It was Lajos’s lucky day. Make that his lucky summer. His experience in the furniture warehouse business back home was finally paying dividends. Several times a day he gritted his teeth and arranged and rearranged boxes of unsolved case files as swiftly as if they were duplicate end tables in his feng shuied showroom. He didn’t need them and he was running out of places to put them.
Budapest’s once-sleepy robbery division was deluged with more than a thousand cases from January of 1993 through the summer of 1994. The thieves were so intoxicated by their success that they were robbing each other. As a result, Lajos was working seven days a week, sometimes under duress, sometimes under his desk, and frequently delusional.
He and his men were making plenty of headway, sure. They caught the infamous One Eye, the Cyclops-like gas station robber who knocked off the same filling station seven too many times. And they were hot on the trail of the priest who stormed a money van with an ex–judo champion and made off with more than 50 million forints ($470,000). (The martial artist, found bleeding from a gunshot wound in an apartment hideaway, had divulged to Lajos before dying that his self-righteous accomplice was almost definitely in Romania, Slovakia, Austria, or Ukraine.) As for the Lone Wolf, please. So he’d robbed ten times. Lajos had a handful of cases of guys who took more than the Lone Wolf’s meager 16.3 million forint ($150,000) total with one strike. Plus, the police had already come this close to catching him twice now: at the Nyugati train station last November, and stepping out of the travel agency the previous afternoon. A mere mention of the Lone Wolf in the robbery office would invariably provoke someone to sing out, “Szerencsés csillagzat alatt született,” meaning, of course, that the thief “was born under the star of luck.” And luck, any Hungarian could tell you, never lasted.
Lajos’s good spirits this day were due to two things. He was blissfully ignorant of the fact that earlier that morning two Budapest cops had stood in the Lone Wolf’s living room, consoling him for being a robbery victim. And he was fully and blessedly cognizant that VI District, in which Ó Street and Eurotours International were located, was not under his jurisdiction, and therefore not his problem. That honor fell to Major János Vigh, who ran the smaller piece of the city’s robbery department that handled just seven districts. And, no doubt, Vigh was being asked to field some questions from his superiors that had no good answers. For instance, What the hell happened on Ó Street?
The coverage in the daily newspaper Népszava (MILLIONS ROBBED ON Ó STREET) was not flattering. The story noted that witnesses saw the police “pass right by” the thief as they stormed into the wrong building. And the large photograph accompanying the article, taken after Vigh’s detectives eventually stumbled upon the crime scene, looked like an advertisement for a new Pink Panther sequel. It depicted one of Vigh’s men holding an oversize magnifying glass up to his face on the travel agency floor. The detective had apparently discovered an almost innocuous-looking array of pencils scattered across the ground and was attempting to decode the message. It was indeed a toughie:
was unintelligible even in Hungarian.
Vigh’s team interviewed every eyewitness to the robbery it could find, including Csilla Serbán, the waitress at the Old Street Pub, who said she had served a man in a double-breasted suit and bad wig four whiskeys plus a beer, which he drank in one gulp. Several wig stores in the area were checked, as was the Ray-Ban shop on nearby Szent István Street.
At the end of the following day, Vigh compiled everything he’d uncovered and faxed the revelations to every newspaper and the only television station, Magyar Televizsió (MTV).
SAJTÓNYILATKOZAT (PRESS ALERT)
The perpetrator of a robbery yesterday at Ó Street is described as about 170–175 cm tall. Brown face but not Gypsy. A little stubble. A thick dark mustache.
He had a black wig on his head that was bushy and uncombed, under which you could see his straight brown hair.
If you know anything about the perpetrator, please call the Robbery Unit at 22-550, and after hours the central phone number for the police.
None of the papers ran a follow-up. On Monday, with new appreciation for Lajos’s plight, Vigh gave up and turned the file over to his colleague to be folded into the larger ongoing investigation. Though it wasn’t easy to admit, Lajos agreed that the Ó Street job sounded like another Lone Wolf special.
To be fair, it was a perfectly maddening time. In May, Hungary had become the second former Soviet bloc country (after Poland) to vote a former communist back into office. Gyula Horn, a sixty-two-year-old ex–Communist Party bigwig who had reportedly helped crush the 1956 uprising, led the newfangled Socialist Party to victory despite campaigning in a head-and-neck brace (the temporary result of a car wreck). But Horn’s new old-style government was possibly even less capable than that of the former medical museum curator who preceded him. Promised renewed funding for social programs such as unemployment, welfare, and police protection never materialized, and instead, foreign troops did. This time it wasn’t the Soviets but the Americans: the U.S. deployment in 1995 and 1996 of twenty thousand soldiers in Hungary, a staging area for the Bosnian peacekeeping mission, was the largest American military installation in Europe since World War II. And there was one more American invasion on the way. Two months after Horn’s election, the American FBI declared that Budapest would soon be home to its first foreign office, which it was calling an international training center for law enforcement from the allied forces of Eastern Europe. Hungary seemed a logical choice. After all, according to the press release issued by the Hungarian information service, Hungary’s relationship with the FBI dated back to 1937, since which time the FBI had “trained some 27,000 officers, including one Hungarian.”
Unfortunately, it showed. During communism, investigative police work in Hungary generally meant digging through an underemployed family’s sock drawers for szamizdat, or self-published, materials. The amount of unsanctioned crime that existed in a country where few had anything worth taking was negligible and of scant interest, as a traditional communist-era Hungarian cop joke depicts: Police find a mugging victim lying in his own blood along the Danube walking path, and ask, “Why were you screaming, ‘Down with Kádár! Down with the regime!’ ” Man replies, “If I yelled that I’d been stabbed, you wouldn’t have come.”
So the fact that the FBI was heading to town was exhilarating news for cops such as Lajos, whose prior training regimen had consisted of divulging his hat size and withstanding a handshake. But FBI director Louis Freeh, who flew to Budapest with President Clinton’s blessing for the announcement, was quick to manage expectations. “The best internal mechanism [against crime] in the world isn’t going to help if police can’t feed their families,” he said.
It may have been slim pickings down at Budapest police headquarters, but the summer of 1994 was bountiful for UTE. The team, finally tapping some of the Western investment in the country, signed up a sponsor. After forty-four years of going by the nickname Dózsa, for the Hungarian revolutionary figure György Dózsa (a Székely who led a peasant revolt in the sixteenth century), UTE would now be known as Office and Home—the English-language name of an office-supply chain funded by Western investors. “Brothel and Pub” might have been more apropos, but as Bóta could now confirm, those institutions did not subscribe to the philosophy of investing for the future.
The financial agreement between the desk purveyor and UTE precipitated a major reshuffling of team personnel. For one, longtime player and coach George Pék, now forty, retired to focus on his more lucrative convenience-store job. Office and Home wasn’t exactly shelling out dough. Other notable transactions included the departure of the two Transylvanian stars—Bubu, regrettably to FTC, where he’d been offered a contract that would enable him to eat several days a week, and Karcsi, midway through the season, back to the fabled Csíkszereda team, where he could be closer to his family. Arriving to take their place were the fighting Szatmári brothers of Canada (Hungarian émigrés who together would hopefully make up for the loss of one Bubu), and a pair of Orbáns, George and Gábor.
The Orbáns were the Kennedys of Hungarian hockey, such as it was, and they would soon get their Chappaquiddick. Father George, the new UTE coach, was the Hungarian national team goalie in the 1950s and had since become a highly successful coach on the European circuit. After a couple of years heading up a top team in France, he’d returned to Budapest and turned UTE’s rival FTC into Hungary’s new hockey dynasty. George’s elder son, George Jr., still played for FTC, where he was Hungary’s “Goal King,” possessor of an even better slap-shot than Karcsi’s. And George’s younger son, Gábor, had also played under him at FTC and was about to join him at UTE after spending the past year in America failing to make the NHL.
“Gabi,” as Gábor was known, was a handsome, well-spoken twenty-year-old whose anxious laugh suggested the introspection of someone aware that if his father weren’t the coach, he would be receiving four or five wedgies a week. Aside from two years in democratic France’s countryside when his father was coaching in Annecy on the Swiss border, Gabi had grown up in Budapest. The family lived in its own two-bedroom apartment in a cluster of brown brick and asphalt buildings built by the state bank, OTP. Mother Klára was an internationally acclaimed folk dancer. They owned an East German Trabant. By Hungarian standards, it was a privileged life, which is to say that aside from some monitored travel, it was not much different from anyone else’s. Like any kid who grew up in Hungary in the seventies or eighties, Gabi had studied Russian since grade school and still couldn’t speak it, had an appreciation of classical music, and had read most of Schopenhauer. But he never felt that he could live up to the accomplishments of his famous athlete brother.
After graduating from high school in 1992, three years after the end of the communist regime, a family friend got Gabi a medical exemption from the army and he joined FTC, where his father was coaching and his brother playing. While brother George drew a livable paycheck as the league’s star, Gabi’s scrub salary was 8,000 forints ($100) a month, about the price of two pairs of Levis. He found a second job as a coroner’s assistant at the city morgue. In his free time, he pondered what he was going to do with his life now that capitalism had created so many opportunities. He soon decided to leave for the United States.
Leaning on his father’s hockey connections, Gabi crash-landed first in southern New Jersey, hoping to latch on with the Philadelphia Flyers, whose practice facility was nearby. But unable to finagle a tryout, he headed to Florida, where an ex-Hungarian player had been appointed to coach the West Palm Beach Blaze, a minor league hockey franchise in the low-paying, lower-profile eight-team Sunshine League. The club’s Hungarian coach, however, died of a heart attack just as the season was about to begin, and Gabi was deleted from the Blaze’s final roster. In October he returned to his parents’ apartment and got into a Budapest state of mind. He went on the dole.
Gabi’s father had promised Gabi a spot at UTE that year, which Gabi accepted, despite having come to the understanding that, in Hungary, professional hockey wasn’t a career and was possibly an oxymoron. But if the point of capitalism was to make as much loot as possible, he didn’t know what a Hungarian career was. Gabi was adrift—until a few weeks into practice with UTE. That’s when he started to notice the free-spending Mercedes-driving rookie-berating goaltender. Gabi’s life ambition suddenly presented itself. He wanted to do what the Chicky Panther did, whatever it was.
Gabi began following Attila around everywhere. He enthusiastically did all of the push-ups and ran all of the laps Panther ordered when he made a bad play. He asked Attila to play tennis, to go out to eat; he laughed at his jokes. And before practice, after practice, and during practice, he waited for the right moment when no one else was listening to blurt out, “Just tell me what you do, I won’t tell anyone, I can be your partner, I’ll do anything.”
For Attila, it was flattering to have an Orbán fawning all over him. But Gabi was more like a pet than an accomplice. There was no way Attila was letting him in. “I don’t do anything,” Attila told him. “I’m an életm
vész,” a Hungarian term that translated as “life artist,” someone to whom working was itself déclassé.
Attila was in fact in a sort of semiretirement even from his unofficial other career. The near disaster at Ó Street had provided enough thrills for a while. He’d pulled ten successful heists over the past year and a half; he didn’t need to keep up that kind of pace to make the history books. He was only twenty-six. And when he’d stopped to think about it, he realized he was rich. Or at least, he was far from broke. He planned to enjoy himself, relax for a change.
During the day, when he wasn’t out at the hockey grounds, Attila was usually attempting to rustle up a tennis game, leisurely affairs for which he applied the same mellow enthusiasm he had for hockey. For some reason, it wasn’t always easy for him to find a partner. Once, restless after a snowstorm, he scooped up an unsuspecting Bóta from his home, saying, “I’m sick of couch potatoes.” He then negotiated himself and his friend through thigh-deep uncleared streets to the Interior Ministry facility, where he used a shovel to tunnel a path to the court. He’d become friendly enough with club officials that even on days when he couldn’t find a member interested in being pasted, Attila could purchase ten cans of balls and be allotted a court on which to practice his serve, which clocked at a pro-level 110 mph.
Attila had also found a smaller, homier new casino, the Globe Royale, which offered complimentary drinks and had a bearskin hanging on the wall and a pool table in back. Of course, he could rarely get himself to leave when he still had money in his pocket, even if it meant buying everyone, including the security guards, a round of drinks. And his nights didn’t always end there. One of his Interior Ministry chums had gotten him on the list at the Cats Club, the new high-class brothel in the ninth-century, cobblestoned artist colony town of Szentendre, an hour north of Budapest. Located in a refurbished mansion on a hill, Cats was as exclusive as a Hungarian whorehouse could be. Though the Russians had all but taken over Hungary’s underworld since the infamous 1991 Magyar Mob Toss (in which a group of Russian mobsters had flung one of their Hungarian counterparts over Budapest’s Margit Bridge), Cats was still Hungarian-owned by Gyula Zubovics, an original Hungarian wiseguy who had cut his teeth in the 1980s in Los Angeles, the Hungarian mafia’s home away from home. Dimly lit and sleekly appointed, Cats was one of Hungary’s premier see-and-be-seen spots for those who didn’t want to be seen: cops, members of Parliament, “used car” salesmen, television personalities, serial bandits.
“The Chicky Panther!” the goateed, Armani-attired Zubovics loved to shout when Attila walked in.
“Zubovics!” Attila called back, since he never knew the owner’s first name. “Where did you get that suit?”
“You couldn’t afford it, my little goalie,” Zubovics would respond. Gangster cred unknown, the Transylvanian goaltender was something of a novelty at Cats, the congenial pauper in the proverbial palace. But it was an equal opportunity palace, and while there, Attila lived like a king. His favorite item on the Cats menu was two girls, any style, in the private room (hot tub and sauna included), where he could do as he pleased while watching the table dancers at the bar through a one-way mirror. For an hour, the prix fixe was 100,000 forints ($900)—a little more than the average Hungarian monthly wage, and at least as much as Zubovics’s designer threads.
One night while Attila was waiting on the gun-and-coat-check line outside Cats, he discovered another way to spend his hard-earned money. Next to him was one of the principals of the Conti-Car auto dealership, one of the biggest mob-run rackets in Europe, who invited him to visit the group’s lot on the outskirts of Budapest. He headed out a few weeks later and liked what he saw: barely used Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Porsches, Audis, and a full bar crowded with backslapping Cats Club regulars inside the ten-car showroom. Every several months from then on, Attila went back to Conti-Car and traded his wheels for another slightly used, and undoubtedly untraceable, model.
That fall, after swapping his Mercedes for a red convertible Audi Cabrio, Attila stocked his new ride full of coffee, rice, sugar, candies, and household appliances and headed over the border into Romania like Santa Claus. He hadn’t been home since the end of his frenzied pelt-smuggling days, and feeling accomplished for the first time in his life, he was ready. Regrettably, little had changed in Romania. Though the country was governed by the democratically elected president Ion Iliescu, equal rights for Romania’s citizens was evidently not on the agenda. Romania’s parliament passed a law banning the display of the Hungarian flag, prompting a letter of disapproval from U.S. president Bill Clinton. In Cluj Napoca (or in Hungarian, Kolozsvár)—the western Transylvanian capital that Hungarians venerate the way Americans do Williamsburg, Virginia—the Romanian mayor was tearing down Hungarian statues and even painting dogs with stripes of red, yellow, and blue, Romania’s flag colors. Meanwhile, Transylvania remained best known to the rest of the world for two buildings—one, the soaring medieval Bran Castle on a rural milkweed-strewn lookout; the other a modest two-story home in the colorful sixteenth-century village of Sighisoara that has been renamed Dracula House Restaurant—both of which are believed to be connected to a vampire who never lived anywhere at any time. (The source of the confusion stems from the worldwide popularity of Irish writer Bram Stoker’s 1897 book Dracula, whose vampire was named after a vindictive spear-wielding fifteenth-century Romanian prince, Vlad “the Impaler” Dracul. The Impaler may once have attacked the castle and was most likely born in the Sighisoara eatery.)
On Attila’s way over the Hargita Mountains, he stopped at the tiny wooden fifteenth-century Franciscan monastery on a bluff in Csíksomlyó, site of the annual Whit Saturday festival to which more than a hundred thousand Hungarians travel each June. He dropped some coins into the well and wished for his continued good fortune, a custom he would follow on each subsequent visit home. It was just a little farther, through the final sweeping turns into the valley, until the white road sign announced Miercurea-Ciuc, and beneath it in smaller letters, the city’s Hungarian name, Csíkszereda. Other indications of communism’s collapse were soon apparent. The streets and parks, once kept clean by city workers, were strewn with garbage. And in the town’s old cobblestoned center across from the Hockey Klub restaurant and bar was a new café, New York Pizza.
Attila stayed on the couch at his aunt and uncle’s apartment, as in the old days. No one mentioned Károly Ambrus, Attila’s dad (and his aunt’s brother), whom Attila’s relatives occasionally saw pedaling around town on a battered bike. The Dacia had apparently died. According to the local grapevine, Attila’s mother was now a Jehovah’s Witness, living in a nearby village with her seventh husband.
Attila presented his aunt and uncle with the food staples he’d brought, as well as a new toaster and a color television, explaining his generosity by saying, “Hockey pays well.” And he had the newspaper article to prove it. In the season opener that October (technically, just an exhibition against the junior national team), Attila had played well enough to make the news for the first time, at least as a sportsman. The neatly clipped story he had preserved between the pages of a book was from Hungary’s national sports newspaper, Népsport, and credited Attila with maintaining UTE’s 12–1 victory. “Another goal would have been scored,” Népsport wrote, “but UTE backup goalie Attila Ambrus defended the net with élan.”
Ninny and Uncle László, who remembered when their nephew’s life dream was to be a professional hockey player, teared up when they saw the paper. Later Attila pulled Uncle László into the kitchen. He knew László hadn’t been able to find work for almost a year. “I could help out, you know,” Attila said, reaching for his wallet.
“No,” said László, grabbing Attila’s arm. “I couldn’t accept it.” Though he didn’t say it, neither did László accept Attila’s explanation for where the money was coming from. He’d seen cousin Laczika’s Jeep (though no one in town had had the gumption to question how the timorous carpenter had claimed its possession). “But maybe I could come stay with you in Budapest for a while,” László suggested. “Find some real work?”
Attila tried to dissuade László. “Budapest isn’t so ripe these days,” he said, but László heard only what he wanted: ripe. Unable to turn down the man who had practically raised him, Attila reluctantly agreed to accept a new roommate and hazard the discovery of his oven’s inedible contents. But he wasn’t taking on another accomplice. He’d figure something out for László, and the living-space issue wouldn’t be so bad. He wasn’t around that much anyway.
Attila had begun spending more time than he’d anticipated with Éva Fodor, the feisty thirty-four-year-old woman with the coquettish smile, who owned the car wash near Judit’s place downtown. For both personal and professional reasons, Attila knew he could never let a woman get too close again. But Éva was always surprising him. In November of 1993, after Attila’s breakup with Judit, he’d stayed at the wash late one night and offered Éva a rare insight into his rejection complex—“Why are you even listening to me? I’m just a hairy-soled Transylvanian”—which was compounded by his inability to get Hungarian citizenship.
The next time Attila showed up at the wash, Éva told him to buy her four bottles of premium liquor and perfume. “And then what?” Attila asked. “I’ll cheer you up,” Éva said. It sounded worth pursuing to Attila, who never imagined what Éva had in mind: in January 1994, about two months after he’d decided to dedicate his life to robbery, his name was called in a municipal chamber and he was asked to swear to uphold the laws of the land. He lied and was pronounced, at twenty-six, a Hungarian citizen. After trying to get his citizenship for six years, the car wash girl had gotten it for him in two months. Clearly, Éva Fodor was a woman to be reckoned with. Attila was intrigued.
Wax by wax, Attila was growing on Éva, too. Except for that late night after his breakup with Judit, Attila was cagey about everything. When he told Éva he was a professional hockey player, she just nodded. “I’m also a silent partner in a car dealership,” he said. “Oh,” she said, and let it rest. She knew the deal. She saw forty customers a day who were silent partners and business consultants, and all of them paid in stacks of small notes. They were probably all crooks, but Attila was different. The fact that he wouldn’t talk much about himself spoke volumes. All she needed to know was Transylvania; to her, his birthplace explained everything. She, too, had grown up in a place that she regularly avoided mentioning, a mostly Roma village called Gergely in the eastern Hungarian plains near the Romanian border. She wasn’t poverty-stricken as a child, nor was her family Gypsy. The Fodors lived on a small farm with pigs and chickens; her father owned two general stores. But she knew too well that to be mistaken for or associated with Gypsies could destroy your hope for a better life. It had taken all of Éva’s strength to leave home at seventeen and, against her father’s wishes, head to Budapest. She put herself through night school to become a teacher while working days as a teaching assistant, barmaid, and clothing-store saleswoman. She was briefly married and bore a son, and when the divorce was finalized, she found a contact willing to sponsor her passage to America. She lived for eight months in a Brooklyn studio apartment, working in a Hungarian-owned wig factory that produced hairpieces mostly for Hasidic Jewish women. But after it became clear that she wasn’t going to be able to stay permanently, she moved back to Budapest and cobbled together enough money to buy the twocar stall on Dob Street and turn it into the Quick Wash. Thanks to the growing population of people in Budapest like Attila, she found that she could make a decent living wiping down pleather. With the money from the wash, she also opened a little clothing boutique in the Budapest suburb where she lived with her son in a small apartment.
When Attila found out that Éva also had a clothing store, he asked if she would help him pick out some clothes. He showed up at the appointed time with Bubu and Karcsi in tow, wanting to know if she might be able to give them a discount. “You know, Bunny,” he whispered, using his new nickname for her, “they have nothing.” That, Éva believed, was the real Attila Ambrus. Not the guy who used to screech up to her curb and yell, “I need it done in an hour. I don’t care what it costs.”
Eventually, Attila’s flirtation with Éva turned into a casual romance. He never let her stay at his place, but he spent a few nights a week in her two-story apartment building in the quiet, undeveloped Budapest suburbs. He taught her how to play tennis. She cooked him what he professed were among the best bean soups and pig’s feet he’d ever tasted. And when Attila’s uncle László arrived from Transylvania, Éva agreed to give him a job as the night watchman for her car wash. Sometimes Attila had to remind himself to keep Éva at a safe distance.
For the first time in his life, Attila had a whole crew of admirers. Aside from Éva and the ankle-nipping Gabi, there was also Gabi’s father, UTE coach George Orbán, who was utterly enthralled by his backup goaltender. Coach Orbán had been around hockey a long time and he’d never seen someone as dedicated as Attila. Even though Attila had almost never seen game action, Orbán could see he was a gifted athlete who kept himself in top physical condition. Plus, despite the fact that Attila didn’t even request a paycheck, he was the only member of Office and Home who never skipped a practice. As a former goalie himself, Orbán took an interest in helping Attila develop his skills: playing the angles, staying in the net. He even contemplated appointing Attila team captain, but it just wouldn’t have made sense. Goalies weren’t usually captains, and Attila wasn’t even the starter. But Orbán enthusiastically supported Attila in his unofficial role as the Office and Home disciplinarian, and he got Attila into the games whenever he could.
Despite Attila’s and Coach Orbán’s efforts, however, UTE’s promising season quickly fell apart. The highlight of the year turned out to be the new brand of fighting that the steel-skulled Szatmári brothers had brought over from Canada. Previously in Hungary when players fought, they hacked at each other with their sticks as if participating in a medieval jousting competition. The Szatmáris, to the astonishment of Hungary’s regular brawlers such as Bubu, actually took off their gloves and attempted to beat on their opponents like gentlemen. It may have worked in North America, but in Hungary it was an easy way to get your ass whupped. UTE finished the 1994–95 season with a miserly 7–13–2 record, the club’s first losing season in its history. It was almost as if they didn’t know who they were anymore. On the bus home from the last game, one of guys pointed to the cursive words Office and Home that had been emblazoned across their jerseys all season and asked, “What does this say?” No one knew. Their minds had been focused on other things, such as trying to figure out how to come up with the rent. Attila’s mind had necessarily begun to drift as well. All that losing was getting to him. During one game he was so aggrieved by his teammates’ performance that he smacked the net over and skated off the ice in the middle of play. For hours after losses he was inconsolable. If he wanted to remember the feeling of winning, he was going to have to look elsewhere.