgent. Several weeks later word came back. Scotland Yard had pronounced the discount-bin videotape worthless.

  After working the case for four months, including commissioning two psychological profiles (“This person is addicted to robbery,” stated one), Keszthelyi not only couldn’t produce the Lone Wolf, he couldn’t even produce a useful facsimile of him. The young detective did, however, deliver a summary report to his boss that was like no other in the robber’s file. “Due to the ‘most excellent’ expertise of the police department,” Keszthelyi wrote in the blistering dossier he hand-delivered to Lajos on November 16, 1995, “it will be very cumbersome to prove that the perpetrator committed this crime. I therefore recommend we terminate the investigation.”

  The desperation felt by the Budapest police mirrored the mood not only at Villányi Street 112, where the Lone Wolf was convinced he was now living on borrowed time, but also in the entire country, where people felt duped by the capitalist pipe dream. It had been six years since the transition from communism to free market capitalism and democracy, and still the country’s infrastructure was so ill-functioning that those without friends in high places couldn’t get a telephone line in their homes without being put on a Soviet-era queue 770,000 people long. Meanwhile, the American conglomerates that had swarmed into the city and taken over the downtown office buildings paid no taxes for doing business in Hungary but were happy to offer worse health benefits and less vacation time and expect far higher productivity than the Hungarians’ previous employer, the state, had. And while the foreign investment had significantly helped grow the economy, some local politicians pointed out that these new foreign despots deposited their profits back into someone else’s pocket, leaving Hungary still too poor to take care of all of its own.

  Many Hungarians were beginning to wonder: Why had America been their country’s role model? It couldn’t care less about them. In Taszár, Hungary, where the U.S. troops were stationed in support of the American effort in Bosnia, Hungarian families had spent their life savings to open stores and restaurants catering to the Americans. Instead, they found themselves serving the American government with lawsuits for damages in connection with eighty-eight automobile injuries or deaths and four hundred incidents of destruction of property. And as with everything else that had been marketed and sold to Hungary as something to improve its lot, the FBI training center was beginning to appear of questionable value to the locals. Whether by plan or neglect, one month after the FBI’s arrival, a powerful branch of the Russian mafiya was chased out of Czechoslovakia in an FBI raid and decided to relocate to Budapest, where it was growing and flourishing under the Bureau’s nose.

  In a country infamous for its gloom, Hungary’s national mood in 1995 was estimated to be the worst it had ever been. Prime Minister Horn splurged on his biggest social program to date, a 2-billion-forint ($16 million) “Optimism Campaign,” which included retraining teachers to positively spin class lessons. But it appeared that many of the prime minister’s own cabinet members had already thrown in the towel. Hungary’s tourism minister proposed as his office’s new marketing campaign: “The Russians came. The Mongols came. The Turks came. They took everything. Come to Hungary and see what’s left.” And the city of Budapest, wracked with debt, allocated 95 million forints ($760,000) for a new museum that would take visitors on an underground tour of the municipal sewerage system. Paris had a similar sewerage exhibit, but the Hungarian capital had long ago lost its resemblance to the City of Light. With the new museum, Hungary’s also-ran Paris of the East had finally forged its own identity. At last, Budapest was a showcase for shit.

  There was an unusual display at the UTE stadium that season as well. The team’s sponsor, Office and Home, had bailed out of its deal with the club, presumably underwhelmed by the partnership’s impact on brand recognition. Once again, the number of qualified professionals on UTE’s roster shrunk by a factor of the reduced odds on getting paid. Among the disgruntled departures were Coach George Orbán and the previous season’s regular goaltender, whose unanticipated retirement meant that for the first time in UTE’s storied history—and perhaps even professional hockey history—a former team janitor was named the starting goalie.

  As a result, the former pelt smuggler and pen salesman whose father said he would be nothing more than a gray nobody was now making news in two sections of the Hungarian newspapers. In the sports section, Attila was unrecognizably depicted in game-action photographs behind a lattice-grille face mask and white helmet. In more prominent parts of the paper, his big round face was plain to see, as the tabloids continued publishing the blurry but troubling frames from the Lajos Street bank video.

  Fame, Attila quickly discovered, had consequences, and with both of his lives on public display, he began to look at the world in a way he hadn’t done since his arrival in Hungary seven years earlier. No matter where he went or what he was doing, he saw escape routes. Unfortunately for UTE, this proved to be a major distraction from his attempts to sight and stop hockey pucks. On the opening weekend of the 1995–96 season, the cover of Népsport featured a photo of Attila in a pose that would become distressingly familiar to UTE fans: lying sideways across the goalmouth with his stick in the air and his feet splayed. “The UTE goalie Attila Ambrus can only search for the puck deep in the back of the net,” read the caption next to the story of the team’s 10–2 loss to Alba Volán.

  To say that Attila had a lackluster season wouldn’t be fair. Attila’s 1995–96 season as UTE’s starting goalie may be the worst performance by a goaltender in the history of hockey. During one six-game stretch, from November 3 to December 15, the Chicky Panther gave up eighty-eight goals, twenty-three of which were deposited in a single outing against Alba Volán in which UTE itself did not score a single goal. Stadiums all over the country, most of which featured scoreboards configured for one-digit tallies, had to make special preparations for Attila’s arrival. In one case, that meant making a cardboard sign with a 1 on it and sending a boy over to stick it to the board; another time an arena announcer informed fans they would have to keep track in their heads after the arena’s scoreboard hit 9. UTE contests had always been hallowed, and this year there was special cause to invoke the Holy Spirit. Shouts of “Christ Almighty!” and “What in heaven’s name?” billowed from the stands as Attila missed shot after shot after shot. At the end of some games, Attila’s head was so swollen from being pelted that he could barely remove his helmet.

  The Panther had no sanctuary. When Attila stepped off the ice and out of the path of 100 mph flying disks, he stepped straight into the vortex of a citywide manhunt.

  Somehow neither Éva nor his uncle László (who was still working nights at Éva’s car wash and sleeping days in Attila’s bed) seemed to recognize Attila’s mustachioed mug in the photos blanketing the city’s newsstands. But fearing capture and isolated by his inability to share his troubles, Attila tumbled into a chasm of manic behavior and illogical thinking. Aware that the couple of million forints ($15,000) he had to his name would have to last, he drove each day to the Keleti train station and exchanged a wad of forints into U.S. dollars with the Middle Eastern money changers at the best black market rate. Then he turned around and headed to the Globe Royale Casino, where he lost himself and his fresh American currency playing slot machines and roulette. Sometimes the only sleep he got was a few hours on a table at the Cats Club.

  Éva could see that Attila was in a funk. Though he still bunked with her several nights a week, he’d become even more remote than he had been in the early stages of their courtship. He wouldn’t show up at her apartment until the middle
of the night and would spend an inordinate amount of time in her bathroom, stricken with stomach cramps. He wouldn’t say what was bothering him, but she could see from the casino chips on his car seat where he was going after hockey. One night when she tried to stop him from going gambling, he told her she was his “lucky charm” and dragged her along. She watched him finish two bottles of whiskey on his own and then refuse to leave until the 3:00 a.m. closing, by which time he was both completely blitzed and thoroughly forintless. Éva liked Attila, but trying to rationalize with him was like performing a Skinner experiment on a rat. All she had to do was mention the words szerencse játék (gambling) and he would robotically pack up the little suitcase he kept at her apartment, mutter, “Nothing is ever good enough for you,” and disappear for a week.

  Noticing his increasingly irritable moods, Bubu, then playing for FTC, asked Attila what was wrong during one of their less frequent gettogethers. But all Attila would offer was “At least you can sleep at night” as he downed another pálinka. Since Attila and his uncle’s work schedules were diametrically opposite, he could practically avoid László altogether.

  But avoiding people didn’t help Attila feel better. In fact, he was beginning to hate himself. He was in an excruciating limbo, always wondering if and when and how the hammer would fall. If he could just get away with this one, he swore, he would give up the robbery game. It was too much. If the Lajos Street bank had gotten a camera that quickly without his knowing, how could he ever keep up? The security improvements were coming too quickly.

  About this time, Gustáv Bóta approached his Panther with an enticing business opportunity. Bóta had heard through his contacts that the infamous Black and White Club downtown on Klauzál Square was up for sale. Owned by Semion Mogilevich, the reputed head of the Russian mafiya, the Black and White was a sleek, exclusive “businessman’s” paradise, the Russian-owned in-town version of the Cats Club. It was a Budapest landmark. Perhaps, Bóta suggested, Attila would like to take it off Mogilevich’s hands, settle down. Attila imagined himself, Zubovics-like, surrounded by velvet ropes and security guards, chatting up the country’s finest crooks. “Let me think about it,” he told Bóta. He was also thinking about something else: Éva.

  Before he’d gone and blown his life to smithereens at Lajos Street, they had had so many effortless good times together. Scuba diving in Bali, skiing in the Italian Dolomites, sightseeing in Paris. He genuinely liked her and, to his surprise and consternation, even respected her. She probably wouldn’t like the idea of his owning a whorehouse, even a well-respected one, but if she only knew how much better that was than his current gig.

  He decided to invite Éva home with him to Transylvania for the holidays. Éva accepted, not that she had much choice. A few days before Christmas, Attila showed up at her apartment and said, “Pack your bags.” He felt like an animal-pelt smuggler again.

  Éva loved Attila’s spontaneity. Half the way to Csíkszereda she kept the car window down just to feel more alive. She knew she was the first woman Attila was taking home.

  As soon as he tasted the chilled Hargita Mountains air, Attila felt a calmness come over him. He drove Éva out through the hills of Székelyföld to St. Anne’s Lake, where in the summers he used to hike and pick mushrooms. “It’s like we’re in a time warp,” he told her along the way, pointing to horse-drawn carts bumping along the snowy roads. Attila also took her with him as he distributed the usual food staples he’d brought from Hungary up and down the two frozen mud streets of Fitód, his native village that had been too insignificant for Ceauescu to bother erasing. Éva was charmed. Fitód was a little like her hometown of Gergely; most people were still without plumbing, phones, or cars. Attila knew everyone by name, and they all remembered him. Dénes Ambrus, his father’s brother, who still lived a few doors down from Attila’s childhood home, recalled little Attila as “a horse always about to bolt.” He invited his nephew and Éva to a pig-killing ceremony.

  Attila and Éva stayed in Csíkszereda on the couch in Attila’s aunt and uncle’s apartment. Éva already knew László (who had also returned for the holidays), and she and Ninny hit it off immediately. It was a real family affair: cooking, drinking, dirty underwear strewn about the living-room floor.

  One morning Attila and Éva arose before sunrise and drove through darkness to Uncle Dénes’s Fitód home, where a group of villagers were dressed in the traditional white riding pants, black vests, and pointed Robin Hood hats. They spent the morning drinking homemade pálinka and singing folk songs before chasing, and eventually stabbing and dismembering, a screeching 350-pound animal. Attila had a ball. Éva almost threw up. Great people, she thought, but she could do without the pig intestines.

  As their stay was nearing its end, Attila told Éva there was one more thing he wanted to do. On their last afternoon in Csíkszereda, they drove to the cemetery on the edge of town, where Attila’s grandmother was buried. As they stood at her gravestone, Attila began to talk about his family, and for Éva, the hazy first act of her boyfriend’s life finally came into focus.

  Anna Ambrus was Attila’s paternal grandmother, a Russian Jew who had emigrated in the early 1900s and changed her name from Friedman when the first “Jewish laws” limiting her freedoms were introduced in Transylvania in 1940. Like the rest of the villagers, Anna and her husband were farmers who owned land and livestock that produced goods they sold and traded in nearby Csíkszereda. But when Attila’s grandfather died in the 1960s, Attila’s father sold all the land but the house with the oversize attic perfect for smoking meats. Károly Ambrus wasn’t going to be a farmer. Exceptionally bright, he had become one of the rare Hungarians to be granted a scholarship to a prestigious technical university.

  All Attila knew about his mother was that she was several years younger and had met his father in 1964 while he was on leave from the Romanian army. They were married soon afterward. Then inexplicably, a year after Attila was born, Klara Ambrus fled Fitód. And later that same year Károly and Dénes Ambrus’s other brother was killed while working on an electrical pole in a storm. Soon afterward, Attila’s father slipped into a despairing alcoholic stupor.

  Anna Ambrus, who slept on a hay bed on the other side of a curtain from Attila, took on the responsibility of raising her grandson. Attila had run into her arms seeking protection from his father so many times, he could still smell her freckled skin. As far as Attila was concerned, she was the only mother he ever had.

  After Anna died in 1976, Attila’s aunt and uncle did everything they could for Attila. But they couldn’t make Attila behave like the other kids. He didn’t have a mother, and his father couldn’t care less about seeing him unless he’d gotten into trouble again, in which case Károly would materialize at László and Ninny’s apartment to deliver Attila a few slaps. Attila gradually began getting into bigger and bigger trouble, as if it were his way of hitting back at the man who made him feel worthless. Ultimately, Attila’s mischief culminated with the episode that literally left him scarred for life, the theft of the musical instruments. When the two friends with whom Attila committed the crime were caught after brainlessly advertising the instruments for sale in the local paper, Attila’s accomplices claimed that Attila was the crime’s sole culprit—a believable accusation, given Attila’s lengthy petty criminal record. After two months in the Csíkszereda jail, Attila accepted full responsibility and, despite his relatives’ pleas, was sentenced to two years in a chain-link-fenced juvenile detention facility near the Moldavian border. As one of the institution’s only Hungarians—who spoke no Romanian—among thousands of wayward Romanian adolescents, Attila was ridiculed, beaten with rubber sticks by the commanders, and, one night, awakened by the whispers of two of his bunkmates, who were bearing down on him with steak knives. He spun away from their swipes just in time to escape with only the deep, long cut along his left arm. He was too afraid of further retribution to see the doctor, so he bled through his shirts for days and went months before regaining pain-fr
ee use of his arm. At seventeen, he went back to Csíkszereda, hemorrhaging hope, only to be called away again two months later for another sixteen months of humiliation in the Romanian army. There was nothing left to say. Éva held Attila as he cried. She had always wondered about the origins of his scars, and now she knew. “When she died,” Attila said, pointing to his grandmother’s stone, “my life took a fatal turn.” If only Éva knew just how far down the wrong path Attila was standing.

  The next day Attila and Éva began the long drive home through the snowy central Transylvanian hills and the barren western Romanian plains. Attila felt closer to Éva than to any woman since his grandmother, and he figured he might as well pop the question. “What do you think about my buying the Black and White bar?” he asked. Not a bad idea, Éva told him, but she had a better one. “Why don’t we buy a bar together?” she said. There was a smaller, quieter place she knew of for sale in Érd, the suburb west of Budapest where she lived. He could take a management course at night to learn to run the place, and they could go into business together and settle down outside the city. It wasn’t what he’d imagined, but by the time they arrived back in Budapest, Attila had agreed.

  Fifteen

  There were no more hockey nightmares that season. After UTE had gone 0–11 leading up to the holiday break with Attila in the net, it forfeited the remainder of its games. That was fine with Attila. Twice a week he headed to a suburban office building for a business management course in preparation for his gig in the bar on which Éva had made a successful 2-million-forint bid ($13,000). By February they had a closing date that they would never make. The night before they were scheduled to sign the papers and hand over the cash, Éva was awakened by her phone. “Bunny,” Attila said, in slurred speech from the Gresham Casino. “You know I love you. Can I borrow two million forints?”