Balthazar remembered how excited Eva neni had been to meet Elad. Her daughter, Klara, had relocated to London several years ago, so Eva neni rarely saw her or her grandchildren. Eva neni and Elad were related via a cousin in Tel Aviv who had left Budapest in 1945 for Palestine. The cousin had contacted her a couple of months ago. She had immediately offered Elad her small flat. It sounded like Elad really had packed up and left. But why would he do that without telling Eva neni where he was going?
‘Was there any sign of a disturbance? Damage, scratches on the door, a broken window? Anything?’
Eva neni sipped her coffee for a moment as she thought. ‘No, nothing. It looks fine, like nobody has been there for a long time. But he was there on Tuesday… Where is he?’ She sniffed for a moment. ‘What if something bad has happened? It’s awful. It’s all my fault. What will I tell his parents?’
Balthazar rested his hand on hers. ‘Evike, we don’t know what has happened, and anyway, none of this is your fault. We’re going to find him. Give me a minute to go to the bathroom and freshen up first.’
Eva neni nodded. Balthazar walked through the flat to the bathroom and ran the cold tap in the sink. He looked at himself in the mirror. His thick black hair was dishevelled and his brown eyes looked bleary. He wasn’t a big drinker and his head felt heavy and fuzzy from the two beers he had drunk alone the previous evening. Eva neni was right. Living alone did not suit him. But finding someone to live with was proving much harder than he’d thought.
He turned his head from side to side and stretched his arms out as far as they would go, feeling his limbs stretch. He rubbed his jaw and opened his mouth as wide as he could. He dipped his hands into the cold water, splashed his face and then switched on the radio to listen to the news while he brushed his teeth.
The radio announcer was speaking about the upcoming visit of the Israeli prime minister, Alon Farkas. He was flying in on Monday morning, in four days’ time, to attend the commemoration of the anniversary of the liberation of the Budapest ghetto in January 1945. He would leave late that evening, after signing agreements on investment, tourism and scientific cooperation.
The upcoming visit had been all over the news for a couple of weeks. This would be the first visit by an Israeli prime minister to Hungary. Farkas, as his name indicated, was himself descended from Hungarian Jews and his visit was generally viewed as a PR and diplomatic boost for the shaky Social Democrat government of Reka Bardossy, Hungary’s prime minister. The newsreader moved on to the steady decline in the value of the forint, Hungary’s national currency, the rise in unemployment and the opinion polls showing that support for her government was sliding rapidly, with an election a month away.
Balthazar towelled himself dry, put his T-shirt back on and walked back into the kitchen. Eva neni was reading the two press clippings on the pinboard. The headline on one announced: GYPSY COP HERO TAKES DOWN INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST AT KELETI STATION; on another, HE’S BACK: BRAVE GYPSY COP STOPS PLOT TO BLOW UP KOSSUTH SQUARE.
Eva neni turned to him. ‘You’re famous. You know how excited all the nenis in the market on Klauzal Square get when you go and do your shopping? They talk about you non-stop.’
Balthazar smiled. ‘Do they?’ He hated the limelight, being recognised in public, but had little choice. Clips of the two incidents were also all over the internet. The last person he had arrested had even asked him for a selfie before Balthazar put the handcuffs on. He had refused.
Balthazar sat back down, feeling fully alert now. The sounds of classical music and a radio talk show host drifted up from the courtyard. The building was waking up. He looked at Eva neni. She picked up her coffee cup, took a small sip, put it back down, seemed about to say something, then did not.
‘What’s the matter, Eva neni? Is there something else?’
She nodded. ‘I probably should have said before. But I thought he was just nervous because he was in a new town. And I didn’t want to bother you.’ She looked down for a moment and sighed. ‘I should have.’
Balthazar rested his hand on hers. ‘It’s OK. You can bother me. What is it? What did he tell you?’
‘Elad thought he was being followed. There was a car parked outside the Jewish Museum where he was working in the archives. A big, blue Mercedes with tinted windows. He told me it was there every day for the past week, whenever he came out.’
Large Audis and Mercedes were very common in Budapest, the favoured vehicles of government officials and local criminals. ‘That’s not necessarily something to worry about. A big Mercedes is about as common as a taxi, especially downtown.’
‘Yes, I told him that as well. But then he said that earlier this week, he saw the same car drive past through Klauzal Square.’
Balthazar considered this for a moment. ‘That still doesn’t mean it’s something to worry about.’ Klauzal Square and the streets around it were used as shortcuts to avoid the heavy traffic on the Grand Boulevard. ‘Maybe it was just passing through. And how did he know it was the same vehicle?’
‘It was the same vehicle. It had a cracked right-side headlight. He was – I mean is – very observant. All those hours in the archives gave him an eye for detail, he said. And you know Israelis; they have to go in the army. He was in military intelligence, he told me. He’s a historian, he’s good with details.’
Balthazar nodded. ‘I don’t suppose he took the number plate?’
Eva neni gave him a worried look. ‘Number plates, Tazi.’
‘Plates?’
‘Yes. He checked. Same car. Two different number plates.’
‘Are you sure he was talking about the same vehicle?’
‘Yes. A blue Mercedes saloon, with a crack in the right-side headlight.’
Balthazar sipped his coffee for a moment, let his memories of his encounters with Elad play through his mind. They had met several times in the building, passing encounters in the lift and by the entrance, and once properly when Eva neni had him over for her famous turos palacsintas, sweet cheese pancakes with home-made vanilla sauce, so they could get to know each other a bit.
Elad was in his late twenties, shorter and slimmer than Balthazar, with short black hair, watchful, green eyes and a wiry build. He was quite shy at first, but friendly, and when Balthazar proposed that they go out one evening for a drink and something to eat, he had responded enthusiastically. Why wouldn’t he? He was a young man, alone in a new city, in the depth of winter. A postgraduate student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Elad was descended from Hungarian Jews. He spoke and read the language well and was writing his dissertation on the lost wealth of Hungarian Jewry after the Holocaust, tracing the fate of the assets of the once great Jewish dynasties of pre-war Hungary, the industrialists, businessmen and nobility who had lost everything. Balthazar had once enrolled in a PhD himself, researching the Poraymus, the devouring, as the Gypsies called their Holocaust, and he and Elad had chatted about libraries and archives.
More than half a million Hungarian Jews had perished in the Holocaust after the Nazis invaded the country in March 1944, swiftly and efficiently speeded to their deaths by the Hungarian state. But while many of the owners of the villas, companies, factories, and apartment houses had vanished in the camps or the icy waters of the Danube, their assets and property had continued existing – still did, in many cases. Their current owners were not usually to keen to discuss how they, or their forebears, had acquired them.
Balthazar asked Eva neni, ‘Did Elad talk to you about his research? How was it going?’
‘Not very well. People don’t want to talk about those times, Tazi. He was very interested in one company, but they would not let him look at their archives. In fact they refused to cooperate in any way, sent him a lawyer’s letter to stop bothering their staff or they would take legal action against him. They even threatened to get the police involved.’
‘Which firm?’
‘Nationwide.’
Balthazar stood up, gestured to Eva neni to follow him. ‘Come. Let’s take a look at the flat.’
TWO
Prime Minister’s Office, Hungarian Parliament, 7.30 a.m.
Reka Bardossy looked through her briefing note, only half focusing, as the Israeli diplomat across the table introduced the final schedule for Alon Farkas’s visit. Her mind kept drifting to the upcoming election. Unemployment, inflation: up. Her ratings, support for her and her party: down. Right down. The economy was sluggish. The young and the educated were leaving en masse for Vienna, Berlin, London. Even Edinburgh was jammed with young Hungarian migrants. Anywhere but home. The forint was losing value day by day. What would it be worth when the country went to the polls? And on top of all this, her uncle Karoly had somehow muscled in on the first high-profile visit of an international politician during her administration. It was at times like this that she missed her father the most. Stop, Reka almost said out loud, forcing herself to concentrate on the matter at hand.
She watched Ilona Mizrachi as she ran through the itinerary. By now Reka had spent so many hours on negotiating and planning the detail of the visit that she anyway knew it by heart. The Israeli government jet would land in Budapest on Monday at 11 a.m. local time. Alon Farkas would be accompanied by his wife, the ministers of trade, science and industry, other politicians and Israeli journalists.
Once they landed, everything had been timed down to thirty-second intervals: the walk from the airport runway to the armour-plated limousine that would bring the delegation down a pre-cleared road into downtown Budapest, the discussion with Reka and several ministers in parliament, the lunch, the ceremony at the cemetery next to the Great Synagogue on Dohany Street where the commemoration of the liberation of the ghetto would take place, the short meet-and-greet there with Holocaust survivors and former ghetto inmates, the ten-minute journey from there back to parliament to sign the trade and cultural exchange agreements and the small half-hour VIP reception in parliament’s most prestigious salon. Ilona glanced at Reka as she explained how pleased they were that Karoly Bardossy, chairman and CEO of Nationwide, one of the country’s largest business and industrial conglomerates, would be among the select group of guests.
Reka nodded and gave Ilona a politician’s smile that did not extend to her eyes. The last person she wanted to see at the VIP reception was Uncle Karoly, but there was no need to let Ilona know that. Reka had seen Ilona in action before, in her public persona as cultural affairs attaché, shepherding a bedazzled Israeli author around the Budapest Book Fair, charming everyone she encountered. Now she watched Ilona as she spoke, marvelling at her self-possession and the way she dominated the room by sheer force of her presence.
