Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  The only two people from Attila’s past life who remained in his present one were Zsuzsa, the maternal grocery clerk who thought of Attila as the son she never had; and a blond, leggy eighteen-year-old national figure-skating competitor named Virág who’d had a crush on Attila ever since he played hockey with her brother for a season at FTC. Each of them arrived once a week, bearing a bag full of the items Attila requested: a half kilo of crispy, all-meat Kaiser bacon (presliced); two packages of smoked broiled chicken legs; one poppy seed roll and one walnut roll (both from a decent confectionery and not a supermarket so they wouldn’t dry out); two or three pieces of vacuum-packed smoked salmon; two pieces of halva; and, most important, whiskey—as much of it as they could sneak in, which turned out to be easiest to do in emptied-out soda bottles.

  There was no official visitation room, so the jail’s visitors met their loved ones in the same office in which they were interrogated, room 309, the little rectangular chamber next to Bérdi’s office. Just as for press sessions, Attila was freed of his handcuffs so he could sit comfortably in the old green armchair near the door. Often the guards left him alone and stood outside during his visit, which they usually allowed to slide past the thirty-minute limit. Only once did Attila emerge from a visit (with Zsuzsa) so smashed that they had to help carry his leftover food and “soda” back to his cell.

  Attila was aware that he was getting special privileges. He was allowed more than one shower a day and could leave his light on as late as he wanted. Colonel Bérdi had even agreed to give him an old typewriter for his cell so that he could begin writing his life story. But as the days wore on and Attila continued to be questioned about the Heltai Square shoot-out while not being told anything about when or how his sentence would be handed down, he grew wary of his captors’ goodwill.

  One day when the lead investigator Valter Fülöp called Attila upstairs to ask him some more questions, Attila decided to ask one himself: he wanted to know if he could talk with Colonel Bérdi about his seemingly inert case. After all, he’d confessed to everything, yet still hadn’t even been formally charged, much less sentenced. Attila wanted to know what the holdup was. But Valter dismissed Attila’s concerns, saying, “There’s no problem. Everything will be cleared up in court.”

  Attila was stunned. There was only one reason he could think of that his case would end up in court, and that was if the government planned to charge him with a crime other than those to which he’d confessed.

  Standing in the hallway outside the interrogation room, Attila nearly lost it. He’d done everything the police had asked and more. Didn’t even have a lawyer to run interference. Valter let Attila rant until he was finished. Then the guards took him back downstairs.

  A few days later Attila got a message to Valter through the guards that he wanted to see his ex-girlfriend Éva. Valter had the number; he’d already questioned Éva several times. Valter made the call, and a week later Éva nervously arrived at the jail and was led up to room 309.

  She got to the room first and tried to be patient while she waited for the guards to get Attila. She was ready to forget the fight she and Attila had had the last time they were together, but the one thing she couldn’t help feeling angry about was just how much Attila had kept hidden from her even on that day in Csíkszereda at his grandmother’s grave. She wasn’t sure how she would feel when she saw him, nor what he would want from her now that he was a big celebrity in a load of trouble.

  When Attila arrived, Éva was shaken by his downcast, alcohol-reddened face. He looked a lot worse than he had during his Kriminális interview. She could tell he was hurting, and when the guard unlocked his cuffs, she reflexively grabbed his strong, familiar hands. Their conversation was stilted at first, both because of their recent fight (for which they each apologized) and because of the guard in the room. After a few minutes, though, he left them alone, and as soon as the door closed, Attila told Éva the one thing she wished he’d been able to say to her years ago: “I need help.” He told her he knew the Szcs brothers had been facing attempted murder charges for the shooting following the robbery of the OTP Bank at Heltai Square on March 11, 1998. But, Attila told Éva, even though he had repeatedly sworn to investigators that the shots he fired that day were only warning shots—in hopes of warding off his pursuers—Attila was afraid the police didn’t believe him.

  “I need you to believe me,” Attila said.

  “I do,” Éva told him.

  She said he needed to get a lawyer, immediately. She would take care of everything.

  A few weeks later Attila was summoned from his cell and taken upstairs to Colonel Bérdi’s office. He walked into the room to find not an attorney but the former robbery chief, Lajos Varjú, sitting on the couch.

  Lajos had received a call the previous week from Judit P. Gál, the lanky enterprising reporter for Mai Nap who had done the bulk of the paper’s coverage on the Whiskey Robber case. She wanted to know if Lajos would be interested in going to see Attila with her so that she could write a story about their meeting for the paper. Initially, Lajos was reluctant. He still wasn’t over his bitterness about his treatment by police brass, and no other case symbolized his frustration like this one. Directly or indirectly, the Whiskey Robber had brought about the loss of his job, his reputation, and, most recently, his marriage. But ultimately he was too curious to say no.

  Lajos could see right away that Attila wasn’t faring well in captivity. His hair was greasy and matted down on his head, he had a scruffy Fu Manchu mustache, and his chest and arms were bulging unnaturally out of his shirt like a steroid-filled bodybuilder. But he still had that disarming grin. When Attila recognized who was waiting for him, his face brightened and he reached out his hand to his longtime foe. Lajos shook it and his own head. Life was a pisser.

  “You were the only true professional at the police,” Attila told Lajos, then added before Lajos could answer, “but I was always one step ahead of you.”

  Lajos laughed, hoping he wasn’t going to regret having come. As he listened to Attila talk, Lajos noticed two things about his old nemesis. First, he was stinking drunk, and second—which he figured flowed from the first—he sounded dangerously wistful about the past.

  “Remember the time I sent you a note?” Attila asked as the Mai Nap reporter scribbled notes and a photographer snapped pictures.

  “Yes,” Lajos said, forcing a smile. “I nearly blew up inside.”

  After about twenty minutes, there was little left to say. Lajos took some satisfaction in seeing that Attila wasn’t much different from what he’d expected. Even though they had just met, he felt that he had a pretty good bead on Attila. He was a simple guy with a decent heart and a screwed-up life who made some terrible choices. He had also spent his hockey career at the rink less than a mile from the Újpest apartment where Lajos had lived until last year. Lajos could be extremely annoyed by Attila, but he couldn’t hate him. He did, however, want to ask him something. As Lajos got up to leave, he saw that no one else was paying attention and he leaned in toward Attila.

  “Have you already figured out how to get out of here?” Lajos asked.

  “Persze,” Attila said. Of course.

  Twenty-eight

  Bérdi’s team was trying to wrap up its investigation. Though Gabi hadn’t been as forthcoming as Attila early on, he’d finally confessed to all thirteen robberies in which he had participated and even allowed investigators to confiscate his house as stolen property. It was pretty clear to Bérdi that he was merely the sidekick.

  So far, Attila’s stories about gambling the money away and spending it on cars and trips for his girlfriends had checked out. Technically, he owned no property: the Villányi Street apartment was a rental, and the town house on Rezeda Street was in the name of his grocery clerk friend Zsuzsa’s daughter, Sylvia. But Bérdi still hadn’t found Attila’s first two accomplices: Károly “Karcsi” Antal, his former UTE teammate, and Attila’s cousin László Veres, whose names Attila had bel
atedly surrendered in what Bérdi interpreted as a desperate attempt by the robber to appear cooperative and trustworthy. Bérdi believed those accomplices—both Székelys from Attila’s hometown—could provide key information about any leftover loot. The only question was how long it would take to find them, because apparently they had fled Hungary. The Romanian authorities said they were “working on it,” which, given the absence of an extradition treaty between the two countries and Romania’s warm feelings toward Hungary, might have meant “fuck off.”

  Worst of all, Bérdi was finding that solidifying the attempted murder charges based on evidence from the Heltai Square shoot-out was a nightmare of Dallas book repository proportions. All that was certain after two inconclusive sets of ballistics tests was that there were bullets fired from several directions, from different guns, some of which had ricocheted off cars and apartment buildings. As far as who was aiming where and why, the best thing he had to go on was a sworn statement from Ferenc Laczik, the sight-challenged policeman who had chased after Attila. Laczik attested that at least one shot fired by the perpetrator was targeted directly at him, because he remembered looking straight down the barrel of the man’s gun.

  It wasn’t until sometime in April that Attila had legal representation. The lawyer Éva had found had refused to take the case after reviewing Attila’s file full of signed and detailed confessions. It was Zsuzsa who finally netted a counselor through one of her relatives: failed mayoral candidate George Magyar.

  It was only a matter of time before someone like Magyar would enter the picture. The fifty-one-year-old attorney had brown eyes that darted around in their sockets when he spoke, as if he were calculating the potential earnings of each syllable. Though he had never handled a criminal case before, he was certain Attila’s would be a success. “Your confession is absolutely illegal,” Magyar told Attila during his first visit to the jail, unveiling his defense strategy. “There was no lawyer present.”

  Attila didn’t know what the slope-shouldered attorney was talking about. He reminded Magyar that on the night of his capture he had signed away his right to a lawyer twenty-six separate times. But Magyar, who was pondering a second mayoral run after commanding 1 percent of the electorate in 1994, was not easily deterred. He kept Attila talking and soon seized upon another trifle: According to Attila, the police had (appropriately, Attila thought) given him some whiskey during his confession that long night at police headquarters. (“Never,” Keszthelyi later said of the charge; “Only at the end,” said Mound.) Magyar nearly jumped out of his chair. He’d hit pay dirt. His client had been hauled off to the Death Star, deprived of a lawyer, and then induced into a drunken stupor before being forced to confess. Johnnie Cochran, eat your heart out. If there was ever a case made for the International Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, Magyar told Attila, this was it. As for his fee, Magyar understood that Attila was broke, but he had some ideas. He planned to market Attila’s story; they would split the profits. Attila mentioned that he’d been typing up his life story. A wonderful idea, Magyar said. He would start working on a book-publishing deal, perhaps with the Mai Nap reporter Judit P. Gál as cowriter. And another thing: no more media interviews without his approval and receipt of a negotiable payment.

  Attila wasn’t sure what to make of Magyar. But he could appreciate his pluck, and at this late stage and with no other options, Attila had to hire him. After crossing out the lines in Magyar’s contract stating that Attila was responsible for reimbursing Magyar’s gas and parking costs, Attila signed Magyar’s agreement for representation. But there was still one thing that Attila wasn’t sure his new lawyer understood: he had no intention of retracting his confession. He’d robbed banks until he was caught, at which point he gave himself up and ended the game. He’d played by the rules, as far as he understood them, and had no intention of starting to lie now just as a legal strategy. Fair was fair.

  If the police or the prosecutors were going to change the rules, however, that was another thing. Attila went to both Valter and Béla “Blinky” Bartha, the two main investigators on the case, and told them straightaway that if they charged him with attempted murder, he wasn’t going to stand for it. He would escape.

  Valter had heard such a threat a hundred times before and no one had ever escaped from the Gyorskocsi Street jail. He told Attila to sit tight; he would be able to read his case file soon enough. Attila spent his mornings typing and jogging in circles around the outdoor exercise walk box, waiting for the other sandal to drop. He traded candy with the guards for getting the cook to make him scrambled eggs, and he drank whenever he had a supply on hand. In the afternoons he did push-ups and leg-sits and played Pente with his new cellmate, an Ecstasy dealer called Zoli. Loser had to do sit-ups. At night Attila didn’t do much sleeping.

  Finally, on July 2, nearly six months after his confession, the investigative phase of the government’s case against Attila Ambrus was complete. Bérdi put the final evidentiary file listing the charges against him into the cabinet in room 309. Attila was informed that he was free to read the file, and he asked to see it immediately. He was led upstairs, where he took his regular seat in the green armchair and began to look at the documents. It didn’t take long for his eye to settle on the word he was looking for: gyilkosság. Murder.

  As far as Attila was concerned, his case was settled. Just as he did that autumn eleven years earlier in Romania, he granted himself permission to leave the prison in which he was wrongfully being held. He would do whatever was necessary to get out.

  Overtime

  Twenty-nine

  Buda Castle

  Budapest

  July 3, 1999

  You are beginning your careers at an auspicious moment,” said Prime Minister Orbán, looking out at the graduates of Hungary’s Police Officer College seated before him. “The past year has brought a breakthrough in the fight against crime. We have made it clear that Hungary will be a peaceful, honest, and respectable country…. The police force today is managed by efficient and strong-handed leaders. And the government is fully behind the police.”

  Gyorskocsi Street jail

  Budapest

  Seven days later

  9:01 A.M.

  Károly Benk stood in walk box number four for several seconds before he could believe what his heavy-lidded eyes and overtired brain were registering. He was sure that six minutes earlier he’d locked Attila Ambrus into this sunny twenty-six-by-sixteen-foot space and gone to the chair at the end of the courtyard to smoke a cigarette, as he always did. Then, thirty seconds ago, when a conspiratorial squawking began to emanate from the open-air boxes, he had walked back to peer through the doors’ round porthole-like windows.

  Numbers one, two, and three were okay. But there was indeed an irregularity in number four. The inmate was gone. The Whiskey Robber was gone.

  Károly’s reaction surprised even himself. Instead of hitting the alarm, he took off past his chair, into the jail, and down the hall toward the kitchen, yelling, “Lock up the knives!”

  Attila had to be somewhere on the premises.

  Károly grabbed two other guards, and the three of them burst into the parking lot in the jail’s inner courtyard. Attila couldn’t have exited through the walk-box door; it was still locked. The only other way he could have disappeared was by somehow scaling the thirteen-foot cement wall of the box. That would have put him on a thin path leading to a guard tower, which was empty today because of a shortage in staff. The only way down from there was through the building’s inner courtyard, which mostly served as the employees’ parking lot.

  Károly and his men looked under the dozen or so cars. One of them dove into the garbage Dumpster. Nothing. They bounded up a small set of metal stairs that led to the door to the administration building. It was unlocked, as it never should have been.

  They spread out through the hallways on every floor, but everything looked agonizingly unremarkable. As on any other Saturday morning, the long corridors were emp
ty and still. The only sounds came from a few clanks of an odd typewriter and the giggle of a secretary making a personal call.

  A few minutes later Károly and one of the other guards spilled out the main entrance, gasping in the morning air like a pair of desperate fugitives. Two joggers heading toward the Danube sneered at them. Then, from behind a city bus, the third guard came careening around the corner with a message suited for an urgent telegraph or Károly Benk’s gravestone: There was a rope! Dangling from the window! Of Blinky Béla’s office!

  Wooden clubs drawn, Károly and his men raced back inside and up three flights of stairs to room 309. The door to Béla’s office was jammed shut. Károly kicked it in.

  The office was empty. The computer and fax machine were on the floor. The seat cushion from the armchair was sticking up from the chair’s base. The green grating on the window had been pulled out of the wall, and a thin rope of pink, red, and blue bedsheets—the same ones Attila used in his cell—was affixed to the steel radiator and led out the open window. He was gone.

  Károly had no choice but to call HQ. He picked up the phone on the desk, but there was no dial tone or, now that he looked, any cord attached to the unit. Like the wires from the fax machine and the computer, the phone cord had been reappropriated as the last several yards of the escape rope, the end of which dangled a mystifying seventeen feet above the sidewalk outside.