If he really thought Elad had gone missing, he should call in the local cops from the District VII station. Each of Budapest’s twenty-three districts had its own force. There were special city-wide squads at the Budapest police headquarters for serious crimes like murder, armed robbery and fraud. Balthazar was a detective in the Budapest police murder squad. There was no evidence of a murder, and, he hoped, there would not be. The District VII cops would send a team over and then open a missing-person case. That would involve calling in a forensics team and an investigator. They would seal the flat and launch a manhunt. That would be the correct procedure, the voice in his head said.
He ignored it.
There was movement at the other end of the corridor, a brief opening of a door, a glimpse of a head before the door closed. He sighed inside. Feri bacsi, Uncle Feri.
When Balthazar had first moved into the building many of the neighbours had been, at best, wary. Gypsies were often not very popular in Hungary and neither were cops. His being both had initially garnered a very cool response. Eva neni had been the only one to welcome him. But over the years, as Balthazar became a fixture in the place, and had used his connections to smooth out potential problems for a couple of neighbouring families with wayward teenage children – Klauzal Square was a popular place for teenagers to gather in the summer, drink beer and smoke dope – he had become accepted. Even more so, now that he was something of a celebrity. Accepted by everyone, except Feri bacsi.
Feri bacsi’s full name was Ferenc Balogh. A former full-time official in the Communist Party, he had lost his job in 1990 at the change of system and never found another. He did not bother to disguise his distaste for Balthazar and could frequently be heard muttering about how the building had been turned into a ‘Cigany-haz’, a Gypsy-house, which was an insult. Nor was he a great fan of Eva neni, but he knew enough not to make that plain. Unfortunately Feri bacsi lived at the other end of the corridor and his front door gave him a clear view along the passageway.
The plan was that Balthazar and Eva neni would both go inside the flat, but Balthazar would just stand with his back to the closed front door. He needed to see the place for himself, and get a sense of it, but she would move around inside, searching for any clues or hints as to what might have happened.
Eva neni took out her key but just as she was about to put it into the lock, she dropped it. The key was on a ring with numerous others, including several large ones for the cellar and courtyard. She was nervous, Balthazar saw. The keys hit the floor with a loud crash. Balthazar saw movement at the far end of the corridor, a door open quickly, then close. Feri bacsi, again. There was nothing to be done about it.
Balthazar nodded encouragingly at Eva neni and she picked up her key again and opened the door. She turned to Balthazar, about to mouth an apology, but he put an index finger over his mouth. She nodded, and silently went inside. Balthazar quickly followed her inside and closed the door behind him.
The first thing he noticed was how tidy the place was. It was a small one-room flat, with a combined bedroom and lounge, a galley kitchen and shower room leading off the main room. An old-fashioned sofa bed took up part of the main wall. Opposite, on the other side of the room, stood a plain wooden chest of drawers and a narrow wardrobe, while a small table and chair stood in the far corner. The walls were pale yellow and the narrow parquet slats, the same size and pattern as those in his flat, were faded and worn. The windows, like those in his flat, were the originals, in ancient wooden frames that let the cold seep in.
Balthazar watched as Eva neni walked around, peering under the table, checking the bed and looking in the corners.
There were no signs of struggle here, none at all.
The aftermath of a crime, or malfeasance, left a kind of energy. That silent witness sometimes spoke to him. It was one of Balthazar’s gifts, to sense something of what had happened in a place. His mother, Marta, had the same ability. Marginalised, expelled, hated by many for centuries, the Gypsies had developed survival instincts that were rooted in ancient ways, which could not be explained by science. The gadjes, the non-Gypsies, did not understand it at all. In the early days of his career he had tried to explain his sixth sense to his colleagues. They had laughed, looked at him like he was a mad person, or a shaman.
Nowadays, after he had found and arrested several murderers who would otherwise have escaped, his fellow detectives listened with more attention, but he knew that behind his back they still mocked what they called his ‘Cigany boszorkanysag’, or Gypsy witchcraft. Perhaps that was one reason why he had become so close to Eva neni. She too could read the signs, which was one reason why she was still alive.
The air was calm. The flat felt peaceful. There was a faint smell of masculine deodorant, but none of that disturbed feeling, the bad energy that he often sensed in a place where violence had taken place. His instinct told him that if Elad had been abducted, it wasn’t from here. It felt more like someone had come in and very methodically swept and emptied the room.
He watched Eva neni open the wardrobe. It was empty. So were each of the drawers in the cupboard facing the bed. She signalled that she would go into the kitchen and the bathroom. She entered one after the other and each time showed Balthazar her empty hands when she came out. So where were Elad’s clothes, his notes, his laptop?
He thought back to his conversation with Eva neni in his kitchen.
Nationwide.
Nationwide was one of the wealthiest and most powerful companies in Hungary. Its main business was construction, but it also had interests and holdings in manufacturing, transport, property acquisition and had recently branched out into the media. There had long been rumours about how the company had been founded after the end of the Second World War. Questions too, about how both the firm, and its owners, the Bardossy family, had not only survived under communism, but had thrived. But Nationwide had powerful lawyers who soon descended on anyone asking uncomfortable questions or writing articles that displeased its boss, Karoly Bardossy. And now that his niece was prime minister, even fewer investigators were probing the company and its past – except for Elad Harrari, who doubtless would not care about Hungarian lawyers.
But had Nationwide really branched out into the abduction business as well? Kidnapping was a very complicated crime to organise and execute, which was why most kidnappings went wrong. It demanded a snatch team, a holding place, a supply of food and drink, a negotiator who knew what they were doing and for everyone involved to keep their mouths shut. Every crime demanded two questions at the outset of the investigation: who had the motivation? And who had the opportunity? Nationwide, or Karoly Bardossy, would have both, and the resources to abduct Elad. But he would be a very obvious suspect. Abducting a foreign citizen, especially an Israeli, was a serious matter. Still, it certainly sounded like someone was watching Elad and he had been followed. The first step would be to get more information about the blue Mercedes with the cracked right-hand lamp.
If Elad really had gone missing then there was no question: Balthazar would need to call in the forensics team to examine the flat. But the more he thought it through, the more he realised that the case would probably not be left to the District VII cops. They dealt with local crimes. This would be a very sensitive one. Elad was a foreigner, a citizen of a country whose relationship with Hungary was complicated, even fraught. The bosses would want the A-team on this. Which meant that Balthazar could ask to take it over.
They were about to leave when Eva neni stood still for a moment. She frowned for several seconds then stared into the distance. ‘Wait, Tazi. I have an idea. I gave Elad a spare key to my flat, in case he needed to get in.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Hidden, of course. In a place where nobody would think to look.’ She smiled at Balthazar as though he was a small child. ‘We all need hiding places. Wait here.’
He stepped inside and watched as she walked across the room and opened a narrow door that led into the tiny bathroom. There was nowhere to sit down, only a shower cubicle and a small sink. Eva neni bent down, reached for the middle tile in the bottom row and pushed in the lower edge. The tile came loose in her hand. She put it down and reached inside the space, her fingers probing, until they found something.
She stood up and walked out, back to Balthazar, her palm outstretched. ‘Look at this. I didn’t leave it there.’
A small silver-coloured stick lay in her hand. Balthazar picked up the silver object. It was light in his hand, almost weightless, with a clear plastic cap over a narrow metal prong at one end.
‘It’s a memory thing, Tazi,’ said Eva neni. ‘For a computer.’
FOUR
Newsroom, 555.hu, Liberty Square, 8.10 a.m.
Zsuzsa Barcsy sat at her desk, watching the contents of her editor’s hard drive scroll across her laptop screen. The rows of folders looked very tempting: story schedules, future projects, legal and personnel files. The correspondence with 555.hu’s new owners was especially appealing. It might explain why an irreverent news site staffed by smartarse bohemians and hipsters had suddenly moved from a dilapidated apartment overlooking not-very-glamorous Blaha Lujza Square to a state-of-the-art office building in the heart of downtown – and why those who had survived the purge had received such substantial pay rises.
But she had one task to complete and very little time in which to do it. Zsuzsa’s investigation into Nationwide had been held over for two weeks now. Each time she asked the editor Roland Horvath when it would run, he fobbed her off with increasingly feeble excuses about libel and lawyers. Zsuzsa was certain of all her facts and had double-checked everything – she had even sent the few sources prepared to speak on the record their quotes for authorisation. She had unravelled a web of front companies that reached from small villages in eastern Hungary and across the border in Ukraine to the Cayman Islands and Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Zsuzsa had proved that Nationwide was gaming the system to produce immense off-the-books profits for its owners and directors – chief among them Karoly Bardossy, its majority shareholder. The mayor of one small village in the Ukraine had been astonished to learn that he was, on paper, a euro millionaire – but when he started asking questions he had been warned off in no uncertain terms.
And there was something else going on, Zsuzsa and several of her colleagues believed. Roland Horvath had never been the most collegial of leaders, preferring to issue edicts from his glass-walled bunker, but lately he had been positively secretive, lowering the electric blinds for hours for meetings with 555.hu’s news editor, Kriszta Matyas. Roland himself just brushed away all queries, saying they were working on a project on a need-to-know basis and Kriszta was equally unhelpful. In fact neither of the two had let slip anything at all about what they were working on, which the rest of the newsroom had dubbed WTFATUT – What The Fuck Are They Up To? Was WTFATUT connected to the non-publication of her Nationwide article?
Zsuzsa looked around the newsroom, suddenly nostalgic for 555.hu’s former offices, and a simpler life when her stories were published. That large ramshackle flat, on the corner of Rakoczi Way and the Grand Boulevard, had no air-conditioning or proper heating system. But its rattly wooden parquet floors, giant marble fireplace, high ceilings and toilets that pre-dated the change of system in 1990 gave it plenty of atmosphere. She especially missed people-watching from the balcony overlooking Blaha Lujza Square. Very little had survived 555.hu’s move from its old offices. H. L. Mencken, the American journalist and guiding light to generations of reporters, still stared out from a tattered poster, a speech bubble recording his supposed epithet that ‘The relationship of a journalist to a politician should be that of a dog to a lamp post’. A pile of boxes of files and reporters’ research material had come with the poster, and were still stacked up in a corner of the room, but that was about it.
Zsuzsa’s story, she was determined, would appear somewhere. OK, it was edgy, but that was her job. Her investigation, she was sure, was being held because of pressure from on high, but from where? Nationwide was the obvious suspect. Budapest was a small city and its political, business and media elites were closely entwined – to an unhealthy degree. In any case, if Roland continued to refuse to run the story, she would resign and take it elsewhere. Several of her former colleagues, sacked in the move, were now crowdfunding the launch of a new website called newsline.hu. It was a shareholders’ collective, owned by the journalists, structured so that it could never be bought or sold. Survivor’s guilt had already prompted her – and much of the remaining 555.hu newsroom – to donate to the fighting fund. If she did jump ship, the Nationwide story would make a great launch for newsline.hu. But first of all, she had to find out why it was being held over. Roland was a slow, methodical worker and she was sure that he would have kept the lawyers’ notes and any other comments. There was also a chance that there were genuine legal issues – in which case she needed to know what they were.
She glanced nervously across the newsroom at the door again, then down at the printout of her instructions how to get into the computer system using Roland’s login and password. The door was still closed; she was connected not to her work computer, but to her personal laptop, as she had been instructed. So far, so good.
This was the first day Zsuzsa had arrived in the office before Roland but he could still turn up at any moment as she prowled around his folders and files, now accessible on her laptop screen. A paunchy divorcee in his forties, Roland had little life outside the office and was known to appear at all hours of the day. His main topic of conversation, other than work, was his teenage daughter, Wanda, whom he saw once a week. Zsuzsa had once seen them in a popular hamburger restaurant, where Wanda seemed more interested in her telephone than her food, or her father.
Zsuzsa’s desk was at the other end of the newsroom to Roland’s office in the far corner. That would give her a few seconds to shut down her probe before he arrived at his desk, but no more. Part of her felt sorry for him, another slightly guilty for what she was doing. A few days ago Roland had asked her out to dinner, ostensibly to discuss his plans for the website, but his loneliness was almost palpable. But in the end she was a journalist and it was her job to dig out information – especially when her biggest story yet was being stonewalled.
Zsuzsa glanced again at her screen. She needed a folder called Misc. There, she had been told, everything she wanted could be found. The knot of tension in her stomach grew as the list of folders on Roland’s desk expanded until eventually Misc appeared.
She took a deep breath. There was nothing remarkable about the newest icon on her screen – it looked the same as all the others. But this was the point of no return. Until now, she could, just about, concoct a story of a system malfunction that had somehow led her to Roland Horvath’s computer instead of her own. She had not downloaded anything.
But once she started copying files onto her laptop, there would be some sort of data trail. That trail would not automatically lead to her computer – or so she had been assured – but it might be noticed and could trigger an investigation – in which Zsuzsa would be one of the most likely and obvious suspects. Who else would hack into a folder on the editor’s computer where their story was stored?
