Helena got up from her table at 3 p.m., just as all the other diners began to trickle back to their offices. The maître d’ didn’t charge her for the coffee or the chocolate-covered pear and insisted that the accompanying pear brandy was also on the house. With compliments. “Dr. Krestin is one of our best customers,” he said in passable English. “Has been for many years.”
“Did you know his first wife?” Helena asked.
“Yes. We don’t see her much anymore. She has moved away, but they do still come from time to time. Last time they ordered the venison with pear and dumplings, and she wanted Champagne. French, not Hungarian. She looked like she hadn’t been eating much.
“The first Mrs. Krestin was a real lady — quiet, soft-spoken, never complained about the food or the service. The second one is a different story. She is barely civil, even to him. Nothing is good enough for some people.”
Helena smiled and nodded as if she had known all along and tipped him generously, not so much that it would lead him to wonder, but enough to keep him talking. “Thirty years is a long time,” she said, assuming he would know how long the Krestins had been separated.
“More than that, I think. But we have been here even longer, since 1885.”
“Some things don’t change,” she suggested.
“But the people who eat here . . .”
“In 1885, the nobility and the newish middle class,” she prompted. “Then two world wars. The Communists.”
“They weren’t all bad, you know.”
“Dr. Krestin, for example,” with as ingratiating a smile as she could manage.
“Even with his Party pin, he was a gentleman. Always polite. I can’t say that about all our guests in those days, but he never changed. Not here, anyway.”
***
Helena took the tram to the East Station, then walked to the Kerepesi cemetery. It was shady, with towering chestnut trees and giant stone mausoleums, but she had no trouble finding the elaborate tomb of the actress and opera singer Lujza Blaha and the nearby arcade. It was a tall, pillared structure with sad putti and an even sadder peasant, boots pointing inwards, bearded head bending over his zither, and inside the colonnade reclined the actress and opera singer, her hair in pleasing ringlets, plump cheeked face, breasts tastefully uncovered. She had died in 1926, but people still made the effort to place fresh red roses and pink carnations in strategic spots around her, and a bunch of gold chrysanthemums was wedged in at the crack of a putty’s dimpled bottom.
Helena waited on the stone bench in the arcade, reading her Aeneid. She found mystery within it every time she read it — it was the perfect companion for her during a journey that required patience. Her father always carried a well-thumbed copy of Joyce’s Ulysses. He’d hoped that by the time he died he would finally understand what the book was about. He didn’t, of course. He lacked the patience. When she was small, he used to try being the patient parent. There was a tone he used when he spoke to her, one of infinite care, and he chose short words, suitable for a child. When he took her to galleries, he made her stand in front of each painting he considered important and asked her to tell him what she liked about it. He called them “teaching moments.” She was ten when she told him that he no longer had to use just short words. She realized then that he hadn’t understood this himself because he hadn’t ever really listened to her.
It was not a long wait.
The woman arrived wearing a long black overcoat, although it was too warm for coats. She was carrying a furled purple umbrella, although there were barely any clouds. She walked with some difficulty, dragging her heels along the gravel. Her shoes were dusty and cracked with wear. Géza had said she would be in her eighties and would carry a purple umbrella. She had been the assistant curator of Italian art at the National Gallery. She had assembled the information for Géza’s father shortly before she was fired in 1950 and took it with her to Hódmezövásárhely, where she had been sent for re-education. Presumably, it was a piece of a larger trove of papers that she had taken as a form of insurance should circumstances get worse than banishment to a provincial town.
Géza had been concerned about the woman’s safety. It had puzzled Helena at the time but she now understood. Krestin would not want anyone else to have these papers and whoever else was after the painting might even kill for them.
The woman circled several of the bigger graves and looked up and down the wide walkway before she approached Lujza Blaha’s mausoleum, rather tentatively, as if she had just happened upon it. Considering that, according to Géza, she was neither an actor nor a trained spy, she was doing an excellent job of impersonating a tourist. She stopped next to the statue of the reclining actress and took a closer look at her face. As she straightened up, she slipped something under the great lady’s stone wrist.
Helena watched her turn the corner near the end of the arcade before she stood up. She didn’t want to endanger the old woman by showing herself. If someone questioned her about Helena, she could truthfully claim never to have met or even seen her.
The papers were carefully folded in four. Yellow with age, but still flexible enough that they hadn’t cracked, they fitted comfortably into the arm of her cardigan. She didn’t look at them until she was back in her room at the Gresham. They did not disappoint.
Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem was painted between 1554 and 1556 for Philip II, King of Spain. It was first described by Pietro Aretino in an ingratiating letter to Philip, a copy of which was attached. There was further mention of it in one of Titian’s own fawning letters to the king, dated 1556. The originals of these letters were in the archive of the Ambrosiana Library in Milan. The painting was inherited by Philip V; acquired by Philippe, the second Duke of Orléans, in 1708; and so on through various European royals to Lord Gower in 1803. He sold it to the Viennese dealer Gregor Sabransky in 1850. Sabransky sold it to Max Meisel, also in Vienna. Károly Márton purchased the painting from Meisel for a mere 50,000 osztrák-magyar korona. There was no history after 1900, no sales, no exhibitions, but Károly Márton was Géza’s great-grandfather, a man with considerable wealth and assets throughout the decrepit empire. He also had land holdings in Austria, Croatia, and Romania. He had been involved in banking for the Habsburgs and very likely helped finance the First World War. All this she had already heard from Géza, but the proof, should she need it, was now in her hands.
As far as Géza knew, Károly had not been an art collector. The Titian was the only valuable painting he owned, and he had bequeathed it to his son, Ferenc.
She had to find out how it had ended up in Krestin’s possession. In their first conversation, Géza had suggested that the painting had been stolen by the State Security Police under Krestin’s direction. That would not have been unusual after the war and in the early 1950s. But why had Géza waited until now to claim it and why was he willing to pay the punishing price Krestin was demanding?
It was unlikely that Krestin was the Bika whom Gábor Nagy remembered from Vorkuta. If Krestin was telling the truth and had bought the painting, what pressure could this man have exerted on Géza or his father to hand over the family’s one valuable possession?
She knew now that Géza had failed to tell her the whole story. He had not mentioned meeting Gábor, who would have been wearing the yellow star, somewhere in Pest before the siege. And she had not wondered, then, about the truth behind Géza’s story. There had been something arresting about the man and his memories. He had told her his story while standing at the back of his house, looking out of those big bay windows at his early April garden, just beginning to flow into spring.
The family had survived a hundred days in the cellar, eating dried meat and rotten potatoes. Had Géza’s older brother, Ferenc, not been killed, he would have been the one to go in search of food. As it was, Géza had had no choice. He’d had to volunteer. With some feelings of guilt, he had realized that this was the first time that he had actually missed his brother. As he left that day, his mother was blackening her face with soot and letting his father cut off her long light brown hair to make her look like a boy. Before the war, she had brushed her hair every evening, one hundred strokes so it would keep its lustre. Ironic, she had said, that she had worried about becoming too fat on black-market butter and chocolates and now she was as thin as she had been when she married his father twenty-two years ago.
Once outside, Géza had searched for food, anything at all that he could buy. He offered a man his father’s family ring for a chunk of bloody meat he was carrying half-hidden in his jacket, but the man scurried off without a word. Someone near their home said that there was a farmer’s wagon on the embankment with black bread for sale, but the wagon was long gone by the time Géza found the place. A man there told him that the Irányi Street bakery near Váci Street was open for business.
Near the Buda end of the wrecked Széchenyi Chain Bridge, there was a rowboat already packed with a dozen people on makeshift seats. The man who owned the boat was charging each passenger a thousand pengös for the crossing. They all had to row. The Danube was choppy, and bits of wood, dead pets, furniture, even human bodies bumped against the boat. He remembered seeing a horse’s head float by. A few waves slopped over the sides, soaking his shoes and his loden coat — a present for his seventeenth birthday. Géza was worried about how he would make it back to Buda and his parents. With all the bridges gone and only a few rowboats on the river, he knew he had to start back early and take the chance that another boat would take passengers.
It was a day he remembered as clearly as if it had been yesterday. In fact, clearer than yesterday. His whole life changed in that hour, and the four lost years that followed could never be recovered. He remembered the young soldier. He was not much older than Géza. He had light-blue eyes, and thin lines of sweat and dirt were caked over his forehead and down his cheeks. His uniform stank of sweat and tobacco. He had shouted at Géza in Russian, but Géza hadn’t understood. He stopped only when he saw the machine gun pointed at his midriff. He offered the soldier his father’s watch. It wasn’t enough.
She should have known better than to believe the whole story, and under normal circumstances she would have known better. Géza had been a friend of her father’s, and she had learned never to trust Simon’s friends or to take anything he told her at face value. He rarely told the whole truth, and sometimes not even the opposite of what he said was true. She was in her late teens before she found out how he had made the money to send her to the elite boarding school in Montreal, and why he had been eager to finance her apprenticeships at the Musée des Beaux Arts and, later, at Christie’s.
***
When she checked out of the Gresham, she was wearing the innocuous black pants, the T-shirt, the black wig, rimless glasses, and a shawl that would have suited the real Maria Steinbrunner, had she believed in dressing her age, which she hadn’t. One of Ms. Steinbrunner’s foibles had been her penchant for frilly pink tops and skin-tight, leopard-print leggings. Unlike her current reincarnation, she had dyed her hair a pinkish blond with red highlights and had paid for expensive breast implants and facial improvements that guaranteed her a good living long after she should have thought of changing professions. Not that it was her profession that had got Maria killed. It was her utter ignorance of the need for discretion that led to her body being deposited in a vat of acid near a Bratislava building site. She had been a vain, chatty woman, but her papers had proved to be useful in a pinch. Her passport photo had been taken when she was still mostly her natural self.
Helena left a personal note with the concièrge for Mr. Grigoriev. She wrote it on the hotel’s stationery, in Russian to make sure he understood and could ponder it while she was travelling.
You may find it interesting to study the works of Elmyr de Hory while you are visiting Budapest. While he was famous for his Picasso forgeries, he was equally successful with his reproductions of earlier artists, especially Titian.
Helena Marsh
She took a hotel limousine to Ferenc Liszt airport, making sure the driver noticed her fine hair and her old-world leather gloves when she paid the bill. She smiled at him and tipped fifteen per cent.
There were people who wanted to know her whereabouts, including the Hungarian police and the brawny man who had been tailing her since she arrived. But they would never recognize her as Maria.