The report of the Vecsés OTP robbery didn’t get to Keszthelyi until the next day. The perpetrator of the crime had gotten away with just 224,000 forints ($960), less than the price of the scooter he’d forgotten in the parking lot, which was found with the key in the ignition and the helmet on the seat. If the job was the work of the Whiskey Robber, he’d set a new all-time low for himself.
The next day the bank camera’s videotape was delivered to the Death Star, and as soon as Valter and Keszthelyi watched the film of the robber jumping over the counter, they knew it was Attila. They also knew that the last thing they needed was to make any public acknowledgment of the out-of-town hit, so the robbery went unreported by the media and George Magyar held on, for the time being, to the T-shirt that Éva had delivered to his office the previous day.
It was probably just as well for Magyar, whose weekly press conferences about the Whiskey Robber case were beginning to grate on the public. Not that he wasn’t a compelling showman. At his last event, he had sat next to a life-size cardboard cutout of Attila and spoken in the first person as if he himself were the Whiskey Robber, announcing the release of his autobiography, I, the Whiskey Robber, the book based on the material Attila had written during his time in the Gyorskocsi Street jail. Rewritten by Mai Nap’s Judit P. Gál, the mass-market paperback—part pulp-style confessional, part how-to robbery manual—sold seventeen thousand copies in its first week, breaking Hungarian sales records.
Keszthelyi, like Magyar, had also resorted to measures that, if they’d been performed in public, may have appeared no less absurd. He was so anxious, he sometimes deployed inexplicably large forces at the slightest suggestion of Attila’s presence. One night after a supposed Whiskey Robber sighting was phoned in, Keszthelyi sent a commando team in full riot gear through the windows of a farmhouse about 3:00 a.m. only to find a petrified elderly couple and their two grown children inside, one of whom bore a resemblance to Attila. Keszthelyi also had a pet project that seemed to have worse odds of catching Attila than Attila’s turning himself in. Aware of the robber’s affinity for exotic seaside locations, Keszthelyi had requested and received funding and personnel to open a fake travel agency in downtown Budapest catering to high-end clients. He had rented the office space and was finalizing plans for the advertising campaign. The Blue Dolphin Travel Agency would be a unique full-service operation—the only travel agency in town staffed exclusively by undercover police officers.
Meanwhile, some small but real breaks in the case were starting to develop. An informant, most likely the hooker Attila called to János’s apartment in the first week after his escape, had come forward to report that Attila had been staying with a János Kovács. János, who was no stranger to the Budapest police (he had a list of petty Planet of the Zorg–type offenses to his credit), was hauled in and questioned. After several interrogation rounds, he admitted having put up the Whiskey Robber for a few days but claimed not to know where the thief had gone after leaving his apartment. Keszthelyi didn’t believe him, and he placed János under surveillance.
Also, Károly “Karcsi” Antal was finally in police custody, having been arrested while trying to come over the Hungarian border from Romania on the Csíkszereda hockey team bus. Karcsi, too, claimed to have no information about Attila’s current whereabouts, but Keszthelyi wanted to see what he would say after sitting in Gyorskocsi for a few months.
INTERPOL was also making some progress. There had been no sightings of Attila in Csíkszereda, the agency reported back to Keszthelyi. But according to its sources, László Veres was indeed hiding in the small village of Fitód. INTERPOL had also found and interviewed Attila’s former girlfriend Betty, in her hometown in Székelyföld, who claimed she had not seen Attila since they broke up in 1998. (She said she’d moved back to Transylvania after her more recent boyfriend threatened that if she didn’t start coming home on time he would “sell” her.)
Lastly, Valter Fülöp had finally received the phone company records from Attila’s Villányi Street apartment and was tracing down every number that had been dialed from the apartment since a line had been installed there in the mid-nineties. They were slowly closing the circle on Attila. It was just a matter of time.
On October 6 Attila spent his thirty-second birthday alone in Domonkos’s apartment. Needless to say, it had been quite a year. Only ten months earlier, his name had been little known outside ice hockey circles of the Carpathian basin. Now, though he didn’t know it, he was being hailed around the world as a folk hero. He knew only his reputation inside Hungary, where he was a bestselling author, and the subject of a rap by Gangsta Zoli (“The Whiskey Robber Is the King”) that was in regular rotation on Hungarian radio. How’s that for gray nobody? But he didn’t feel much like celebrating. He was living like a caged animal, once again too afraid to consider leaving the confines of Domonkos’s flat because of what he perceived as a slight but discernible increase in the frequency of the statements from police sources that the Whiskey Robber was out of the country by now. Attila saw the scattered assertions as a delicate and deliberate ploy to draw him into the open.
He wasn’t going to fall for it. And yet he couldn’t keep living the way he was much longer. In order to quell his anxiety, he was drinking so much that his face was swollen. His stomach was constantly upset. His only wish on his birthday was that he’d live to see another. If he could survive, he would go back to selling Parker pens. Anything but this.
Within a few days he’d made a decision. It was going to have to be all or nothing. The odds wouldn’t be good, but he needed to go for one big score. It was time to place his bet and accept his fate, whatever it would be.
He settled on one bank, memorable for its distinctive sloped all-glass ceiling, that he’d cased and recorded in his now-destroyed encyclopedia. It was a huge institution, set in the shadow of a maudlin high-rise apartment building, on 
ll
i Street, one of the main arteries heading southeast out of town. It was about four minutes without traffic from the nearest police precinct station. Though Attila preferred banks with five or fewer employees, this one had approximately thirty and potentially as many customers—a clear 5 in his rating system. Plus the OTP had recently made a well-publicized investment of a billion forints ($4.3 million) in bank security systems. There would definitely be cameras, an armed guard, and a time-coded safe. But if locating a large supply of money was the only factor that mattered, it was a good choice. Attila figured there would be at least 40 million forints ($172,000) on hand, enough to enable him to set up a life far away that he could possibly even enjoy, and as a bonus, strike a final crushing blow to the police department.
He asked Domonkos to spot him some cash and to go buy him a new pair of dress shoes and a sports jacket. As usual, Attila would do the job as near to closing time as possible.
Three times the weather forecast an autumn rain and Attila began drinking early to steel himself. But each time the sky cleared by lunch-time and he aborted the plan. Finally one dreary October morning, he pushed a bullet clip into his Glock 9mm gun, packed a can of pepper spray to throw the dogs off his scent, and got dressed in the outfit Domonkos had bought him.
Unwilling to risk public transportation, he pulled his baseball hat down low and hailed a taxi. He’d drunk so much that on the ride over his head was spinning. When he got out of the car near the bank and tried to make it inside, he realized he also had a bigger problem. It was his new loafers. They were killing him. By the time he made it to the bank, their stiff backs were slicing into his ankles. He sat down in the waiting area to decide if he could go through with it, but there was no way. He could barely walk. If he was going to have a chance to pull off this job, the one thing he had to be able to do was run fast and far. He got up and limped out.
It was a week before his blisters healed enough for him to function normally in shoes again. He chose another pair of shoes and Monday, October 18, as the day—rain, shine, or shoe trouble.
Again, Attila went by taxi, sloshed. The security camera captured him entering the bank at 5:50, wearing a plaid English cap, black shoes with a buckle, dark wool pants, a black sports jacket, and glasses. The change from the cool outside air to the temperature-controlled atmosphere of the bank made him nauseous. He took a number and sat down on a couch in the waiting area, sweating whiskey.
The interior of the building was huge, almost the size of a hockey rink. About fifteen customers were scattered around the premises, changing notes and depositing and withdrawing cash. After a few minutes Zsolt Kemecsei, a teller, came out from behind the counter with a key ring in his hand. He walked past Attila toward the front door, which was separated from the main area by a small hallway and shielded by a black glass partition from the inside of the bank. When Kemecsei reached the hallway, he felt a gun at his back and heard a voice say, “Don’t do anything stupid. Lock the door and then give me the key.”
Attila clutched Kemecsei close enough that the employee could smell the liquor on the Whiskey Robber’s breath. Attila took the key and put it in his jacket pocket. Still shielded by the black glass, Attila asked Kemecsei to walk with him back into the atrium and over to the haggard-looking guard. János Májor was completely surprised by what the well-dressed customer in front of him had to say. “Throw down your gun, or I’ll shoot,” Attila commanded, pointing his gun at Májor’s chest. Májor complied without a word.
A few of the customers nearby saw what was happening and screamed. Attila wheeled around and began to yell. “Bank robbery! Bank robbery! Everyone on the ground!”
He couldn’t even see all the way to the other end of the room, but it appeared that the number of people inside had multiplied while he was at the front door. Including customers and employees, about forty people were inside the bank. “Bank robbery! Bank robbery!” Attila shouted again, running up and down the length of the cavernous space. He took an earpiece out of his pocket and put it in his ear, mumbling into it every few seconds so as to appear to be working as part of a team.
When it seemed that everyone was quiet and on the floor, he went first to the two currency exchange booths on the side of the main hall for the foreign money. He took a plastic bag out of his duffel, leaving the bigger bag on the counter. Inside the duffel was one of Attila’s regular closed for technical reasons signs that he’d made for the occasion but had forgotten to hang when he went to the door with the teller.
Attila started digging into the foreign-exchange desk’s loot. The drawers were full of piles of Italian lire and U.S. dollars and German marks, which he stuffed into the plastic bag. Afterward he ran to the main strip of tellers, yelling, “Money, money, money!”
Though he was too drunk to realize it (and had no accomplice to warn him), he was working far more slowly than usual. The robbery was already thirteen minutes old. Sirens began sounding in the distance, but Attila knew that none of what he was doing mattered if he didn’t come away with at least 20 million forints ($86,000). Booth by booth he went, emptying the drawers, as the sound of sirens got louder.
When Attila finally reached the front door, ready to run, sixteen minutes had gone by since he’d started the robbery. The police would have been inside the building already were it not for the fact that the first two cars responding to the call had gotten into separate accidents along the way, one of them flipping over as it turned the corner onto lli Street.
Attila stood confusedly pulling at the handle on the front door, having forgotten the key was in his jacket pocket. Dozens of police units were careening down the street toward him. Hoppá, he kept saying. Hoppá! Uh-oh! As a forest of blue lights sprung up outside, Attila took out his gun and aimed it at the lock. He’d also forgotten about the back exit.
“You are surrounded,” said a voice over a megaphone on top of one of the police cars. “Come out with your hands up.”
Attila ignored the warning and began shooting at the lock on the door. The cops in front of the building responded by opening fire. At about the same time, Keszthelyi was pulling up at the scene half a block down the street. Hearing the gun battle, the robbery chief nervously tried to coax a group of onlookers back from what sounded like a gruesome firefight. He knew Attila had nothing to lose.
Dazed, Attila saw his own blood dripping onto the carpet and turned away from the door, his gun empty. He walked back into the bank, which now seemed to resemble a morgue. Dozens of still, quiet bodies were sprawled out on the floor like a human shag rug.
Half a mile away, Colonel Zsolt Bérdi was driving down lli Street on his way home from a soccer game with friends when he saw the blue glow looming ahead of him. He turned and headed down the street’s back alley to see what was happening.
From what Attila could tell, he was only bleeding from bits of broken glass that had sliced his ear and hand. He was able to run, and he did. His hat and glasses flew off his head as he raced toward the bank’s back door that had escaped his mind earlier. It, too, was locked. He called out for the security guard but no one answered, so he went and sought out the old man, who was lying on the ground near his post. “Do you know who I am?” Attila asked him.
“Of course,” Májor said.
“Then unlock the back door for me now,” Attila said.
They went to the back and Attila crashed through the exit into the alley. Outside, a voice on his right yelled, “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” Attila took off the other way.
As Attila ran down the alley, Keszthelyi and two dozen cops stormed into the bank from the front. Attila’s blood was all over the entrance floor. When the cops got inside the bank’s main atrium, forty sets of arms pointed up from the floor toward the back. Keszthelyi ran to the rear door, which was hanging open, just in time to see two of his guys dashing down the alley. He also saw Zsolt Bérdi’s Volkswagen.
Keszthelyi assumed from the little pools of blood on the bank floor that Attila had been seriously wounded and wouldn’t get far. But he had to be sure, and with one call to the Death Star, Budapest was sealed shut again, along with the country’s borders.
With the police on his trail, Attila sprinted through a parking lot and then across a busy boulevard, where an oncoming city bus swerved to avoid him. Then he turned down a side street and ducked underneath a parked car as several police units sped past. When he climbed back out, he saw that he was in front of a house. Not wanting to stay on the street, he headed for the backyard, which was separated by a tall chain-link fence. In his haste to get out of sight, he fell headfirst over the fence, breaking two of his fingers and knocking himself unconscious when he landed on the other side.
All night, the police searched the streets but found no sign of Attila, who was passed out in a thicket of rosebushes three hundred yards from the bank.
If there had ever been a worse morning at the Death Star, no one could remember it. The rookie cop who’d yelled for Attila to freeze at the bank’s back door and then didn’t fire a shot at him when Attila ran was publicly excoriated and demoted to a desk job. Keszthelyi was so enraged and incredulous that Attila could have gotten away without someone’s help that he told members of his team that he’d seen Bérdi’s car at the scene, insinuating that the investigative chief of the Gyorskocsi Street jail was in cahoots with the Whiskey Robber. When Bérdi got wind of Keszthelyi’s slight, he was so incensed that he decided to resign from the force. (the waterloo of the police, read the headline of the story about the fallout in Mai Nap two days later.)
About noon, most of the city’s media outlets crammed into George Magyar’s law office for a hastily called press conference in which the Whiskey Robber’s lawyer announced that his client was responsible for the latest heist. And to prove it, he produced Attila’s homemade T-shirt, reading aloud the message Attila had written for the police—“Corrupt cops will never catch me”—which quickly became the newest slogan to be emblazoned upon Whiskey Robber T-shirts and websites.
Keszthelyi was no longer sure about anything but this: he was in a race against time. Attila had taken a record 51 million forints ($220,000) from yesterday’s robbery. Wherever he was now, he wouldn’t be there for long.
Attila didn’t have a chance to enjoy his latest publicity coup. After awakening in the rosebushes the night of the robbery, he stayed put until well after midnight, then picked his way through the neighborhood, unwittingly shedding banknotes along the way. He made it to Budapest’s national sports stadium, not far from the Keleti train station, where he slept for about an hour inside the shell of the stadium’s generator. When dawn arrived and he could see people out on the street, he wiped his bloodied face with saliva, shed his wrinkled sports jacket, and hurried to a nearby bus stop, where he caught a ride back to Domonkos’s apartment.
Hungover and battered, he was having trouble seeing straight when he got home, so he lay down on the floor in what remained of his filthy disguise and didn’t wake up for twenty-four hours. The following afternoon, a Wednesday, two days after the robbery, he hobbled downstairs to the public phone on the ground floor to call Domonkos. Attila needed his Székely friend to go to Transylvania immediately to get him the best fake passport and identification papers money could buy.
Funny, he couldn’t find his phone card.
It took Keszthelyi’s team two days to trace the calls from Attila’s phone card, which they’d found in the lli Street bank, inside the bag of extra clothes Attila had forgotten on the foreign-exchange counter.
There were three calls on the card, all made on the day of the robbery. Two of them were to 107, the police emergency line. The first was made at 4:45 p.m., reporting a bomb threat to a building on the opposite side of town. Then at 4:49 p.m. there was another call, saying there was a drug deal taking place in a shopping mall parking lot, also across town from the lli Street bank. And earlier in the day one call was made to a mobile phone belonging to a Domonkos Kovács.
Nine days later, on October 27, Domonkos returned from Transylvania. He was to meet Attila at the apartment at 6:00 p.m. It had turned out that he couldn’t get the documents on the spot, but they were being prepared. At 5:10 p.m. Domonkos was sitting in traffic near downtown Budapest when suddenly he found his homey Honda surrounded by police.
Domonkos was arrested and put into a car headed for the Death Star. On the way there, he promised himself that no matter what the police did to him or how much they beat him, he wasn’t going to talk. But once he was set down in interrogation room 736, all Detective Keszthelyi wanted to know was how many ways there were to get into Domonkos’s apartment and how many guns Attila was keeping there. Upon realizing that the police already knew not only where he lived but that Attila was hiding there, the hulking Székely collapsed on the floor and began weeping.
Back at the apartment, Attila was cooking Domonkos a thank-you dinner (beef tenderloin with paprika) and listening to Prime Minister Orbán on the radio, defending his Interior Minister Sándor Pintér against charges of involvement in the mafia-related oil frauds. As Attila turned toward the sink to wash a pot, he noticed something strange. The whole neighborhood had gone silent. There were no cars honking or trams squeaking, nothing but his own increasingly labored breathing.
He crept to the window and looked out from behind the curtain. On the roof across the street, he could see the outline of several men. They were holding rifles trained at the apartment.
The doorbell rang.
“Coming,” Attila called, walking slowly back to the foyer. It had been a good run. But he wasn’t going to make it out of the country. The game was over. He pulled the door open to a hallway filled with black helmets and assault rifles sticking out from behind curved white police shields. Wearing only a pair of shorts, Attila raised his hands in the air for the first and last time.
ONE LESS SMALL FISH, read the headline in Népszava.