Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  Both robberies were covered by a burgeoning media that now included two more Hungarian television channels. The government had finally privatized the airwaves, and the two new commercial networks launched with Kriminális copycats as their showpieces. But aside from the lone account of the second robbery in Népszava (the robber in a joking mood), the media did not attribute the bullet-marked heists to the Whiskey Robber. To Lajos’s relief, he wasn’t even pressed for comment.

  At eight years of age, the independent Hungarian media was hardly a model of journalistic rigor and responsibility, unless perhaps if judged against its nonexistent past. For the majority of local journalists, covering crime was a privilege, and the pervasive aura of criminality in the nation’s capital lent an air of exhilaration and significance to even the shoddiest tabloid operations. In that regard, the postcommunist 1990s in Hungary was not unlike the fabled golden age of American sports in the 1920s and 1930s, when journalists rode the rails with the ballplayers they unapologetically mythologized. The tall and handsome chief of the Budapest homicide department, Péter Doszpot, happily became a larger-than-life celebrity. A regular on Kriminális and the other crime shows, the thirty-five-year-old Doszpot was invariably shown wearing black leather jacket and sunglasses, riding in to fight the city’s dark side in his red Alfa Romeo convertible (a gift from the Italian carmaker). The only thing he lacked was a theme song.

  Lajos, who wore the same style jacket, didn’t have the right look—or an evil nemesis—and wasn’t offered a free car. But on the days when he didn’t have use of one of the department’s Volkswagens, Lajos could usually hitch a ride with the affable reporters to the crime scene.

  Kriminális host László Juszt, who had been given an entire wing of offices at Hungarian Television, spun off his television show into a theater production, the Kriminális Cabaret, which caricatured the country’s crime problems and government corruption scandals. The show, which ran for three months in Budapest’s Little Broadway theater district, featured the harmless Whiskey Robber as Hungary’s court jester, a lovable lout in an out-of-control lot. (The actor who portrayed the Whiskey Robber—wearing a business suit and wig, and carrying flowers and a whiskey bottle—was József Zana, father of Gabi’s and Attila’s friend rapper Gangsta Zoli.)

  But though the media had no shortage of crime material, it was getting harder to make light of it. That spring a Bulgarian diplomat was found stabbed to death in his home with his mouth taped shut. A member of Parliament was killed when he was hit by an oncoming car while trying to fend off an attacker attempting to steal his parked vehicle. And since January, a serial killer had been stalking the city’s shop clerks.

  Needless to say, Prime Minister Horn could have picked a better time to have to make the case that Hungary was the safest and most progressive country in the former Eastern bloc. But with only a few months left before two momentous votes—his own for re-election, and that of the U.S. Senate on Hungary’s acceptance into NATO, a key endorsement for foreign investors as much as a military safeguard—that was the task ahead for Horn.

  Like both of Hungary’s democratically elected prime ministers before him, Horn would fail to make his case for re-election. A month before the first round of voting, a Hungarian media mogul, János Feny, was gunned down in broad daylight on Budapest’s streets by men in balaclavas, sparking a national outcry. Even the prime minister angrily declared, “Whatever this is in Hungary, it is not public safety!”

  The blame game quickly began. Horn announced that he would fight for stricter immigration laws, claiming that 80 percent of the country’s robberies and murders were committed by foreigners. The interior minister, who oversaw the police department, accused Parliament of neglecting to adequately fund the police. (Adjusted for inflation, the police department budget was 14 percent lower than it had been in 1995.) And inside the Death Star, Budapest police chief Attila Berta began sniping about a certain robbery chief. The city’s robbery division, Berta had said, was suffering because Lajos Varjú was upset about not receiving kickbacks.

  Berta’s charge drifted down to Lajos’s office in early March. Upon hearing it from one of his colleagues, Lajos dropped what he was doing and headed to the emergency stairwell. He’d had it. He’d been running one of the busiest departments at the police with less than half the cars, equipment, and people he needed. The KBI had refused his requests for help tracing the marked bills. Dance Instructor was threatening to quit to devote himself to his new and possibly more lucrative hobby of training carrier pigeons. With no more cars to crash, Mound had lost interest in everything but fishing. Of course, Lajos hadn’t hidden his dismay at the fact that his request for pay raises for his staff had been denied for the nth year in a row. But unlike many of his colleagues, he had never asked for or accepted bribes. Lajos bounded down two flights of stairs to the fifth floor, walked straight past Berta’s protesting secretary, and flung open the door to Berta’s office, where the city police chief was in a meeting with several other top cops.

  “You’re stupid and you’re a liar,” Lajos bellowed at Berta. Then he turned around and stormed out, slamming Berta’s door shut. After sixteen years as a cop, Lajos had just turned over an hourglass on his career. His only chance to save his job now would be to catch the Whiskey Robber. Quickly.

  Twenty-three

  Budapest

  March 11, 1998

  Three minutes!” Gabi yelled. The sirens were sounding just as they had when he and Attila had been here in police uniform almost exactly a year ago. But Gabi needed to remain calm. He’d remembered to bring the paint this time and to use it. He was watching the door and the customers and the time. And he was trying to keep one eye on his partner—but he had no idea where his partner was.

  “Three and a half minutes!” Gabi yelled, looking out the glass double doors behind him at a piece of the Heltai Square shopping center. In the reflection of the glass store windows across from him, he could see the bank’s orange outdoor alarm lights spinning.

  Gabi couldn’t believe he’d let Attila persuade him to do this bank again. After the December OTP robbery at Grassalkovich Street, he had actually started to believe Attila was too good to ever allow them to be caught. When they had arrived there that day, a police car was parked outside the bank. It had pulled away a few minutes later, and Gabi jumped out from the bush in which they were hiding and began moving toward the bank. Attila yanked him back. “They’re going to circle around,” Attila had said. “They always circle around.” Sure enough, a minute later the car had appeared behind them, drove slowly past the front of the bank, then moved on. Gabi was awed. His partner had a sixth sense, he had concluded. Now, panicking, Gabi wondered what he had been thinking. Attila wasn’t a psychic. He was a drunk.

  “Four minutes!” Gabi yelled over the alarm. “Do you hear me, Mr. X?”

  Attila was in the back, hovering over the chief teller while she fumbled around with the keys to the cash drawers. But his pickled head was somewhere else. Betty was gone. Attila’s relationship with her had been going downhill since the summer, but it ended for him a few weeks ago in Aruba when he’d started to tell her his secret one rainy day in their hotel room. “I don’t want to know,” she’d said, stopping him. After that he’d lapsed into a stoic silence, anesthetized by the realization that the woman he’d contemplated marrying didn’t want to know who he really was. He was still in a sort of shock when, last week, he was walking around the neighborhood with Don and saw Betty sitting in the McDonald’s with another man. Something snapped. He ran inside and slapped Betty across the face right in front of her lunch companion. Gave her three days to move her things out. She left, and he was glad—he certainly didn’t need a woman like that. But he hadn’t been able to take down the note she’d left on the refrigerator that morning. “Hi, can you take my black dress to the cleaners?” It seemed so normal, he thought, so nice—so much like something he would never have. Attila hadn’t cried so much since the time with Éva at his gran
dmother’s grave. He felt as though he didn’t know anything anymore, only that he was alone, again.

  “Five minutes!” Gabi was screaming, but Attila didn’t much care. He’d started the timers going on the file cabinet safe first before going back to collect the contents of the teller drawers, and now he was back at the safe. The first two drawers were open, but he was going to wait at least until he got to the third. “Open it now!” he yelled at the teller with the key ring. “I know you can open it.” He’d read somewhere or other that there was a special code that could override the time lock in an emergency.

  Vegetable vendors, whose carts were parked just outside the bank, were gathering around the front door.

  “Five and a half minutes!” Gabi shouted. “Mr. X, there are people outside!”

  No response.

  “Six minutes!” Gabi yelled. “Six minutes!”

  Attila finally appeared from behind the counter, waving his arms. He was wearing a long wool coat and a dark beret over a long dirty-blond wig. With his small round glasses, he resembled a shorter, stouter John Lennon in the Yoko years. “Let’s go,” he said to Gabi. Gabi ran from the front door toward the counter, where Attila pulled him through a doorway. Like last time, they headed to the back exit that opened onto the alley. But this time, when they crashed through the steel door, a crowd of ten or twelve people were waiting for them. It was the vegetable vendors.

  A weak sun strained through the early-morning sky. Attila and Gabi had wanted to wait for rain or snow so that the police response would be slowed, but today’s chance of flurries was the worst weather in the foreseeable forecast. It was cold but clear. The vendors began to make their move.

  Girding for a challenging flight, Attila had already dumped the loot into his Camel duffel bag, which hung from his right shoulder. “Stay back!” Attila yelled, firing twice into the air with his Tokarev pistol.

  The produce personnel backed up, and Attila and Gabi bolted down the alley along the back of the shops. When they passed the Jéé discount department store, Gabi tore off one way through the apartment complex and Attila went another. Most of the group followed Attila because he was the one with the gun and the bag, presumably carrying the bank’s money.

  Hearing the clamoring vendors in tow, Attila fired two more shots in the air without looking back, in hopes of forcing another retreat. Two blocks ahead, along a footpath, an off-duty policeman, Ferenc Laczik, was on his way to the shopping center’s post office when he heard the shots. To his left, he saw a man in a business suit running directly toward him, followed by a pack of apron-clad vigilantes.

  Attila didn’t see Laczik until they were only forty feet apart. “Don’t come near me, or I’ll shoot!” Attila shouted as he approached the policeman in a dead sprint. Laczik didn’t have his gun with him. He backed up onto the grass on the side of the path with his hands up as the bespectacled thief ran past him and turned a corner at Building 7 in the apartment complex. “Keep going!” some of the vendors shouted to Laczik, who took off ahead of them in pursuit. “He’s getting tired!”

  As Attila ran, he fired one more shot, then another. Laczik knew the gun had at most a ten-bullet chamber, and he’d already heard at least four shots. “Fire!” Laczik yelled, trying to egg on the perpetrator. “Go ahead, try to hit me!”

  Attila turned down a walkway and kept running, past a kindergarten building and playground. At the end of the winding path, he emerged onto the main boulevard, Pünkösfürd. He burst into traffic on the road, heading for the nearest intersection, Király Street.

  At that corner another off-duty policeman, István Tamari, was waiting to cross the street on foot. Tamari heard car horns and then saw a man with a gun running ahead of a trail of people, all yelling, “Robber! Robber! Get him!”

  Tamari pulled out his gun and pointed it at the man. “Freeze!” he shouted at Attila. “Police!”

  Attila ignored the warning. The light had turned red and a line of cars was stacked up at the intersection. He approached a small white Czech-made koda 120 and put his Tokarev up to the driver’s window. “Get out!” Attila yelled. The man and his wife leapt from the car with their hands in the air.

  Attila jumped in and started driving even before he could close the door. Tamari, now just thirty yards behind the car, fired twice. One of the bullets shattered thekoda’s back window. Attila crouched so low in the driver’s seat that he could barely see the road as he lurched out into the intersection, ran the red light, and turned left down another major boulevard.

  The first police unit on the scene arrived from the opposite direction and, seeing thekoda run the light and the people pointing after it, gave chase—as did four of the vegetable vendors, who hailed a small Volkswagen. The three cars swerved and sped along through the morning rush-hour congestion, drunken-caravan-style. Before a Shell gas station on the corner of another intersection, Attila turned left onto a smaller road, swerving into oncoming traffic. The police car and the vegetable vendors followed. The vehicles darted and weaved through traffic, traveling in circles until, after about twenty minutes, the other two cars lost sight of thekoda.

  The Whiskey Robber had eluded capture again.

  Gabi cautiously approached his mansion an hour and a half later, after a circuitous route using several modes of transport took him back to the car he’d left at the Déli subway station, the last stop in suburban Buda. Attila and Gabi had made a rule after Attila was nearly nabbed by the pedestrian pursuer almost a year ago to the day: if either of them was ever captured, he would wait at least three hours before giving up the other’s name. It wouldn’t be fair, they decided, to expect the captured party not to talk at all. But a three-hour window would allow enough time for the other to make it over the Romanian border to freedom. Gabi hadn’t seen Attila since the discouraging glimpse he got over his shoulder of the screaming vegetable vendors charging after his partner. If Attila had been caught, Gabi had only ninety minutes left to get out of the country. He needed his passport.

  He entered the house from the sliding door in the back, half expecting to find a commando team hiding under his dirty laundry. But there was nothing out of the ordinary that he could see, except for his answering machine, which was blinking with twenty-five messages on it, all hang-ups. Within a minute, the phone rang again. Gabi picked it up and said nothing.

  “Gringo?” Attila’s voice said.

  “Where the hell are you?” Gabi asked in a whisper.

  “I’m at the border at Ártánd,” Attila said, referring to one of the checkpoints on the Hungarian-Romanian border.

  “How did you get there so fast?” Gabi asked.

  “You’re not going to believe it,” Attila said. “It’s safe to come back?”

  Two hours later Gabi heard the sound of a car pulling up the gravelly road. “Where the fuck are you?” Gabi heard Attila yell as the car pulled to a stop in the driveway. “You wouldn’t believe it, Gringo,” he kept on. “They shot the window out of my car. It was really like in America what happened to me.”

  “What car?” Gabi yelled out his second-floor bedroom window. “Wait, I’m coming down.”

  Gabi came outside and shut Attila up long enough to proffer the important question: “Do you have the money?”

  Attila had left his outer layer of clothes and (accidentally) the dependable Camel duffel bag in the stolen car when he parked it near the HÉV station. But before jumping out to catch a subway to a tram back home for his own car, passport, and Don (who was now panting in his backseat), Attila had transferred the money from the plastic bag to the inside of his jockey shorts. The 5 million forints ($23,600) was sweaty but safe. It was time to celebrate.

  There was also a small celebration taking place across town at the Death Star, though it was not in the robbery offices. That day the violent crime unit, with the help of the KBI and the FBI, had captured the serial killer who had been stalking the city since January, stabbing to death four shop saleswomen. The arrest was trumpeted at a sp
ecial news conference in the media room, where champagne was served. If the bubbly gathering went the way the public relations department and Lajos hoped, no one in the media would be left with the time or faculty to ascertain that in other news, the Whiskey Robber had just knocked off his twenty-fourth bank, shot up a street, stolen a car, and outraced the police through morning-rush-hour traffic.

  Lajos was clinging to his job by a thread. In the month since telling his boss that he was an idiot, he had been summarily rejected on every request he’d made for equipment or assistance. The new KBI was unwilling to provide him any personnel, and had reiterated its lack of interest in helping him trace the marked bills that the Whiskey Robber had stolen last May. So while Lajos appreciated the press office’s maneuvering on his behalf that afternoon, he couldn’t take it as anything more than a token bearing the inscription: You’d better come up with something, or your time is up.

  An hour after the Heltai Square shoot-out, Lajos was on the scene with his entire department. One witness told investigators that he had seen one of the perpetrators arrive that morning in a sedan. Mound of Asshead had managed to borrow a video camera from another department and began recording pictures of every car, and license plate, in the shopping center lot, beginning near the bank door. Unfortunately, the police administrative office had refused Lajos’s request to restock his department’s depleted battery supplies, so halfway through Mound’s filming, the camera went dead.

  Later, back at HQ, while the serial killer press conference dragged on downstairs, a group of Lajos’s men played back what they had on tape, then ran every license plate through the vehicle registration system. If you had a criminal record and a good enough parking space at Heltai Square that day, there was a 100 percent chance you would be arrested.

  Brothers Norbert and Tamás Gergely were the first. Tamás had a car parked near the bank, and when police stripped and searched his home later that day, they found a Chinese throwing star, two 9mm gas guns, and a stolen ID. Norbert was positively identified by a five-year-old who was in the kindergarten playground when a band of angry men had stampeded past the school.