And what of the decisions he had taken? He could have had that life, had he wanted, spending his days in the not very arduous world of academia, surrounded by the young, smart and quite often beautiful.
All the doors had been open. His supervisor in the history department, an amiable New Yorker of Hungarian background called Misha Fekete, had made it clear very quickly that a comfortable career was in easy reach if he finished his PhD. Misha was well connected in academia. There was talk of scholarships to Oxford or Harvard, tenure at CEU. The Holocaust was thoroughly documented, and still pored over by academics around the world. The Poraymus was neither.
Balthazar had been in prime position to contribute to the study, even build a new discipline – and who better to do that than a Gypsy historian? Yes, there was the suspicion that he would be a disz-Cigany, a decorative, token Gypsy, in place to highlight the liberal credentials of those around him, rather than on merit. But really, so what? Everyone needed a patron – at CEU it would have been Misha Fekete; at the Budapest police he had Sandor Takacs.
To himself at least he could be true. Balthazar would never tell Sandor, or indeed anyone, but one reason – perhaps the real one – he left academia was the prospect of seeing Sarah every day at the CEU building, in the café, the lifts and the libraries. Losing his wife – and to another woman – had been a hammer blow, even a humiliation. Perhaps he should have listened to his parents’ warnings before the wedding – Gypsies and gadjes, their culture, their values were too far apart for a mixed marriage to ever work. Gypsy women did not leave their men.
His family had been stunned – even more so when he had eventually explained that Sarah had moved in with a woman. Every one of his relationships after Sarah had seemed to prove that true: Eniko had left him, for reasons he still did not fully understand, and now Kati too. Still, he had a son, handsome and smart, to whom he was growing closer as he grew, and that was something that made everything else worthwhile.
Balthazar turned the corner from Oktober 6 onto Zrinyi Street. The narrow pedestrian thoroughfare led onto St Istvan’s Square and the Bazilika, which housed the right hand of St Istvan, Hungary’s first king. He paused for a moment to take in the view of the church. Dusk was falling now and the Bazilika looked magisterial, its giant domed roof and two towers softly illuminated against the darkening sky, streaked with grey.
The wind picked up and the pressure on the back of his neck intensified.
This time he took notice. Was he being followed? He stopped for a moment, glanced at his watch, then looked up and down the street as if looking for someone. The pedestrians flowed around him: commuters hurrying home for the evening from their jobs in the nearby ministries, a few hardy tourists and the CEU students.
Nobody stopped, but that did not necessarily mean anything. A professional team might be following him in a box, with one tracker behind him, another to the side and the third in front.
He really needed to call Alex, and also message Anastasia the address that Attila had given him. But first he needed to see if he was being watched. Surveillance detection drills used all sorts of techniques to see if someone was following: taking the suspected watchers into a chokepoint, like an underground passage or a staircase, to see if they followed, getting on a bus or train then getting off at the very last moment, going into a department store and moving up and down between floors or simply stopping and checking as he was now.
Sometimes it was necessary to lose watchers without them knowing that they had been detected. At other times it was more useful to get up close and personal, to let the watchers know that they had been busted. This, he sensed, was one of those times.
There were six benches spread out along Zrinyi Street. Balthazar sat down on the one in the middle, which faced an art gallery on the other side of the street. He took out his phone and scrolled through the numbers, as though he was looking for someone’s contact details, but was actually watching the street with a sharp, intense focus. Several tables stood outside a café on the other side of the street, a few metres further towards the Bazilika.
Nobody sat down next to him – that would be a very amateur move. But among the crowd two people stopped walking. One, a woman who looked to be in her late twenties, suddenly became very absorbed in the painting on display in the window of the facing art gallery.
She wore a grey skiing jacket and had black hair under a black baseball cap and stood with her back to Balthazar. A few yards further up the street, a man of similar age in a brown skiing jacket, stopped, turned and sat down at the café’s outdoor table. Both had white wires trailing from their ears.
He watched them for a moment. Neither caught his eye. None of this was evidence that he was being tailed. Lots of twenty-somethings had Apple earpieces and wore skiing jackets in winter.
Balthazar looked again at the young woman and the man at the café table. Where were they from? There was something about them, their gait, the way they held themselves, their alert, hyper-confident manner, that made him think they were not Hungarian. Were they British or American? He didn’t think so. In any case there was no reason for the British or the Americans to be following him. There was a reason for another country’s operatives to be doing so.
A waitress appeared at the table and handed the man a menu. He held it high to his face. Balthazar dropped his head, apparently absorbed in his telephone. In reality he was looking across the street. The man glanced at him over the edge of the menu. The young woman was still staring inside the art gallery. The door opened and an assistant invited her inside. She declined and her head turned rightwards for a fraction of a second at the man sitting at the café table before returning to the gallery window.
Balthazar smiled to himself.
The man, or the woman? The woman, he decided.
He walked across the road and stood next to her. ‘Nice paintings. I like the one in the corner,’ he said, pointing at a colourful portrait of an elderly lady looking out of a window at the sea. ‘She looks like she knows someone is watching her.’
The young woman took a half step to the side, glanced at Balthazar, not quite able to keep her irritation from showing. ‘If you say so.’
‘I do.’ He tilted his head to the side, looked intently at her. She had brown eyes, full lips and a plump face. ‘You know, you really look like a friend of mine.’
She stared at Balthazar, her eyes darting sideways for a moment. ‘That’s nice. But I’m waiting for someone, so thanks but no thanks.’
‘I’m sure you know my friend,’ said Balthazar.
‘I doubt it. Please stop bothering me, or I will call the police.’
Balthazar took out his wallet and showed his identity card. ‘I am the police.’
She stepped further away. ‘I have no idea what you are talking about. Please leave me alone. Or I will shout for help. There are lots of people here.’
‘I don’t think you are going to do that. But I’ll tell you my friend’s name anyway; that might help. She is called Ilona Mizrachi.’
The young woman stiffened and a pink flush crept up the side of her face.
‘Give Ilona my regards,’ said Balthazar.
TWENTY-FOUR
Mariahegyi Way, Obuda hills, 4 p.m.
Karoly Bardossy stood on his terrace and sipped his single-malt whisky as he looked out over Budapest. Far in the distance, past fields and woodland, the city glimmered faintly, as dusk fell. His city.
Sometimes he felt intensely protective of the Hungarian capital. He had reshaped it, moulded the skyline, scraped forty years of dirt off grandiose Habsburg apartment houses, demolished communist-era concrete piles, put up new towers of glass and steel, dragged Budapest into the twenty-first century. Here and there he could make out the faint shapes of Nationwide’ constructions – tall office blocks, residential parks, new museums, shopping centres, gated residential compounds. Whatever was coming – and he sensed that something was – nobody could take away his legacy.
The air here was fresh and clean, sharp with the coldness of winter. The ten-room villa stood high on the top of Mariahegyi – Mary’s hill – and could only be reached by a winding, narrow track through the surrounding woods.
At the end of the track was a security cabin, manned twenty-four hours a day by armed guards. A CCTV network covered the track and the surrounding woodlands, as well as the entrance to the house, the terrace and every room inside, except of course his bedroom and bathroom.
A short tarmacked path led from the security cabin to the entrance of the villa, and the house itself was surrounded by a high wall. There were no neighbours here for several hundred metres in every direction, which is how he liked it. He had designed the villa himself and overseen the construction in conjunction with an Italian architect whose usual clients were Russian oligarchs. All the materials, from the imported marble tiles to the custom-made furniture, and the labour had been run through the construction division of Nationwide. The architect had accepted payment in 500-euro notes from the company’s petty cash.
Karoly turned to look at the house, its angular modernist facade softly illuminated by light-sensitive LEDs. His home had not cost him personally a single forint, which only increased his pleasure.
He took another sip of his whisky when a soft cough sounded to his right. He turned to see Porter, his butler, standing expectantly. ‘Will sir require the jacuzzi later tonight?’
The jacuzzi sat on a raised teak platform and took up most of the corner of the terrace. Thursday nights were his midweek break and time for female company, lately in the shape of two nineteen-year-old countryside girls who claimed to be sisters. He had no idea if that was true, but they certainly seemed very well acquainted.