by Aaron Elkins
"But you do know more?"
"I can guess more, but it would be too dangerous to talk about it. These men are killers, don't you know that? It's freezing, I'm going to turn around and go home now. I'm starting to think it was a mistake to talk to you at all."
I put my hand on his arm to stop him. "Yuri, don't say that. You know I'd never do anything to put your life in danger."
He looked startled. "My life? Who's talking about my life? I'm talking about your life. Ben, listen to me. Don't pursue this. There are things it would be very bad for you to know. You don't know what you're up against."
At least, that's what I thought he was saying, or trying to say. Now that I think about it, how would I know for sure?
Chapter 21
The Hungarian language is not related to any of the Romance languages, or to the Germanic, the Slavic, the Italic, or any other member of the Indo-European language family. It is (so Alois Feuchtmüller had told me), a member of the Uralic family, subfamily Finno-Ugric, branch Ugric, formal denomination Magyar. Its closest—almost its only—relatives are Ostyak and Vogul, which are still spoken in a few parts of Siberia. As a result, Hungarians have only each other to talk to. Save for the occasional visiting scholar of Finno-Ugric, foreigners who arrive in Budapest can rarely speak more than a few phrases of phrase-book Hungarian. By the same token, Hungarian vacationers who want to be understood on their foreign travels are pretty much limited to the general vicinity of Irkutsk.
It's Alois's theory that this has made them grumpy in their dealings with visitors, over and above the expectable general grumpiness of Eastern Europeans only now emerging from a grim and repressive political system.
Maybe, maybe not, but it was certainly true that the ones I ran into, from the moment I arrived at Budapest's Ferihegy Airport, were a dour bunch. The customs and passport-control people, the taxi-driver who drove me to the hotel, the English-speaking hotel receptionist—all were impatient and unhelpful, and the first two, in their plain gray woolen uniforms, had been subtly, sullenly threatening, so that by the time I got to my second-floor hotel room a little before midnight, I was feeling edgy and paranoid, over and above my usual first-night-in-a-foreign-country jitters.
The Hotel Duna wasn't doing anything for my mood either. The minute I walked into the place I knew that I was in one of the old State Tourist Authority hotels of the Eastern bloc—I'd been in them before, in Prague and East Berlin—now probably privatized but otherwise unchanged in atmosphere and appearance. If you've ever been in one of these places, you know what I mean. The building itself was typical Breznev-era style (otherwise fondly known as Neo-Brutal), a drab, cubical hulk with a façade of cement-colored cement. The lobby areas were shabby and neglected, with linoleumed floors that smelled of disinfectant, and packed—even at midnight—with frazzled-looking tour groups huddled in clumps, waiting for—well, I'm not sure what they were waiting for. The night staff was overbearing, disgruntled, and pointedly slow. And the air was full of sinister, unanswered mysteries: Who was the bald man in the black suit who leaned against the counter sucking on a toothpick and writing something in a notebook every time anybody got on the elevator? What were the cashier and the security guard sniping at each other about under their breath? Why was the chambermaid crying behind the laundry cart?
My room had two narrow, low-to-the-floor beds, a round table with no ashtray but many cigarette burns (could these facts be related?), and an unobstructed view of acres of railroad yards with standing freight trains, open box cars, and rows of tracks, all illuminated by lurid, purple-white lights that cast hard shadows and made the place look like an embarkation point for Buchenwald. All it needed were a few patrolling Wehrmacht guards with slavering Dobermans straining at the leash.
In all, it wasn't a view that recommended itself to me, so I called down to see if I could upgrade to a room in the front, looking out on the cobblestoned streets and handsome houses of Castle Hill. The reply was a single contemptuous word: "Impossible." I heard the clerk laughing to himself as he hung up the telephone.
I hung up too, then drank a glass of bottled water in the bathroom, scowling at the multi-language "welcome" sign pasted to the door.
WELCOME IN BUDAPEST
We hope you have a pleasant stay of enjoyment in Hotel. Here are some "tips" to mach your stay more enjoyable.
- You should carefully check restaurant bill. Mistakes are often being made.
- It is adwisable to carry only small amount of money in wallet or purse, with most money elsewhere in case of robbery.
- Due to bad experiences, best to carefully lock door of room always. Hotel Duna cannot be responsible otherwise.
- You should check hotel bill carefully before leaving premises. Refunds and complaints can not be possible.
ENJOY YOUR WISIT HOTEL DUNA!
Next time, I said to myself, next time I'd let Stetten pick my hotels for me.
* * *
In the morning, the people-be-damned approach so charmingly reminiscent of the old Evil Empire continued. At the door of a corridor leading to the breakfast room, a formidable woman who was checking names off on a list stopped me and held out her hand. "Card, please."
"I'm sorry?"
"You have buffet card?"
"I don't know about any card," I said. "I'm a guest here."
"What group you are with?"
"I'm not with a group."
"You are not with a group?" She sounded stunned, as if this were the first time such a thing had happened in the history of the Hotel Duna, which it may well have been.
By this time twelve or fifteen people, all wearing tour-group cards, had piled up in an impatient line behind me, and the woman with the checklist decided it might be best to let me by, even if I wasn't with a group, and in I went to breakfast.
You know that scene in prison movies where the inmates all start yelling and banging their forks on their plates at the same time? Well, that's what the noise that came bouncing off the walls at me sounded like, and the scene itself was almost as riotous. There were some big tables in the center, and around them were mobs—"groups"—of people, three and four deep, all wearing tour-group cards, struggling to get at the food and shouting warnings or encouragement to their compatriots in a Babel of broad-voweled East European languages, plus Japanese, German, and (I think) Finnish. Every now and then somebody would fight his way back out of the crowd, ducking out from underneath the tangle of arms and triumphantly clutching in both hands an impossibly loaded plate that was practically a buffet table unto itself.
I was thankful Stetten wasn't with me. With his attitude toward buffets, he would have had a heart attack on the spot. Personally, I'm a buffet fan myself, but this was too much even for me. I managed to spot a little-used dessert table off to one side and went to it to get myself a shot of coffee and a prune pastry that I took out to the lobby and ate there under the disapproving stare of the woman with the check-sheet, who looked at the toothpick-sucking guy near the elevator with a meaningful lift of her eyebrows and tilt of her chin: You see? I knew there was something wrong with this one.
The prune pastry wasn't half-bad, though, and I went back for another. But I didn't have the nerve to eat it under that stony glare, so I took it with me to munch on while I went out to beard Attila Miklós Szarvas, better known, according to Christie, as Attila the Hun, and for good reason.
Szarvas had owned his gallery—it had the frighteningly unpronounceable name of Mügyüjtök Aukcióház—for more than fifty years, and no one knew how old he was, although it was documented that he'd been arrested in Italy as far back as 1926 for exporting stolen art, and in Brussels in 1929 for trying to peddle fake Michelangelo diaries. That meant he was a nonagenarian for sure, and for at least seventy of his ninety-some years he had been an art dealer of less than stainless repute. During the Second World War he had willingly and profitably assisted the Nazi authorities (Hungary, like Austria, had signed up as a German ally early on) in their syste
matic looting of private and institutional art, and in the Soviet occupation he had just as readily (but probably not as profitably) worked with the Russians. Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc he had been engaged in one dubious transaction after another, sometimes getting himself fined, once or twice being jailed for a while, but almost always coming out of them richer than he'd been when he went in.
In the last few years he'd made a semi-profession of filing claims for works of art that he said had been taken during the war, either from him or from the families of clients that he was now representing. He'd been a
principal in at least two dozen civil suits, in four countries, won at least five of them outright, and had squeezed a rewarding financial settlement out of another ten. And now it looked as if he'd trained his sights on
Stetten's Velazquez.
Not a man to be taken lightly, Attila the Hun.
* * *
The Mügyüjtök Aukcióház (Christie thought it might mean Collector's Auction House) was, as promised, three blocks from the Duna, on Krisztina körut, a commercial, middle-class street of small shops, some of which had signs in the new pan-European language that is nowadays equally likely to be found in Moscow, Dubrovnik, London, or Paris—and probably Ulan Bator and Pyongyang, for all I know: 0-24 Mini Mart, Optika Foto, Marboro, Toto Lotto. These were enough to make me feel at least minimally at home among the bewildering array of Hungarian signs: Élelmiszerbolt, Cukrászda, Bortársaság (to judge from the goods in the windows, groceries, pastries, and wines in that order).
Szarvas's gallery, next to the pastry shop and filled with the luscious scent of warm almond paste that came from it, was a warehouselike spread of small bays that was more like an antiques mall than an art gallery, crowded with old dish sets, flamboyant gilded mirrors, and 1930's furniture, as well as the usual assortment of muddy nineteenth-century oil paintings and anonymous marble busts and statuary. The
most expensive item I saw, a bronze table sculpture of a saddle-weary cowboy à la Remington, had a tag on it with a price of 265,000 forints, or about $1,500.
At the rear of the main room was a first-rate Empire desk at which a neatly dressed man with a thin fuzz of orange hair sat alertly, hands folded on the desktop, like the manager of a local bank overseeing his domain.
"Good morning, I'm Benjamin Revere," I told him, hoping that he was the English-speaker I'd talked with on the telephone.
He was, and I was rewarded with the first genuine smile I'd gotten since arriving in Budapest, as well as a flurry of courtesies. Wouldn't I sit down? (No, thank you.) Would I care for some tea or coffee? (No, thank you.) Was I happy with my room at the Duna? (No comment.) Would I like a small glass of Unicum, Hungary's national drink? (No, thank you.) Or perhaps—
I had to interrupt him to get more than three words in. Thank you, no, I told him, but it would be nice if I could speak with Mr. Szarvas.
Alas, Mr. Szarvas, was not on the premises. He had expected me at nine a.m., not at ten (I chalked this up to the everyday vicissitudes of translation). He had waited for me until nine-fifteen and had then left, but if I went to the street market at Ecseri Piac I could speak with him there. I would find him in the leather goods aisle, playing chess.
"But I don't speak Hungarian. How do I communicate?"
"Don't worry, there will be someone."
"Fine, I'll go right now. What directions do I give the taxi? Could you write them down for me?"
"Oh, everybody knows Ecseri Piac," he said, "but don't take a taxi, it will cost you a fortune. Public transportation is not only cheaper but faster. Just walk two blocks to your left, to Deák Ferenc ter and take the Metro Line Number 3—be sure you don’t go toward Újpest-Központ but toward Kóbanya-Kispest, and get off at Határ út. Then take the number 54 bus to Ecseri Piac, only a five-minute ride. That’s all there is to it. Only make sure you don’t take the bus going to Boráros ter. It sounds confusing, but it’s really very simple. And it will cost you only sixty forints."
I thanked him profusely for his help, left the shop, and immediately got into a taxi.
Well, wouldn't you?
* * *
Ecseri Piac, on the outskirts of the city, was a vast, crowded enclave of patched asphalt pavement with four long metal sheds running side-by-side down the center. The hundred-yard-long spaces between the sheds were roofed with grimy Plexiglass, forming covered aisles filled with tables and stalls selling everything from framed, hand-tinted photographs of Lenin and Stalin, to old automobile engines and carburetors piled willy-nilly in rusting heaps, to cuckoo clocks, to delicate porcelain figurines running the gamut from Jesus Christ to naked ladies. There were tables with forty pairs of bright new shoes, each with a printed price tag, as in a real shop, while a few yards away someone else was trying to sell a single pathetic pair of worn overshoes and an old purse.
The sellers ranged from elderly, snuff-taking Mustache Petes who sat at folding tables with collections of war medals or old coins, to snazzy, miniskirted bleached blondes overseeing racks of gleaming belts and trendy boots. Away from the sheds, along the market's perimeter, were shadier-looking operators, men selling rings, or watches, or icons, or jewelry from the hoods of cars or even out of their pockets. Some simply stood there looking stealthy, with no goods at all on display, but obviously conducting some kind of unwholesome business. If there were any police around, I didn't see them.
Adding to the general hubbub, there was a carnival going at the far end of the sheds, with rides, and shooting galleries, and games of chance.
Finding Szarvas was easy. As the man in the gallery had said, one of the aisles was devoted to leather goods, mostly new, mostly bomber jackets like the one I'd almost succumbed to in St. Petersburg, and soft, thigh-length, belted coats. At a folding table set in a nook at one side of this fragrant aisle, wedged in among racks of buttery-looking, cocoa-colored coats, sat an old man with a red flower in the button hole of his gray blazer, a colossal sapphire ring on one pinky, and a face amazingly like that of Ramses II—the mummy of Ramses II, I mean, after he'd been dead about 3,000 years—hollow-cheeked, parchment-skinned, and beak-nosed. He was playing chess with a much younger man while a dozen other people, all male, stood around the table watching.
As I came up I saw that one of the men beside the table seemed different from the others, standing humbly with his baseball cap in his hands and nervously, expectantly, watching Szarvas. Szarvas, meanwhile, appeared to pay no attention to him, pondering his move, scratching his liver-spotted scalp and stroking a clean-shaven chin. Shaking his head, he shifted his knight, then said a few quick words without looking up from the chess board.
The waiting man looked stricken. He opened his mouth to protest, but a brusque word or warning from one of the others instantly stopped him. Still clutching his cap he backed off a step and slunk away down the aisle, between the coat racks. Someone else stepped forward into his place and began to speak in a soft voice, sounding like a man going to his execution.
At that point I realized there were two distinct groups around the table. One of them was composed of men like the one who had just left—humble, imploring, respectful, and standing in a ragged line. Those who had caps or hats held them in their hands against their chests. Those who didn't have caps looked as if they'd have been holding them if they'd had them. The other sub-group was made up of dangerous-looking men in their twenties or thirties, in soft, expensive leather jackets like the ones on the racks. They all seemed to come from the same mold: handsome, square-jawed, lizardy, with long, carefully combed black hair and mostly with gleaming black sunglasses. They looked like the male models you see sketched in the newspapers leaning casually against motorcycles, modeling the very sort of jackets they had on.
Whatever passed for a mafia in Budapest, I knew I was seeing it in action: the padrone holding court at his chess table, the supplicants coming to beg favors or forgiveness, the vigilant ring of lounging bodyguards. Szarvas moved another piece, a pawn this time,
and muttered a few more words. This time they were favorable, because the man who had approached him looked as if he was going to faint with relief, but the moment a flood of grateful words began to pour from his mouth Szarvas dismissed him with a negligent wave of his hand and the man immediately shut up, bobbed his head—I thought for a moment that he was going to drop to his knees and kiss the old man's ring—and left.
Before the next person in line could shuffle into his place I stepped forward. "Mr. Szarvas—"
One of the lizardy guys mumbled something—probably the Finno-Ugric version of "hey"—and stepped into my path, his fingertips against my collarbone, his eyes inviting me to do something stupid.
I held my hands up, shoulder-height, to keep him off. "Look, I'm just trying—"
He shoved with both hands, sending me back a few steps. "Now look—" I said with as much dignity as I could.
Whatever would have come next was interrupted by a couple of clipped syllables from Szarvas: "Tibor!"
Tibor moved aside a little, but remained, as they say, in my face. Szarvas made a quick, graceful gesture at me with his pale, tapering fingers, like a conductor encouraging his chorus: go ahead, sing.
"Is there anyone here who speaks English?"
No response. I put my hand to my chest and addressed Szarvas. "Benjamin Revere."
Nothing.
"America."
Nothing but simple curiosity all around. I was a variant in the afternoon's entertainment, no more. "Telephone," I tried, miming. "From Vienna? Painting? Portrait? Porträt?"
The guys in the leather jackets were starting to lose interest, The one barring my way looked devotedly back at Szarvas, like a puppy-dog who couldn't wait to please. Would you like me to beat the shit out of this guy for you? Would you like me to kill him for you, huh?