Twenty

So they’re dealing with this Whiskey Robber again,” the man with the newspaper in the backseat said to the taxi driver.

“Yeah, I saw that,” the driver said, weaving through traffic along Stefánia Street near Heroes’ Square.

They drove in silence for a few minutes.

“What would you do if he got into your cab?” the passenger asked.

“I would probably recognize him,” said the mustachioed driver, who himself bore a resemblance to the thief. “But I’ve never seen anyone similar.”

“Where do you think he goes, the casinos?” asked the mustachioed passenger.

“Probably,” said the driver, looking in the rearview mirror at his fare. The man in the backseat had long dark hair under a baseball hat and bushy eyebrows sticking out of his Ray-Ban sunglasses. “I don’t mind playing the tables a bit myself,” the driver offered.

“Really?” his passenger asked. “What’s your game?”

“I like them all,” the driver said. “Blackjack, roulette.”

The cab pulled up to downtown’s Deák Square. “The corner here is fine,” the passenger said, digging into his pocket with effort. “Can you hold this for a minute so I can get my wallet?” he asked the driver, passing him a half-empty can of Coca-Cola. A moment later the man in the backseat pulled out a thousand-forint bill ($5.50) and handed it over the seat. The driver gave him back the Coke. “Thanks,” the passenger said. “Good day.”

Then Lajos Varjú climbed out of the back of the cab, hurried down the pedestrian underpass and back out the other side in front of police headquarters, where, once inside, he pulled off his wig, hat, and sunglasses, and rushed the Coke can to forensics to be tested for finger-prints. Unfortunately, the mask of desperation he wore was his own.

That summer Lajos and his robbery team became the last Budapest police division to vacate the hundred-year-old downtown headquarters next to Planet of the Zorg and relocate to a tinted-glass space needle in northern Budapest. The new nine-story HQ, topped with radar towers and satellite dishes, was an impressive sight, particularly as it was set on the edge of the city’s largest communist-era housing block, a colorless diorama that resembled a meeting of disorderly cereal boxes. Locals quickly dubbed the sleek new police palace the Death Star. Indeed, image was everything. In order to get out of the state-of-the-art structure’s parking garage, Keszthelyi once had to dismantle the malfunctioning parking arm that drooped down after the passage of each car. And because several hundred million forints had allegedly been embezzled from the construction fund, the building’s design plans had to be altered in progress. Instead of a seamless cylindrical design, the new HQ was completed in the shape of one wide half cylinder abutted by another much narrower half cylinder. It was a true testament to just how little anything had changed.

For Lajos, however, the new surroundings were invigorating, at least briefly. After working the city’s busiest beat from an oversize closet overlooking a band of outlaw ragamuffins, he would command his 103-member division from a spacious, carpeted office with a view of the one-bedroom apartment Hungarian rapper Gangsta Zoli shared with his mother. In contrast to what Lajos had become accustomed to at the old HQ, thinking like a cop no longer required an active imagination or a lukewarm tonic. His new digs featured an arrestee tank, entire hallways lined with one-way-mirrored interrogation rooms, and a press center stocked with pretzels and refrigerated beer in which he would soon long to swim.

With Sándor Pintér and his cronies off the police force and the next year’s national elections in sight, Prime Minister Horn had underscored his commitment to winning Hungary’s war on crime. Aside from promising an end to the crime wave, Horn created an expanded public relations department and a new special operations force, the KBI (Központi Bnüldözési Igazgatóság, or Central Criminal Office). The KBI, also known as the Hungarian FBI, quickly arrested the owners of Attila’s preferred auto dealership, Conti-Car, on organized crime charges, a bust that resulted in an internal staffwide police request that the ubiquitous “I Love Conti-Car” stickers be removed from all police cars and offices. But it was the KBI’s follow-up bulletin that began to ruin Lajos’s mood. The blueprints for the new police headquarters building had been stolen from the KBI director’s car, and the KBI was warning that a group of mafiosos linked to the arrested Conti-Car kingpins had phoned and faxed the Death Star to report that they were about to destroy the building with shoulder-fired missiles. With his marriage suffering from a lack of attentiveness, Lajos had hoped the new green velvet couch in his office might offer him comfort in times of need, not a cushioned landing in case of a projectile attack.

And to think he’d actually been almost giddy after the Whiskey Robber’s last strike. The Grassalkovich Street OTP that the robber and his partner had pilfered for the second time was one of the banks that Lajos had successfully persuaded to store marked bills in its safe—and sure enough, the bait was among the 25 million swiped forints. All Lajos had to do, he’d somehow assumed, was be patient and eventually he would reel in his robber. He was, of course, mistaken. When he arrived at the bank and asked the manager what system would be employed to detect the bills when they re-entered circulation, the manager told him simply, “Neither the OTP nor the post offices have the technical capacity or human resources to do such a thing.”

He’d then interviewed the robbery’s twelve uninjured victims, among whom was Ms. Plóder, a seventy-five-year-old woman who had entered the bank while the crime was in progress. Ms. Plóder described being rudely ordered by one of the perpetrators to get on the floor, which she naturally refused. “I will not,” she had told one of the robbers. “And don’t ever talk to me like that again.” The young perpetrator, apparently the Whiskey Robber’s accomplice, had then apologized and helped her into an armchair. “It almost seemed like a robbery,” Ms. Plóder told Lajos. Then she opened her purse and offered Lajos a small gratuity for his kindness.

It wasn’t the first time Lajos had been treated like wait staff. Everyone in Hungary knew how badly the police were paid. But he hated the presumption of helplessness. Unfortunately, the kind of tips Lajos wanted were harder to come by and often worth even less. For example, it was a call from one of the casino managers that had led Lajos to don a wig and makeup in search of the roulette-playing taxi driver. But the cabbie’s fingerprints did not match the few prints the police had managed to collect from the Whiskey Robber.

Despite the trail of evidence and phone book’s worth of tips Lajos had collected on the case in the past two years alone—the videotape, the audiotape, János Kis and Stuttering Józsi, the wig, the rare-edition Levis hat—he was no closer to knowing the identity of the thief than he was when the series began in 1993, twenty-two robberies and more than four years ago. Everything, including the shiny new building in which he worked, was beginning to make Lajos feel like a joke.

Given his team’s investigative track record, he decided his best chance to catch the robber would be in the act, which at the current rate was almost once a month. He signed up for a course offered by the FBI, a series of weekly trainings role-playing bank-heist scenarios at the Citicorp bank in downtown’s touristy Vörösmarty Square across from the famous Hapsburgera Café Gerbeaud. The rest of the week, Lajos and his team patrolled the top projected Whiskey Robber targets both in and out of Dance Instructor’s concentric circles, stopping in to make sure the employees were properly prepared for their impending melodrama. And they waited for the call to come. But the summer of 1997 passed into the fall and fall became the holiday season, and there was no sign of the Whiskey Robber.