by Anna Porter
Judging by her appearance, he figured those fine literary works had improved her body — no sign of those comfortable hips, nor the charming little pouch under her chin she had developed during their marriage. Now she looked like a woman who spent more time on a treadmill than on a sofa, reading. What the hell, not my problem anymore, Attila thought as he climbed the two sets of stairs to her swish new apartment and readied himself for the usual critical appraisal of his own body parts when she opened the door.
“Na végre,” At last, Bea said, glancing at her expensive watch, though she would have known he was only two minutes late.
“Szia,” he said with as friendly a smile as he could conjure. “Looking lovely as ever.” That, he thought, should stop her in her tracks. She did, as it happened, look lovely in her tight-waisted blue dress, her matching blue high-heeled shoes with little spaces at front to display her blue-painted toes, and her hair with its frosted ends, swept up over her face. Every bit a woman pleased with her own carefully crafted appearance.
“Hmm,” said Bea, and called for the girls.
They had been waiting in the overfurnished living room behind her, their backpacks at the ready, Anna’s pencil case dangling from her hand, Sofi’s soccer ball under her arm. They approached cautiously at first, not knowing whether there would be another fight. When they saw that their parents were peaceful, they came and hugged Attila and chorused, “Good morning, Apu.”
Bea marched into the kitchen past Attila. She managed not to touch him, though it meant having to flatten herself against the wall where the girls’ raincoats hung on yellow-painted hooks that blended into the wallpaper. Attila could have stepped aside to leave her room, but he didn’t. He was tired of stepping aside for her. He was also tired of feeling like he should be apologizing for something. Even when he was on time. Even the last time when he had brought her flowers to apologize for being half an hour late. Or when he brought the dinner (admittedly, that was not often, but he did bring dinner sometimes). Somewhat like his mother, Bea managed to disapprove of everything about Attila’s choice of work. Neither made an effort to hide her disappointment in his lack of financial stability, with no prospects for improvement as time went on. “Unlike other people’s,” Bea had said, “your career moves are all downward.”
His mother used to chime in with, “You could at least have waited till they retired you. That would have given you a steady income. With this,” she said when he visited her last week, “whatever it is you do, you can’t even afford a reasonable vodka.” She preferred Chopin, but only because it was the most expensive choice in Budapest stores. Attila rarely drank vodka, and when he did, he couldn’t tell the difference between Chopin and any other brand. But his mother knew. As she seemed to know that the only white wine worth drinking was Olaszrizling and the only men worth knowing were former Party members who had acquired some wealth after the wall came down. At eighty-four, she was still on the lookout for new boyfriends for herself and new ambitions for her son.
“What are we going to do today?” Anna asked as she threw herself into the back of his Škoda. “Not the zoo!” she announced. Only eleven and already past the zoo stage, Attila thought. Another year and she would not want to get into a car with dog hair on the dog-slashed plastic seat. Gustav had stripped the back seat of its fuzzy cover and scratched the plastic into unforgiving strips in a vain effort to soften it.
“We could go swimming,” Sofi ventured to loud derision from her sister.
Attila drove up Castle Hill to Mátyás Square, parked his Škoda in the Hilton parking lot, and suggested they race down to the Chain Bridge, a plan that had no attractive features other than that they had never done it before, so Anna couldn’t say it was boring. It had the singular advantage of being close to where he wanted to look for Adam Biro, the man, Helena said, who sold the painting to the Vaszarys. About halfway down from the recently cleaned and buffed Fisherman’s Bastion there was a park with swings, a slide, and, most important, a couple of round trampolines he thought Anna would find tempting. She was good on them. She could do backflips and aerials, and she had recently asserted that she had never been beaten in a bum war.
Biro’s address, according to the internet, was 5 Fő Street, a new apartment building with a large courtyard. The architect had made an effort to fit it to the area by adding a couple of disappointing winged stone lions at the entrance and a set of marble steps that led to a heavy wooden door. Attila had left the girls at the playground (Anna was focused on the trampolines, and Sofi didn’t care where she was, so long as there were other kids to play with and a slide) and pressed the buzzer for Adam Biro’s apartment.
He spoke into the intercom that he was with the police department and had a couple of questions he wanted to ask Biro. “Semmi komoly,” nothing serious, he claimed. What with inexplicable arrests in the area since the pocket dictator moved his office here, plus parking indictments and bribe collections, most citizens were entitled to feel suspicious when a police officer rang their bell.
The man who buzzed him in was bald, about eighty, wearing fuzzy slippers and a cardigan over checkered pyjama pants. Attila flashed his long-expired police ID and explained that he had a few questions about Mr. Biro’s friend, Iván Vaszary.
Biro insisted that he knew no one by the name of Vaszary, but he was interested enough in the subject that he came out onto the landing to discuss what kind of painting he was supposed to have sold to the unknown Vaszary and why someone would have named him as the man who would have such a painting to sell.
“Who did you say this Vaszary is?”
Attila hadn’t said. “He owns an expensive painting by a woman named Gentileschi that was, I am told, sold to him by you.”
Biro shook his head.
“Could be a year ago. Perhaps you have forgotten?”
Biro shook his head again. “It’s not the sort of thing I would forget,” he said, though Attila assumed at eighty there would be quite a lot of forgotten bits lurking about in a man’s brain. “How expensive is it?” Biro asked.
Attila shrugged. “I have no idea, but it’s expensive enough they want the police involved.” He let that float in the air without an explanation, which was fine, since Biro got the message. To underline the impression, Attila squared his shoulders and affected a menacing look.
Biro shrank back into his doorway. “I know nothing,” he said defensively. Though maybe he was just disappointed to be deprived of further interesting conversation. Perhaps he would have been happy to engage in conversation with anyone at all. Maybe no one had talked with him for some years.
Attila said he would be back and returned to the playground. Anna was already waiting for him at the railing, her feet planted, her arms stretched out, practising push-ups. When he was close enough to see her face, he was surprised by how much she now resembled her mother. “Hol a fenébe voltál?” she demanded in a tone that was unmistakably her mother’s.
“Popped in to see someone,” Attila said. “I was gone for only a few minutes.”
“Mom runs up and down Gellért Hill in only fifteen minutes,” she said. “Flat.”
“Good for her,” Attila said. “Where is Sofi?”
“Sofi?” Anna asked, looking around casually. “No idea.”
He felt that moment of absolute heart thumping, head-buzzing, dry-mouth panic he hadn’t felt since four-year-old Anna jumped into the Dohány Street traffic chasing a strange cat. He ran over to the slide. Three small girls starting down the blue plastic tube, a boy emerging from below, a woman holding a toddler stomping about in a sandbox. “I am looking for my daughter,” Attila stammered. “She was here about ten minutes ago. . . .”
“Twenty,” Anna said. “But who is counting.” She had materialized at Attila’s elbow.
“She is wearing a pink shirt and a skirt. . . .”Attila tried to regain control of his breathing.
“Gree
n.” Anna said.
“A blue parka . . .”
“That one,” Anna pointed at a kid’s blue parka on a bench.
The woman, her eyes darting from Attila to Anna and back, seemed unsurprisingly confused.
Attila ran to the bench and grabbled the parka. He climbed to the top of the slide, his huge feet slipping on the kid-sized steps, peered down the chute, and, finding nothing — the little girls were again waiting their turn — he straightened and looked around the playground, shouting “Sofi!” again. It was then that he noticed Anna laughing, her shoulders jiggling with the effort to keep it in. No, she would not be laughing like this if . . . And Sofi emerged from behind the trunk of a chestnut tree.
“It wasn’t my idea, Apu,” she said when Attila landed on his ass near the slide. “It wasn’t.”
Attila picked her up and hugged her, his back to Anna. He didn’t want to let her see the tears in his eyes. “Ice cream at the Ruszwurm,” he managed to say, as he grabbed Anna’s hand (no protests this time) and, carrying Sofi in the crook of his other arm, began the long ascent to the top of Castle Hill.
* * *
Helena had watched the slow procession of Attila and his girls but didn’t want to intercept them. She had agreed to meet him later and interrupting him while he was practising his paternal duties would be not only unwelcome but awkward. She adjusted her wide sunglasses, pulled her black hoodie over her hair, and took the winding path down to Fő Street.
Adam Biro didn’t respond to her persistent buzzing.
She waited under the winged lion, made a reasonable display of texting on her burner phone (it was not connected to the internet), rummaged absent-mindedly in her large bag, and waited until a chatting couple opened the door to let themselves and Helena into the courtyard — a big, paved open space with a few small trees in containers, some boxes of flowers, and a view all the way up to the top floor of the building, with doors opening onto the terraced walkway on each level. While talking and gesticulating excitedly in French, she indicated to the couple with an upraised palm that she was too engaged to find her own key. She continued the pantomime until the couple stepped into the elevator.
She took the steps up to the third floor and rang Adam Biro’s bell.
Again, no response.
She waited a few minutes, rang the bell again, and kept ringing it another couple of minutes for emphasis. When that didn’t elicit a response, she slipped the knife out of her sleeve and out of its sheath, inserted its point into the lock, and opened the door. She was delighted that it took less than a minute. The last time she had jimmied a lock, she had been worried that she had lost her touch. It had taken too long and left nasty marks on the paintwork. She had been trying to see a painting offered for sale online that had been purloined from a private collection. Fortunately, Toronto’s finest had set out to find a couple of young men and ignored the well-dressed woman sipping her juice on a porch. When asked whether she had seen anyone suspicious-looking in the neighbourhood, she was able to tell them that it had been a quiet evening. Rosedale liked quiet evenings.
No one would suspect that she had recovered a stolen Matisse from the lovely Georgian house with its porticoed veranda and crystal chandeliers — no one except the man who had paid the thief and the man for whom she had recovered a special gift.
The hallway was narrow and dark. She stood for a moment, allowing her eyes to adjust to the general gloom of the apartment. She walked slowly into the living room, dank, airless, curtains drawn, tall windows shut. Smell of burnt toast. Bacon. Large pieces of furniture blocking her way, a wide table with something in the middle. She slipped by the chairs and the too-wide sofa, made her way into what had to be a darkened bedroom.
Still no sounds in the apartment. Dogs barking outside but far away. She felt her way along the wall and switched on the light. It was a blue stand-up with an elaborate tasselled lampshade that failed to do justice to the multicoloured woven silk carpet under her feet or to the jumble of drawings crowding the walls. She examined them with her flashlight. There were some precise pen-and-ink nudes, some sombre faces, a few bearded hunched figures, all signed, though she didn’t recognize the names. In the corner, surprisingly, a Matisse; two, maybe three Picassos over the bandy nightstand; a long horizontal etching that could have been a Rembrandt; a Renoir with orange ink shading; a Van Gogh sketch of a windmill, and another of a couple at a table with a bottle between them. What the hell?
The bed was a jumble of sheets and pillows, with discarded pyjamas on the art deco dresser. Flattened woollen slippers. A half-filled long-stemmed crystal glass on an ornate, perhaps Louis XV, marble-topped commode. She used her scarf to pick up the glass. It smelled of cheap, pungent brandy.
The wardrobe was of the same vintage as the commode. Two doors, curved gilt lines running around them, brass-handled drawers. There were several suits inside, dark blue, dark brown, black, and folded shirts and underwear, all white. One small pair of muddy, black lace-up shoes, worn down heels. Several large lace-up brogues; perhaps two men lived here.
A still damp towel in the bathroom. Gold fixtures, marble tub, bidet.
The living room was overfurnished, as if it were used to store pieces from another, much larger home. A bronze sculpture of a Hindu deity with four arms dancing on an old writing desk that was maybe a Napoleon III. Helena hadn’t paid much attention to furniture in her art history classes, but this one did seem to be genuine, even down to the thin line of gold filigree around the edges. The drawer came out reluctantly.
Inside, there were piles of thin paper with long lists of names and dates, an example being “Cardinal Borgia by Velázquez: Prince Rupert II 1788–?, Collection of Liechtenstein 1922–1940, Knoedler Gallery 1940–1957, Colnaghi Gallery 1957–1978, Predelict Gallery 1979–2005 . . .” The next set of sheets set out the history of a harvest scene by Jacob Savery. The first date was 1567. Flicking through, she didn’t see one for a Gentileschi, but she assumed there could easily be one somewhere in the apartment.
Paintings of various sizes hung on the walls. She recognized one of Rippl-Rónai’s brooding Parisian women, a large canvas by Vladimir Makovsky of a group of depressed-looking peasants, and a lonely figure in vibrant colours signed by Sándor Nagy. Helena assumed the other paintings were also by eastern Europeans, until she saw a small Gauguin self-portrait with a Christ figure in the background, then an unmistakable Luca Giordano, and an unsigned Turner watercolour of a town with a river. She paused for a few moments and stared at the Turner: the lines were almost but not quite perfect, yes, it could be a fake. Maybe even one of Simon’s. That would raise questions about some of the others, including the drawings. Simon’s Thai artists could produce seemingly authentic watercolours.
Near the door to the surprisingly modest kitchen were unframed canvases leaning against one another.
It was, she thought, inconceivable that the person who had collected all the art in these two rooms would be so careless as to lean unframed paintings one behind the other, their surfaces touching and maybe damaging the paint. It was, however, conceivable that the person who had collected all this art would have had an Artemisia Gentileschi to sell, that the painting now in the Vaszarys’ new home in Strasbourg would have come from here. Who is Adam Biro, how did he assemble his art, and, if he could afford all this, why would he share his apartment with another man?
She photographed the two rooms with special attention to art she recognized, then, as quietly as she had entered, she left the apartment, waited a few moments outside the door, then took the stairs down to the courtyard. She found a sunny spot across from the entrance, with a good view of the glass-enclosed elevator, and opened her copy of The Odyssey.
Who, her father had said, would suspect someone of a crime when they were reading classical literature?
She waited about half an hour and saw no one press the number three button in the elevator. The sun had
dropped behind the building, creating a late afternoon shadow in the courtyard, when a youngish man in cargo pants, black lace-up boots, and an unzipped dark grey hoodie came in, hurried to the stairs, and took them, two at a time, to the third floor. He must have gone to Biro’s apartment because he didn’t emerge on either side of the elevator shaft. She was thinking about how long she should give him to settle in, pour himself a large drink, and not notice that anyone had been inside, when she heard running footsteps and the now hooded figure appeared in the courtyard again. He looked left, then right, reached for the main door, wrenched it open, and turned down Fő Street toward the Chain Bridge.
She had seen only a part of his face as he scanned the courtyard, but Helena had an art expert’s memory for face shapes and eyes. She had no doubt that she had seen this face before, the thin lips in an almost straight line, small narrow eyes: in Strasbourg, on a bridge over the river, and later in the cathedral.
She had been close to the baby oak tree across from the main entrance, her book held high, her own hood over her head, but she thought he had seen her. She had been sitting next to his victim in the tour boat. She had followed him. He had looked right at her in the cathedral before he ran out, leaving his coat and the crossbow. He would recognize her.
She was out the door a minute after it banged shut, but he was already near the bottom of the street. Black Converse shoes running fast. He zigzagged to avoid some pedestrians, leapt into the road, jumped out of the way of a car, got back on the sidewalk, and went straight downhill, the white rims of his shoes flashing as he rounded the corner, left. Helena was also running fast now, her legs pumping to keep up, leaping sideways to avoid people, then back, as he had done, taking long deep breaths, elbows in, hands curled. She was about forty feet behind him when he skirted the roundabout and started along the sidewalk across the Chain Bridge as Helena bounded out of the way of a bike, then a group of tourists on upright scooters. “Scheisse!” one of them shouted as she careened into Helena, arms flailing, feet slipping backwards as she tried to regain her balance. Helena stopped the scooter with her shoulder, grabbed the woman by the waist, and hoisted her back on the two-wheeler, avoiding another collision just as the tour leader called her group to a halt.
