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.’
She shrugged. ‘Gaspar said to try my luck.’
Balthazar shook his head. ‘Bad idea. It’s not safe.’
Balthazar reached into his pocket, took out 10,000 forints and handed it to Marika. Her eyes widened. ‘But I thought you said you didn’t…’
He smiled. ‘I don’t. This is for you, keep it, don’t tell Gaspar. Go home. Buy yourself a proper dinner. Tell Gaspar I told you to. Tell him I said he needs to stick to District VIII.’
She swiftly pocketed the money. ‘Thanks, Tazi, but he’ll be angry.’
Balthazar rested his hand on her arm. It felt thin under her puffa jacket. ‘He won’t. I’ll tell him myself not to send any more girls here – that I gave you the evening off.’
Marika leaned forward and kissed Balthazar on the cheek. ‘Thanks, Tazi.’
TWENTY-SIX
Andrassy Way, 7 p.m.
Ilona Mizrachi watched the three dots on the screen of her laptop, each pulsing steadily on top of a map of Budapest. Two, red in colour, were stationary at a fancy hotel on the Great Boulevard near Rakoczi Square, where the operatives were waiting in a café for their instructions.
The third, blue dot was moving up Dob Street towards the Grand Boulevard, where it turned right, in the direction of District VIII. Ilona knew immediately where the phone’s owner was going. Her sense of unease, which had been growing exponentially over the last twenty-four hours, took another leap forward.
The main point of Alon Farkas’s visit was buried in a small secret annex to the agreements he would sign on Monday. Everything else – education, trade, the reception for the Holocaust survivors – was theatre. Farkas knew what was contained in the secret annex, of course, but he had a notoriously short attention span – his main focus was keeping his fractious coalition together so he could stay in power. But most of those involved in his visit to Budapest had no idea of its hidden provisions. The secret annex was even being kept from the Israeli ambassador to Budapest – and from Reka Bardossy. But Ilona had a copy.
The annex was one page long. It outlined how Nationwide Ltd. would sign a licensing deal, the first of its kind, with its new Israeli partner. Hayam was a software firm set up by veterans of Israeli military intelligence and Mossad. Ilona had just discovered that Shlomo, the deputy ambassador and her head of station, sat on the board of Hayam.
Hayam had a sure-fire winner of a product, but it needed Karoly Bardossy’s contacts and introductions to sell it. Few Muslim or Arab countries would buy from Israel, but a Hungarian label was a very different matter.
Everyone loved Hungary, handily situated in the centre of Europe. The country was a member of the European Union and NATO but was still the gateway to the west for the east, and vice versa. Hungary had excellent diplomatic relations across the developing world. Karoly Bardossy had a network that stretched back decades and still reached across the Middle East, the former communist states and Soviet Union. Not just of businessmen and women, but of former intelligence operatives who either still ran the domestic security services or used their contacts to enrich themselves. Bardossy’s contacts were a potential goldmine. If all went well in Hungary, Nationwide – and Hayam’s owners – would make millions. Shlomo would finally be able to buy himself one of the villas in Herzliya, an expensive beachside city, that he spent of much his day looking at online.
Ilona had signed up to her agency to serve her country, to guard against threats, whether physical, economic or political, to the state of Israel. On balance, she could just about rationalise the trade deal to herself. There were many ways to serve one’s country and helping its exports was one. It was not for her to judge how ethically acceptable Israeli exports were. Russia, China, even the United States were all working on similar programmes. It was just a question of who got to market first.
But being part of some kind of off-the-books black operation that involved a gunman opening fire with an Uzi on two women and throwing smoke bombs into a café owned by the grandson of a Holocaust survivor wasn’t what she had signed up for. She knew from personal experience that once the gunplay began, it was hard to stop – and nearly always triggered retaliation.
Perhaps it was because she was partly Hungarian, but either way, she was not about to let District VII, or any part of Budapest, get turned into a shooting gallery. Ilona had a very good sense for people, which was one reason she had been recruited by her service and given her current job. She had once met Karoly Bardossy. Underneath the faux charm, she had thought him utterly ruthless.
For a moment she was back in the Boho Bar, listening to Balthazar recount the short version of his life story. She really would like to hear the longer version, she realised – and perhaps take the time to tell him her story. It would certainly be better than another night sitting here on her own, watching television.
Ilona sat back and looked around her apartment. Andrassy Way was a glamorous address, home to some of the city’s most spectacular apartment houses. Her flat had high ceilings, ornate plasterwork, marble fireplaces, glossy wooden floors. Budapest was her first foreign posting. Initially she had been thrilled to move here, loved the sense of space and history in her grandiose nineteenth-century apartment building, which was a listed monument. But lately it had palled. The flat was far too large for one person. The lounge alone was bigger than her place in Tel Aviv. It wasn’t permitted for her to date anyone who was not Israeli. The medical and dental students were too young, the businessmen too old, and frequently too touchy. Anyone at the embassy was out of the question. She was lonely.
She looked at her watch: it was 7 p.m. The Sabbath had commenced. Her grandmother would be bustling around her flat in Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv, where the family gathered every Friday night, serving soup, passing the cholla bread.
After the meal was finished the stories would begin, of life in Budapest and Baghdad. Ilona never tired of her grandmother’s stories, hearing about how she had escaped from the Budapest ghetto and the year-long odyssey before she arrived in Haifa. Without the help of Gypsy smugglers, Ilona’s grandmother would never have made it to Palestine. They had helped her escape across the border into Romania, and passed her along a network of relatives that reached across the country to the border with Bulgaria and then through to neutral Turkey.
Ilona’s phone rang and she took the call. She watched the blue dot move along the Grand Boulevard as she listened to the angry voice before replying. ‘Slicha, Shlomo, I’m sorry. Yes, we have the target address. No, I don’t know where he is. The program is not working. It’s new, it’s still buggy.’
She held the handset away from her ear, the angry male voice audible around the room, and allowed herself to get annoyed. Sometimes it felt like all her life men had either been shouting at her or trying to get into bed with her, her boss included. ‘Listen to me, Shlomo. Fix your shitty software. Is it my problem that you are out somewhere and don’t have your computer with you? I don’t know where he is. Yes, I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything.’
She ended the call. Shlomo could fuck off. The tracking software was working perfectly. The lies came easily, but Ilona had been well trained. She spoke fluent Hungarian but was under orders not to let it be known – appearing ignorant of the language frequently brought a rich harvest of information as she eavesdropped.
The red dots were still stationary in the hotel café, waiting for her instructions. The blue dot was almost at Rakoczi Square. She had no intention, she realised, of calling Shlomo, or anyone else, to keep them updated.
The two operatives were freelancers brought up from Serbia. This wasn’t a termination mission, but their instructions were to take Balthazar somewhere and rough him up enough so that he told them what he knew about Elad’s research – and where he might be. That prospect, and the events so far, were enough to make up her mind about what to do next.
Ilona looked at her screen again. The blue dot, Balthazar, was inside the building.
She looked at her screen again. The red dots were moving now, toward the target address. It was just a couple of hundred yards on foot, but they were moving faster than walking pace – they must have jumped on a tram.
She took out a burner phone, tapped out a text message, sent it, then made a call.
