Sarah had complained to her mother, who had complained to the American embassy, which had eventually filtered through to Sandor Takacs. He had been sympathetic, of course, but had warned Balthazar off. For a while last year Sarah had been more cooperative, even easy-going. Sarah and Alex had been on Kossuth Square last autumn when Balthazar had stopped Pal Dezeffy’s attempt to spray poison gas through the sprinkler system. Balthazar became the most famous cop in Hungary. After that Sarah had, he sensed, basked in his reflected glory. Certainly Alex had been immensely proud of his father. Sarah had even let Alex stay overnight several weekends in a row.
The problem wasn’t Sarah, but Elsa. Elsa was always polite to Balthazar but could never quite hide her disapproval of her daughter’s former choice of husband. Amanda, Sarah’s girlfriend, was another matter. A daughter with a female partner gained substantial points in Elsa’s social circle and Amanda was always lavished with gifts. Lately there had even been talk of Sarah and Amanda getting married. Maybe he could arrange to switch Saturday night to Sunday, and then take Monday off and spend the day with Alex.
‘I’ll sort it out, Alex. Don’t worry. I’ll take a day off on Monday. We’ll spend the day together. Don’t sulk with Elsa. Be nice with her. Use your Gypsy charm. Big smile, big eyes. She’ll melt. We’ll sort it out.’
He could sense Alex smiling down the line. ‘OK, Dad, you got it.’
Balthazar ended the call and put his handset away. He shivered for a moment. The remaining daylight was fading rapidly now and sitting still had chilled him.
He would take a taxi home, he decided. There was a line of cars on the corner of the street. Several were private vehicles whose drivers looked like they were hoping for a naïve tourist that could be taken on a long, winding and lucrative route. Balthazar looked up and down at the cars until he saw one registered to a reputable company.
He walked over, opened the door and sat next to the driver, a dishevelled-looking man in his fifties with sparse grey hair. He glanced at Balthazar, asked, ‘Where to, boss?’
‘Klauzal Square.’
‘Which way?’
‘Take Dohany Street. Let’s go via the synagogue.’
The driver nodded, and turned onto Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Way, a wide, eight-lane road that cut through the heart of downtown. Balthazar sat back, glad to sit still for a moment and watch the city slide by.
The driver, he saw, glanced at him in the mirror several times. This wasn’t unusual. A tall Gypsy man in a black leather jacket wasn’t welcomed everywhere. But the driver, he sensed, was curious rather than wary or hostile. Like every Budapest taxi driver he had a plastic card on display with his name and registration number: Zoltan Lukacs.
‘Zoltan,’ said Balthazar, ‘have we met?’
The driver shook his head as he cut into the bus lane to avoid the traffic. ‘No, boss, I don’t think so. But you’re that cop, aren’t you?’
Balthazar smiled. ‘Which cop?’
‘The famous one with the fancy name. The one who took down that terrorist last autumn, then stopped that nutcase Pal Dezeffy from gassing everyone on Kossuth Square. I’m sure it’s you.’
‘It’s me. You’re right.’
The driver smiled at Balthazar with a row of crooked teeth. ‘I knew it.’ He turned the meter off. ‘This one’s on me, Detective. And there’s something else you should know.’
‘Mondd, tell me.’
‘People are asking about you. The word’s out. Anyone picks you up and takes you anywhere, there’s 20,000 forints in cash for information.’
Balthazar sat up, alert now. Twenty thousand forints, around sixty euros, was a lot of money for a tip-off. Zoltan glanced at him again. ‘I won’t say anything, of course.’
The car turned left onto Deak Square. A large island divided the road, itself bisected by the 49 tramline. Balthazar watched a yellow-and-white tram pull away, heading towards the Freedom Bridge and Gellert Hill. Balthazar looked at the driver. Could he believe him? He had no choice, and Zoltan had given him some useful information, if it was true.
‘Tell me more. Who’s offering the money?’
Zoltan laughed. ‘I don’t know, boss. He didn’t say his name. But he’s been doing the rounds of all the taxi ranks downtown, handing out 5,000-forint notes like sweets. Told us to take this, and if we had anything for him, there would be another 15,000 in it for us.’
He glanced at Balthazar again in the mirror. ‘Lots of the guys took it. I didn’t.’
‘That’s OK. What did he look like?’
‘Fancy clothes, but rough-looking bloke. Looked like he’s been in a fight once and not done very well. His nose had been broken, set badly, it looked like. He gave out a telephone number to call.’
The road narrowed as Deak Square became Karoly Boulevard. The car moved into the left-hand lane, ready to turn into Dohany Street. Balthazar glanced at the Great Synagogue as they drove by. Built in the neo-Moorish style in the late nineteenth century, it was the largest synagogue in Europe, a statement of pride and belonging by a once great Jewish community.
He had first visited the building on a school trip. Like the neighbouring Jewish Museum, it had been a run-down place, its once ornate decor and fittings worn. The rows of wooden benches still had the nameplates of the families who had once sat there. But if the building was scruffy, it was deeply atmospheric and he had thought it a haunted place. Over the years it had been painstakingly renovated and restored to its former glory. He had been inside several times with Sarah, accompanying her to services on the major holidays. The interior was stunning. Now it glowed like a golden sentinel, its imposing facade and twin towers looming over the edge of the city’s Jewish quarter.
Balthazar asked, ‘Did he give his name, or any name?’
The driver shook his head. ‘No. Said there was no need. Whoever answered the phone could help. They would send the rest of the money over.’
‘Have you got that number, Zoltan?’
The driver nodded. ‘Of course. I’ll give it to you when we arrive.’
The car turned onto Sip Street, then weaved through the narrow back street of District VII until they arrived at Klauzal Square a few minutes later. The pavements were already crowded as the buli-negyed, the party quarter, slid into the weekend. Balthazar smiled as he watched a man in his twenties, wearing a pink tutu over his jeans, direct his friends, each with a beer bottle in hand, into a nearby bar. Even in January the stag parties still poured in. On the other side of the road, two ultra-orthodox Jews, dressed in their Sabbath best, walked briskly to synagogue.
The car arrived in Klauzal Square, and pulled over on the corner of Dob Street. The driver turned and handed Balthazar a slip of paper, with a mobile number on it. ‘That’s the number.’ He shook hands with Balthazar. ‘Pleasure to meet you, Detective. I hope it all works out for you.’
Balthazar thanked him and stood for a moment, watching the car drive off, when he noticed a young woman watching him.
She was leaning against the fence around the park, smoking a cigarette, several yards away. She wore a puffa jacket, miniskirt and knee-high black leather boots and looked familiar. She looked up as he walked closer.
Balthazar was right, he realised, he did know her. Her name was Marika, and she came from a small Hungarian-speaking village in northern Romania, near the border. Marika was twenty and worked for his brother Gaspar.
She had been walking the streets for a few months, but was likely to get promoted soon to one of the brothels. Marika was a pretty girl, with soulful brown eyes, and long black hair. She was supporting a family of five brothers and sisters, most of whom were unemployed, an alcoholic father and a mother who sometimes found work as a cleaning lady.
Marika saw Balthazar looking at her and waved at him. ‘Hallo, Tazi,’ she said. Tazi came out as Tathi, as Marika had a lisp. ‘Sure you don’t need warming up, Detective?’ she asked, laughing.
Balthazar smiled, shook his head. It wasn’t a serious proposition. ‘Thanks, Marika, but not tonight.’ Not any night, not with any of his brother’s girls, not ever, but there was no need to tell Marika that.
There were Gypsy girls like Marika across eastern Europe, he knew. Bright, entrepreneurial, street-smart but with little, if any, agency over their lives. Across the post-communist world, from the Baltic coast to the Balkans, Gypsy communities were stuck in the same cycle of deprivation and grinding poverty. Much of that was due to the endemic prejudice and discrimination that they faced, but their own community’s mores and customs were also part of the problem.
Much of Roma society was not well prepared for modernity and did not know how to adapt to it. Women might rule at home, but Gypsy society was still deeply conservative and patriarchal. Teenage girls were still often quickly married off and encouraged to have as many children as possible as quickly as they could. The young mothers had little education and there were rarely books in the house.
The children came quickly but they were often classified as mentally handicapped by teachers and education authorities, even though most of them were not. They received a sub-standard education which gave them few or no life skills for the twenty-first century and so they too left school at sixteen, got married and began raising a family and thus the cycle of deprivation continued. Or, like Marika, they worked the streets. That said, a growing number of young Roma were entering education, becoming entrepeneurs and building careers, often in the creative fields. Balthazar’s sister Flora ran a gallery that frequently showcased Roma artists and his youngest brother, Melchior, was a musician. Successive Hungarian governments had launched several initiatives to help break the cycle of poverty and unemployment but there was still a long way to go.
The sight of Marika made him sad, churned up all the complex, contradictory emotions he felt about his father and his brother. Yes, his father had ostracised him, but Balthazar knew that he had self-exiled as well. Balthazar had known full well what his father would do once he joined the police.
But once this case was over, and they had found Elad, he would continue the conversation with Gaspar that the two brothers had started recently. The Kovacs family business was under pressure – the refugee crisis and the collapse of Europe’s borders had opened up a space for new gangs from the Balkans to muscle in and move up through central Europe to the west.
In the old days the heads of families from across the region had met together and carved up the region into spheres of influence like the diplomats at Versailles redrawing the post-war map of Europe. The newcomers, some from the former Soviet Union, others from Albania, cared nothing for those agreements, positively relished tearing them up, sometimes using extreme violence. The Kovacs family, like many of the city’s veteran criminal dynasties, could not – would not – compete.
Balthazar’s plan was to become legitimate. The brothel in the Buda hills would be turned into a proper hotel, the bars would no longer offer extra ‘services’ but would provide food instead. Tourists were pouring into the city, foreign investment was soaring. Even the eighth district now had its own fancy ‘Palace Quarter’, where it bordered District V downtown. There was plenty of money to be made, without exploiting anyone. Gaspar was open to the idea – like many businessmen operating on the edge of legality, he yearned for respectability. The problem would be persuading Laci, his father.
But that was in the future. The immediate question was what was Marika doing here? District VII was out of Gaspar’s territory, controlled by another Gypsy family, the Lakatos clan – and they were under pressure from a new alliance of Serbs and Albanians. Sending Marika here was exposing her to danger.
Balthazar asked, ‘Marika, why are you here? You’re well out of your patch.’
