Marta and Sandor had fallen in love when he was a cop on the beat in District VIII. They began seeing each other in secret. Marta was seventeen, Sandor twenty-two. She became pregnant. Normally the couple would marry and settle down. But Sandor was a gadje, a non-Gypsy. Marta gave birth and the baby was handed to some cousins who were having trouble conceiving. She saw her daughter often at family gatherings. The longing for her, to tell her the truth, never faded, but Marta learned to manage it. Balthazar had blamed himself – still did – for not going with Virag to the party to protect her. He strongly suspected that Virag had been fleeing from Dezeffy’s unwanted advances. Now Dezeffy too was dead, drowned in the Danube a couple of months ago, which was a kind of poetic justice.

Sandor looked out over the water for several long moments. The trees along the riverbanks were dark and bare, their long branches waving in the wind like spectral fingers. A police motorboat sped past, leaving a high white wake behind it. ‘What’s happening with the music school?’

A few days after Balthazar had foiled the terrorist attack on Kossuth Square the previous autumn, Reka Bardossy had called him into her office in parliament. It was clear that she wanted to talk about Virag. Balthazar had plenty of questions. Reka had told him that she knew nothing about Virag’s death and had nothing do with it. She had been in another part of the house, busy with someone else, she had explained, blushing slightly. She was deeply, deeply sorry about the tragedy. Balthazar had believed her, more or less. Reka presented him with the plans for the new Virag Kovacs school of music, to be based in District VIII. The school would offer numerous scholarships and grants for ‘underprivileged’ – meaning Roma – children, if the family approved. They did and the school was due to open later in the year.

Balthazar shrugged. ‘All going ahead as far as I know. They have the premises, the construction is started. It should open later this September.’

‘Who is doing the building work?’ asked Sandor.

‘Guess.’

Sandor laughed. ‘The construction division of Nationwide.’

‘Who else? As long as they do a good job.’

‘They will, don’t worry. Reka will make sure of it.’ He turned to Balthazar, suddenly shy and uncertain. ‘Do you think I could come to the opening?’

‘Of course,’ said Balthazar. ‘She was your daughter. Everyone who knows what really happened will be glad to see you there. Nobody else will ask.’

‘Thank you, Tazi.’ Sandor sipped his tea. ‘Back to business. What exactly was this Elad working on?’

‘Investigating the lost wealth of Hungarian Jewry. Specifically whether several of our big companies are holding looted Holocaust assets and how they have responded to compensation claims from survivors or their descendants.’

‘Which companies?’

Balthazar exhaled. ‘All the important ones. But he was focusing on Nationwide.’

‘That makes sense. There’ve long been rumours about how the Bardossys became so rich after the war, and then stayed rich under communism.’

‘And how did they?’

‘By meeting a need, I guess. Even a communist state needs some capitalists to deal with the outside world, to sell their products for proper money. This memory stick. How did Elad know where the hiding place was in the bathroom?’

Balthazar frowned. The same question had occurred to him, on the way to the island. ‘Eva neni must have told him, I guess.’

Sandor nodded. ‘Which begs the question, why would she show him where to hide things?’

‘I asked her that. She said because everyone needs a hiding place.’

‘She’s right. Especially if you lived through what she did.’

‘Maybe also because she knew that Elad’s research might get him into trouble. He thought he was being followed. The same car kept appearing. A blue Mercedes, with tinted windows.’

‘A blue Mercedes. That’s a start, I suppose. Number plate?’

Balthazar shook his head. ‘No, but it has a cracked right headlight.’

‘That helps, till they fix it.’ Sandor turned to Balthazar, shot him a quizzical glance. ‘Why are you so keen on this one? The Israelis are furious, demanding that he is found before the prime minister arrives, or they will cancel the visit. Reka is frantic.’

Balthazar sat back for a moment, watching the river. The water was running hard and fast now, the sleet vanishing as soon as it hit the surface. ‘You know that before I was a cop I was a postgraduate student at CEU. I was researching a doctorate into the Poraymus. Do you know what that is?’

Sandor nodded. ‘The devouring in your language. The Gypsy Holocaust.’

Balthazar said, ‘I spent a lot of time in the archives in Hungary, trying to find out more. It has not been written about that much.’

‘And what did you find?’

‘Death and misery. The family stories, whole generations just wiped out, including some of my family. The incredible sense of betrayal. Those old faded photos, the scraps of memoirs. It was the same as what happened to the Jews. Hungarian clerks drew up lists, Hungarian gendarmes rounded them up. Hungarian officials put them into ghettos. Hungarian trains took them to Auschwitz. Some of them came back – nobody wanted to know their stories. Nobody wanted to help. After a day in the archives I couldn’t sleep. I was angry all the time. I kept fighting with Sarah. That’s when it all started to go wrong. So I gave up and became a cop. I couldn’t fix the past. But maybe I could help with the present.’

Sandor placed his hand on Balthazar’s shoulder. ‘That’s true. You can and you have. You’ve never told me this before. Is that why Sarah left you?’

‘Partly. And partly because she realised she was a lesbian,’ said Balthazar, half laughing. ‘So, in a way, I feel that Elad is carrying on the work I gave up. Someone has to call these people to account. Our skill sets are not so different. A detective is also a kind of historian, but working in a much more recent time frame.’

There was another reason, but he would keep that in reserve for now. He glanced at Sandor. ‘Can I ask you something, boss?’

Sandor nodded. ‘Sure.’

‘What happened in your village, in the war?’

‘We were smugglers. Mainly szilva palinka, plum brandy, or slivovitz, as they call it in Serbia. And tobacco, salami, cheese, whatever people wanted. I wasn’t born then. But my dad and grandad before him, all smugglers for generations. They knew when the razzias, the round-ups of the Jews and the Gypsies, were planned. They kept the gendarmes supplied with the best booze. The gendarmes used to tip them off in advance. My family knew the paths across the border, where to hide in the woods or by the river.’

He poured himself some more tea, and refilled Balthazar’s cup. ‘So my dad and grandad smuggled. People: Gypsies, Jews, Polish POWs, even two British airmen once. We got them to Yugoslavia. What happened to them after that I don’t know.’ His voice hardened. ‘Sometimes they stayed in our house, for a night, for a week. Once we hid a Jewish family for a month. A couple from Budapest and their kid. They made it to Israel. We still get cards from their relatives sometimes.’ Sandor was silent for a moment, then took a draught of the tea. ‘But we did not hand anyone over to the Arrow Cross or the Nazis. Not a single one. Or stand by watching when they took the Jews away. Which is more than most people in this country could say.’

Sandor looked out over the water. Two seagulls soared, then dived. ‘Looted Holocaust assets. The whole fucking country is built on looted Holocaust assets. Houses, shops, firms, factories, land. We took it all. From the Jews, from your people, Tazi. Hundreds of thousands of people we sent to be killed. Hundreds of thousands. Loyal Hungarian citizens. Businessmen, lawyers, doctors, teachers, craftsmen, some of the best we had. Families, their kids. In the summer of 1944, even after D-day. Everyone knew the war was over, the Allies were coming from the west, the Russians from the east, but still we carried on. And when the Nazis stopped the trains, even then we could not stop. We did it ourselves, shooting them into the Danube.’

He raised his hand, flicked his arm out and slid his thumb across his stubby fingers. ‘That’s five per cent of our population, pffff, up in smoke or floating in the river. For what? Why would any government do that to its own citizens?’ He stopped talking, staring into the distance.

It was a question that Balthazar had asked himself many times. He still did not know the answer.

Sandor sat silently for several moments, slowly shaking his head, then shivered. He drank the last of the tea, carefully replaced the cup on the thermos and put it back inside his bag, looking slightly embarrassed at his outburst. ‘We should go back, Tazi, it’s getting very cold.’

Balthazar watched his boss with affection. He had never heard these stories about Sandor’s family during the war, never seen him so animated about that era. One part of him wanted to probe deeper, but another sensed that now was not the time. The family stories would come out eventually. In his experience, they always did. In any case, he had a more immediate agenda. ‘Elad?’ he asked, his voice hopeful.

Sandor smiled, his anger dissipated. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’

‘Would you?’

‘Probably not.’ Sandor’s telephone buzzed. He took the call, listened for less than a minute then hung up. He looked at Balthazar, the skin around his eyes crinkling as he narrowed them. ‘Good news, maybe. The Duchess has the case. So, Detective. Give me another reason why I should agree to this?’

Balthazar finished his tea, handed his cup back to Sandor. This was indeed good news. The Duchess was Sandor’s nickname for Anastasia Ferenczy. She and Balthazar had worked together last autumn, first tracking down Mahmoud Hejazi, then derailing the attempt by Pal Dezeffy to release poison gas across Kossuth Square through the misting system used on summer days to cool the area down.

One day Anastasia had delivered a burner phone to Balthazar, via Eva neni. He smiled for a moment, remembering his neighbour’s verdict on his new colleague: ‘Nice teeth, spoke very well. No slang. Quite classy, I would say. You could do a lot worse.’

Maybe Eva neni was right. Trusting his own judgement had not worked out very well so far. And he did have another reason to give Sandor. ‘Because Elad Harrari is Eva neni’s cousin.’

Sandor had met Balthazar’s neighbour several months ago, when he came round to check up on him after all the excitement of the previous autumn. Eva neni had immediately invited Sandor for some of her famous turos palacsintas with vanilla sauce, which he pronounced the best he had ever eaten – on the strict condition that nobody told his wife.

Sandor said, ‘Her cousin. Hmmmm.’ He crossed his arms, and extended his legs, amusement playing on his face. ‘I’ll need two things.’