It was a small building close to the old synagogue, in an area that had once been part of the ghetto. Some of the houses had been converted into apartment buildings. One of the developers who had sprung up like weeds after ’89 had laid claim to much of the land around here, but he had not yet succeeded in evicting the tenants from this building.
There were no names on the board, only apartment numbers, but Attila had no problem identifying the man Helena had met. The old pre-democracy police files were still useful, when needed. Gábor Nagy, eighty-four years old. He lived alone, a retired school teacher. He had spent three years in Vorkuta, one of the Soviet labour camps. He was lucky to be alive. He got in trouble again in 1956, joining a group of students he had taught — or so the indictment said. He was tried and jailed for ten years but got out after only five. He couldn’t return to teaching, so he had moved to Eger and worked in the state winery. He had been married. His wife had taught engineering at the university, but she gave up her job when they moved to Eger. Two daughters who both left the country in November 1956. After 1989, they visited every Christmas. His wife died in 2014 and he came back to Budapest.
“Is this some sort of Jewish thing?” Attila asked Tóth.
“What do you mean, Jewish thing?”
“I mean is this woman, Marsh, is she of interest because she is after some Second World War Nazi or a homegrown Arrow Cross man? Something he stole from the Jews? Is that whom we are protecting?”
Tóth sighed theatrically before he answered.
“I’ve already told you this has nothing to do with Jews. We took care of them years ago. That 2011 conference dealt with all their remaining claims.”
“What about the Herzog lawsuit?”
“Never heard of it.”
“A bunch of paintings in several museums that used to belong to a guy called Herzog. They were confiscated by the Nazis, shipped to Germany with all their loot. Now Herzog is suing the government.”
Tóth rolled his eyes with frustration. “He is damned lucky his stuff wasn’t reclassified as Soviet loot. If it were hanging in the Kremlin, he’d have no chance of ever seeing it again. But I told you, this woman is not here about Nazi loot. It’s nothing to do with Herzog or whoever else. And I am not sharing any more information with you unless it helps you find her and get her out of the country. We want no fuss.”
“The man she met on Dob Street seems to be Jewish,” Attila said.
Tóth shrugged. “There are still a lot of Jews about.”
“Any idea what the connection is between her and Nagy?” Attila asked. “She wouldn’t go to see him if there is no connection. Right?”
Tóth paced the room, then dropped back into his chair (the one that used to be Attila’s chair), his balls slapping on the wood as he sat down, legs wide apart. On full display. “Look, Fehér,” he said, trying for a more considerate tone, “what we have here is a foreign national on some sort of private mission invading the home of someone who was once close to the prime minister and to the former prime minister. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are claiming that she may be a threat to their peace of mind. We don’t need to know why. We need to encourage her to leave the country. Encourage her hard, if that’s what it takes. That’s where you come in.”
“The former prime minister?” Attila raised his eyebrows in exaggerated astonishment. “Which one? The young Commie or the dictator?”
“That’s on a need-to-know,” Tóth said, not quite succeeding in hiding his grin under the ridiculous moustache. There had been a time when had Attila used those words in this office both of them would have laughed openly. “You are wasting time. The Ukrainians didn’t sound very patient, and I gave them my word that we were using one of our best. That’s you. But tomorrow, it may have to be someone else.”
“You could arrest her.”
“No. We can’t.”
Attila sighed. There was no sense pushing Tóth once he had dug his heels in. He tried another tack.
“The lawyer she met at the Gerbeaud is known for selling antiques. And art.” Attila had been assigned to watch him once before. Nothing came of the investigation, because everyone had been paid a share of the profits. They had been handsome profits, with several zeros at the end, and the antique credenza was, for sure, happier where it landed than in the storage space of the old Buda building where its former owners used to hide stuff before the Soviets came.
Tóth nodded.
“So, she is after something valuable,” Attila prompted.
“Could be.”
“And the thing is in the former comrade’s house, where it’s been safe and sound for many years, but someone now wants it. And the thing stays unguarded when the former comrade is out for an evening. Why?”
“You were on the job, so it wasn’t supposed to be unguarded.”
“And you are absolutely sure this is not about recovering Jewish stuff from the Second World War.”
“I told you those fucking cases were settled long ago,” Tóth shouted. “Dammit. You know that. Not our job.”
“Do you know who she’s been talking to on her cell?”
“No. She is very careful. She uses only disposable phones.”
“What about those handy little listening devices the state police installed in the guest rooms?” Attila had helped remove a number of them from hotel washrooms and overhead lights in ’90, but there would have been thousands more all over the city. The Communists displayed an almost insatiable curiosity about everyone, including tourists.
“No. The touristy ’56-ers had them all removed from the hotels.”
“Even in the toilet bowls?”
“Especially the toilet bowls.”
“Well, as you said, the lawyer is only interested in buying and selling stuff. He tells us something now and then just for business insurance. I expect he could tell us more.”
Tóth threw a navy blue business card on the desk between them. “Don’t damage the golden goose,” he said and answered his cell phone, signalling the end of the meeting.
The silver type on the card read, “Dr. Ferenc Kis, Counsel and Specialist in European paintings and antiquities.” Hungarian on one side, English on the other. No address, just a phone number for downtown Pest. It had been a few years since Attila’s last visit.
In the hall outside Tóth’s office, Attila called Ferenc Kis and politely asked the secretary for an appointment in an hour. After a short pause and a disbelieving gust of breath, the secretary told him that Dr. Kis was busy and asked the reason for this appointment. She sounded like the sort of self-important, management-school type Attila specialized in irritating, so he got rolling with his least polite voice, accent tending to the lower prairies near the Serbian border, descending to the offensively familiar, and advised her that his business was strictly between Mr. (he refused to call anyone with a law degree “doctor”) Kis, and that if Mr. Kis valued his ass, he would be in his office in exactly forty-five minutes, which is how long it would take Attila to get to — where was it again?
She gave him some dead air, then an address at the high end of Váci Street, and hung up. He used that tone of voice to persuade petty bureaucrats of some impending doom breaching their comfortable horizons. Members of local organized crime gangs often spoke that way. Grand bureaucrats usually had their own enforcers, so scum threats rarely worked with them.
Although traffic congestion had made driving in the city almost impossible, he was at the entrance to Váci Street in less than fifteen minutes. He parked illegally in front of the old Vigadó Palace, where his grandmother, when she was a debutante, used to dance through the autumn nights. The petty nobility would come up to Budapest for “the season,” expecting their daughters to be hooked up before Christmas. Very civilized before the First War, if you were in the right economic class or had inherited a reasonable title. Attila was glad his great grandpa just had an added surname, a Hungarian form of the German “von,” otherwise his grandfather would have ended up in some godforsaken dump of a village for enemies of the state during the Rakosi years, and his father may never have been conceived.
Attila’s father died in 1970 when Attila was only ten, but he still remembered the rough skin on his hands, his swollen fingers, the bristly hair on his chin when he kissed Attila goodnight.
***
The private offices of Dr. Ferenc Kis were on the second floor of a building with street-level windows that displayed the bucolic art of the late nineteenth century — hay wagons, sturdy white horses, overdressed wranglers, the usual kitsch tourists loved. Attila didn’t bother with the doorbell. He held the door for a man who was carrying parcels and struggling with his keys. Then he slipped in after him.
The door to Kis’s office faced the courtyard. He had fancied it up with mosaic glass and fake white pillars on either side of the wide wooden door. Attila opened it with just a push of his elbow and walked up the short flight of stairs into a room reserved for clients who had time to read American magazines while waiting. Attila didn’t. He marched into the inner office, where Kis and his stick-thin secretary were enjoying a mid-afternoon coffee.
Attila announced his name. “I called in advance,” he told Kis, nodding at the formally dressed woman daintily holding her coffee cup in the air. “I am following up on your meeting with the American agent yesterday.”
“American agent?” Kis seemed genuinely surprised. “Whose agent? You don’t mean like CIA, or whatever?”
Attila tried to look very serious.
“Who said she is an American agent? She is not even American,” Kis protested. “And what do you mean ‘following up’?”
Kis was shorter than he had seemed at the Gerbeaud, but he compensated for his lack of height by styling his hair in a high wave. It didn’t work. He had rimless glasses over a tight mouth and a narrow forehead that struggled to be seen under the big hair. He wore a blue-striped shirt with a matching blue-and-white square peeking out of the breast pocket of his navy blazer. Did ordinary mortals still wear this sort of garb?
“We have had prior dealings with her, and we are keen to avoid the problems she brought with her the last time,” Attila said. It was not a good lie, but he hoped it would do the job. People nowadays seemed more concerned about being seen with American agents than Russian FSB guys, although the latter were scarier. This government was paranoid about Americans. Russians, not so much.
“What kind of problems?” Kis asked, his left eyebrow lifting ever so slightly in a futile effort to indicate he was not seriously interested.
“The kind you would want to avoid is my guess,” Attila said. “Involving a bit of violence with guns and an unexplained death. Lots of mess for the police.”
Kis leaned back in his chair and regarded Attila with curiosity. “I don’t think so.”
“Which part?”
Kis shrugged. “I have a good relationship with the police. As you know.”
Attila nodded. “But not with the Ukrainians.”
He sat down in one of the gilt-armed chairs across from Kis. Its silk-embroidered seat groaned. Clearly, it was a chair made for a much smaller man.
“The who?”
“Ukrainians,” Attila repeated, still nodding.
“I don’t know any Ukrainians.”
“So you say.”
They sat for a while, letting the information simmer between them, then Kis said, “And I am not interested in dealing with them.”
“They may not care what interests you,” Attila said, making it up as he went. “They believe they have a prior claim on the property you’re peddling.”
Kis dabbed his face with the back of his hand, then took a cigarette from a silver case. The secretary lit it with her own silver lighter. How quaint, Attila thought, how old black-and-white Hollywood, how pre-war.
“That’s impossible,” Kis said. “The Canadian couple registered with me thirty years ago . . .”
Now we are getting somewhere, Attila thought. “Ms. Marsh’s clients,” he said, nodding, as if he had known all along.
“Márton. He called as soon as one could do that sort of thing. He sent photographs. Okay, so they are black and white, but you don’t have to be much of an expert to recognize this painting. He paid the retainer and renewed every year, so I could keep an eye out. The painting means a lot to this guy. He doesn’t even care if he has to pay a bit more than the market price.”
“And you found it for him,” Attila prompted.
“It’s what I do,” Kis said. “This man up in Buda asked me to look at a Renoir he wanted to sell. Nothing special, just a small unfinished thing in a big frame, but I got him top price, and he didn’t even have to bother with the usual papers. The buyer lives right here in the city. He owns a bunch of companies. Some buildings, a shopping mall, a TV station, couple of radio licences. Well connected,” he jerked his head in the direction of the parliament buildings.
“And he wanted to sell the other painting, as well?”
“No. I asked him when I saw it. I told him it could fetch at least forty million, and that got him interested.”
“Forints?”
“Dollars.”
Attila whistled.
“No one I know deals in forints,” Kis said. “They are weak and stupid and keep going down.”
“So you called these Canadians?”
Kis looked uncomfortable.
“After making sure of the market?” Attila prompted.
“I had to make sure it was what it seemed to be.” Kis was not admitting anything.
“And?”
“My original judgement was correct,” Kis said. “It usually is,” he added with a supercilious smile.
“Then this woman arrived.” Attila was beginning to piece it together. Tóth could have saved him a lot of time had he filled in the blanks earlier.
“She represents Géza Márton.”
“And anyone else?”
Kis seemed aghast. “That’s not done in this business.”
Attila shrugged. “No. More like the CIA.”
“The CIA? Are you kidding?” Kis said, but he seemed hesitant. “Why? She is an art expert. She is known in the business.”
“Your phones are bugged,” Attila said, although he had no more reason to assume they were than to suggest that Helena Marsh had a connection with the CIA. Sometimes it was useful to be inventive.
Kis said he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to bug his phones, but he seemed concerned.
“With a guy like you, it’s normal,” Attila said. Hell, if the Americans could bug the Israelis, who have exemplary security of their own, why not record the arcane deal-making that went on in this office?
Kis kept his mouth shut.
At least he had succeeded in making him uncomfortable, Attila thought. He wanted to know more, but he’d leave it for the next time. It would be unwise to let on that he knew less than Kis.
“So,” Attila said, “you expect her to leave soon as she has the painting she came for. Right?”
“It’s not that simple,” Kis said. “There is a ton of paperwork. You can’t just buy a painting like that in Hungary and expect to wrap it up and leave with it just like that.”
“How long will it take?”
“It depends,” Kis said meaningfully, implying that there were more middlemen and bureaucrats to pay off. Attila knew that, for a painting worth forty million dollars, the line of outstretched hands could reach from here to Vienna.
“I will be meeting with her handlers,” Attila said, as ominously as he could manage, when he opened the door. Let Kis ponder what he meant by that. He, himself, had no idea what he meant, but “handlers” was a word the local press used when they talked about spies reporting to the U.S. Embassy.
Attila stood outside the building for a minute. It was Wednesday. A warm, sunny day, fluffy clouds in a clear sky, the Danube rippling along its banks, a few old men fishing. It would have been pleasant to sit on the embankment for a while and enjoy the day. But it was Wednesday, and on Wednesdays he had to visit his mother on Naphegy.