Budapest
January 15, 1999
The alarm clock jolted Gabi awake at 4:30 a.m. He dragged himself out of bed and stumbled over to the storage room beneath the basement stairs, where he had stowed a curly black wig, mascara, glasses, a disposable Gillette razor, and a can of black spray paint. He collected it in a blue sports bag and traipsed out into the cold garage. It was still dark as he steered his Suzuki Samurai through the hills, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in the CD player, trying not to think too much about the hours that lay ahead.
They both needed the money. It had been ten months since the shoot-out at Heltai Square. Gabi had tried to save every forint he could, but there was still more to be done on the house. Most recently, the outdoor wooden staircase leading from the back to the deck had cracked from the weather.
For his part, Attila owed 2 million forints ($8,600) to the Atlantis casino, which he tried to get from Éva, who owed him that amount for a loan he gave her for her house. But Éva didn’t have it. He’d have to do this one job and then figure out the rest. He didn’t really care. Truth be told, if it weren’t for the visceral memories of those adrenaline-charged robberies, he might have believed he didn’t even exist anymore.
Ten days earlier, on January 5, after a light snow had left the streets icebound, Attila and Gabi pulled off another OTP robbery. But the guard put up a serious fight with Attila, and a few minutes went by before Attila could pin him to the floor. Gabi had held the rest of the customers and employees at bay during the scuffle, but too much time had elapsed. Attila could only do a quick sweep of the teller cash drawers before they had to split. The 297,000 forints ($1,250) they collected was Attila’s lowest take ever.
Normally, Attila and Gabi prepared at Villányi Street, but for the last two robberies they hadn’t had the energy to bother. Plus there was no one else living at Attila’s place on Rezeda Street now but Don. At 6:00 a.m. Attila answered the door in Bermuda shorts and fuzzy red Fila slippers, stinking of alcohol. “I have to go back to sleep, Gringo,” he said, heading back into the bedroom. “Wake me at seven.”
Gabi lay down on the couch and watched soccer highlights on cable. As the sun began to rise, he could see that it looked like yet another nice day, which wasn’t very nice if robbery was on the docket. At 7:00 Gabi pulled on Attila’s big toe and his partner rose from the bed in one motion, saying, “What’s with this weather?”
“I don’t like it,” Gabi said. “Are we still going to do it?”
They’d been trying for bad weather for a week. “We can’t keep waiting,” Attila said. “Our freedom is everything, but it’s not worth anything without money.”
They began their preparations in silence.
At 8:30 a.m. Gabi left the house, followed a few minutes later by Attila. They were to meet on a corner near Frankel Leó Street, a cobblestoned pedestrian road just off the Danube River on the Buda side of town. Gabi had argued against doing this OTP because the street was too choked with people. But there weren’t any easy targets left, and Attila felt it was too dangerous to do another site they’d robbed before. The upside of this bank, which rated a 4 in Attila’s book, was that it was likely to carry big money because the branch was a major OTP hub for foreign currency and transfers.
They had observed the place three times in the past week. It sat in a crowd of stores on either side of the street—a fruit and vegetable grocery, a hairdresser, a copy place, a café, and a supermarket. The police station was at least three minutes away by car every time they clocked it.
When they arrived at about 9:00 a.m., the street was still relatively quiet. It was Friday; Attila hoped people would be tired from the long week. He sure was.
Attila had his raincoat draped over his arm, which Gabi knew meant that his gun was already in his hand. Attila entered first and quickly sized up the scene. The bank had a split-level layout: a wide, open staircase rose up from one side of the room. All told, he counted about fifteen people, employees and customers.
When Gabi entered a few seconds later, Attila was already moving at the guard. Gabi positioned himself in front of the door, while Attila tossed his coat off his arm and attacked the unsuspecting security man, forcing him onto the floor. In seconds, Attila had taken possession of the guy’s small black Russian TT gun and turned toward the counters, shouting, “Bank robbery! Hands in the air!”
There were so many customers that Gabi was worried some of them hadn’t heard Attila’s order. He fired a shot into the ceiling and yelled, “Everyone! On the floor!” Then he froze. He’d forgotten to spray the camera. He was already beyond the entranceway when he spun to find it staring straight down at his face. He pulled out his paint can and doused the lens.
Meanwhile, Attila had his gun to the manager’s head. If she didn’t open the safe immediately, he said, he would shoot her. “I need another key from upstairs,” she told him calmly. He let her go.
Gabi took a canvas bag from his pocket and tossed it over the counter so Attila could start on the drawers. Almost three minutes had passed by the time the manager reappeared with the key ring.
“Time!” Gabi yelled as two women wandered through the front door behind him. “On the floor,” Gabi said, turning to face them and shaking the nose of his gun at the ground.
Attila stood with the manager at the safe. She said the time lock was set for five minutes. “Open it now!” he yelled, then went back and finished clearing out the rest of the teller drawers.
“Four minutes,” Gabi yelled. He was looking out the door. Was that a siren?
Attila was back at the safe. He noticed a separate drawer on the top part of the cabinet vault with its own latch. He got the woman to open it. There looked to be at least 10 million forints ($43,000) inside. He stuffed it into Gabi’s duffel.
“Five minutes,” Gabi called. “Five minutes! Five minutes!” Attila waited another minute until the next drawer opened, bagged the cash, then ran around to the front, where Gabi was nervously waiting. Before they could open the front door, the sound of the sirens was loud and clear.
There was only one way out. They charged through the front door as a voice to their left shouted, “Freeze! Police!” They turned right, ran down the street, then bolted through the garden in back of the sixteenth-century domed brick Lukács bathhouse. They rounded the next corner, where Attila had left his cab. “We’re in a hurry,” Attila said as they climbed in and thrust their heads between their legs to stay out of view. “Take us to the HÉV station.” The driver pulled out into the traffic-logged street. After traveling only a few blocks, the sirens got noticeably louder. “We’ll get out here,” Attila said, throwing a 5,000-forint note ($21) at the driver and pushing Gabi out the left side. Attila’s muffled heartbeat pounded in his chest. It was good to be alive.
Ahead of them was the flat cement Margit Bridge, which led straight into Pest just north of Parliament. They stormed down the stairs of the pedestrian concourse that ran beneath the bridge traffic, pulling off their wigs, hats, and outer layer of clothes and doing their best to shave off their mustaches with their Gillettes and saliva. When they came out on the south side of the bridge, sans disguises, the sirens sounded as though they were converging on them from every direction except for the river to their left.
Heading south, Attila and Gabi made their way onto the river’s scenic jogging path, across from Parliament and the poor-man’s-Paris east Danube bank. Glancing over his right shoulder, Attila saw three cops trying to negotiate their way across the crowded boulevard that separated them. To Attila’s left was a twelve-foot drop toward the cement highway at the edge of the river. “We have to jump,” Attila yelled to Gabi; then he threw the bag over the edge, crouched, and jumped after it. He hit the cement hard, and a sting rang all the way up his spine. “Jump!” he yelled again to Gabi, but his partner didn’t appear.
Two hours later, as the UTE-FTC game got under way at the UTE stadium, Attila was in his purple Opel Omega, speeding down country road E4 toward the Romanian border with the money, three guns, his robbery encyclopedia, and Don pacing back and forth in the backseat. As he passed the fragrant fertilizer plant outside the frozen Tisza River town of Szolnok, he heard on Hungarian radio: “UTE ice hockey player Gábor Orbán, son of coach George Orbán, has been arrested for robbery. Police are still searching for his accomplice.” According to the news, the robbers’ taxi driver, whose name also happened to be Orbán, was being questioned as a possible third accomplice.
Attila jerked the wheel and peeled off the road into a gas station. Into the bathroom he went, carrying the most incriminating piece of evidence he owned: the notebook that had guided him through six years of robberies. Standing over the open toilet, he tore the book apart page by page, ripping each information-packed folio into confetti and flushing it into the sewers of the eastern Hungarian plain. Then he shuffled inside the station mart and bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker. He just needed a quick freshener. He was about sixty miles from the border with less than an hour to go before Gabi was allowed to spill the beans about his identity. Before getting back on the road, he stuffed the cash and all but one of the guns under some clothes in the bottom of a blue Budmil hiking backpack and stuck it in the trunk. The other gun he loaded and rammed into the shoulder holster beneath his shirt.
Back at the UTE stadium, the game’s first period came to an end with an eruption in the stands caused not by fire, a hail of batteries, or the fact that UTE was actually leading FTC, 4–2. It spouted from the mouth of a balding radio journalist who was covering the event from the top of the bleachers while listening to a small transistor radio. He’d just heard a bulletin about the arrest on bank robbery charges of UTE forward Gábor Orbán, one of two UTE players that the reporter had noted earlier had failed to show for that afternoon’s game. The other was the wealthy goalie…. The man sprung from his press seat at the top of the metal bleachers and bounded toward the rink, shrieking out the scoop of his lifetime: “Attila Ambrus is the Whiskey Robber!” he cried. “Attila Ambrus is the Whiskey Robber!”
One hundred fifty miles to the east, the flat, frozen fields of western Romania stretched out before Attila like a welcome mat. He checked the digital dashboard clock: 3:31 p.m. In approximately fifteen minutes it would be three hours since he last saw Gabi on the jogging path by the river. Attila pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
At 3:40 p.m. he reached the multilane Ártánd checkpoint station at the Hungarian-Romanian border and picked an empty slot. He pulled his car to a stop in front of the guard and rolled down his window. “Jó napot,” he said, smiling. Good day.
The guard bent down and glanced into the car at Attila and Don, and asked for Attila’s papers. Attila handed over his passport and car registration and reclined his seat while the guard took his information back to the booth. Inside the adjacent station, the fax machine was kicking up a document titled “Emergency National Search Warrant.”
A few minutes later Attila watched the guard head back in his direction. Attila put a smile back on his face. “Step out of the car, please,” the guard said, as six marksmen with rifles crawled toward the car.