Seven

UTE Stadium

Budapest

May 1991

The apple red Opel Astra careened into the lot with a squeal. It slowed, then turned out again, making a tight loop around the parking area before pulling up next to the hollowed-out cement block that served as the stadium snack bar. A group of players—Bubu, Pék, Gábor Lantos, and some others—were enjoying a pre-practice feast of zsíroskenyér, or bread with fat, fifty forints, or three cents a slice, from the girl at the counter.

The Opel didn’t look familiar, but the driver, the players soon noted with incredulity, did.

“Hello, boys,” Attila said with a wide grin as he climbed out of the driver’s seat. “Don’t we have a practice to go to?”

There were a number of responses such a comment could have elicited. The one that surfaced came in the form of a question.

“What did you do, knock off a bank, Panther?” Bubu asked. Given that beneath Attila’s sweats was most likely someone else’s underwear, it didn’t seem an unreasonable query. But by 1991, Budapest had become a place where the fortunes of even a disgraced Zamboni driver could change overnight. The privatization process—by which everything from factories to hotels was dealt away to the best-bankrolled or most-connected bidder—was making multimillionaires of former apparatchiks. Minting was also available to anyone who had the sagacity to recognize a demand without a supply—be it for bananas, girls, leather, heroin, twentieth-century furniture and electronics, or maybe even Transylvanian animal pelts.

The massive influx of Western capital had transformed Hungary into a remarkably fertile business center—as well as a magnificent dreg drain in continental Europe’s big sink. Budapest was full of crooks. Employment opportunities unheard of during the law-and-order days of communism were springing up everywhere, particularly in wholesale merchandising such as drug running, arms dealing, and car swiping. Pimping and prostitution was also a growth sector. And if you could make your cash here, you could launder it at any of the growing number of local banks conveniently unencumbered by any laws regulating the previously nonexistent financial service industry.

Budapest’s reinvigorated underworld and its fast-growing tentacles were soon of enough concern to U.S. interests that each of the top American law enforcement officers made official visits to the Hungarian capital: CIA director William Webster, FBI director William Sessions, U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, and Drug Enforcement Agency director Robert Bonner all sampled the goulash. László Tonhauser, the unfortunate new head of Hungary’s organized crime division, explained to them his untenable predicament. “If I start to take out of circulation a couple of big entrepreneurs who are leaders of criminal gangs, I will be labeled anti-entrepreneurial,” he said.

But ideology crisis was only the beginning of the problems for the Hungarian police. With the government wary of funding a police force previously viewed as the right arm of an oppressive state, the Interior Ministry, responsible for crime-fighting, was forced to subsidize its paltry budget by renting out its employees and sniffer dogs to private security companies. Some police precinct houses in Budapest couldn’t afford to pay for their electricity. There were only a few cars to go around, and none of them were as fast as the ones speeding away from crime scenes.

Rather than stay on for approximately $100 a month, many of the more capable cops left the department for the private sector, leaving a remarkable group of individuals in charge of stemming the country’s unforeseen crime epidemic. The force was a farce. In 1990 alone, more than a thousand of Hungary’s cops were themselves arrested on corruption charges. The rest of the newly hired gang were merely incompetent, overmatched, or miserable.

Lajos Varjú, a twenty-eight-year-old constable working the burgeoning pickpocket beat, would eventually, and somewhat unfairly, become famous for being all three. He was a short, thick, barrel-chested man with a black mustache, bushy eyebrows, and a shock of dark bangs that hung over his high forehead like a just-crashing wave. Though he laughed easily, Lajos was serious about his work and had the unpredictable intensity of someone who might perform an unexpectedly long Cossack dance at a wedding. In reality, he had no such physical abilities, but he was game enough to give anything a try. Why not? He’d grown up on a southern Hungarian horse farm, spent his post-high-school years hauling furniture around a warehouse, and after only a year in uniform was well on his way to becoming the highest-ranking detective in Budapest’s robbery department. He didn’t know how to be a cop, either.

But Lajos had learned a lot in a short time just from observing the scene that unfolded daily in the park beneath the window of his fifth-floor office in Budapest’s downtown police headquarters. If you wanted bagmen who could collect unpaid loans, ferry prostitutes around town, or perform other sundry duties on short notice, you pulled your tinted-window vehicle up to the far side of the park in Erszébet Square, the 24-hour lawbreakers’ mini-mart. This dynamic establishment was staffed primarily by members of the new and bedraggled Csíkszereda mafia, fresh out of Transylvania and seemingly oblivious to the fact that they’d set up shop on the police headquarters’ front lawn. The group constituted one of the most unimpressive collections of small-time gangsters since Don Knotts and Tim Conway formed the Apple Dumpling Gang. Once, Lajos had to chase a guy he’d arrested earlier in the day back through the park, where the man was laboring to get away while still handcuffed to a metal bench he’d dragged out of the station house. Another arrestee was found by one of Lajos’s colleagues suspended Spiderman-style inside the police building’s heating ducts. The Erszébet Park gang was so bizarre that Lajos began calling the place Planet of the Zorg.

None of it was what Lajos had expected to encounter in law enforcement from watching dubbed Columbo reruns. But if he thought any of it seemed strange, it was only because he had no inkling just how absurd a career in Hungarian law enforcement could get.

The 850-mile pelt-smuggling route from eastern Transylvania to the Tyrolean mountains of Austria was fraught with potholed roads and corkscrew turns that would make even a donkey nauseous. Dominated by stretches of unlit two-lane streets clinging to cliff overhangs and dotted with the occasional Gypsy selling pumpkins or, not infrequently, themselves, the pelt smugglers’ thruway was not to be confused with the autobahn. It was twenty-two hours of hell, done, in Attila’s case, in one uninterrupted charge, alone, without music, and with the thick stench of rotting flesh emanating from the trunk.

Immediately upon returning from the ski trip to Hansi’s lodge, Attila had begun plotting such a trip home to Transylvania to find pelts. For starters, he needed a visa. He also would require a car.

He had cobbled together enough money from his odd jobs and by borrowing from teammates to purchase a ten-year-old brown Russian Lada Samara for 100,000 forints ($1,400) from George Pék’s father, who ran the garage at the Interior Ministry. It would be arranged so that someone would forget to remove the Interior Ministry license plates from the vehicle, giving Attila a premium insurance policy against being pulled over by kickback-hunting traffic cops. Lesser strategists might also have recommended he learn to drive. But when the Romanian consulate’s approval for Attila’s travel visa came through, our man opted to set off for points east before someone levied another processing fee. He figured he would learn to drive as he went.

The 450-mile ride to Csíkszereda took Attila ten hours, but not because he kept stalling at the traffic lights in Budapest. The big holdup was the line of horse carts moving like low-budget parade floats through the snowy mountain passes. When Attila finally got to his aunt and uncle’s apartment, they were so overjoyed he’d returned that they let him gobble down his food standing up without bothering him with any questions. At his request, they hadn’t told his father he was coming.

Csíkszereda didn’t seem to Attila particularly different without Ceauescu. There were no Securitate marching around, of course, but the place looked as gloomy as ever. Romania’s economy was so bad that people were using their bank notes, or lei, as toilet paper, which they could no longer afford to buy. Just three streets away, Attila’s father sat jobless and alone over an empty pálinka bottle in his dark third-floor apartment, indifferent that the room’s only lightbulb had gone out hours earlier. Food was scarce and still strictly rationed. Attila’s uncle—who was making an unlivable pittance operating a crane at construction sites—put victuals on the table thanks to handouts from farmer friends. Needless to say, Uncle László had an interest in helping his nephew get his smuggling career off the ground. It was one of his contacts who sent them, on a snow-dusted January day, north over the hills to Csángóföld, in search of “Uncle Béla,” the pelt king.

Split by roaring rivers and shaped by jagged cliffs on one side and rolling fields on another, Csángóföld is the Transylvania of Transylvania. It is so remote and untouched that livestock rule the roads and avuncular pelt monarchs can take hours even for locals to find. As Attila and László rode through the winding boulder-strewn byways and past the creekside wooden shack villages, they spun off down auxiliary routes to avoid pig and sheep flocks and passed carriages full of peasants whose language they could barely understand.

The misturns and misunderstandings were to be expected. Much of Transylvania was so snow-saddled and inaccessible that over the centuries it had become, and has remained, something of a real-life Oz populated by little-known tribes: Saxons speaking German, Germans speaking Schwab, Gypsies speaking Roman (not to be confused with Romanian), Székelys speaking an ancient form of Hungarian, and Csángós speaking their own Hungarian-Romanian blend. To the rest of the world, they may as well have been vampires.

Attila and László had at least one thing in common with Béla the Csángó pelt king. They were each from one of the two primary tribes of Hungarians still living in Transylvania: Béla’s Csángós, and the Székelys, from whom Attila and László descended. The similarities between the two groups, however, end there.

The Székelys are the only tribe of Hungarians that traces its lineage all the way back to Attila the Hun, who conquered the Carpathian basin nearly five hundred years before Árpád’s ninth-century arrival. As the oldest known ancestors of the Hungarian people, the Székelys feel they played a special role in the country’s history that is too often over-looked. Imagine a Scotsman who is always carping about the unattributed inventions and contributions of his people (the kaleidoscope, the bicycle, the decimal point, the television… ). Multiply the Scot by a factor of ten and feed him fifteen pálinkas at a bar in Tomorrowland. That’s a Hungarian (the Rubik’s cube, 1956, nuclear fission, the carburetor, the croissant… ). Now consider that the Székelys are “the most Hungarian of Hungarians,” or a Hungarian squared. And it started with a tough from the fifth century named Attila, who achieved such renown that generations of Hungarian parents named their children after him and generations of English-speaking people incorrectly assumed that the Hungarian people are called the Hungarians after him. (Hungarian is actually derived from the Turkish word onogur, meaning ten tribes, close enough to the seven that Chief Árpád united to form Hungary; the Hungarians call themselves Magyars, or, in English, Men.) Even though Attila the Hun died a rather unglamorous death at forty-seven by nosebleed, his fearless warrior reputation was passed on to the Székelys and led to their all-important assignment by future Hungarian kings as the country’s border guards. In exchange for the Székelys’ courageous (and not altogether successful) service over several centuries of war, the Székely tribe was accorded special rights, such as tax exemption and, not infrequently, early and gruesome death.

Battle losses in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries to the Mongolian Tatars and the Ottoman Turks nearly led to the extermination of the Székely nation, as the tribe was known. Then in 1764 the Hapsburgs swept through Transylvania, killing thousands of Székelys in a bloody nighttime attack. The remaining Székelys dispersed throughout the Carpathian basin, founding towns with such imposing names as God Help Us and God Receive Us. Along with folk music and woodcrafts, the fabled warrior tribe soon developed a line of memorable tombstone epitaphs, including “I’d rather be dead and lying down here than alive like you standing up there.”

After Transylvania was turned over to Romania in 1920, a movement for Hungarian repatriation reignited Székely pride. A Székely national anthem was written, and the entire eastern part of Transylvania, including Csíkszereda, became and is still known as Székelyföld, or Székelyland. But the Székelys found they could only watch from the intricately carved woodwork as Romanian history books were rewritten to show that the Székelys were descendants not of Attila the Hun but of the early Romanians who had lived in the area in the second century, a view that supported Romania’s claim to Transylvania. A pleading 1940 essay “The Székleys Are Magyars” is a mere hint at the tribe’s desperation for recognition and Attila Ambrus’s heartache at being called a Romanian even in Hungary.

The Csángós, on the other hand, had done everything in their power to remain hidden from the rest of the world. Few people, including the Csángós themselves, are positive of anything regarding their history, but the prevailing local wisdom is that they were originally Székelys who split from the tribe in the thirteenth century because of their unwillingness to fight against the Tatar invasion. Instead, they wandered away—or csatangol-ed—into the hills and forests beyond Székelyföld, where most of them now live in what has become known as Csángóföld.

After sliding through snow and dung for hours and inquiring discreetly in their best Székely-inflected Hungarian Csángó dialect at places like the Vadász (Hunter) Bar, Attila and László arrived at last to the base of a large hill in the middle of Nowhere, Nowhere. A small wooden house stood on the side of the road, in front of which was a tall, lithe man doing nothing. Attila and László got out of the car and cautiously approached.

“Are you Béla?” László asked.

“No,” Béla said.

“But we were told you were Béla,” Attila said.

“No,” Béla said.

“Do you know Béla?” László said.

“No,” Béla said.

“But you look like Béla,” Attila said.

“No,” Béla said.

“How would you know, if you don’t know him?” Attila said.

“I said I don’t know him,” Béla said.

“We know,” László said. “But how do you know what he looks like, then?”

“I don’t,” Béla said.

“Right, you already said that,” Attila said.

“I did not,” Béla said.

An ice-chilled wind was sucking away the day’s last light. Attila turned the conversation to the pan-Transylvania-accepted topic of pálinka, a sip of which he sorely needed. As chance would have it, the Csángó in question was carrying a flaskful in his jacket pocket. They drank as darkness began threatening and the last of the day’s hay-filled horse carts jerked over the bridge.

“Hello, Béla,” two men yelled from the road.

After a minute, Béla looked at his Székely visitors. “What do you want?” he said.

“Szrme.” Pelts.

Béla said nothing. He had recently returned from a freezing overnight excursion to his special spot in the woods. There, his regular three “chasers” had performed well, scaring an ark full of animals into the clearing over which Béla presided, rifle-sighted and ready, in a wooden fort built forty feet up a lone tree. Of course, it was illegal. But he was a damn good shot.

Béla turned and started walking toward the steep snow-covered hill, past the small house, through a fence, over the blackening field, and toward a red barn Attila and László hadn’t noticed behind a shroud of spidery bare weeping ash. They followed.

Béla threw the latch, sucked in a chestful of air, and pushed open the gate. Almost half a century in the business, and he still wasn’t used to the smell. Up and down both sides of the cavernous barn, hanging by their haunches on metal hooks, were about a dozen bears, wild boars, deer, rams, and badgers. It was like being backstage at The Lion King.

The size of the car was estimated, the price was negotiated, the handshakes were delivered, and one bearskin complete with head was salted and stuffed beneath some blankets into the Lada’s little trunk.

A few months later Attila showed up at Uncle Béla’s again, this time driving the UTE hockey van so that he could transport up to ten pelts, if Béla had them available. Attila bought bears for between 10,000 and 20,000 forints ($145 to $290), rams and boars for about 5,000 ($70), and deer for 3,500 ($50). He then turned around and sold them to Hansi in Austria at a 300 percent markup. Sometimes a single trip’s profit, minus expenses, could be up to $1,600.

The drive was a haul, but Attila quickly discovered that delivering animal pelts across three borders had much more cachet than cleaning ice hockey rinks and digging graves. Except for the door-to-door Parker pen and paper sales, which he continued only occasionally and on his own schedule, Attila gave up his other jobs. He was around more for Judit, and he could afford to take her out to concerts (Rod Stewart: she loved it, he hated it) and shows (Hair: he loved, she hated). Attila didn’t hide from her that he was an animal-pelt smuggler; he was proud to be part of the global economy. He was feeling happy and, finally, at home in Budapest, a once-dreary city that was exploding in Technicolor. Patches of the Danube riverbank were dressed and undressed in scaffolding as teams of authentic painters methodically converted the exhaust-stained apartment carcasses into desirable addresses decked in yellows, pinks, and blues. Big black Mercedes sedans and red Pontiac Firebirds cruised the serpentine streets, making the compact Zhigulis and Trabants look like an uncared-for set of collectible Matchbox cars. The old communist street names were X-ed out with red paint and new names placarded to the corners of the city’s buildings. The former East German cultural center reopened as a Porsche dealership.

Money, once such a shameful symbol of Communist Party loyalty that it was enthusiastically renounced, now required flaunting in order to make the same important point: that obviously it was meaningless to you. The best way to illustrate this in Budapest circa the early 1990s was by pushing a stack of chips across a table at one of the sparkling new casinos, eleven of which opened to great fanfare in Budapest between 1991 and 1993. The grandeur of these wildly popular gambling halls, replete with marble colonnades and reflecting pools, was fit for ancient Rome, or at least modern Reno. One of the best-attended casinos, suitably named the Las Vegas, was opened by Sylvester Stallone and the Hungarian-born Hollywood film producer Andy Vajna (the Rambo movies, Terminator 3, I Spy) in the basement of the Hyatt hotel just off the Danube River. Over a three-month period in 1992, the Hungarian newspapers reported, the Las Vegas contributed more tax money to the Hungarian government than the entire metallurgy industry had in about a decade.

There were three types who frequented the casinos: foreigners (particularly the Americans, Western Europeans, and Chinese, all of whom were snapping up an inordinate percentage of Hungary’s resources at bargain-basement prices); the nouveau riche Hungarian politicos and businessmen (who were well connected enough to steer whatever wealth was left in their direction); and the immaculately groomed gangsters, many of them Russians (who had more elaborate methods of making money and who moved from table to table like a buffalo herd under the protection of armed shepherds in sunglasses).

Attila, who was flush with pelt money, also became a casino regular, though he was hard to pigeonhole. The tuxedo-topped-and-lingerie-bottomed waitresses came to know him as UTE’s Panther, who wore silk Italian suits and copious amounts of aftershave, liked his Johnnie Walker straight up, and always sat alone. Of course, they weren’t fools. Anyone who could waste an evening pissing away a few hundred thousand forints (about $4,000) at the roulette table clearly couldn’t be making a living as a professional athlete. But it didn’t matter. All that was required to be accepted into this exclusive club was money—and Attila had it.

As UTE’s 1991–92 season rolled around, it was becoming harder to ignore the grim realities of the Hungarian hockey league. This was partly because the NHL was now available on cable television in Hungary, and watching it for up to four seconds was enough to generate an epiphany that the Hungarian league was penniless, bereft of sponsors, devoid of all but a few quality players, and required fans to freeze their asses off outside on a metal bench in order to see live. If there was a bottom of the barrel, Hungarian hockey seemed to be occupying it.

Not surprisingly, the Three Vodka-Swilling Musketeers had staggered back to Moscow after helping carry UTE to a respectable but disappointing third-place finish the previous season. Even without them, however, the team was showing some promise, at least on the nights the schedule was accurate in its suggestion that a game would in fact take place. Advance ticket purchases were not advised. One contest was called off when the UTE Zamboni broke down and an attempt to tie towels to the back of a Trabant and drive it around the rink proved unsuccessful. Another game ended seven minutes into the second period when the lights at the UTE stadium went out. But the problems weren’t only at UTE. A club out in the eastern Hungarian plains town of Jászberény had lucked into a sponsorship from the Swedish refrigerator company Electrolux (which had bought up the local factory) but announced midway through the season that it could no longer afford to cool its ice to playing temperature.

For the first time, team road trips on the red Ikarus buses with the vertical double-set headlights were more than just a cheap way for the players to loosen their teeth. They could also have their spirits destroyed simply by gazing out the vehicle’s barely transparent windows at the omnipresent IKEA billboards along the road. On the left side of the ad was an image of Karl Marx’s book Das Kapital; on the right, a photo of the IKEA catalog. At the bottom it read, “Which one will make your life more beautiful?” The real question was how IKEA expected to do any business when the cost of a couch, $450, was equal to three months of the average Hungarian’s salary.

Theoretically, the UTE players were still being paid, though their weekly cash allotments were now distributed approximately monthly. All of them were hustling at least one other job to support themselves. Taxi driving wasn’t proving to be the easiest buck; one debt-burdened cabbie some of the UTE guys knew drove to the front of Parliament, doused himself with gasoline, and burned himself to death. George Pék, the UTE captain, stuck with trying to make his 24-hour mini-mart profitable. Bubu found employment that occasionally obliged him to field phone calls at the stadium and sprint from practice yelling, “I have to take care of something quickly!” No one had time for card games after workouts anymore. Only Attila, who hung around in the UTE cafeteria, seemed to have any free time, pumping coins into the complex’s new toy, a slot machine. “Watch this,” he’d say as the guys passed through. “I won on the last one.”

The players found Attila’s bit about smuggling animal pelts amusing, but they didn’t believe he could make any real money trading in dead animals. Most likely, Attila’s teammates figured, the Chicky Panther had found a stable second career running guns or drugs like the others with flashy cars and name recognition at the casinos. It was a real party at the gambling halls to hear Attila tell it—free drinks, loose women—but in truth Attila could go whole nights there without speaking to a single person but the croupier. Judit didn’t like to go, and sometimes when Attila returned home after a long night, pockets empty, he couldn’t remember why he did.

Even though the shiny new Opel Attila drove made it clear that he was now in a higher income bracket than most of his teammates, Attila went out of his way to make sure they didn’t begrudge him his new-found status. There was nothing more important to him than his UTE team, and to prove it, he began inciting his teammates to question his loyalty. What did they want him to do? Run ten laps? He’d run twenty. Buy drinks? Everyone in shouting distance of the bar had a round coming. A thousand leg-sits? Start counting. (Of course, after completing the last challenge, he had to take a few days off from practice, since he was too sore to stand.)

Attila’s archmaniac on the squad was, perhaps unsurprisingly, his attention-starved Székely companion, Bubu. (Karcsi was now married and, though he continued to be among the league leaders in scoring, was generally considered too lazy to chew gum.) Attila and Bubu had a number of ludicrous, vomit-inducing physical duels, such as distance canoe racing during the UTE summer training camps at the Interior Ministry’s Lake Balaton compound. But the two most famous contests between the Székelys took place in the fall of 1992 at the Atlantis pool hall, a dingy red-carpeted dive on an industrial boulevard lined with gas stations and fast-food restaurants. Both matches were well publicized around the hockey grounds by way of diatribes, epithets, and profanity-laced proclamations of billiard supremacy from the contestants. Standard eight ball was the game.

The first match (billed as a three-of-five, but ultimately amended to the strict Transylvanian-style fourteen-of-twenty-seven) was won by Attila. As soon as the final ball dropped, the small crowd pushed forward to watch Bubu begin serving out his impossible wager, a thousand push-ups. He was well into the four hundreds by some reports when his body froze like a crossing guard mannequin and he crashed to the floor on his side. By the time the ambulance arrived, Bubu’s rigor mortis–like symptoms had worsened and he exited the Atlantis on a paramedic stretcher, arms extended toward the ceiling, screaming, “Please, quickly, I think I’m having a heart attack!”

As is often the case with billiards injuries, it was only a muscle tear. It was also great publicity for the rematch, which began a few weeks later after the Friday-morning practice session. Attila had also been to the hospital twice in the interim (sprained knee, chipped clavicle), so it was decided that the grudge match would be a gentleman’s game: the wager was cash, which heightened the pressure on Bubu, since his life savings fit snugly into his left shoe.

The match would go on for three straight days. Attila kept the owner’s palm full of thick tips to see to it that the Atlantis remained open through the night. The competitors ventured out of the hall’s confines only for fresh air and slept on tables in separate corners of the building for a couple of hours each night. Both mornings Bubu was awakened by a pool stick to the gut.

“Is it true you’ve surrendered?”—Attila.

“Not likely.”—Bubu.

By dinnertime on Sunday, Attila had polished off a few gallons of whiskey and purchased seven pool cues from the owner, the remnants of six of which were splintered and scattered around the hall. He was down 600,000 forints ($7,500), his TV, VCR, and stereo. “Double or nothing,” he said.

Double was agreed to mean Attila’s Opel, which had been illegally parked in front of the Atlantis’s entrance for the past fifty-six hours. Some of the witnesses, who had been in and out all weekend, were summoned back for the final game. Girls were prohibited, Attila declared, to no objection from Judit, who had gotten bored and left after the first day of competition. (It was Bubu’s girlfriend Attila found objectionable, whispering hexes on him each time he lined up a shot.)

Attila wouldn’t even get to take a shot in the final game, however. Bubu ended it with one thunderous break, in which he either heroically sunk the eight ball, winning in extraordinary fashion, or tragically sunk not only the eight ball but also the cue ball, losing in extraordinary fashion. Both he and Attila simultaneously raised their arms in triumph as if they’d just picked a lock safeguarding a tunnel of meats, and began to sing the Székely anthem. (“Our ancestors crumble to dust through these wars of nations, as cliffs on rough seas. / The flood is upon us, oh, overwhelming us a hundredfold; Lord, don’t let us lose Transylvania!”)

After order was restored, the de facto judges at the Atlantis declared that the cue ball, which had dropped into a side pocket on Bubu’s break, had done so because of a tap from Attila’s hand. Though Attila would forever dispute the decision, Bubu was declared the victor. Graciously, he let Attila keep his Opel, but he waltzed out of the basement apartment on Villányi Street with the super’s television, stereo system, VCR, and an IOU for a fistful of cash Attila didn’t have.

Finding himself suddenly without financial prospects wasn’t Attila’s only problem. His glamorous high-flying life was a mirage. He was living from pelt delivery to pelt delivery, dead broke by the time of his bimonthly excursions to Csángóföld. Béla’s prices were rising, and so were the costs of gas, Uncle László, Romanian prostitutes, Hungarian prostitutes, Hansi’s prostitutes, Judit’s pop concert tickets, and, worst of all, bribes for the border guards. Sometimes when he emptied his pockets at the bar, calling out for another round, he was spending his last forints. He was so self-conscious of the way his car looked that he had it washed every day even if it meant skipping dinner.

Perhaps worst of all, Attila had all but lost the thing that most defined him: his unpaid day job as UTE’s backup goalie. UTE’s hockey season had been going well enough that General Bereczky had decided he was going to do everything in his power to ensure that the team reclaimed the Hungarian championship. So, a call had been placed to Sergei “the Champ” Milnikov, the legendary anchor of the Soviet Union’s 1988 Olympic gold medal–winning team, who agreed to fly in from Moscow in January to be UTE’s starting goalie for the remainder of the season. Since so many foreign players had been imported into Hungary over the past few years, the league had instituted a team limit of three. No one had to tell Attila what that meant. Bubu, Karcsi, and the Champ would get to play in all the games. Attila, as long as his official papers listed him as a “temporary resident,” would once again be relegated to practice goalie/cheerleader in just a few short weeks.

The outlook wasn’t promising. But as Attila chewed over his hockey and pelt-smuggling tribulations, he realized there was one remedy that could cure both problems: citizenship. The real obstacle preventing him from profiting in his pelt business was the Romanian border guards. They kept jacking up their prices for safe passage—and given that on the outward-bound leg, he was carrying illegal goods and not carrying a passport, he had no choice but to empty his wallet. He’d been on the waiting list for citizenship for four years now. He needed a passport, pronto.

Having hung around with people from the Interior Ministry for the past few years, Attila had become a keen observer of the way things were dispensed with in Hungary. Whenever he got a speeding ticket, which was not infrequently, he went to the liquor store, bought two bottles of Finlandia and Jack Daniel’s, and took them to General Bereczky’s office. Bereczky, who at some point had decided he found his madcap goalie charming, always appreciated the possibility of being stutter-step smashed by 10 a.m. So, on Attila’s days in need, he would show up at Bereczky’s office around breakfast time, hand over the bottles with a wink, and wait while Bereczky put down his cigarette and picked up his “K” phone, for közvetlen (direct), which was wired into Interior Ministry headquarters. “In the matter of Attila Ambrus, ticket number [X],” the general would say, “why don’t we just remove that page from the system.” Then Bereczky, whom Attila now called Uncle Pista, would hang up, exclaim, “Okay, there’s no speeding,” and prepare for the toast.

But Uncle Pista didn’t do passports. After searching his memory for someone he could reliably turn to on the delicate topic of citizenship subornment, Attila recalled that he’d given skating lessons about a year earlier to a girl whose father worked at the immigration office. When her dad had come to pick her up, Attila had made a point of introducing himself. Just before the New Year, Attila got the guy’s number and phoned him up with his proposition. What he needed was citizenship papers and a passport, he said. That was a risky proposition, he was told. But for 100,000 forints ($1,300) it might be possible. “Done,” Attila said.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to be done easily. Aside from Bubu, Attila now owed both Pék and Gogolak for loaning him a couple of hundred thousand forints (a few thousand dollars) to get his car keys back from the Las Vegas Casino, which had been holding them as collateral for a miscalculation Attila had made on black 17 at the roulette wheel. Attila was going to have to make one more chancy trip to Béla without a passport. After UTE’s 9–2 loss on Friday, January 15, there was a one-week spell between games during which time Milnikov would arrive in Budapest and Attila would take off for Transylvania. At the Thirsty Camel pub after the game, Attila managed to shake 50,000 forints ($650) out of two more teammates to fund the journey. “You’ll have it back plus ten percent in a week,” Attila promised them, sipping someone else’s drink. And no, they didn’t need a new fountain pen.

On Saturday afternoon Attila went to see the UTE groundskeeper. As per the usual agreement, he handed over 10,000 forints ($130) for the keys to the hockey van—bags, sticks, and helmets included, under which he would hide the pelts. He would leave late that night and have the van back before practice Monday morning.

After squaring away his transportation, Attila jumped back into his Opel, headed to the Margit Bridge, where he crossed into curvy Buda, and drove south toward the volcano-like Gellért Hill, behind which he lived. He was going to pick up Judit in an hour for dinner, then send her home in a taxi, ride back to the stadium for the van, and hit the pelt road. He had 40,000 forints ($520) in his pocket, thirty-eight hours to the next hockey practice, forty-one hours until he could sleep, and less than a week before he would make yet another career change.

For the moment, Attila Ambrus was still a nobody. Soon, he would be a legend.