At 6:40 p.m., Attila was waiting at the front doors of the Historical Archives. Arriving a half hour early was a pointed way of letting a woman know that her presence in your evening was important. Especially when you had asked her for a favour that could have, in more stringent times, meant her dismissal. Original files, even when requested by relatives, must never leave the building. He still wasn’t sure how exactly he had managed to persuade Mrs. Lévay to go against her own strict instructions to staff, never mind her instinct for survival, but he had succeeded.
She appeared a sensible ten minutes past the hour. She was wearing black high-heeled shoes and a simple black dress that managed to cling to her body as she walked, and she was carrying a red purse. The notion of matching shoes and handbags seemed to have entirely bypassed Magda Lévay. That was one of several things Attila liked about her.
Attila leaped from the car with an agility that defied his girth and age, swept Magda up in his arms, and kissed her on both cheeks. “How wonderful to see you,” he shouted. There were always cameras and sound equipment outside the Archives. Wild enthusiasm would distract any observers from the suspicion that they needed to pay attention.
Magda, taken aback at first, responded happily. “I hadn’t wanted to mention it, Attila, but you have been notable by your absence since . . . well, since the last time we spent an evening with Gustav.” She checked the back seat of the car. “Hello, Gustav. Glad you could join us.”
Attila handed her into the front seat and dashed around to the driver’s side. With the door still open (and the windows down), he said, “Why don’t we have a drink on the InterContinental’s terrace, then we can take Gustav for a walk along the Embankment? He’ll have a little frolic, then” — he put up the car window and lowered his voice — “we can go for dinner at Kisbuda Gyöngye. It’s just off Bécsi Street, in the third district, but it’s worth the drive. The food is excellent, and you’ll like the setting.” Of course, he had no idea whether she would like the setting, but it was the best restaurant he could think of where they might be unobserved.
“With Gustav?” she asked somewhat archly.
“Not exactly. The new owner is crazy about dachshunds, and she will take him to the garden in the back.”
They drove across the bridge in silence. Attila wasn’t sure how or when to ask whether she had brought the file. He didn’t want her to think that the file was the only reason he had asked her to dinner. On the other hand, he had to see the file, and the sooner the better. He was quite certain that the past held the key to the identities of the killer or killers. In Hungary, the present was so deeply rooted in the past, it was not even the past. Unless you were born after 1980, in which case you had probably left the country to enjoy the benefits of being a free citizen of Europe.
He was afraid that Magda’s silence reflected her disappointment that he had not followed up on their last evening together. He had still been hurting over the loss of his marriage and his apartment had been little better than a student flat. His shirts had been distributed throughout the apartment, Gustav had used the tatty couch as his personal domain, the bed was unmade, the kitchen sink full of dishes, and several days of newspapers, movie tickets, amusement park brochures, milk cartons, sausage wrappers, and a police-issue Ruger handgun were strewn over the kitchen table. He had been embarrassed that the chaos of his private life was so painfully revealed.
It was not until they arrived at the InterContinental that he broke the silence with, “I am so glad you came.” He handed his car keys to the doorman, as if he were in the habit of having other people park his car.
“I was wondering,” Magda said, “why it took you so long to ask.”
“I wasn’t sure you would be willing to try again.”
Once they were seated on the terrace café, he ordered a bottle of Olasz riesling with a bottle of soda and ice. He wanted to show her he remembered she liked this wine. At first, they talked lightly, about the vast numbers of tourists, the difficulty of finding cafés and restaurants not overrun by visiting Germans and Americans, the recent influx of Scandinavians, the noisy tour boats on the Danube, the drop in the forint’s value, Gustav’s avid interest in every passerby, the astonishing variety of new acts of parliament, the debate over compensation for those forced to move to the country in the early 1950s — pretty much everything other than whether she had brought the file.
It wasn’t until Attila let Gustav off his leash for a run alongside the river that Magda asked whether he was investigating János Krestin’s murder. He said he was working for the police, for Tóth, but not for Tóth alone, because Krestin’s case had been taken over by Homicide.
“You don’t like Tóth much?” she asked.
Attila shrugged. “He’s not bad. No imagination, which makes him ideal for the job, but he is on the take. Nothing major, but he likes to keep his hand in the till. If you want to get away with a major crime in this city, there are always policemen you can bribe. I am of the old school. Tóth is more modern.”
“When you were in the Archives last time, you wanted to know about Gertrude Lakatos?” Magda asked.
“Yes. She was once Géza Márton’s girlfriend, and I was curious about Márton. I still am.”
“She was more than that. In 1957, after Márton left, she became Mrs. Krestin.”
“She did?” Now he knew why he hadn’t been able to get the Gertrude Lakatos file from Magda’s assistant.
“She left him in 1981 and moved to Slovakia. Little place called Dunajská Streda — Dunaszerdahely in an earlier life. That’s where her family had come from. They are all buried in the cemetery there with the other Hungarians. There were a few reports about her in the Czechoslovak state police files by agents of the ŠtB. Nothing major. While she lived here, she went north every year to tend to her family’s graves, on All Saints Day.”
“Children?”
“One son. He makes his living as a house painter, and he took a few art courses. He never finished high school.”
“What were the reports about?”
“Whether she took part in political gatherings. She didn’t. At least not before 1989. The ŠtB was dispersed in ’89. There were no more reports after that.”
“Has anyone else asked to see her file in the archives?”
“A woman called Marianne Lewis. An American. She claimed she was a relative of Mrs. Krestin, but when my office called Krestin, he denied his wife had American relatives. So we didn’t let her in. She came the same day as you.”
Marianne Lewis? Who the hell was Marianne Lewis? And how did she fit into the Márton-Marsh-Krestin picture?
Attila didn’t ask her about the Krestin file till she slipped it into his hand at the end of their drive along Bécsi Street. The file was a lot thinner than Géza Márton’s, but that was not surprising. Krestin had been a stalwart Party member, while Márton was suspected of harbouring ill feelings toward the state.
He read it sitting in the car under an old chestnut tree near the Kisbuda Gyöngye restaurant, while Magda took Gustav for a stroll along the herbaceous border, where other dogs had left messages for Gustav’s enjoyment.
The notes started in 1948 when Krestin was twenty-five years old. He had professed he was a member of the Communist Party of Hungary, a group, the first report said, with its own ideas about the future of the country. There was a single line about his having met Comrade Rákosi when both of them were arrested in 1943. Rákosi served a year in prison, but Krestin did not. That was interesting. In 1944, the government imprisoned card-carrying Communists, even suspected Communists, for as long as possible, or as long as it stayed in power. Perhaps it had other uses for Krestin? In 1948, Rákosi, who had become prime minister and first secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, must have become suspicious of Krestin for some reason and ordered the surveillance. There was no explanation in the file.
The notes recorded Krestin’s meetings with other members of his Communist cell. They met once a week in the old Emke Café, where they drank beer and talked. They had made no attempt to disguise their discussions. The notes had few details — the noise, the note said, was deafening — but what there was read like a bunch of young people debating the fabulous future they were promised under Soviet rule. There was a list of names, with the nicknames they called one another. They had voted on a list of essentials: no more hunger, the ascendency of the working class, voluntary membership in the armed struggle to bring Communist ideas to other countries where workers were still living in the nineteenth century.
One of the nicknames was Bika, the name Helena Marsh had mentioned when he told her that Krestin had been killed. There was a small handwritten note here: “Gulag #442.” Alongside that note: “János Krestin was a model prisoner.” So, perhaps he, too, had been in Vorkuta.
Krestin had read a great deal of foreign literature: Camus, Sartre, Stendhal, de Maupassant. One member of the surveillance team read several passages from one of the books Krestin had talked about by a man called “Dikens.” The writer was unsure of the spelling, but it was certainly a foreign work and, he thought, possibly subversive.
The next surveillance notes were written by a woman with the initials J.S. who had been inside Krestin’s apartment in Újpest and wrote about his morning routines of drinking coffee, exercising, and reading the newspaper. He had seemed particularly interested in the trial of László Rajk, one of the original organizers of the Party and the founder of the state security police. She said she thought he was not actively involved with Rajk, who was later accused of being a Titoist spy. This was in the days when being an admirer of Yugoslavia’s Tito was a crime, although he had been designated a friend in earlier times. Krestin had told several of his friends, many of whom were already working for the state police, that he supported re-education for people like Rajk. The person who had received this particular report had written on the margin: “Not!” Rajk, as Attila knew, had already been slated for execution by then.
He was amazed to learn that the people who had commissioned these reports worked in the same building and for the same organization as Krestin. How could this surveillance have remained hidden from a man of Krestin’s standing in the hierarchy? Had one of the seventeen departments of the ÁVO had special powers that extended to spying on their own?
While in bed with Krestin, J.S. had initiated conversations about Rakosi, then boss of the Communist Party in Hungary; his sidekick Ernö Gerö; Stalin; and even Soviet First Deputy Premier Vyacheslav Molotov. (It must have been a marvelously satisfying experience for both of them, Attila thought and tried to imagine what sexual situation would most readily lend itself to such a dialogue.) Krestin had been fervent in his boundless admiration for all of them. As per instructions, she had installed a number of listening devices in his rooms and assured her handler that no conversations occurred other than those recorded.
There was a neatly typed memorandum dated February 11, 1953, from Krestin to László Péter, recommending continued surveillance of Géza Márton. Péter, Attila knew, had been the feared and despised head of ÁVO, the state security police in Hungary; he was arrested a few months later, tried at a court martial in 1954, and condemned to life in prison. Like his boss, the unlamented Gerö, Péter was charged with being part of the Soviet-invented Jewish conspiracy to control elite positions within the Soviet bureaucracy.
The name Bika popped up again as one of a group of friends who had visited Krestin at home.
Krestin’s report on what he had observed during the 1956 Revolution was in the file, together with his sworn testimony that he had been a witness to the attack on Party headquarters. He had been inside the building in the morning, went out for something to eat, and found the crowd had grown much larger while he was away. Instead of entering the building, he had gone home for a camera. It was a German-made Leica, already four years old, a gift from Ernö Gerö, the comrade who had earned his stripes in the NKVD, forerunner of the KGB. (Why would Gerö have given Krestin a camera? He was not known for his generosity even toward those who followed all his orders.) Krestin had taken photos of some of the people in the square. He claimed that he told anyone asking why that he worked for LIFE magazine. The photographs were fuzzy, some had been scratched, some folded and bits were missing from five of them. Clearly, someone had decided to eliminate a few faces.
A signed affidavit testified that Krestin had seen Károly Márton carrying a rifle at the scene and witnessed his aiming it at one of the officers who had escaped from the building.
A new observer wrote that Krestin met Gertrude Lakatos in January 1957 in a bar called Kedves, close to ÁVO headquarters on Andrássy Avenue. She had offered to teach him French. He had accepted. There was a report on his courtship of her, because she was already a person of interest. Her former liaison with Géza Márton had triggered an investigation. The Krestin file cross-referenced a file under her name. There was a note there about her family’s move from Slovakia to Hungary and Krestin’s first meeting with her parents. The person who wrote the report must have been close to Gertrude, as he (she?) knew that Krestin had been invited to dine with her parents and that the meeting had been frosty. Krestin had not been interested in listening to the elder Lakatos’s views on collective farming and his critique of the latest five-year plan. The next time this person reported contact between the parents and Krestin was at the wedding, a civil ceremony.
Krestin had remained friendly with his group of Communists as they aged. One of them died, the others, including Bika, kept meeting Krestin for drinks and dinners.
There was no mention anywhere of a relationship between Géza Márton and János Krestin. No mention that they had ever known each other. If, as Helena Marsh had said, the Titian or quasi-Titian that Krestin had decided to sell had once belonged to Márton, there was no suggestion in the file of how Krestin had acquired it.
There were several reports from Toronto and one from Vaughan, dating from Márton’s arrival in Canada in early 1957. The fact that these were in Krestin’s file suggested that he had initiated the surveillance, but there was no signature and no names attached to the reports.
Krestin, who had been close to the various governments that followed the collapse of Soviet rule, could easily have accessed these files and just as easily removed anything he thought incriminating. The existence of the file was evidence that Krestin himself had been under suspicion.
Márton had plenty of motives for Krestin’s murder: the imprisonment of his father, the loss of Gertrude’s affections, or just the fact that Krestin had been a faithful ÁVO officer in the service of a murderous state. Heck, thought Attila, that alone should have been enough to have the bugger killed.
Magda came back to the car with a very cheerful Gustav, and the three of them entered Kisbuda Gyöngye exactly on time for their 8 p.m. reservation. The maître d’ looked stunned by this unaccustomed punctuality. Their table was not yet ready, but the owner was delighted to see them (“Such a long time, Attila.”) and squired Gustav into the garden.
The restaurant was exactly as he had remembered: low lights, red tablecloths under white ones, gold-edged white plates, tall crystal glasses, deep armchairs, four to a table. The maître d’ showed them to the corner table, with just two armchairs, far from the kitchen, and served them glasses of Champagne to start.
“Lovely place,” Magda said. She seemed to relax now that the file was safely back in her purse. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I am not sure yet. János Krestin was not the most likable guy, but we still need to find out who killed him. Did you read his file?”
“Of course, as soon as I heard that he had been murdered. He was an old-style Commie, not someone you would have wanted to cross in the good old days. It’s interesting how fast he managed to become part of the new capitalist system. He had become useful as a negotiator for gas prices. He spoke good English, French, serviceable Russian. Bought a football team, a couple of apartment houses, a shopping mall. Invested in the movie business. A seamless transition with a great deal of unexplained cash. Friends in high places. A few boards. Connections with all political parties.”
“You can buy political connections everywhere. The only questions are how much and to what end,” Attila said. “Even Americans use money to buy votes. It’s not as obvious as here, but everybody knows.”
“You were also interested in his wives?”
“Wives?”
“He had two. Too few for a Hungarian, don’t you think? Are you planning to remarry?”
The thought hadn’t crossed his mind. He gulped down his water and pretended he hadn’t heard the question. He told her what he had gleaned about Gertrude. “I assume his second wife is still alive?”
“Yes. She’s much younger than him.”
“Children?”
“Just the one with his first wife.”
“I wonder whether your great video system managed to get a shot of the woman who had asked to see her file.”
“Ms. Lewis? Of course,” Magda said triumphantly, and she produced a fuzzy but unmistakable picture of Helena Marsh.
“That’s Marianne Lewis?”
“Yes. She showed us an American passport when we asked. We don’t let just anyone walk into the Archives, you know.”
Alexander had told him that Helena was a master of disguises. She could be anything she wanted. Young, old, pretty, frumpy. And she could be dangerous. This woman had killed a man in Russia. Could she have killed two men in Budapest?
The Russian in St. Petersburg had had his throat cut.
He couldn’t shake the image of her walking across the Szabadság Bridge, her skirt swishing around her long, tanned legs, her smile. Then he remembered her clinical concentration when he showed her the photos of the dead Ivan Dalchev. She had shown no shock, no disgust, just that little smile, different from the one on the bridge but still a smile.
He let Magda order the wine, because he was sure she would be frugal. The last time they had met, she told him she had never had Champagne before. Not even Hungarian sparkling wine. He was optimistic she would select something less expensive than what he, in thanks for her bringing him the file, would have felt obliged to order. She studied the list with the attention she would have given a new acquisition for the Archives, or so he thought. In the end, she decided on a half litre of the house red and one of the white. Luckily Kisbuda Gyöngye had chosen its house wines with care.
After they ordered, she talked about the sixty boxes of state police files that had been found in a warehouse in Szúcs and, although she wouldn’t mention names, she said they were all on highly placed people whose pasts had been successfully buried until now. Attila presumed the contents would be revealed selectively, depending on whose lives would be hurt and how much those lives were worth.
She thought there might be more information in these files about Krestin and his connections during and after the war.
He did not tell her that he had been hired to follow Helena Marsh, but he did say that he was interested in the No.442 Gulag file. Everywhere he turned, the camp’s name came up. He was becoming convinced that the answers to this case lay there.
“I may be able to help you with that file,” she said after her second glass of wine. “I will be in charge of cataloguing them, and my staff will enter them into the records.”
He took her hand across the table and held it, gently.
“All the original Gulag files have been transferred to the vaults,” she said.
He kissed her palm.
“But I have access to the vaults.”
He poured more wine and gazed into her eyes.
“Perhaps—” she said, as his phone buzzed. He ignored it, but it buzzed again almost immediately.
“Helena Marsh,” a woman’s voice said. “I have something for you. It’s about the man they called Bika. Can we meet in half an hour?”
He should have said no, but he didn’t. Instead, he gave Magda a sorrowful look and said, “I have to work tonight, after all.”
She withdrew her hand.
“Could we do this again next week?” he asked.
Magda didn’t reply. Nor did she say anything on the drive across the Danube to her building off Erzsébet Királyné Street. Had Attila been more courageous, he would have ventured a joke or a cheerful remark about the exigencies of after-hours work, but she had turned into a statue. It was only when he drew up in front of the entrance that he dared a gentle “Goodnight then,” and climbed out of the car to open her door only to discover that she had already left without so much as a curt farewell.
“I will call you on Monday,” he said feebly to her back.
She shrugged without turning and walked into the building without a backward glance. A lost opportunity, he thought, regretfully. But, then, Helena Marsh was waiting for him in the lobby of her hotel. He found even the idea of her exciting and, yes, maybe dangerous. He had assumed that he was long past the age of finding danger an aphrodisiac, but with Helena it was the whole package: attractive, confident, muscular in a feminine way, foreign. That little smile of hers had somehow quickened his pulse. He squared his shoulders and made a valiant effort to rein in his belly.
Even dressed in training pants and a T-shirt, she seemed too attractive for an art expert. But, then, Attila’s idea of an art expert was a weedy egghead with a tuft of hair and the facial expression of a giraffe — somewhat like Kis, in fact. She greeted him with the same smile that had got his attention in the gallery. As if she were thinking over a joke or knew something funny she had chosen not to reveal. Yet.
“I thought I would go for a run up and down Gellért Hill and along the Danube,” she said. “Since you won’t let me leave the city, I may as well get to know it better.”
“What is so urgent you had to see me tonight?” he asked as gruffly as he could manage.
“You remember the old man in the apartment building near the synagogue?” she asked.
He stared at her.
“You followed me to Dob Street and waited outside the building where the old man lives.”
“I may have . . .”
“Gábor Nagy,” she said. “I assume you worked that out.”
There was no point in dissembling. “I may have.”
“He contacted me today. He says he is afraid. Someone has threatened him.”
“What does that have to do with János Krestin? Or with the dead Bulgarian?”
“The man who threatened him is called Gyula Németh. When they were all in Vorkuta, he went by the name of Bika, most likely because he looked like a bull.”
“Who all?”
“Nagy, Márton, Németh, and Krestin. Gyula Németh is the man I mentioned to you before, but I didn’t know his real name then. Now I do. And I know that he told Gábor Nagy he could find himself being thrown down into his courtyard to sniff the remnants of his potted plants if he talked about Vorkuta to anyone. And one more thing, this guy Németh was in your ÁVO with Krestin.”
“It’s not my ÁVO,” Attila said. “And who told you that?”
“Nagy. It’s amazing how his memory returned when he needed it. When I talked with him before, he was all for burying the past and letting the future take care of itself. That’s why he didn’t tell me Németh’s name then. Very philosophical. Now, it turns out, he remembers.”
“And why would this man want to kill Krestin?”
“Perhaps they shared a secret he didn’t want revealed. Maybe Krestin owed him and didn’t pay up. I don’t know, but judging by what Nagy told me, Németh was the muscle in that camp. And now that Krestin is dead, Nagy felt free to tell me that Krestin was in charge of a group of prisoners. He was a kapo, and Bika was his enforcer.”
“You made me come all the way here to tell me this?”
“Not entirely,” she said. “I think Nagy needs protection. If this Bika knows enough to threaten him, he could be thinking of killing him, and you and your friends in the police may be tired of finding dead bodies. The first two may have been unpredictable, but for this one, you have had fair warning.”