What do you mean, they set you up?” Annie asked.
Will was kneeling on the restaurant floor, looking under their table for his wallet.
“It’s probably at our flat,” Annie said, turning the jogger and pointing it toward the door. She paid for lunch with cash she had on hand and was ready to leave when she saw Stephen coming over to her.
“Everything okay? I was just heading out.”
“Will seems to have misplaced his wallet.”
Will stood up. “Or someone stole it.”
“I’m sorry,” Stephen said. “If it’s stolen, you should report it to the police.”
“I doubt it was stolen,” Annie said. “It’s probably sitting on his desk at home.”
“You won’t be the first,” Stephen said. He gave her a look of confidence as if to say he knew about these things.
“What do you mean?”
“I know it’s upsetting when it happens, but it happens, especially to Americans.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ukrainians. They target Americans. Americans are easy prey. Call me if you need help. Was your license in it? That could be a nightmare,” Stephen said. “But I can help you with that.”
“What kind of nightmare?” Annie surveyed the crowded room.
“The license. You’ll have to go to the police and get something to replace it. You’ve got my number there.” He pointed to his card on the table. “If it’s not at your flat, call me and I’ll meet you at the station.”
“We’ll manage. Thanks,” Will said. “We should go, Annie.”
“Thanks very much,” she said. She released the brake on the stroller.
“Hold on. Let me talk to the waitress in case it shows up.” Stephen flagged their waitress who came over to him. He spoke rapidly in Hungarian, his words soft and fluid, spilling out without hesitation. Annie was impressed and comforted at the same time. The waitress frowned, shaking her head. Stephen said something else and the waitress walked away looking irritated.
“She thought I was accusing her,” Stephen said. “You have to speak firmly about these things. Let’s hope you left it at home.”
“Thanks. That’s likely where it is,” Will said.
Stephen bowed and headed toward the door. Annie looked at his card. It was bare bones. Black lettering on white: his name and cell phone number with country and city codes for Hungary and Budapest. No company name. No address.
STEPHEN HÁZY
c. 36 1 438-5629
She put it in her shorts pocket. Everyone in Budapest had a business card to hand out, including Will. Everyone was looking to cash in or make a deal or a connection.
“That was nice of him to want to help.”
“I can handle this, Annie.”
“Of course you can.”
She watched Stephen exit. He walked with a sure, balanced gait, his hair tousled in an appealing, friendly-dog kind of way. Despite what Will said, part of her wanted him to stay to help them.
“Let’s go,” Will said.
Outside, they retraced their steps from the flower stand, which was now closed for the day, to the phone booth four blocks down the side street. Will opened the folding door of the phone booth, which she now resented and blamed as the cause of their current trouble and which looked very much like the ones in the States except for its bright red color. He searched under the seat. Nothing. They headed back toward the bridge and home.
“Don’t you think we should go back to Mr. Weiss’s to see if you left it there?”
“I think he would have called,” Will said. “It’s either home or those men fleeced me.”
“But what if you dropped it on the way? Mr. Weiss was so out of it, it could be on the floor next to the door. He may not have seen it.”
“I didn’t drop it. I either left it at home or it was stolen. Call him if you want to.”
“We didn’t get his phone number.”
“He has ours. If he finds it, he’ll call.”
“Why don’t I run back to his building, check the sidewalk where we walked, and rule it out. I’ll catch up with you.”
They arranged to meet on the other side of the bridge. In her heart, she hoped Will had left it at the apartment. When she reached the brick building, she hesitated, then pushed open the exterior door with the broken lock and quickly ran up two flights into the dark hallway. If Mr. Weiss saw her, if he was walking out for any reason at this moment, she would stand tall and tell him the honest, embarrassing truth. As it turned out, no wallet appeared in the hall or on the steps or on the sidewalk. She chided herself for being rash and ran out to the street again, feeling more foolish than disappointed in the heat and sun. If the wallet had fallen inside the apartment, she hoped that Mr. Weiss would call like Will said, but her greatest wish was that Will had simply left it in his sock drawer. The fax was so disorienting this morning. They had rushed out . . .
Running back toward the bridge, she kept her eyes on the sidewalk, passing clothing stores, appliance stores, offices —all of them closed on Saturdays for the rest of the weekend. Since the spring, however, more convenience stores had opened, another sign of free enterprise taking hold. Restaurants and cafes—that’s where the crowds went. Still, after all these months, she expected all the stores to remain open—her American psyche lunging out like a hungry child, demanding access to the toys she was used to back home. She spotted Will with Leo standing on the other side of the bridge under the shade of a tree.
“Nothing,” she said.
They resumed the trail back to their flat.
“Who were those men? What did they look like?” she asked.
“Two tall guys with dark hair. It happened so quickly I didn’t see their faces. They bumped into me on the sidewalk. I didn’t think anything of it, except that it seemed odd because they were holding a bag between them and that’s what I knocked into. Instead of slackening their grip, the bag caused me to fall forward. They didn’t say anything, no apology. That’s what bothered me. Now I get it.”
“You didn’t say anything when you came back.”
“I brushed it off as being rude or the craziness of the crowds and the heat. It didn’t occur to me that they were trying to steal my wallet.”
Now she felt irritated and angry. As they walked away from the river toward their street, Annie reminded herself that this would not be the first time Will or she had left something behind: a key to the apartment door, the battery charger for their cell phone, and now, she hoped, his wallet full of cash.
Back home in the States, Will would never think of carrying that kind of cash in his wallet. But here everyone dealt in cash, expected cash, except for the better hotels and restaurants, which catered to tourists and took credit cards. It made sense to keep a stash of money on hand. In fact, it was prudent. In Hungary, cash was king. No one wrote checks. Banks didn’t use credit cards. And ATM machines didn’t exist here. It was hard to believe but true.
They walked into their dark, smelly foyer—the one aspect about the building that repulsed her—and passed their building superintendent sweeping the entrance. The super looked the same every day: a bony, chain-smoking middle-age woman who Annie guessed was in her forties. Here was an example of Hungarian resistance to outsiders. Even after eight months, Annie, who had tried to be friendly from day one, did not know the woman’s name because the super refused to talk to her.
“Hello,” Will said.
The bony woman averted her eyes and pulled on her broom.
Annie smiled at the bad comedy of it and said hello, and as usual, the super turned away—sentry to her broom and rum and angry-looking teenage son who lived with her on the first floor. Annie smelled liquor now, an odor like wet pennies in the stale air.
Will headed for the elevator and hit the call button.
Twice a day, sometimes more, the super swept the foyer’s entrance. Once in the morning; once at night, occasionally midday like today. Those first few weeks, Annie had tried to make a connection, but the woman with cropped dyed-red hair would not allow it. With each hello, the super shook her head to indicate she didn’t understand a word Annie was saying. After that, she turned her back when Annie appeared. Annie, out of some perversely American impulse to be liked, insisted on saying a perfunctory hello. Every time. It felt like a game at first, but now it had become a source of irritation.
The elevator was taking a long time. They waited for the doors to open.
Despite the super’s twice-daily sweeps, the entranceway remained grim—dull cement floors weathered by grit, no windows, and those smelly garbage barrels stacked in a little storage room to the right of the entrance that emitted the foul odor of rotting food. Their modern apartment building—modern for Budapest—was seven stories high, three units to a floor. The building itself, tall and narrow, was tiny compared to those behemoth concrete complexes the Russians built just outside the city center, ugly blocks of gray with tiny windows and flat facades, nothing at all warm or welcoming. By comparison, she had come to think of her building as a pretty good find. A small garden next to it gave them something green to look at from their bedroom window on the top floor.
Finally, the elevator doors opened and they went in.
“I bet she could use the money,” Will said, meaning the super. “Her son, too.”
“Are you thinking they took it while we were out? I don’t think so. That’s paranoid.”
“Shhh. Lower your voice, Annie. She has a key to our place.”
“The wallet could be in your underwear drawer.”
“My theory is that she’s a leftover brick.”
“A communist informant? I don’t believe it,” she said.
“She hates Americans. That’s clear.”
“Fine. But she’s been harmless all year. Why now? It’s too risky.”
“Why not?”
The elevator made its slow, steady way to the seventh level and shuddered to a stop.
“If it’s not here, then it was those two men outside Luigi’s. The money’s gone. I’m sure of it. We won’t find it here.”
Annie had a feeling Will was right.
The elevator doors slid open and they walked out into the small hallway outside their door, Leo heavy in sleep in the jogger, his ragged carnations resting in his lap.
“She could use the money, but I doubt it’s her,” Annie said.
Sometimes she thought of leaving money in an envelope and slipping it under the super’s apartment door—an anonymous gift. But the woman looked nervous, even paranoid. Annie was convinced she was an alcoholic. That would explain her behavior—using Coke cans to hide daily rations of cheap rum. Once, Annie thought her face looked bruised. Her teenage son appeared as miserable as his mother. The son, with his short orange-dyed hair, wore straight-leg jeans and black thick-soled shoes. It was a kind of punk / car mechanic / rebel-skinhead look. A possible skinhead. Right here under her nose. The son also avoided looking at her whenever Annie ran into him in the hall. She had wanted to help their sorry, miserable lives, but after so many rebuffs and what she had seen that skinhead do to that little Gypsy girl, she couldn’t summon up any feelings of sympathy for his empty, twisted, repressed life right now.
Annie wheeled Leo inside their flat. “I’ll look in the front rooms,” she said. A shaft of bright sunshine greeted them. She thought of Mr. Weiss, again wishing she had his phone number, wishing the wallet were miraculously lying on the old man’s floor.
Will hurried down their long, sunlit hallway, which linked Leo’s room and the kitchen to a living room and their bedroom at the opposite end. She could hear Will shuffling papers, opening drawers.
She loved the apartment—practically stole it for a few hundred dollars a month, including utilities. The herringbone floors, shiny as glass, the corner unit with so much light, and windows in Leo’s room that looked out to distant but spectacular views of Castle Hill, an old section of Buda. At night the castle glowed like a Disney World postcard. Spotlights lit up the castle’s stone walls casting long, elegant shadows under the stars.
Annie searched the bathroom off the hall, checking pockets in their pile of dirty laundry. In the living room, nothing on the couch or the desk with the fax machine. She felt her throat closing up, the apartment stifling and thick with heat.
“Not here,” Will said, coming down the hall again. “It’s lost. They stole it. God damn it. I’m reporting it to the police.”
“How will you do that?”
“We’ll walk over now.”
“Do you want to call Stephen?”
“No. I can manage it. If I need him, I’ll call.”
“I guess he was right.”
“Right or not, the wallet’s gone.”
Once more, they stepped back into the hall, baby asleep in the stroller. Two other tenants lived on their floor: an elderly woman, frail and stooped, who Annie had seen twice in eight months, and a middle-age man who lived by himself with his beer. She saw him more often, several times a week in the hall lining up empty beer cans on his door mat next to his shoes. The super collected the cans once a week.
Today Annie counted fourteen beer cans.
They went back down in the elevator and passed the super again, standing at the door finishing a smoke.
“God, she’s miserable,” Annie said once they stepped outside.
“So am I right now.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Will pulled out his street map. “We need to cross the river and then it’s just a few blocks from there.”
She felt bad for him, but the super’s misery had gotten under her skin.
“Seriously. Can you imagine living her life?”
“That’s a rhetorical question.”
“Not really.”
“Worry about your life. Worry about mine right now.”
“I do. I’m sorry.”
Outside, seeing the road and the cars heading toward the city center, she thought of the many thousands of people living their lives, hauling hidden stories. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. The entire planet was full of people hauling secrets, struggling to come to terms with them, like her brother. Like her sister.
“Where to now?” she asked.
Will pointed toward the river.
“I think the super got divorced when her son was a toddler. Maybe her ex beat her and knocked out her side tooth. She has terrible teeth. I’d be an alcoholic if I lived her life.”
“If all those things are true, what can you do about it?”
“I don’t know,” Annie said. “That’s what bothers me.”
“She has her life. It’s not a happy one, but it’s hers. Start with your own life, hon. Promise me you’ll meet some of those American women. Give it a chance.”
Will took her hand and squeezed it. “I’ll get over this. Anyone would be upset.”
“I know.”
What she didn’t say is that the super reminded her, daily, of what her family didn’t discuss. Her alcoholic brother’s death five years ago in central Florida. Thirty-one. Unmarried. She was twenty-eight at the time. Newly married. The last time she saw him, Greg had been at her wedding, but even then her mother left the reception early to take him back to the hotel, embarrassed by his drunken behavior. Greg was stumbling on the dance floor, had knocked over a chair. It made Annie sad. It was summer. At the time, her mother had felt hopeful. Greg had landed a six-month contract to work at the university. Some new science facility. Maybe Greg would settle down there, her mother said before the wedding. Then the wedding revealed that nothing would stop his drinking. Annie stopped hoping for her brother. So she retreated from him. She stopped trying. During high school and college years, he disappeared for months at a time, then reappeared working construction somewhere on the East Coast. One wild throw of a baseball and their lives split off forever—her brother, her sister, her family—damaged for life. And, for Annie, she too buried a part of herself that fateful day.
She stroked Leo’s sweaty head.
THE POLICE STATION, or rendőrség, was located in a 1920s deco-style white-stucco building. Its preserved exterior hid a dark, rundown interior—beauty and ugliness coexisting, each one vying for dominance. It was a familiar aspect of the city and it unsettled her again. She sat down in one of the plastic chairs in the main room, Leo by her side, asleep for now and hopefully for at least another hour. Will went to the service window and explained the situation in Hungarian, speaking well enough to get by.
The woman behind the window pointed to another door.
“We need to fill out a report,” Will said.
Annie followed him into a small room where a large-bellied policeman sat at a metal desk.
“Sit down, please,” he said. “I speak little English.”
Will explained what happened, talking slowly in Hungarian, looking up words in his pocket dictionary. The policeman hunched over his desk, his shoulders lopsided and bulky.
“I write paper but”—the officer shook his head and shrugged—“we find American wallets in Duna, on street. Every week. Empty. Gypsies. No good.” The pen looked tiny between his thick fingers. He grimaced then dropped his pen on the table.
“You’re saying this is a scam?”
Will flinched, then squared his shoulders.
“I don’t know this word, scam.”
“Criminals?”
“Igen. Yes. They are Gypsy.”
Will pointed to the papers. “I don’t think they were Gypsies. They looked different. I’ll fill out those forms.”
The policeman leaned toward them. “Gypsies. This is the way.”
Annie thought of the flower woman and her two girls and those disgusting skinheads. She didn’t believe it was the Gypsies. Will would know. Tomorrow she would go back to the flower stand and follow the mother home, see for herself. She watched Will write his name and address, the make of his car, and his passport information. Did Will look that obvious in the crowd? That American?
Of course he did—they did. Her husband’s dense curls, his tall, muscular posture—no, that wouldn’t have singled him out, though the men in Budapest tended to be shorter, smaller-boned. With Annie in her American running shorts, their American jogger that no one in Budapest had seen before, the three of them together were a walking pronouncement of their absolute Americanness.
“Impossible,” he said, looking at Will. “Nothing we can do.”
“What do you mean, impossible? How many like me?” Will asked.
Annie knew that Will was annoyed by that favorite Hungarian expression: impossible. It was the antithesis to their American way of thinking.
“Will. Forget it. He’s saying there’s nothing he can do about it.” She was sickened, too. This theft sucked the air from that shrinking balloon of optimism that floated around her when she first arrived in Budapest.
The officer nodded at Leo and smiled.
“How old?”
“Almost one year.”
“I’m sorry. Wallet. Every week somebody.”
She looked at her child, who mixed Hungarian sounds with English words because he spent every day with Klara, their Hungarian babysitter, and Klara’s boyfriend, Sandor. Another convenience: babysitters cost nothing compared to what she would have to pay in the States.
“Do you know who these Gypsies are? Where they live?” Annie asked the officer.
Will repeated what she asked in Hungarian.
The policemen shrugged. “Pest. They do this after Russians leave.”
The policeman left the room to make a copy of his report.
“Why don’t we call Stephen, have him look at the forms?”
“I can read them, Annie.”
“Just trying to be helpful.”
Above them, a 1920s chandelier seemed oddly out of place — intricately etched crystal glass and brass—hanging in this ugly utilitarian office. Annie considered the life of the chandelier, guessing it had hovered in the wings of history, bearing witness to horrors. Possibly lifted from a Jewish home during the Nazi occupation. Probably stolen from one of those Gothic stone-and-wood estates lining the big avenue that led to the hills of Buda and to Leo’s pediatrician and the green region of the city where most American expats lived.
“Do you think they targeted you because you’re Jewish?” she said.
“Doubtful.” Will went over to the windows—two French windows that might have been beautiful except for the bent metal blinds defiling them. “I’m American. I have big American dollars. Pretty simple and obvious. There aren’t many Jews left in this city. I don’t think anyone’s thinking about Jews here. The city’s making a grand gesture of restoring the big synagogue downtown, but that’s about it.”
“Well, I’m not convinced.”
At the end of the war, the city was emptied of Jews in a matter of months—more than a half-million Hungarian Jews rounded up, sent off to be gassed at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen death camps, an orgy of murder when Hitler saw the end coming.
The policeman returned and handed another form to Will.
“This is for car. If police stop, you show.” The policeman shook the paper at them both. “You must have. Okay?”
Will’s cell phone rang.
“Hi, Stephen. Yes. Filling out the forms right now.”
She listened as Will told Stephen where they were.
“No need,” Will said. “Thank you. Sure.”
He hung up.
“What did he say?”
“He offered to stop by. I told him not to.”
“That was nice of him to offer, don’t you think?”
She felt relieved to know that someone American, someone able to cross the language barrier, was so available to help them. Will managed, but he wasn’t fluent. On the form, she read Will’s birth date, their address back in the States, their address here in Budapest, and Will’s bank number.
“What are they asking for?” She pointed to a long paragraph that Will had written in Hungarian.
“An account of what happened.”
“You keep in car,” the policeman said, handing Will several copies. “One copy for you. Understand?”
“Igen.” Will gave the policeman his business card. “Call if you find the wallet. It’s got a pen mark on the front. The baby wrote on it.”
They all looked at Leo, asleep in his stroller, impervious to it all. The prospect of finding a waterlogged wallet with an ink scribble mark on it was ridiculous. The officer nodded, but it was clear he didn’t think he would ever make that call.
“I’m glad I reported it,” Will said. “Even if they never find it. Maybe it will motivate them to do more.”
They stepped outside, Annie manipulating the jogger over the threshold, Leo’s limbs shaking gently from the movement.
“Stephen!” Will said. “You didn’t need to come.”
“I know.” He shrugged apologetically. “You’re not mad I did, are you?” Stephen smiled at Annie.
“Of course not,” Annie said, glad to see him again. “How are you?”
“I was a block away when I called. Did you get those papers?”
“All set,” Will said.
“That’s good. You’ll be fine with those papers.”
“I still can’t believe he was robbed,” Annie said.
“It happens to the best. Don’t take it personally,” Stephen said. He leaned over and took hold of the front wheel of the jogger, helping her lift it over the stairs onto the sidewalk.
“I’ll try not to. Thanks.”
She wanted to feel optimistic and not discouraged. She reminded herself that these mixed, uncertain sensations were common to expats and that getting robbed would upset anyone, expat or not.
Stephen tapped the wheel of the bike with his sandal. “Nothing bothers this guy, does it?”
“Not usually.”
“Thanks for your concern,” Will said.
“Have a good rest of your day.” Stephen took a step back, his moss-colored eyes drawing her in. “See you soon.”
“Thanks, Stephen,” she said.
They watched him walk away. Annie didn’t want to go home to their suffocating apartment and it was too warm to stay out. The heat’s constant presence was a wall hemming her in. She couldn’t climb over or get around it, like the thought that they had actually been robbed. It stirred up waves of homesickness. Yet, she still held on to the stubborn hope that Mr. Weiss would call and tell them he had found it.
“That was nice of him,” she finally said. “Why were you unfriendly?”
She waited for Will to say something, but he was lost in himself, his shoulders rounding inward, his mouth stiff with annoyance, silent and grim. He looked miserable.
Finally he said, “I wasn’t unfriendly. It’s very simple. I didn’t need his assistance in handling this. It’s personal. That’s all. Let’s go to the hotel and cool off in the lobby. It’s too hot to do anything else.”