She knew that there had once been a thriving Jewish community in her home town, but there was nothing left of it except an overgrown cemetery and a dilapidated synagogue that was scheduled for demolition. No Jews lived there, or in any of the neighbouring villages any more. Zsuzsa had once asked her grandmother about the Second World War and what she remembered about her Jewish neighbours. At first she started describing her school friend Vera and how they used to play together and share their sweets. Vera’s father was a carpenter, and her mother ran a small grocery store. When Zsuzsa asked what happened to Vera, her grandmother started crying and could not speak. She got up and stood by the window, staring out over the fields. Zsuzsa’s father had then become angry and yelled at her for upsetting her grandmother. Zsuzsa did not ask again.
A few yards in front of the makeshift memorial on Liberty Square was another, far more elaborate construction. In the middle of a row of jagged, broken pillars, stood a mawkish statue of the Archangel Gabriel. Above him an eagle swooped menacingly. The memorial had been put up by a previous government to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. The Archangel Gabriel was supposed to represent Hungary, pure and innocent, until the evil German eagle had swooped down on a virtuous land to take away its Jews. The reality, Zsuzsa knew, was very different. It was true that for much of the war Admiral Horthy had refused to hand over Hungary’s Jews to the Nazis, which was one reason why the Germans invaded in March 1944. But after that Hungary had turned on its Jews with a vengeance. The Hungarian state had proved so efficient at organising the ghettos and deportations that even the SS was impressed. More than 420,000 people had been deported to Auschwitz in less than two months – a record, even for the Nazis. Most had been murdered on arrival.
Zsuzsa stood back up and walked over to a nearby bench on the edge of a deserted playground. The trees around the edge of the square were stripped bare, and the café in the middle was closed. A few years ago the area had been pedestrianised, and the footpath was now slick with slush and ice. She glanced at the other end of the square, at the Soviet war memorial to the Red Army soldiers who had died fighting the Nazis and the Arrow Cross in the winter of 1944 and 1945: a plain, pale stone obelisk with a golden wreath in the middle, standing on top of a stepped, raised platform. Next to the memorial was the grandiose building that housed the American embassy, fenced off from its surrounds. During the war Carl Lutz, a Swiss diplomat, had operated out of here, issuing Swiss protection papers to desperate Jews to save them from the Arrow Cross and the Nazis. For a moment Zsuzsa was back at the makeshift memorial, kneeling down as the wind pulled the plastic envelope with the story of Miklos and Rahel back and forth in her hand. There were ghosts here, she knew.
Zsuzsa pulled her coat tighter but the wind was gusting hard now, the freezing air sliding down the back of her neck like icy fingers, and she shivered as she sat down. She closed her eyes for a moment, ignoring the cold, thinking of Rahel and Vera, her grandmother’s childhood friend. Which was worse? To be Rahel, knowing that you would not live your life, never have a family, that you and your husband were being taken to your deaths; or to be a child and not understand what was happening while your parents tried to shield you from the coming horror? There was no answer to that question.
Zsuzsa opened her eyes. There were two benches in the park and a man in his thirties was now sitting on the other one. Something about him made her uneasy. He was holding a copy of Magyar Vilag, Hungarian World, the pro-government newspaper, but she could sense him glancing at her.
This was the fourth or fifth time she had felt that someone was watching her since she had filed her Nationwide article. There was nothing definite, but several times recently she had felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. She had no idea how to tell if she was being followed, other than common sense, but today, of all days, she had no patience for this. She had to call Eniko Szalay, immediately. But not while this guy was around. Then an idea struck her.
She took out her mobile phone and let it fall from her lap onto the ground. Shaking her head at her supposed clumsiness, she bent down to pick it up, using the movement to glance sideways at the man on the bench and sneak a photograph of him. It worked and she looked at the snap on her screen, making sure not to look back at him after she did. He looked short, perhaps five feet six, wore jeans, a black parka, expensive-looking light-brown boots and a grey woollen hat pulled down over his head. His nose was slightly crooked and had a noticeable bump in the middle, the kind that comes from having it broken.
Now she had a photograph of him for her records but she needed to find out if he was watching her.
She turned on the bench and held her camera in front of her, as though she was taking a selfie. The man was visible in the background. She watched on her mobile’s screen as he stood up and briskly walked away.
She smiled to herself, unnerved, yes, but also feeling that for once, she was in control of the situation. Now she could make her call.
NINE
Margaret Island, 1 p.m.
Sandor proffered the flask to Balthazar, who nodded. He filled Balthazar’s cup and the two men sat in silence for a several moments, sipping their palinka-infused fruit tea, watching as a seagull hovered over the water, then banked and soared away.
‘You know what day it is next Saturday?’ asked Sandor.
‘Of course. It’s her birthday. She would have been thirty-six.’ Balthazar swallowed for a moment, wiped his eyes, told himself it was the sleet.
‘I think about her every day. She’d be married now. A mother with kids.’
Balthazar laughed. ‘A grandmother, probably. You know how we are.’
There was another reason why Sandor had protected Balthazar and nurtured his career behind the scenes, beyond his natural talent for police work. The two men’s lives were deeply entwined, bound together by far more than a shared profession. Balthazar had once had a cousin called Virag, or someone he thought was his cousin. The two were very close. A beautiful young woman with a singing voice to match, Virag, then sixteen, had been hired to perform at a fancy party at a grand villa in the Buda hills in 1995. The party’s hosts were Pal Dezeffy, the former prime minister – at that time a rising young apparatchik – and his then girlfriend, Reka Bardossy. Something very bad had happened and Virag, who could not swim, was found drowned in the swimming pool.
The Kovacs family was devastated. Some of the hotheads wanted to take revenge, to make Dezeffy and his family pay. Balthazar and his mother, Marta, shut down the wild talk. Virag was gone, would be mourned and never forgotten, but more bloodshed would not bring her back – and would only end with the Kovacs menfolk incarcerated for a very long time. As for suing, no court would take the side of a family of pimps from District VIII against the gilded son of one of the country’s most powerful dynasties. The Dezeffys, like the Bardossys, had supplied a steady stream of ministers and officials before and during the communist regime and continued to do so after the change of system in 1990. Even in 1995 Pal Dezeffy had been marked out as a potential future prime minister. The Dezeffys offered Balthazar’s family the villa as part of a compensation package in exchange for not making a fuss. In truth there was very little the Kovacs clan could do but accept. The swimming pool was filled in and the villa was now an upmarket brothel, run by Gaspar, Balthazar’s brother.
One day in the previous autumn, Marta had brought Balthazar lunch, her csirke paprikas, chicken paprika, his favourite childhood dish. She looked at the large, framed photograph of Virag and started crying. The story had tumbled out. There was a reason Balthazar felt so close to Virag. She was not his cousin. She was his half-sister. And her father was Sandor Takacs.
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.’
