The Old Street Pub was a basement dive with a small bar and three tables, situated on the corner of Ó Street and Hajós Street, five blocks from the city’s police headquarters at Deák Square. A little past noon on Thursday, July 21, Attila stepped in wearing a pasta-colored double-breasted suit, a short, curly brown wig, and a thick mascara mustache. He carried a hard dark leather briefcase. “Off work early,” he told the pub’s waitress, who took his order for a beer and a whiskey. On her way back with his drinks, the waitress noted that if she’d thought it odd that her only customer was wearing Ray-Bans inside her dark cellar, it was odder still that he was reading a newspaper upside down and had a wig hanging halfway off his head.
On his first of many trips to the bathroom with stomach cramps, Attila ruefully fixed his hair and removed his sunglasses. Halfway through his fourth shot of Johnnie Walker, three uneventful hours later, he plunked down some banknotes and headed for the door, clutching his stomach with one hand and his briefcase in the other. “Halló,” his waitress called after him, meaning “good-bye” in Hungarian. “Szia,” he responded, meaning usually “hello” but also “good-bye” and, since he had mislaid his bearings, a safer choice.
He ambled down the thin, shaded one-way street. The outer part of the sidewalk was lined with parked compact cars whose owners had nowhere else to put them; the inner half was lumped with people trying to squeeze past one another against the paint-chipped buildings. In the road, delivery trucks stopped where they liked; horns blared. Above, the hazy blue sky yawned.
As he walked, Attila felt his blood begin to circulate. He passed the electronics store and then the private security guard company and finally arrived at an arched portico with a big blue cube hanging over the entrance. eurotours, read the sign. HAVE A HOLIDAY ON THE BEACH; LUXURY TRIPS AND AIR TICKETS.
Attila pushed open the brass-framed door and was comforted by the sight of two young women behind a long white counter, as the entry in his robbery playbook had described.
“Yes, hello,” Attila said, putting his briefcase on the counter in front of the cute one. “I’m the marketing director of Malév Airlines.”
“Oh,” the woman said.
“I would like to look into a vacation for my flight attendants,” he said. “They work so hard, and I’d like to reward them.”
He was slurring his words.
“Couldn’t you book this directly through Malév?” the woman asked.
“Maybe to the Canary Islands, somewhere nice.”
“Just a minute,” the woman said, reaching down beneath the counter, “while I get our information on that….” When she looked up again, the Malév marketing director’s feet were on her desk. “Robbery,” Attila said, looking down at her through his Ray-Bans.
He hopped down onto the floor on the other side of the counter. “On the floor,” he said, pointing his gun at the other employee. “Everything will be fine.” He began grabbing the bills from the open counter drawers, when a terrible clanking interrupted his routine. The front door was opening. He had forgotten to hang the closed sign he’d brought with him in his briefcase.
An old woman carrying a basket sauntered in as if she were returning from a picnic. “Hello,” she said, approaching the counter.
Attila thrust his right arm—the one holding the gun—down below counter level and flashed a stare at the women on the floor, quickly floating his left index finger close enough past his mouth to be understood.
“I’m looking for information about trips to Italy,” the old woman said.
“That’s very interesting,” Attila replied, sweating whiskey, “because we have an expert on Italy here. But, unfortunately, she’s just stepped out for lunch. Could you come back in half an hour?”
“Yes, thank you,” the woman said, and she turned and walked out.
Attila had lost nearly a minute and knew he couldn’t count on getting so lucky with another customer. He yanked open the drawer in front of him. There was a key inside it. He held it up to the employee beneath him. “Let’s go,” he said.
She got up and walked slowly to a large wooden bureau in the back of the office. Inside, on the bottom shelf was a small black safe. “Give me the key,” Attila said. Then he asked, “Where’s the bathroom?”
The woman pointed down the hall. Attila waved over the other employee and herded them both into the water closet. Once they were inside, he said, “Now give me the key around your neck,” to the one with a string necklace. She looked surprised. He was drunk but he wasn’t stupid. He knew the key he’d picked out of the drawer, a skeleton, was for the toilet, not the safe. He locked the women inside, then headed back to the money box with the string necklace.
He was close to getting it open when sirens rang out on the street. Attila looked at the floor under the counter and saw what he faced: it was a foot pedal. The place was equipped with a silent alarm system. As if it needed another reason to score a 5. There was only one exit, out onto a busy street that could be sealed by police with, for instance, training. He grabbed his suitcase and bounded back over the counter. Police HQ was only five blocks away, but the sirens didn’t necessarily mean the police were anywhere close. Cars were virtually useless on such a narrow, congested street. If they were going to have any chance against him, they would have to come on foot—and in that scenario, he liked his odds.
He pulled the door open and stepped out onto the front stair. To his right, two cops not twenty feet away were barreling toward him. Before he had time to think, the first one ran past and turned into the shopping atrium next door that bore the same address as the travel agency. The other followed. A third came puffing up behind.
“What’s the problem, Officer?” Attila asked.
“Robbery,” the cop said, hurrying by.
Attila wanted to laugh but he was shaking so badly that he felt as if he’d forgotten how to walk. The police would realize their mistake any second.
He started heading in the opposite direction from where the police had come, brushing by the rubberneckers. As soon as he passed anyone, he tried to weave behind his figure so as to shield himself from view from the other end of the street. But when he got about a quarter of a block from the corner, two police cars screeched up to seal the road. It was the improbable doomsday scenario for which he had no provision.
Just then, on his left, a man came out of an apartment building. Attila lunged around him and caught the door as it closed.
He ran to the stairs and up five flights to the top. There was a small door in the corner of the hall leading up another flight. Attila proceeded up the steep narrow stairs to a low-angled attic, which had a small hatch in the ceiling. He shed his suit jacket and pants and stuffed them, along with his suitcase, behind a pile of storage wood and tiles. Then he pushed open the hatch and pulled himself out onto the building’s sloping black tile mansard roof.
He had stepped into a postcard. The oversize pool-green dome of St. Stephen’s Basilica burst out of the skyline to the west. In the distant north, he could see the Danube River winding its way out of the pollution-ringed city, which, in his immediate vicinity, resembled a multilayered checkerboard of Tuscany red and black roofs. But somewhere below him, the police were scurrying around like blind mice; he could still hear the sirens. At least one of the cops had seen him come out of the plundered travel agency, and at least one other witness—the man who’d eyeballed him as he dove for the apartment building’s door—had seen a similarly dressed man enter the dwelling on which he was now perched. For all he knew, the police were already in the building. His feet slipping on the roof tiles, Attila scrambled toward the closest of several short rectangular brick chimneys. Once there, he wrapped his arms around it and pulled himself upright so that he could shuffle around to the opposite side, where, with some luck, he might remain unseen by a cursory check from the attic hatch.
Day turned to dusk and still Attila clung to the chimney. The muscles in his chest and arms went numb. There were shooting pains in his back. Around ten o’clock the city grew quiet. Then darkness settled in, leaving only a twinkling of lights from the Buda hills to accompany him until morning.
8:00 A.M.
Attila sat amid of a pile of newspapers in the waiting area at the Interior Ministry’s Korvin Hospital. After retrieving his car from a subway station parking lot, he had driven himself to this familiar spot in lieu of attending the morning workout session at UTE since he was having a few problems moving his left shoulder. Considering that two hours earlier he had been plastered to a chimney, where he had been unable to move either arm, or wrist, and had only minimal use of his back, he wasn’t overly concerned. He was already able to turn the pages of seven newspapers like a one-armed blackjack dealer. He’d also managed to count the money in the car. That was the greatest agony. Thanks to the fact that he hadn’t had time to funnel anything from the travel agency’s safe, all he’d gained for his rooftop misadventure was 955,000 forints ($8,900).
“Panther,” said the young bespectacled UTE team doctor, Attila Tóth, appearing in the waiting room doorway. “What is it this time?”
“Tennis elbow,” Attila said. “I can’t move my arm.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Tóth said. “You’re—”
“I know,” Attila interjected, “I’m a kid with balls.”
They went to Tóth’s examination room, and Attila hopped onto the table.
“Out late?” Tóth asked, pulling out his stethoscope as Attila unbuttoned his mangled dress shirt.
“Igen,” Attila said, managing a smile. Yes.
After a few pokes and prods, Tóth put away his equipment and sat down. “You have an inflammation,” he told Attila. He gave Panther a shot in his arm and suggested his patient go home and go to bed, which sounded just fine to Attila, who rebuttoned his shirt, went back to his car, and drove off, swearing never to do a 5 again. As soon as he got home, he was going to take his encyclopedia out of the oven and draw an X through Ó Street, he’d just decided when he noticed that a police car was parked on the street in front of his building. He hit the brakes and skidded to a stop. Your nerves are shot, he thought, trying to calm down. There were any number of reasons the cops could be on his block; there were dozens of buildings and hundreds of apartments. He continued around a corner to the super’s spot in the back. He parked and headed through his building’s back doorway, like always. As soon as he stepped inside, he was standing next to two of his neighbors, who were peering down the half flight of stairs leading to Attila’s basement apartment, where his door stood open. Curiosity pulled him down toward his flat—just as a policeman was coming out.
“Do you live here?” the officer asked.
“Is there a problem?” Attila responded.
Igen, the man said. “There’s been a robbery.”
Attila looked into his apartment. Another cop was standing in his living room. “I’m sorry to say it,” the second cop said as Attila glanced around at the torn-up space, “but they’ve taken everything.” The officer pointed to Attila’s kitchen. “Even the knobs on your oven.”