Deceptions

by Anna Porter

  “Why?”

  “Well, the car that came that time had government licence plates. We thought he was in some trouble with customs, since he travels so much, and they were taking him in to ask questions. He came back the same day.”

  “Kind of you to worry about him,” Helena said. She thought it was interesting that Zsuzsa had kept an eye on Berkowitz’s movements. Obviously, there was something about him that concerned her.

  “I wasn’t really worried,” Zsuzsa said with a smile. “He doesn’t seem like someone you need to worry about, you know what I mean. Always elegant. Fine suits, good shoes.”

  Helena agreed with her, but she could hardly say so. What little she had seen of Magoci’s killer did not suggest vulnerability. Even when he was running from her, it was more like a challenge than fear.

  “Well, since he is your friend, what does he do for a living?” Zsuzsa asked.

  “He said he worked for the government.”

  “That would explain the car picking him up.”

  They talked a little about the weather, about U.S. politics, about the elderly American ambassador (Zsuzsa thought he may be senile), and, as Zsuzsa ushered her out of the apartment, she mentioned that she had some relatives in New York. Their parents had left before the war. “Lucky for them,” she added. “Maybe you would like to come back to my place for coffee?”

  Perhaps it was because the two apartments were next to each other and because Helena had spent fifteen minutes looking for something — anything — personal in Berkowitz’s apartment that Zsuzsa’s place seemed such a glaring contrast. The walls were painted warm reds and light browns, there were worn Persian carpets covering the parquet floors, hundreds of books on packed shelves and overflowing onto low wooden tables where they shared space with a couple of calico cats that blended in with their surroundings. There were family photographs on a large sea chest in the corner; potted plants that had begun to invade the corners by the windows; and on the walls, two framed pastel Bonnard prints, a couple of Monet reproductions, an unframed print of a Turner seascape, a Hungarian National Gallery poster with Bruegel and a Kunsthistorisches Museum poster with Klimt’s The Kiss for a major exhibition. She had seen that show.

  Near the kitchen, there was a poster of the Titian exhibition she, herself, had curated at the Kunsthistorisches almost ten years ago.

  The smell of browned onions and red wine cooking wafted from the kitchen.

  “Delicious,” Helena said, sniffing the air appreciatively. “What are you making?”

  “Goulash, with a bit of wine. Have you ever had goulash?”

  “If I have, it didn’t smell remotely like this.”

  Zsuzsa laughed. “Come in the kitchen. I’ll make us coffee and maybe let you try a little. It needs to sit for a while before it’s done, but it should still taste okay.”

  The kitchen was warm and bright. A loaf of bread sat on the table with a dish of soft butter next to it. There were four chairs and four table settings with flowered plates, wood-handled cutlery, and tall glasses. Zsuzsa poured water and spooned coffee into a percolator, and pushed one of the plates aside to make room for Helena. “You know, in all that time that Berkowitz has lived next door, he has never even come over for a coffee,” she said. “I invited him for dinner once, but he was, he said, too busy, and I never had a chance to ask him again. He is barely here. You said you met him in the U.S.?”

  “No. I met him in France. I have just come from New York to visit.”

  “You came to visit him?” Zsuzsa said.

  “No,” Helena said. “I came for business and wanted to look him up while I was here.”

  “Where in France did you meet?”

  “Strasbourg.”

  Zsuzsa wrinkled her nose. “Those guys,” she said. She busied herself drying a few dishes in the kitchen and then turned around to face Helena. “Are you sure you know Berkowitz?” she asked.

  “Gyuszi? Of course,” Helena said.

  Zsuzsa kept looking at her.

  “I love your pictures,” Helena said, deflecting Zsuzsa’s scrutiny. “You’ve been to the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna?”

  “Yes. And the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, The National Gallery and the Tate in London, and the one in Warsaw . . . I love the art, but all I can afford are the posters. My grandfather loved art,” she said. “He took my father to galleries when my father was just a little boy. My father took me later to the same places.”

  “Was he a collector?”

  “My father? No. But my grandfather had been. He used to travel a lot, and, my father said, he bought paintings on his travels. Lost them all when the Arrow Cross came. All stolen.”

  “1945?”

  Zsuzsa nodded. “He drowned in the Danube. They were running short of ammunition, tied people up so they couldn’t move and threw them into the river. It was cold. I hope he died quickly.”

  “Did you get some of his art back?”

  “No. My father tried, but there was no record of where they ended up. It was too late, I think, by the time he had grown up enough to look for them. My father was just a boy, but he remembered some of what had been lost. The furniture, he thought, had been used for firewood. Like I said, it was a long cold winter. He could have reclaimed the house, but what was the point? You couldn’t own a house after the Communists ran things.”

  “What was your grandfather’s name?”

  “Alfred Klein. I kept his name after I married. Not many do that in Hungary, but since my grandfather lost everything, I thought I would at least keep his name.”

  “Wasn’t there a restitution law?”

  Zsuzsa shook her head. “My father couldn’t prove anything. There were no photographs of the paintings. There was a box of family photos that had been hidden in the basement, but they were only of people. And most of them had been killed. My father would show me and say their names. I think it was to remind me to remember them after he died.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “He died last year.”

  “Did he know anything about the Arrow Cross men who had taken your grandfather?” Helena asked.

  “Not really. He was only seven or eight at the time. Hiding in that chest with a bunch of old clothes on top of him. My grandfather assumed the chest would be too heavy to move and the Arrow Cross men wouldn’t think it had much value. My father didn’t come out till he heard the front door bang. He was lucky that one of the neighbours took him in and hid him till after it was all over.”

  “Did he take anything?”

  “He took a few things. Why do you ask?”

  Helena had a pat answer ready: “I always wonder what people take with them when they have to escape.”

  Zsuzsa looked at Helena even more closely than before. If she had become suspicious of Helena’s interest in her grandfather’s art, she didn’t say so.

  Helena wrote her local cellphone number on a piece of paper, and Zsuzsa agreed to call her if she heard Berkowitz return to his part of the house.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The silver SUV was waiting for her around the corner, the engine purring, the front window down. Gennady Abramowitz, Grigoriev’s so-called secretary, was seemingly enjoying the sunshine and the scent of roses. Helena slowed to a walk.

  “You will please allow me to drive you to hotel,” Abramowitz suggested in English.

  Helena faced the car. Never turn your back on a man with a gun. Particularly if he bears you a grudge as this man still did for his humiliation of a year ago. Helena had come close to breaking his arm when he tried to push her in the elevator on their way to see Grigoriev.

  “Mr. Grigoriev says he has information for you, and he hopes you have information also for him.” He was hissing his h’s Russian style.

  “I have no information for him,” Helena said in Russian.

  “He is not far from here,�
� Abramowitz said a touch petulantly.

  “How did he know where I was?” Helena asked.

  “That is not the information he wishes to discuss. It is about the man you are . . . how you say . . . seeking.”

  “Tell him I am busy,” Helena said, and she went around the back of the car and took the narrow alleyway between the houses, where the SUV couldn’t follow, came out on Mecset Street, and climbed the steep staircase to an octagonal yellowish building with a grey metal roof. A plaque announced that it was the tomb of Gül Baba, built during Hungary’s Ottoman times. She could see the red-roofed houses of Rózsadomb from the parapet. No sign of the silver SUV. But there was another car at the corner, its driver leaning out the window, peering upward at the Gül Baba monument. She had no trouble recognizing Azarov’s driver, Piotr.

  She ran down Rómer Flóris Street to the Danube and Margit Bridge. She crossed to the Pest side and walked down the rakkpart toward the parliament buildings. She took a taxi from one of the riverside hotels and returned to the Astoria. How did both men know she was in Budapest? She had been careful with her appearance. If the man in front of Nagy’s house had been working for Grigoriev, as she had surmised, he may not connect the woman he had encountered with the real Helena. Or would he?

  It was not so much how both Grigoriev and Azarov had tracked her down, but why they would do so. Azarov had seen the painting, and if he wanted to own an Artemisia Gentileschi, he could wait for her advice. That advice, if her sense of the painting was correct, may even be detrimental to his personal interests. He would be expected to bid exponentially more than now, while the authenticity was still questionable.

  * * *

  Her room had been cleaned, but her clothes had not been disturbed. The safe was locked. Inside, her second burner phone and various pieces of identification were in the same seemingly random positions she had arranged them.

  She called Attila to ask him about Brankovitz.

  “You are still in Budapest,” he said.

  “Till tomorrow,” she told him.

  “Why? You plan to shoot off more testicles?”

  Helena took a deep breath. “I did not intentionally shoot that man,” she said.

  “Maybe not intentionally, but it seems he is still short a testicle after meeting you. For the first time. God forbid he run into you again. Why?”

  “He attacked me,” Helena said. “I had no choice. And, in any event, I did not shoot him. He shot himself.”

  Attila didn’t say anything. Helena had saved his life in Bratislava a year ago. She threw a knife into the man’s leg just as he was about to kill Attila. In hindsight, he recognized that he had been uncharacteristically careless, and that he was lucky Helena had been observing the scene.

  “I was just asking him some questions. He grabbed for his gun, it let off a shot. He should have known better than to grapple for a cocked gun.”

  “The police suspect it was you.”

  “Tóth?”

  “Yes, even Tóth. You have some unique talents.”

  “The guy is going to be all right?”

  “With one ball. He is on his way to Moscow.”

  “Courtesy of Grigoriev?”

  “Yes. Grigoriev. And I know he is more dangerous than the arrow killer, but that is no reason for you to tangle with one of his men in Budapest. As a matter of fact, that’s a good reason for you to avoid all contact.”

  “I didn’t seek him out. I had no idea Grigoriev would have one of his thugs in Budapest watching a house owned by one of your government’s officials. For that matter, I am trying to figure out why someone working for a government official in Hungary would want to kill a lawyer in Strasbourg, and what that has to do with the man who may have sold a painting to the Vaszarys.”

  “Now you have the French police looking for you because you are a material witness to a murder, and the Hungarian police looking for you because you almost killed a Russian visitor who just happens to work for a billionaire with excellent contacts in the Gothic castle.”

  “What have you found out about Biro?” Helena inquired, ignoring Attila’s comment.

  “His father was a young Arrow Cross Nazi during the war. He accumulated a lot of paintings when he was herding Jews out of their homes down to the river to be shot. His companions went for easier or more obvious stuff to steal, jewellery, cash, furs, but Biro the elder had haunted the National Gallery as a student, and he had some idea that art would be valuable again. After the war, he became a young Communist. A lot of the little devils changed sides once the Russians took over, and, as far as I have been able to establish, the new regime was happy with their defection. They were ruthless, enjoyed inflicting pain, and the Commies needed men who did not flinch when it came to a bit of bloodshed in the service of the ‘Cause.’”

  “He built quite a collection,” Helena said. “My colleague at Christie’s says he sold many of them.”

  “Yes, but he had to be careful how and where he sold them because a few of the Jews he had robbed hadn’t died. Some others may have known who the true owners of his collection had been, and someone could have come after him.”

  “And after 1989?”

  “He seems to have prospered after the Soviets’ party was over. He still had friends in high places. His son followed in his footsteps. Became friendly with the new regime. And took over his father’s art collection. This is the Biro we’ve been looking for.”

  “Did you know that Kis sold some of the art for him?”

  “I am told Kis talked a lot about the Biro collection and that some person or persons may have decided to kill Biro. No one was sad to see him vanish, but the government didn’t like the idea of an investigation into how the Biro family had managed the transition from Nazi to Communist to wealthy capitalist and who had provided the protection, so the murder of the son — if it was murder — was hushed up. Biro just disappeared. There was certainly no death notice and no record of his dying. Tibor said he died about six months ago, and Tibor is usually right. He has the best connections of anyone I know in Hungary.”

  “That means that the real Biro junior could have sold the painting to the Vaszarys.”

  “He could have.”

  “And they reinvented him as the old guy you met? Why?”

  “Tibor thinks — and never mention his name to anyone — that the people in high places wanted to continue to sell the paintings. It was good money and virtually untraceable. But why the hell would he sell the Gentileschi to them as a copy if it’s the genuine article?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Helena said, “but I plan to find out. Which takes me back to Gyula Berkowitz. That, in case you are wondering, is the name of the man who killed the lawyer on the boat. He lives here, in Budapest, and he has some sort of job with the government — at least a couple of politicians with offices in the parliament buildings.”

  “How did you . . . ?”

  “I tracked his coat.”

  “His coat?”

  “The one he wore in Strasbourg. Could you feed his name into some system to see if anything comes up? And those politicians I asked you about?”

  “Németh, Magyar, and Nagy?”

  “Yes. I am looking for the connections. Any thoughts on who was the old guy in Biro’s apartment?”

  “Not yet. Helena, I am responsible for your good health while you’re working for Gizella. I brought you into this mess, and I am determined to restore you to Paris in one piece. I don’t know why you won’t leave the detective work to real detectives. Lieutenant Hébert strikes me as a man who is good at his job. And you and I are tracking the same beast. You’re not safe.”

  “I’m probably not safe anywhere till the Gentileschi debate is resolved. I don’t have time to wait until you or the Strasbourg police figure out what’s going on and why.”

  She gave him her current cellphone numb
er and hung up.

  Helena filled out the forms at the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security at 7 Eötvös Street. She claimed to be Marianne Lewis, a historian working at New York State University, researching art lost during 1944–1945, after the Germans changed from Ally to Occupier and including the months that the Soviet Army was collecting booty in exchange for its victorious war against the Nazis. She was not surprised that there was no trace of Adam Biro. Some of the least savoury characters from both the Nazi and the Communist eras had successfully disappeared their own files. Attila had shared this bit of Hungarian history the last time she tried to track a man who had acquired another man’s Titian. If Biro’s father had murdered Zsuzsa’s grandfather and stolen his paintings, he would have known how to cover his tracks. What Helena found surprising was that he had also managed to position himself as an entrepreneur with good contacts after 1989. Yet that was one of the aspects of regime change that had least surprised Attila. Corruption, he had told her, in eastern Europe is not political. It is governed by loyalties. So long as you stay loyal to your leader, you are safe, protected, but god help you if you deviate.

  She did find a file on Alfred Klein and his family. They had been designated suspect individuals because Alfred had been an art collector. There were notes on his son, Sándor, who, when he finished technical school, began to ask questions about Alfred’s art. Sándor did not qualify for a passport and had not been allowed to travel out of the country, even to other Republics of the Soviet Union. He had been denied a request to visit Warsaw. A small notebook contained a handwritten list of a few paintings that Sándor indicated were of interest to him but, since he had become a plumber after his schooling, there was no reason to grant him a visa to see art. According to the agent who had deposited the notebook in the “Alfred Klein” file, this was his list of the art he had planned to see when he travelled.

  He had listed a Verrocchio Virgin with three angels and a child, 1476; Van Gogh, Field with Flowers, 1889; Renoir, Girl with Parasol, 1867; a Rippl-Rónai with no date and something in Hungarian; a Gustav Klimt garden, 1882. The last page was headed by several question marks followed by the name Michele Angelo Merigi de Caravaggio. The same handwriting with small slanted letters and almost no space between them went on in Hungarian for two paragraphs. Was it a list made from memory of other things Sándor’s father had told him? Could he have remembered such detail from when he was a boy of seven or eight? Improbable. Much more likely, the notebook was something of his father’s that Sándor had grabbed when he ran from his family’s apartment after the Arrow Cross raid. Later, he would have become curious. That would explain the desire to visit art galleries. It would also explain taking his own daughter to Vienna and Paris and London after 1989, when they could, finally, travel.