After leaving his mother’s, Attila went to the Historical Archives of Hungary’s State Security at 7 Eötvös Street, close to the Franz Liszt Music Academy and south of the former headquarters of both the Arrow Cross and State Security, now retooled as the House of Terror museum. The building was painted a dull, nondescript beige, perhaps, Attila thought, so it would not stand out from its surroundings. He registered his name with the guard, filled out the requisite forms, and walked down the long courtyard and into wide hallway to the far end, where a third storey had been added.
During the first confusing weeks of the 1989 regime change, the government had retrieved purloined filing cabinets from the laid-off security men and built the extra floor to house them. Every time he came here now, Attila remembered the new Internal Affairs Minister asking parliament what he was supposed to do with the two thousand people employed to spy on their fellow Hungarians. Should he drag them into the cellars for interrogation? Threaten them into co-operating? The new regime could hardly revenge the dead here on these marble steps. What could they confess to that wasn’t already known? Petty secrets? Best let them go and get on with their lives in the brand-new democracy. Plus, he was not a vengeful man.
Attila opened the door to the waiting room. He knew Magda Lévay well and she was still in charge of the archives. He also knew her personal assistant and the two other lower-level assistants who could, or could choose not to, grant you entrance. They may have been suspicious of his relationship with their boss, but there was nothing they could do about it. Magda was well-connected and didn’t mind using her connections when she felt threatened.
The assistants would be observing him through the small two-way mirror at one end of the waiting room. He walked slowly to a narrow chair next to the table and squeezed himself between its arms. Difficult to seem comfortable.
One of the assistants came in. “Same files as before, Dr. Fehér?”
The “doctor” was a mark of excessive, old-world respect that could sometimes get you a table at a pricey restaurant or help you obtain State Security files. “No,” he said leaning toward her, wanting it to look as if they were about to share a secret.
“You are not looking for dead men, then?”
She was an attractive woman, about forty-five, but, judging from her high-necked dress, pulled-back hair, and the way she shielded her body with her hands, she lacked confidence in her looks. Magda Lévay, on the other hand, did not lack confidence in her appearance. Some time ago, when he felt a lot younger and was still smarting from the ex’s departure, he had invited her to dinner at the Kedves and for some Zack Golden Pear back at his apartment. She had been an enthusiastic lover, treating sex as if it were part of her pilates routine.
“I am not sure. He would be in his eighties if he were alive.” He remembered her name from his last visit, but he had no idea whether she was married and didn’t want to risk offending her by saying either Mrs. or Ms.
“Not the same file, then,” she said.
“Not today. His name is Márton. He lives abroad now. Probably a ’56-er.”
“And your interest in this man?” she asked, a bit archly. Attila was accustomed to women with little power and no self-confidence loving moments like this.
“It’s a police matter,” Attila whispered. She would enjoy thinking this was something confidential. “We need to know, for sure, that he survived, that it’s the same man we have been tracking. We need to know what he did while he lived here, why — other than it was ’56 — he left, and what happened to him after he left.”
She nodded and left him alone to contemplate the posters celebrating the government’s decision to turn all tobacco shops into state enterprises and hand out new licences to their new owners. The former owners could, of course, apply for licence renewals, but they had no chance unless they had connections at the highest levels of the gothic palace. There was nothing unusual about the government’s decision to control tobacco sales, his ex had said. Some other countries did that sort of thing with liquor. Here, that might have caused riots in the streets. But tobacco, not likely. And for the new concessionaires, it’s what people here had grown to expect: privilege and punishment.
Attila noticed that the prime minister’s face had been airbrushed in the official portrait hanging among the posters. He was getting old, like everyone else in the country. The young didn’t like it here anymore. It was easier to find jobs in Germany or the Netherlands.
The assistant came back with a thick file and a few audio-cassettes. “He didn’t seem to interest them as much as the last one you checked,” she said, her voice apologetic. “One audio is him and his girlfriend planning a trip they were not allowed to take. It was 1953. The rest . . . well, you can use the far table, if you like.”
Géza Márton had been sixteen when the Russian army replaced the Germans in Budapest and took him off the street, on the Buda side, for a little work — that’s what they called it — in the Soviet Union. He was there for almost three years. No. 442 Vorkuta Gulag.
That would be the connection with Gábor Nagy, Attila thought. Four years in a labour camp is a long time. It would have marked both men for life.
Márton hadn’t made it out in the first wave in 1947. He may have been put on a train at the end of ’48. There was no list of the men who had been sent there or of those who were allowed to go home. And no mention of Nagy anywhere.
Márton had gone back to his family’s house, or what was left of it, on Sashegy, but the whole lot of them, his parents and his sister, were moved in December 1948 to make room for a government television installation. There was a report from one of the neighbours (unnamed) about the Mártons arguing at home, the mother wanting to know whether they could stay in the same area and the father saying they were better off somewhere cheaper. He said they didn’t want to stick out, draw attention to themselves.
Next, they lived in an apartment near the opera house. Not a bad neighbourhood, although not as pretty as Sashegy. Márton senior had been an engineer. Railways and roads. Not important enough for the post-war Communists to hold a grudge against him. Géza’s older brother had been killed at the Don River bend in 1942. He had been a simple foot soldier in the Second Hungarian Army when it was annihilated by the Soviets. That and Géza’s years in Vorkuta had marked their father as a potential enemy of the state, a man worth watching.
There was a notation in the file to the effect that Károly Márton, Géza’s great-grandfather had been wealthy but the next generation had squandered the fortune. There was nothing left except the house on Sashegy by the time Géza’s father, also named Károly, was born.
There were reports from a neighbour in the apartment building that the Mártons listened to Radio Free Europe — a black mark against them, but not enough to get Márton senior fired from the State Roads and Railways Department. A lot of people listened to Radio Free Europe, and Géza’s father seemed to have been good at building bridges. Another handwritten note said he had purchased cheese and cherries on the black market from a farmer who had not yet joined the co-op in the Bakony area. That must have been before the co-ops took over the orchards and the farms, leaving the cherries to rot and downgrading the cheese to state-approved bland.
After his return from Vorkuta, Géza had finished high school in evening classes where some of the sons of the former nobility eked out meagre marks. He was not admitted to university, although his father tried to pull some strings with the ministry. Another black mark against him. Having been a Soviet prisoner was bad enough, but having a father with no strings to pull who thought he could influence people in office was worse.
In 1951, he met a woman called Gertrude Lakatos, eighteen, the daughter of farmers from Czechoslovakia, the part that used to be in Hungary. There were some grainy photos of them walking along the Danube, holding hands. After the war, the new coalition government had confiscated her parents’ farm, and the family moved to Budapest. They lived on Rökk Szilárd Street. The father worked on a farm near Pécs. He came home for weekends only. There was reference to separate files on him and on the daughter, but this one noted only that he had been observed secreting corn, beets, potatoes, and apples in a sack and taking it home to his family.
Géza spent time at the Lakatoses’ apartment. But there was no report on what they talked about or whether they listened to any forbidden radio stations.
In these years, Géza worked as a plumbing apprentice in a state enterprise that took care of toilets in Pest. There was a long report on his attempt to organize a group of draft resisters. A couple of them were arrested, and Géza went into the army. His superior officer recorded, with an astonishing number of grammatical errors, that Géza was a lazy soldier and had earned two demerits, one for smoking in his bunk, the other for being found with a girl (not named) in the potato field. There was a photograph of Géza in uniform: a thin face with large staring eyes, jug ears (although their size may have been exaggerated by the close haircut and the dumb-looking cap centred on his head). He had thin lips and dark lines down the sides of his mouth.
There was another photo of Géza in civvies with Gertrude wearing a wide-skirted floral dress cinched in by a wide belt, puffy white sleeves, knee-socks, ballet slippers, and a ribbon in her pleated hair. She had an oval face with finely drawn eyebrows and a pert little mouth. She looked shy or frightened.
The recording of a conversation between Gertrude Lakatos and Géza Márton was made in January 1956. He was suggesting a trip to Trieste; she didn’t want to go and doubted they could get a permit, even if they were on a honeymoon.
Attila’s cell phone had buzzed as soon as he arrived at the Archive. It buzzed again now, and he turned it off. He was tired of Tóth.
The report on Géza stated he was in the Killian Army Barracks in Budapest when the revolution began in 1956. There was no mention of his whereabouts when the army joined the rebels, but his father was arrested in 1957 for activities promoting civil disobedience and for taking part in the attack on the Communist Party’s headquarters in Budapest. The photographs taken at the scene were horrific, especially the one of a group of seven young men with their hands up in surrender and a second one, taken a moment later, of their bodies falling, riddled with bullets. One of them was already on the ground, lying face up, soaked in blood, eyes still open.
There were no photographs of either Géza or Károly Márton at the scene, although there were a lot of pictures of others, including a woman helping to string someone from a lamppost and people in white coats, carrying stretchers, running toward Köztársaság Square. There were several more bodies lying under the trees at the edge of the square. Attila had seen most of these photographs before.
Géza Márton had crossed the border into Austria in late December 1956.
Károly Márton was tried and condemned to death in March 1957. His sentence was commuted to life in 1959. He served only two more years in jail. In September 1961, he was allowed to return to his home but not to his job. He ended up working on a pig farm near Debrecen. His wife joined him. There was no further mention of their listening to Radio Free Europe or Voice of America.
The only report filed on the Mártons’ activities at the farm was written in pencil. It stated that Márton Sr. was a good worker and Mrs. Márton helped in the kitchen. The person who supplied the report, identified only by the number 507, said he or she had attempted to involve them in discussions of the Soviet army unit in the Debrecen barracks and of local youths taking part in the ’56 “Counterrevolution,” the official word for the Revolution.
The Mártons had made no comment on either topic.
The most interesting part of the file for Attila was the notes showing that surveillance of Géza Márton continued after he settled in Canada. They detailed his rejection of the State Police’s request that he report on his fellow refugees. There was a handwritten notation on the margin of the request for continued surveillance stating that this man is an enemy of the state. A woman, identified as M379, had told Géza Márton that things could go very badly for his father if he continued to refuse. There were a lot of recorded conversations with M379. She made sure he knew of his father’s incarceration at Recsk, one of the nastiest forced-labour camps for convicts.
Géza was kept under close observation for a year to determine whether he was sending anti-government letters home. He wasn’t.
There was a note about his investment in 300 acres of land north of Toronto in 1965, more notes about his land development scheme for housing in a place called Vaughan, and, later, his building two shopping malls, a two-level underground parking garage, four old-age homes, and an extension of Toronto’s York University. In all this time, he showed a complete lack of interest in joining the post-’56 community, or taking part in events at the Hungarian House in Toronto. Twice a year he sent packages of food and clothing to his parents and sister. The packages were opened and nothing but food and clothing was ever found in them. In the late 1970s, he started sending money transfers.
He married a Croatian girl named Klara in a civil ceremony in Vaughan in 1968. There was a photograph of the two of them, both looking thin and gawky, she in a long dress with a somewhat ravaged fox stole, he in a sagging suit with a white flower pinned to his top right pocket. In 1975, he joined the boards of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Bank of Nova Scotia.
Géza visited Budapest in 1977. He claimed that he was interested in building a hotel on the Pest side of the Danube. He took his mother and sister to dine at the Alabárdos. He put flowers on his father’s grave in Kerepesi Cemetery.
The last entry was from 1987, when Géza was celebrated by both the Toronto Chamber of Commerce and the Vaughan Chamber of Commerce. The brochure advertising the event claimed that he had received an honorary doctorate from York University and that his two children — a boy and a girl — were both York graduates.
Attila turned on his cell phone but ignored its persistent buzzing.
The assistant had been standing quietly by the window, watching Attila but not interrupting while he read through the file. He’d pretended not to notice until he had finished. Then he said, “We are also searching for other men from number 442 Gulag. Vorkuta. Mining.”
She returned with a slim white file and waited while he opened it.
“Not much here,” she said. “The location and the camp was emptied by 1951. Is there anyone in particular?”
“I want to know who was in Vorkuta with Márton.”
In the file, he found a note from the Ministry of Internal Affairs declaring that the contents had been removed or destroyed before the material was handed over to the Archives.
“Please,” Attila asked, “could you bring me the file on János Krestin.”
When she hesitated, he added that he thought Mrs. Lévay would have no objections. Attila wondered whether the assistant knew that he and Magda Lévay had been lovers — for a night only, but still. This time she was gone for about half an hour, returning empty-handed but with a new attitude. She was defiantly self-important, her head held high, although her arms were still crossed over her breasts.
“We have no file on Dr. Krestin,” she said.
Attila wondered when Krestin had acquired his degree and whether universities now ran courses in bribery and corruption. If so, Krestin would certainly have earned his doctorate. For the assistant’s benefit, he nodded and smiled, hoping she would report that he had known all along and was just testing the system.
“Any chance you could find the file on Gertrude Lakatos? Or the Lakatos family? They were from Slovakia,” Attila asked.
This time the assistant didn’t feel she needed to check with anyone. “There is no such file, Dr. Fehér,” she said.
“But you didn’t look,” Attila said.
“I don’t have to. There was a request for that file earlier today and we didn’t have it then, so we do not have it now.”
“Who requested it?”
“Sorry, we can’t divulge that information,” she said, not sounding particularly sorry.
***
Back outside, in the courtyard, Attila finally checked his phone. There were ten increasingly furious messages from Tóth, the last one, barely coherent, about a dead body at the Gellért.
“What the fuck?” was Tóth’s opening line when Attila called.
Attila said nothing.
“A man was found in a chair near the elevator, and he has been sitting there for at least two hours,” Tóth shouted.
“Dead,” Attila added.
“Why the fuck do you think I called you? If he was resting after a long night —”
“How?
“Knife in the neck.”
“Professional job?”
“How the fuck would I know that?” Tóth spluttered. “You haven’t seen the son-of-a-whore —”
“Anyone we know?”
“Maybe one of your friends. His face was battered a while back, nose broken, but not today. I don’t know him.”
“What floor?
“The third. Where that fucking woman’s room was. The one you haven’t been able to keep track of. Right?”
“Any ID on him?”
“None. A hundred euros. Two hundred forints and change. Car keys.”
“You found the car?”
“Son-of-a-whore parked right in front of the Gellért. They had the car towed.”
“I guess he didn’t expect to stay long,” Attila said. “Registration?”
“Car was stolen last night. The owners were having dinner in that fancy place near Hösök Square. Guy reported the car missing at ten forty-five last night.”
“The Gündel?”
“Yes. Never been there. Can’t afford it on my salary,” Tóth said.
What about the bit you take on the side? Attila thought. “They have parking attendants,” he said. “Why didn’t he use them?”
“How the fuck should I know?” Tóth yelled.
“The coroner has the body?”
“He is here.”
“Anything unusual about it?”
“He’s had some teeth replaced with gold,” Tóth said. “Does that tell you anything?”
“Russian,” Attila suggested. “Or Albanian? Maybe Ukrainian?”
“Not Ukrainian,” Tóth said.
“Oh?”
“Get your ass over here.”
“There is always a chance he is Bulgarian. Or a Turk.” Attila hung up before Tóth became seriously unhinged.
He called the Gellért’s front desk and was informed that Ms. Marsh had checked out.
He sat in his car for a while, thinking about the strands tying these people together and Helena Marsh’s interest in Old Master painters.
He googled her name and got several hits from sites in the USA and UK but nothing from Hungary. She was born in Vienna, went to university in Montreal, studied art history. She later trained in art restoration at Montreal’s Musée des Beaux Arts and at Christie’s in London. She had been awarded research grants by the Social Science Research Council of Canada and the Ministry of Culture, Monuments, and Fine Arts Office of Venice. She had worked as a restorer at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice, and there were colour photos of a few paintings her team had restored, both before and after, including several of the Giotto frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, some of the frescoes in the Church of San Salvador, a niche in the twelfth-century church I Gesuiti, and one of Titian’s Gonzaga portraits. She had curated a 1998 Titian retrospective at the Alte Pinakothek in Vienna. Her biography also listed twenty articles she had written about various artists, including Titian, Raphael, and Giorgione. She had worked for the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, had been consulted on the identification of paintings taken by Goering for his personal collection, and had spent 1994 at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, authenticating its collections of Titian and Raphael. She had been a speaker at several conferences on the restitution of Holocaust-era artworks. She had been called as a witness in the case of Laurent v. the New Gallery in Vienna for the recovery of two paintings by Egon Schiele.
Kis was right. The woman was well-known in the business. She had a ton of credentials. What Attila couldn’t figure was why a bunch of Ukrainians would be so eager to have her leave the country that they were happy to pay Tóth the kind of bribe the Hungarian police demanded for such services.