Having disclosed his secret to the coach’s kid, Attila was stricken by his own stupidity. It had been three years since he had let anyone into his shadowy world, and his memories of his two accomplice experiences—with Karcsi and with his cousin László—weren’t particularly reassuring. But at least with them, Attila felt relatively comfortable that they wouldn’t blab—or that even if they did, they would only sound like another incomprehensible Székely spinning fairy tales. Gabi, on the other hand, knew a lot of people in Budapest. And it wasn’t difficult to imagine the little squirt bragging around town about his new career in the limelight.
After mulling it over, Attila decided he needed to come up with a litmus test for Gabi’s trustworthiness, even if it was a smidgen late. He invented a new birthday for Bubu and a coming-home party for another teammate and invited Gabi out for a series of boozy nights on the town. He made sure to bring along many hot women, cool teammates, and the city’s celebrity hockey fan, Gangsta Zoli—the only Hungarian rapper (who was at work on a soon-to-be-bestselling album, Helldorado, about what he called “the wild, wild East”). Then Attila would see to it that Gabi got blitzed and would follow him around to see if he talked. It wouldn’t be a scientific assessment, but it would have to do.
On their first evening, at the LeRoy Café, Gabi, intoxicated not only by the attention he was receiving from Attila, picked up a woman whom he thought he could impress by downing several triple shots of pear pálinka. After a few rounds he put one of his shot glasses back on the bar and tried to sit back on his barstool but missed, leaving Attila in a familiar predicament: lifting an unconscious partner off the floor. He carried Gabi out to his car and drove him home. But Gabi didn’t talk out of turn that night or on any of the others. He’d passed the test.
A few weeks later, in the deadening heat of an August hill sprint, Attila told Gabi he’d pick him up at a bus stop a few blocks from the stadium after practice. When Gabi arrived at the appointed station, Attila collected him and drove them to a busy intersection in southern Buda, where a post office sat in the middle of a diagonal row of corner shops.
Attila nodded ahead. Gabi looked across the street. “You want to do a post office?” he asked with obvious disappointment.
“You’re not ready for a bank,” Attila said.
“Don’t I need a gun?”
“Leave everything to me,” Attila said. “Be at my apartment at six a.m. sharp next Thursday. And don’t shave between now and then.”
When Gabi arrived the following week, Attila’s formerly spotless apartment looked like a costume shop on the eve of a masquerade ball. There were wigs, glasses, hats, coats, and ties all over the checkered carpet and the bed, which hadn’t been folded up. There was also a big plate of smoked sausages, raw onions, goat cheese, and several rashers of bacon, which Attila paid to have shipped from Uncle Dénes in Fitód. “See this, Gabi,” Attila said, sitting down at his small table with a glass of whiskey. “Soon you’re going to be eating from the bowl of life with the biggest spoon.”
After they ate, Attila went to the kitchen to get his notebook out of the oven. He came back and opened it to the page featuring the post office they had observed from the car the previous week. Gabi looked in amazement at Attila’s densely inscribed book.
“This is a serious business, Gabi,” Attila said. “Don’t forget that.”
Attila had rated the Fehérvári Street post office a 2 because of its distance from the police station and its surplus of worthy escape routes. Gabi’s job, Attila explained, was to wait in line for a teller until Attila found the right moment to begin, then pull his gun at Attila’s word: rablás (robbery). From then on, Gabi was to guard the door and keep track of the time. Anyone trying to enter was to be allowed in and then immediately made to get on the floor. No one was allowed to leave, for any reason. At three minutes Gabi was to yell out the time—but never was he to use Attila’s name or nickname.
“How long do we have?” Attila asked.
“Three minutes.”
“How long?”
“Three minutes.”
“Say it a hundred times.”
While Gabi reiterated his instructions, Attila went into the bathroom. His stomach was bothering him. After a while he returned to the living room and dangled a gun in front of his partner. “No matter what, you don’t shoot at anyone,” Attila said, yanking it back just as Gabi reached for it. “Understand? If anything, you shoot at the ceiling.”
“So the idea is to create a panic, right?” Gabi said, snatching the gun.
“No,” Attila said, annoyed. “Listen to me, Gabi. If you create a panic, the situation gets out of your hands. You always have to be in control. This is very important. You have to be strong enough and fast enough to scare them, but they must always believe you are in complete control of the situation. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“That means you don’t use the gun.”
“What do I do with it?”
“Point.”
At 1:00 p.m. Attila told Gabi to go to the bathroom and shave everything but his mustache. “And shave your sideburns—all the way to the top,” Attila said. That way the color of the wig wouldn’t clash with Gabi’s real hair. While Gabi was in the bathroom, Attila emptied the bullets from his pupil’s gun.
When a mustachioed Gabi emerged, Attila handed him a wig and a fedora and told him to put them on. Gabi returned from the bathroom looking like a grade-school thespian. Attila fell off the bed laughing, but it was the cackle of the stupendously doomed. He and this clown he’d handpicked were supposed to knock off a post office in a few hours. Attila took a mascara brush and darkened Gabi’s patchy mustache, then it was time to put on their dress shirts and suits over their shorts and T-shirts. “Always keep one eye on me and it will be fine,” Attila told Gabi before swallowing his third glass of whiskey. Soon Gabi’s stomach was bothering him as well, and he and Attila were fighting for turns in the bathroom.
Around 2:30 Attila got his Camel gym bag out of the closet—which folded and zipped into a coaster-size pad—and stuffed it into his back pocket. They synchronized their watches and prepared to leave separately. Gabi was to take a taxi—one without a CB radio—to a location several blocks from the post office and give the driver 5,000 forints ($32) to wait while he ran an errand. (“A what?” “An errand.”) Attila was going to take a separate cab to another corner. They would meet on the opposite side of the intersection from the post office.
Attila was about to send Gabi off when he realized he’d forgotten something. “Wait a second,” he said, running back into the kitchen. He was so drunk that he’d almost forgotten his plan. “Watch this,” he said, emerging with two empty bottles of wine. He picked up the oversize shoebox in which his Transylvanian meats had come and placed the bottles inside. Then he grabbed a blue Parker pen and a paper napkin, on which he wrote, Greetings Colonel Lajos Varjú, vice commander, sir! He thought for another moment but couldn’t come up with anything else, so he just signed the note, XY!! and stuck it in with the bottles. Attila wrapped the package in brown construction paper and taped it up. Then he picked up the pen again and inscribed another higher-profile name on the top of the box—Sándor Pintér, national police chief—along with a fictional address. He’d show them lucky. Attila handed Gabi the package. It was time to go.
By 3:30 p.m. one-third of UTE’s starting lineup was positioned on the pavement at opposite ends of the Fehérvári Street shops. It was a splendid afternoon for robbery: cloudless and August-delirium warm. Gabi was miserable. He was sweating profusely beneath his double-layered clothes, and his scalp was itching under the wig. In his arms he cradled the package for the police chiefs.
Before assuming his post at the corner, Attila had strolled by the glass front door of the post office, taking a quick count of how many customers were inside. Now, when anyone came in or out, he threw his left hand down to his side and, like a baseball catcher, signaled to Gabi with his fingers the number of people left in the building. This went on for twenty minutes. Every time the count got down to one—the number Attila had said they needed in order to start—someone else went in. Thanks to the half hour Attila had wasted having two more whiskeys at the pub across the street, Gabi was becoming convinced that the post office would close before they ever got inside. Then the sign came: one index finger pointing down, followed by a quick thumbs-up. They began walking toward the door from opposite sides.
Gabi entered first, as planned, and got in line to send Attila’s package behind the only customer in the place. The interior looked just the way Attila had drawn it in the diagram. It was a rectangular office with a small foyer and four glass-encased teller booths. No security guard, no camera, and all female employees. When the customer in front of Gabi left, the woman working booth number one told him, “Just a moment, please.” She stood and walked out into the front, past Attila, who was filling out a lottery ticket at a counter; pulled a key out of her pocket; and locked the front door. “We’re about to close,” she told Gabi upon returning to the booth. Gabi handed her the package, and just as the teller turned her head to pull the mailing forms from her desk, Attila’s voice pierced the stillness. “Robbery!” he shouted. “Hands up and two steps back!” (No more “Down on the floor!”s for Attila. He’d learned after the calamity at Ó Street that if he got the employees down there, they were liable to hit an alarm.)
Attila’s command was so jarring that even Gabi almost put up his hands, but he regained his composure and instead reached for the gun in his raincoat pocket. He pointed it at the teller in front of him, who already had her hands in the air, and said unconvincingly, “If you do what he says, everything’s going to be fine.” One of the other employees was already on the phone with the police when Attila bounded onto the chest-high counter and vaulted his body and legs over the tall glass divider.
Impressed, Gabi backed up toward the door to assume his post. Within a minute he began to hear what would become a familiar sound: the shoosh, shoosh, shoosh of the packs of bills hitting the bottom of the plastic grocery bags Attila used to collect the money before transferring it during the getaway to his Camel duffel, which he never allowed to be seen during the robberies’ commission. Gabi also could hear the post office phone ringing off the hook, but he was only supposed to keep track of the time. Two and a half minutes. Two-forty-five…
Just as Gabi was about to yell three minutes, Attila came back through the side door and walked quickly toward him. With the key that was already in the lock, Attila let them out into the sun, then turned and, with the same key, closed up the office for the day.
Lajos Varjú pulled up to the post office in his newly issued white Volkswagen Golf, sirens and blue lights blazing, to find the building secured. No one, including the police, could get in—or out. This hitch was a little tough for Lajos to take, since the post office was one of three Lajos had preselected as a probable Lone Wolf target due to its distance from the local police precinct and its location in Buda, where most of the robberies had occurred. As instructed, one of the employees had called the police hotline as soon as two suspicious men sauntered in wearing raincoats on a sunny August afternoon. But the operator at police headquarters was so incredulous that one of the places the robbery department had prepped was actually in play that she asked the employee to call back if she was serious. When no callback came, the operator phoned the post office but got no answer.
It was Thursday, and as Lajos stepped up to the curb in front of the locked post office, József Jónás, the on-scene reporter for Kriminális, was already taping his stand-up piece for that evening’s show. “Here come the police now” were the words Lajos caught from the Kriminális reporter’s mouth as he approached the crime scene, followed by “Colonel Lajos, what do you have to say?”
Lajos staggered through an interview in which it became apparent that the media had surmised the same thing he had from the scant information already available. The nonviolent post office robbery was the latest effort by the Lone Wolf, who once again had taken on what one newspaper would call “a servant.” When Lajos finally got inside, he was handed the evidence the dispatcher had warned him about, a wrapped shoebox addressed to Sándor Pintér, the highest-ranking police officer in the country. Lajos had little choice but to call in the bomb squad to open it. His next call was to his wife, informing her not to wait for him for dinner. He couldn’t bear to sit with her through another episode of Kriminális.
Fortunately, all the reporters were gone by the time the captain of the bomb squad handed Lajos the empty Boglari merlot and Kiskóŕösi Kékfránkos (both 1994 vintages) and the napkin offering him greetings.
Lajos then stomped over to the two sörozóś, or pubs, across the street, where he’d also prepped the staffs with sketches and asked them to be on the lookout for a man in a wig ordering whiskey. At the Jáger Pub, the owner slapped himself on the forehead with his open hand. “I knew I was supposed to remember something,” the bar owner said, pulling a folded-up Lone Wolf police sketch from his breast pocket. “This guy was here earlier with another guy,” he said, nodding at the small green benches surrounding a row of wooden tables with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths. “You were right, Detective. He drinks whiskey. Had two Johnnies and left a great tip.”
That night, back at police headquarters, the empty halls of the police building echoed with Lajos’s screams while his wife and 4 million others tuned in to a memorable Kriminális. The show’s on-scene report featured a tongue-tied Lajos stepping onto the sidewalk in front of the post office in a white Puma T-shirt and ruefully admitting that the job indeed appeared to have been done by the city’s increasingly famous robber who was “asking for the money—because that’s how he does it: he asks.” Noting the thief’s penchant for downing whiskey before the heists, Kriminális host László Juszt christened the thief the Viszkis Rabló, or the Whiskey Robber. The nickname not only stuck but, to the apparent delight of everyone, as Blikk wrote the next day, the Whiskey Robber was “making the life of the police an absolute misery.”
The following week that misery grew with the publication of a story in the daily newspaper Népszava that Lajos had done his best to suppress. The article, headlined the gentleman robber sent a message to the detectives, described the Whiskey Robber as a korszer
betyár, or a modern bandit. It was a clear reference to the nineteenth-century Hungarian folk legend Sándor Rózsa, known as the Hungarian Robin Hood, who stole from the elite as they crossed the Hungarian plain on horseback and who fought as a freedom fighter against the Hapsburgs in the 1848 revolution. “It isn’t impossible that he [the Whiskey Robber] is giving his money to the poor,” Népszava wrote.
With sixty thousand homeless on the streets of Budapest, and two-thirds of the country living around or below the poverty line, who didn’t want to believe it?