‘She’s in the back. I’ll bring your coffee through.’
‘Thanks,’ said Balthazar, as he started to walk around the bar to the door at the back.
‘Wait,’ said Mishi. He scribbled something down on the back of a business card. ‘You’ll need this. It’s the door code.’
*
There were three back rooms behind the public café space. One had been converted into a kitchen, the second an office. Balthazar glanced inside the kitchen, watching the cook chop, fry and stir by the long cooker range. In the neighbouring space Noemi, Mishi’s younger sister, sat by a computer, taking care of the café’s paperwork. Balthazar stopped in front of the third room, where a large, grey steel door was firmly closed in a metal frame. He looked up to see a small CCTV camera pointing at him, waved and smiled at the lens. A entry pad was mounted by the side of the entrance. He tapped in 05101940 – Samu’s birthday – and gently pushed the door open.
Inside the room a tall, pale, very skinny woman in her late twenties with a silver nose ring and buzz-cut black hair sat in front of a large desk. She turned when the door opened and greeted Balthazar with a raised hand. She was speaking on her mobile, he could see.
Balthazar waited a moment, but she gestured for him to come inside. As he walked into the room he caught the tail end of her conversation.
‘Good, good. I told you it would work. Now put it all on the stick, then wipe all the files from your laptop with that program I gave you…’ Vivi listened for a moment. ‘No, don’t worry. They might suspect something but they won’t be able to actually prove anything, make sure you wipe everything from your laptop… OK, come over later.’
A 1980s fake leather armchair stood in the corner by a small wooden table. He sat down in the armchair, his nose prickling at the smell of burned rope that hung in the air. A large blue ceramic ashtray stood on the table. A bent stub lay in the centre, too thick to be a cigarette.
‘No trace… wipe your laptop. That all sounds intriguing, Vivi,’ Balthazar said.
Vivi put her mobile down and turned to Balthazar. The handset, he noticed, was an old-fashioned Nokia candy-bar model. She smiled. ‘Doesn’t it, Detective? Now how can I help?’
Balthazar picked up the remainder of the joint and sniffed it. Hungary had very harsh drugs laws. Mere possession of a joint was enough to earn a hefty fine or even a jail sentence. ‘Firstly, don’t do this in the square, at least for the next few days.’ Klauzal Square was a popular haunt of the local dope smokers. ‘The city will be crawling with cops, because of the Israeli prime minister’s visit.’
‘Thanks. I won’t. But you didn’t come here to tell me that.’
Balthazar put the stub back down in the ashtray. ‘No, I did not.’
Vivi Szentkiralyi was a computer genius and had, until recently, worked as the systems manager of 555.hu. She had rescued the laptops of countless journalists after they dropped them or spilled coffee over the keyboard. She had saved 555.hu from a sustained DDOS attack, a distributed denial-of-service attack, when swarms of computers around the world had been hijacked and ordered to visit the news site and overwhelm its systems. She even knew how to navigate safely through the Dark Web, the secret internet where weapons, drugs, and many more illegal goods were traded, making it a rich source of stories. The new owners, however, had decided that Vivi’s services were no longer required. She was one of many staff members who did not make the move to the website’s new offices overlooking Liberty Square.
Balthazar had once seen Vivi’s workspace at 555.hu: two massive desks, overflowing with hard drives, keyboards, tangles of cables, half-finished mugs of coffee, sandwich wrappers, pizza boxes and who knew what else. Her new workplace was the complete opposite: three sleek brushed-steel monitors and a single keyboard. A large steel cube hard drive with a blinking blue light stood at the edge of the desk, emitting a faint hum. The walls were painted white and the floor was the same wide, grey wooden flooring as the café’s. It looked like there had once been a window on the other side but it had been bricked up and painted over. At the other end of the desk was a heavy, black old-fashioned IBM ThinkPad, which even Balthazar knew was very out of date. Vivi’s outfit, however, had not changed and she wore her usual black long-sleeved T-shirt and ripped black jeans that showed the skin of her knees.
Balthazar looked at the three monitors and her orderly desk. ‘It’s a bit different to 555.’
Vivi smiled wryly. ‘It has to be. I’m a grown-up now.’
She handed Balthazar a business card. He looked down. ‘Information technology and security consultant. Sounds impressive. How is the hacking going?’
Vivi shrugged. ‘Fine, I suppose. Mishi rents me the room. I bought the equipment with my redundancy. They gave us all a decent pay-off so we would go quickly and quietly. Companies pay me to break into their systems. Then I tell them their vulnerabilities. Then they give me quite a lot of money.’ She looked wistful for a moment. ‘But it was much more fun at 555.hu. I don’t get a lot of visitors. In fact I don’t get any. You are the first. That’s it. So here I am. All legal and above board. Sorry I don’t have anything to offer you.’
‘That’s fine, I ordered us both a coffee. Mishi will bring them in.’
‘Great. So, what can I do for you?’
Balthazar leaned forward. ‘I need your help, Vivi. With two things.’
‘You have computer experts at police headquarters. I don’t mean to be difficult, but why don’t you ask them?’
‘Firstly, because they are not as good as you.’ He paused, let the compliment – which they both knew was true – sink in. ‘And secondly, I need these done off the books.’
‘Hmmm, sounds intriguing.’
‘I think so,’ said Balthazar as he reached into his pocket and took out the memory stick that Eva neni had found hidden in Elad’s flat. He walked over to Vivi and showed it to her, lying in the palm of his hand. ‘This is encrypted. I already tried to open it on my laptop at home. I couldn’t get in.’
Vivi eyed the stick suspiciously then sat back for a moment. ‘I don’t mind doing things in a grey area, Detective, but it has to be for a good cause.’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘I know you are a decent guy and you used to be Eniko’s boyfriend and you are the hero of Kossuth Square and everything, and Eniko is a good person, so you must be as well, but you are a cop.’ She fixed him with a steady gaze as she spoke. ‘So how do I know I am not going to get someone into trouble?’
Balthazar thought for a moment before he replied. It was a fair point and underlying it – which did not need to be said – was the fact that not all of his colleagues were decent. ‘The memory stick belongs to someone who has disappeared, probably been kidnapped. I think it has some clues about what happened to him. None of that is public and the police have not even opened a case yet, so I am trusting you with that.’
Vivi frowned. ‘Why the secrecy? If someone’s been kidnapped it will come out sooner or later.’
Balthazar still stood with his hand outstretched. ‘It will, you’re right. But I need to get a head start. And it’s connected to someone close to me. But if you feel you can’t get involved, I quite understand…’
Vivi hesitated for a moment, then reached forward and took the stick. ‘OK. I believe you. I’ll help.’ She looked down at the memory stick. ‘I’ll put it in the sandbox.’
Balthazar looked around, confused for a moment. There was no sand in the room as far as he could see. ‘The what?’
Vivi reached across for the IBM ThinkPad, placed it by her keyboard and powered it up. ‘This is the sandbox. It’s never been connected to the internet and never will be. It’s so obsolete it needs a card to connect to a Wi-Fi network. I filled the slot with epoxy glue just to make sure. I also glued up the cable connections so it can never be connected to a server.’ She patted the lid approvingly, suddenly more animated than he had ever seen her. ‘It’s as safe as a computer can be. The hard drive is partitioned and runs on Linux, which is the safest operating system. Nobody writes viruses for Linux. Even if there is a virus on your memory stick it will only infect one part of the hard drive. The rest is safe. They call it a sandbox because you can play around there, with dangerous toys.’
Balthazar nodded slowly, as though he understood, although he was mystified by much of what Vivi was saying. Linux? His knowledge of computers was minimal at best. He could use a keyboard and a browser, run a basic Google search. He kept missing WhatsApp messages from his son, Alex, even though Alex had shown him how to set the notifications. ‘Sure, sounds great.’
Balthazar watched the screen light up and Vivi pressed numerous buttons. A window appeared on the screen, with a flashing cursor at the top-left corner, and a line of code started spilling rightwards. It looked like nothing he had ever seen. Vivi inserted the USB drive. At that moment the door opened and Mishi walked in, carrying two cups of coffee, and handed one to each. ‘A Samu for you, Detective, and today’s special for you, Vivi.’
They both thanked Mishi and he left quickly. Balthazar sat back and drank his coffee while Vivi worked. He looked at Vivi as her long fingers, each tipped with glossy black nail varnish, moved across her keyboard. What did he know about her? Could he trust her? He didn’t really have a choice. He didn’t know anyone else in this world and he certainly could not take the memory stick to the police headquarters. Balthazar remembered Eniko telling him once that Vivi was a mystery, and never socialised with the reporters, even though they several times invited her for drinks after work. Nobody knew if she had a boyfriend or a girlfriend. She was very smart, that was clear. Perhaps she was just shy and even a bit lonely. He looked around the room. It wasn’t much of a life, sitting here on your own all day without a window, even if the money was good.
Vivi’s pale face was set in concentration as her fingers danced across the keyboard. Lines of code flowed back and forth, symbols appeared and disappeared. The coffee was perfect: thick, lukewarm and slightly bitter. He missed Samu and their conversations, he realised. The area around the square was changing more rapidly than ever, as though forty years of stasis and decrepitude under communism had suddenly erupted into an insatiable hunger for everything new and western and shiny. Mishi at least had made a great effort to keep the spirit of his grandfather’s shop and incorporate its heritage. Which was why Javitas was Balthazar’s go-to coffee bar – and also because it was underneath his flat.
The taste of the coffee was the taste of his childhood and teenage years. For a moment he was back at the kitchen table in the family flat on Jozsef Street, on the other side of the Grand Boulevard, in the heart of District VIII, explaining to his father, Laci, why he wanted to be a policeman, seeing the expression on his face, watching his incredulity turn to anger. Laci had expected him to leave school at sixteen. As the eldest son he would eventually succeed him in running the family business, running several topless bars and brothels. Laci, like many of his generation, had left school at fourteen. What was good enough for him was good enough for his sons, he exclaimed repeatedly.
But Marta, Balthazar’s mother, had been determined that at least one of her sons would go out into the world and make his fortune legitimately. A short stint without cooked meals or other marriage benefits had quickly persuaded Laci to let his wife have her way. Balthazar was the first – and still the only – person in his family to go to university. Laci had even agreed that Balthazar could take a postgraduate degree at CEU. And when Balthazar had married Sarah Weiss, a Jewish student from New York, he and the whole family had attended the wedding, even though she was a gadje, a non-Gypsy.
