Helena got out of the cab at the south entrance to Hviezdoslavovo Square in Bratislava, waited for the driver to turn tail and race back toward the border (Hungarian taxis were not welcome in Slovakia), bought a coffee at a café kitty corner to the renovated National Theatre, then strolled along the pedestrian walkway, stopping now and then to look at the metal sculptures of people sitting on the benches or rising out of the pavement. It’s what any tourist would do, and it allowed her to check if anyone was following or watching her. For Michal’s sake, as well as her own, she couldn’t risk being followed to his shop.
Michal had been her chief source of identity papers and disguises for more than ten years. Her father had introduced them some twenty-five years ago, when they were on vacation together, travelling throughout Eastern Europe. They had come to Bratislava from London. Simon said he had some business here and had left her for a couple of hours with a bit of local money. She had walked the pockmarked streets and listened to the rustle of Slavic voices. Back then, Bratislava still looked like it was only just recovering from the war. There was a lot of rubble everywhere but also a lot of construction, thanks to the new money pouring in from Western Europe. The Hilton had just opened in place of an old hotel on Hviezdoslavovo Square, behind the eponymous Slovak poet whose thoughtful statue still dominated the square.
On his return, Simon said he wanted her to meet a man named Michal. “You don’t need him right now,” he had said, “but you may need him sometime, and an introduction by me still counts.”
The idea that she may one day need anyone her father knew seemed weird, but back then, she hadn’t known that recovering lost works of art would become part of her profession or that such work would expose her to the fury of those loath to give up what they had.
Her natural reaction to anyone introduced by her father — there had been few such people — had been sullen resistance. She had grown accustomed to his long, unexplained absences and to her mother’s unhappiness. She no longer cared that he claimed she was possibly not even his daughter and had learned to ignore his interest in her art studies. But she had begun to suspect that whatever he did for a living was likely not legal. When he took her to galleries and museums to show her fakes and forgeries, she had thought he was merely contributing to her education. “You may be hired to identify fakes,” he told her, “and no course you take will help you as much as I can.”
She did not like him much anymore, but she listened.
She was suspicious when he was cheerful and expansive and liked him even less when he was quiet and conspiratorial. On this occasion he had chosen to be quiet. He took her arm and walked her along Ventúrska Street, then back to Michalská, stopping in front of a couple of boutiques and pointing at sweaters he had no interest in buying. Window shopping, he explained, was a good way to check whether you were being followed.
Now, she was doing what he had done. She picked a wide window displaying designer dresses because, with her face close to the glass, she could see not only the reflection of the other side of the street but also down both ends. For a moment she thought she recognized the shape of a man studying a placard near the entrance to the university, but he hurried inside before she could take a good look at him. She waited but he did not come out again.
Michal’s workshop was upstairs from his small posters-only gallery on Ventúrska, where it had been on her visit with her father, except that back then there was no gallery, just a long dark entranceway.
The two men she had previously met through her father (he had introduced her to both of them as a student, not his daughter) were preening, overconfident, and entirely self-involved. She had expected Michal to be like them. He wasn’t. In the years since, he had been invariably helpful and interested in her latest escapades. He rarely complained about the urgency of the work or about how much she paid. He had not increased his prices since 1990, and his papers were still as professionally prepared as ever.
A small man with birdlike features, he seemed delighted to see Helena. He was already printing the passports and driver’s licences when he ushered her into his sanctuary. His door was always triple locked, and he had assured her long ago that he kept no records of their transactions. The only records were in his head. He had a remarkable memory for names and numbers; he never forgot an email address and placed all communications in a file labelled “junk,” which he claimed he could discard without leaving a trace. He had told Helena once that there might be a few people in the world who could access what he had deleted, but he had yet to meet one.
In addition to his other talents, Michal was a computer wizard.
He gave her a tentative hug and urged her to sit in one of his two “good” chairs.
“So,” he said in passable English, “Maria has outlived her usefulness. And you are concerned about Ms. Lewis. I had thought they would last a few more years.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how anyone could have identified you inside Maria’s improbable figure, but shit happens.”
“I didn’t care for her, anyway,” Helena said. “She was a silly woman when she was alive, and I was concerned that some of her clients would seek her out. I wish she hadn’t had such fondness for pink frills and leopard-print leggings.”
“She had a lot of clients,” Michal said, “but no one went to her funeral.”
That was Michal’s way of telling Helena that Maria’s clients may have been unaware that she had died, thus making her identity eminently suitable for Helena’s purposes. So long as she didn’t vary the disguise too much, anyone who had known Maria would overlook the change in appearance. When Michal had given Helena the Maria papers and appropriate clothes, he had said, with a grin, “It is possible for a woman to grow out of her persona but not to depart completely from what she was when she was alive.”
“I think you’ll like Eva more,” Michal now said. “She was about your shape and age. She worked in the history museum, the acquisitions section, middle management. A serious woman, and a conservative dresser. Brown hair, glasses. You still have Maria’s pair?”
“Yes.”
“Good. They will do.” Michal pulled out a bag with a light-brown wig, a dark-brown pant suit, a blue sweater, and a raincoat. He handed her an Austrian passport, health card, driver’s licence, and a Viennese library card, as well as American Express and Visa cards, all in the name of Eva Bergman. “Her accounts are paid up to date,” he said, “but she should still be spending, to keep everything above board. She was a woman of conventional tastes. She bought excellent value. She paid her bills promptly, and I have kept up all those habits after her demise.”
“Demise . . . how?” Helena asked.
Michal shook his head. “She died unremarkably,” he said. “She was let go by the museum and went for a long swim off the pier in Bremen.”
Although the clothes were a bit loose, the wig fit perfectly.
“Eva will need new shoes,” Michal said. “There is a store five blocks from here. You have cell phones, I presume, in case you run into trouble. I will be here.”
She paid him in American dollars.
“Next time, let’s retire Marianne Lewis,” she said.
“By the way,” he asked as he unlocked the door, “do you still speak German with an Austrian accent?”
“Yes. Did she have family?”
“Would I give you a woman with family?”
Helena waited in the gallery for a while, scanning the faces and attitudes of people walking by, then took her time looking at unframed posters. She chose one, paid, and left, carrying a coloured woodcut of old Presburg in a cardboard tube that also held a long-bladed knife, courtesy of Michal. She strolled over to a fashionable shoe store at the end of Ventúrska, where she bought a pair of almost-sensible maroon pumps, then settled at one of the wrought-iron tables outside Tempus Fugit, on Sedlárska. She ordered a glass of wine to celebrate her new alias and kept watching passers-by.
This was the restaurant her father had chosen for dinner the evening after he bought himself a new set of papers from Michal. He said he liked the restaurant because it was not overdecorated. You could still see its fifteenth-century walls.
Simon was not much older then than Helena was now. He still prided himself on being fit, and on his extraordinary ability to fool almost everyone he met. It kept him youthful. As Helena knew now, he had been running an exceptionally successful business selling fakes and forgeries to buyers too eager to demand all the papers proving provenance. That day, he had made what he proudly called “a killing.” She didn’t know it then, but the painting he sold that day was the genuine article. Dark, gloomy, but real. The man who had wanted it so ferociously had been willing to pay even more than the exorbitant amount Simon had initially quoted. It would complete his collection of late nineteenth-century portraits, Simon had explained. Poland’s National Museum in Warsaw was still working out the details of how to guard valuable paintings, so stealing the small Aleksander Gierymski had been easy. In the days before video cameras, a man could hide his identity simply by donning a hat or glasses, but Simon was a perfectionist. He didn’t take a chance on someone remembering his lingering near the Gierymski portrait or leaving the museum with a bulky package under his arm. Hence the visit to Michal.
Helena had resisted her father’s offer to look at the portrait. “I will take your word for it,” she told him when he said the picture was of his client’s great grandfather, one of the szlachta, the nobility practically eliminated by the Nazis.
“He couldn’t afford to buy it, but he can afford your price,” she had said.
Simon had laughed. The painting had, obviously, not been for sale — at least not after the war.
He had tried to put a good face on his business when he told her about it. By then, she had a degree in art history and was working at Christie’s. “It’s better that you know as little as possible,” he said. “But one day, you may want to do this yourself. It’s a way to keep warm and well fed and to give your kids a good education.” He had been proud of being able to send her to a private school and a good university. Now she knew that he had viewed her education and her apprenticeship at Christie’s as an investment.
Her mother never explained where the money had come from, and she had prepared for Simon’s visits with the excitement of a young girl, putting on a new dress, applying makeup, spraying a bit of Chanel No. 5 behind her ears. Helena was still furious with them both: him for deceiving her all those years and her for going along with the deception. Was it only the money that mattered to her mother? The big house on Roxborough Drive, where the wealthy lived, the expensive cars she bought, including the latest, a Mercedes convertible? Or had she really loved him? And loved him enough to acknowledge that she had an illegitimate daughter at a time when and in a neighbourhood where people still frowned on that sort of thing.
She had not once turned her head to look at Simon while he told her about the Gierymski portrait, which now she regretted, because he had lived for only another month, and they would never have another conversation.
Even now, thinking about her father gave her a toothache.
Her wine was warm by the time she lifted it to her lips. She knew she’d been silly to sit here, not watching the street, but that’s what thinking about him did to her. “You must always be aware of your surroundings,” he had told her. “Always scan faces. Watch how people move. Do they turn after they pass you? Do they give you a second look?”
She picked up the copy of SME Bratislava she had taken from the restaurant’s stack of newspapers, but she was looking beyond its open pages at the people walking along Sedlárska, angry at herself for becoming careless. The new wig and the glasses had given her a false sense of security.
She first saw him stop at the corner of Sedlárska and Hlavné Square, looking up at street numbers and down at a map in his hand. He seemed slimmer in his black windbreaker, but still thick-necked and bulky in the shoulders. His sunglasses were balanced on his short-cropped sandy hair. Attila from Budapest. What the hell was he doing in Bratislava?
She hid her face behind the newspaper but kept watching. There was a movement in the doorway of the facing building, a large dark shape. At first she could not make out whether it was male or female, but there was no doubt once he poked his big moonface out and the sun hit the visor of the cap he was wearing. Big chin under the cap, mouth a straight line. He stepped onto the street, huge, leaning forward, like a boxer flexing for a fight. He was not looking at Helena, but at Attila Fehér. There was a barely perceptible movement as he drew something from the front of his bunched-up jacket while Fehér was still looking at his map. Helena put down the newspaper and reached for the cardboard tube.
Fehér turned slowly toward the big man. It was impossible for Helena to see the big man’s face from this distance, but he seemed to square his shoulders and bring his arms forward. Then he marched, almost ran, toward Fehér. They met at the corner, facing each other, the bigger man’s gun rising up toward Fehér’s midriff. Helena threw her new knife at his back with enough force to stop him but not enough to kill him. Given her seated position, she thought it was a pretty good throw.
Everything stopped. The noise in the street suddenly hushed, then started up louder and sharper than it had been before. Everyone froze as Fehér kicked the gun out of the big man’s hand and stepped on his arm for good measure. A woman screamed and pulled her child close.
No one was looking at Helena.
She left some euros beside her wine glass, picked up the papers and her handbag, and left for the taxi rank outside the Carlton Hotel. She had a plane to catch.