‘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.’
Balthazar smiled. ‘Sure. She’ll send you a regular supply.’
‘It will have to be to the office. With the vanilla sauce, and the sour cherries? And not a word to my wife.’
‘With the sauce and the sour cherries. And not a word to your wife. Not one. The second thing?’
‘The Duchess. If she agrees, you can work together,’ said Sandor, his warm breath turning to steam in the freezing air.
Balthazar smiled. They both knew that was a racing certainty.
TEN
State security headquarters, Falk Miksa Street, 2 p.m.
The headquarters of the state security service took up half a block, flanked by Marko Street on one side, merging into the Ministry of Defence complex on the other. Amid the architectural elegance of its surrounds, the site struck a jarring, even shocking note. But the discord was intentional. It was one of the ugliest buildings in the city, a homage to communist-era brutalism: six floors of raw, grey concrete with rows of slit-like windows of reflecting glass. The message was clear: we are watching you – and this is where the power lies. More than twenty years after the change of system, much of it still did.
Anastasia Ferenczy’s office was a cramped, narrow space on the corner of the fifth floor. It had grey walls, a filing cabinet, and a metal government-issue desk, on which sat a monitor and a keyboard. A small secure cupboard, where she stored her pistol, was attached to the wall. Two faded Picasso and Mondrian posters did little to brighten up the room. A pot plant sagged in a corner, the edges of its leaves turning brown.
Anastasia sat at her desk, sorting some papers for a few moments while Balthazar stood by the window, looking down Marko Street. She glanced up at him. ‘I’ll just be a minute.’
