The Appraisal

by Anna Porter

  Although traffic congestion had made driving in the city almost impossible, he was at the entrance to Váci Street in less than fifteen minutes. He parked illegally in front of the old Vigadó Palace, where his grandmother, when she was a debutante, used to dance through the autumn nights. The petty nobility would come up to Budapest for “the season,” expecting their daughters to be hooked up before Christmas. Very civilized before the First War, if you were in the right economic class or had inherited a reasonable title. Attila was glad his great grandpa just had an added surname, a Hungarian form of the German “von,” otherwise his grandfather would have ended up in some godforsaken dump of a village for enemies of the state during the Rakosi years, and his father may never have been conceived.

  Attila’s father died in 1970 when Attila was only ten, but he still remembered the rough skin on his hands, his swollen fingers, the bristly hair on his chin when he kissed Attila goodnight.

  ***

  The private offices of Dr. Ferenc Kis were on the second floor of a building with street-level windows that displayed the bucolic art of the late nineteenth century — hay wagons, sturdy white horses, overdressed wranglers, the usual kitsch tourists loved. Attila didn’t bother with the doorbell. He held the door for a man who was carrying parcels and struggling with his keys. Then he slipped in after him.

  The door to Kis’s office faced the courtyard. He had fancied it up with mosaic glass and fake white pillars on either side of the wide wooden door. Attila opened it with just a push of his elbow and walked up the short flight of stairs into a room reserved for clients who had time to read American magazines while waiting. Attila didn’t. He marched into the inner office, where Kis and his stick-thin secretary were enjoying a mid-afternoon coffee.

  Attila announced his name. “I called in advance,” he told Kis, nodding at the formally dressed woman daintily holding her coffee cup in the air. “I am following up on your meeting with the American agent yesterday.”

  “American agent?” Kis seemed genuinely surprised. “Whose agent? You don’t mean like CIA, or whatever?”

  Attila tried to look very serious.

  “Who said she is an American agent? She is not even American,” Kis protested. “And what do you mean ‘following up’?”

  Kis was shorter than he had seemed at the Gerbeaud, but he compensated for his lack of height by styling his hair in a high wave. It didn’t work. He had rimless glasses over a tight mouth and a narrow forehead that struggled to be seen under the big hair. He wore a blue-striped shirt with a matching blue-and-white square peeking out of the breast pocket of his navy blazer. Did ordinary mortals still wear this sort of garb?

  “We have had prior dealings with her, and we are keen to avoid the problems she brought with her the last time,” Attila said. It was not a good lie, but he hoped it would do the job. People nowadays seemed more concerned about being seen with American agents than Russian FSB guys, although the latter were scarier. This government was paranoid about Americans. Russians, not so much.

  “What kind of problems?” Kis asked, his left eyebrow lifting ever so slightly in a futile effort to indicate he was not seriously interested.

  “The kind you would want to avoid is my guess,” Attila said. “Involving a bit of violence with guns and an unexplained death. Lots of mess for the police.”

  Kis leaned back in his chair and regarded Attila with curiosity. “I don’t think so.”

  “Which part?”

  Kis shrugged. “I have a good relationship with the police. As you know.”

  Attila nodded. “But not with the Ukrainians.”

  He sat down in one of the gilt-armed chairs across from Kis. Its silk-embroidered seat groaned. Clearly, it was a chair made for a much smaller man.

  “The who?”

  “Ukrainians,” Attila repeated, still nodding.

  “I don’t know any Ukrainians.”

  “So you say.”

  They sat for a while, letting the information simmer between them, then Kis said, “And I am not interested in dealing with them.”

  “They may not care what interests you,” Attila said, making it up as he went. “They believe they have a prior claim on the property you’re peddling.”

  Kis dabbed his face with the back of his hand, then took a cigarette from a silver case. The secretary lit it with her own silver lighter. How quaint, Attila thought, how old black-and-white Hollywood, how pre-war.

  “That’s impossible,” Kis said. “The Canadian couple registered with me thirty years ago . . .”

  Now we are getting somewhere, Attila thought. “Ms. Marsh’s clients,” he said, nodding, as if he had known all along.

  “Márton. He called as soon as one could do that sort of thing. He sent photographs. Okay, so they are black and white, but you don’t have to be much of an expert to recognize this painting. He paid the retainer and renewed every year, so I could keep an eye out. The painting means a lot to this guy. He doesn’t even care if he has to pay a bit more than the market price.”

  “And you found it for him,” Attila prompted.

  “It’s what I do,” Kis said. “This man up in Buda asked me to look at a Renoir he wanted to sell. Nothing special, just a small unfinished thing in a big frame, but I got him top price, and he didn’t even have to bother with the usual papers. The buyer lives right here in the city. He owns a bunch of companies. Some buildings, a shopping mall, a TV station, couple of radio licences. Well connected,” he jerked his head in the direction of the parliament buildings.

  “And he wanted to sell the other painting, as well?”

  “No. I asked him when I saw it. I told him it could fetch at least forty million, and that got him interested.”

  “Forints?”

  “Dollars.”

  Attila whistled.

  “No one I know deals in forints,” Kis said. “They are weak and stupid and keep going down.”

  “So you called these Canadians?”

  Kis looked uncomfortable.

  “After making sure of the market?” Attila prompted.

  “I had to make sure it was what it seemed to be.” Kis was not admitting anything.

  “And?”

  “My original judgement was correct,” Kis said. “It usually is,” he added with a supercilious smile.

  “Then this woman arrived.” Attila was beginning to piece it together. Tóth could have saved him a lot of time had he filled in the blanks earlier.

  “She represents Géza Márton.”

  “And anyone else?”

  Kis seemed aghast. “That’s not done in this business.”

  Attila shrugged. “No. More like the CIA.”

  “The CIA? Are you kidding?” Kis said, but he seemed hesitant. “Why? She is an art expert. She is known in the business.”

  “Your phones are bugged,” Attila said, although he had no more reason to assume they were than to suggest that Helena Marsh had a connection with the CIA. Sometimes it was useful to be inventive.

  Kis said he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to bug his phones, but he seemed concerned.

  “With a guy like you, it’s normal,” Attila said. Hell, if the Americans could bug the Israelis, who have exemplary security of their own, why not record the arcane deal-making that went on in this office?

  Kis kept his mouth shut.

  At least he had succeeded in making him uncomfortable, Attila thought. He wanted to know more, but he’d leave it for the next time. It would be unwise to let on that he knew less than Kis.

  “So,” Attila said, “you expect her to leave soon as she has the painting she came for. Right?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Kis said. “There is a ton of paperwork. You can’t just buy a painting like that in Hungary and expect to wrap it up and leave with it just like that.”

  “How l
ong will it take?”

  “It depends,” Kis said meaningfully, implying that there were more middlemen and bureaucrats to pay off. Attila knew that, for a painting worth forty million dollars, the line of outstretched hands could reach from here to Vienna.

  “I will be meeting with her handlers,” Attila said, as ominously as he could manage, when he opened the door. Let Kis ponder what he meant by that. He, himself, had no idea what he meant, but “handlers” was a word the local press used when they talked about spies reporting to the U.S. Embassy.

  Attila stood outside the building for a minute. It was Wednesday. A warm, sunny day, fluffy clouds in a clear sky, the Danube rippling along its banks, a few old men fishing. It would have been pleasant to sit on the embankment for a while and enjoy the day. But it was Wednesday, and on Wednesdays he had to visit his mother on Naphegy.

  CHAPTER 6

  Her room looked undisturbed.

  Helena closed the curtains, undressed, pulled on her bathing suit, and slipped her arms into the large hotel terry bathrobe (obviously made for a much bigger person). She slid her thin-bladed knife into one pocket, rearranged the wig, the pillows, the shoes, and took the cage elevator down to the baths. The bathrobe and slippers identified her as a guest to the old woman who operated the elevator as part of the hotel’s effort to seem friendly to guests. She walked under the baths’ mosaic-inlaid arches, past the massage areas, to the “champagne” swimming pool in the atrium. The room was luminous in the late afternoon gloom, with flickering sconce lights mirrored and fracturing on the green tile walls and light from the art nouveau glass roof dancing on the pale green water, the bubbles barely reaching the surface before they popped.

  There were two children at the shallow end, their mother sitting on the steps, supervising their splashing. A man wearing a Gellért Baths’ plastic bathing cap was swimming a vigorous crawl along the side near the showers. Two men in similar caps sat on the edge on the same side, dangling their feet in the pool. One of them was drinking from a cardboard cup, the other was smoking something, cupping his hand to hide the cigarette. They both glanced up as she entered but didn’t interrupt their conversation.

  There was no attendant.

  She lowered herself slowly into the pool, shuddering when the cool water reached her hips. She swam with measured breast strokes, keeping her head well out of the water and staying close to the side farthest from the men. She didn’t slow when she reached the shallow end where the kids were playing, just turned and swam back the way she had come, her leg muscles stretching with each kick. It felt good. The long flight, the drive, the jog up the Buda hill, her anxiety about the painting, and the lack of adequate time to study it had taken their toll. She was out of practice, and maybe out of patience, with this sort of venture. She wasn’t going to be able to take the painting out of the country legally, even if she paid its worth and even if she was re-patriating it to its original owner. There were too many laws around taking art out of the country. So she was forced once again to utilize her father’s noxious legacy.

  The big clockface showed 5 p.m. when the man she had been expecting came to the side of the pool, executed a perfect shallow dive (despite the “No Diving” sign), and began to swim to the far end, now abandoned by the children, whom she’d overheard agitating to go to the outdoor wave pool.

  Miroslav stopped in the middle, trod water, and smiled at her. He was about her height, narrow-shouldered, and the sinews on his neck stood out, as did his Adam’s apple. He had a wide forehead, sparse hair under the transparent shower cap, and long earlobes. The hotel’s compulsory shower caps flattered no one but were particularly unkind for men with prominent ears.

  “How are you enjoying Budapest?” he asked, his voice cracking and his Slavic accent a bit less obvious than the last time she had met him.

  “Pleasant enough,” she said. “You?”

  “I prefer warmer weather,” he said.

  She swam closer and waited, also treading water.

  “We could go to the café?” he said. “They make good espresso here. Just as you like it.”

  “Here is fine.”

  “You know you can’t leave with it, don’t you?” he said. He had very bad breath. “This is not Bratislava.”

  “Obviously.”

  She had first met him in Bratislava. She had been trying to recover a prized Raphael taken by a city official as payment for allowing a family to depart for France in the 1960s. In 1993, the family wanted the painting back. The former official had become a senior functionary in Robert Fico’s quasi-democratic government and showed great reluctance to hand it over.

  “And there is no reason we should both chase the same prize again, now, is there?” he added. He had been trying to buy the Raphael from the functionary at about the same time Helena was hoping to retrieve it for the family. They were both agents for others, but she had felt righteous about her cause. A dangerous sentiment when you need a clear head.

  She had lost. The family had to pay a ransom for the painting, and Helena had cancelled her own fee.

  “You were satisfied with our deal the last time. Fair. Fast. Safe. Why change horses now?”

  “Not entirely,” she said.

  “Vladimir sends his regards.”

  Vladimir Azarov was one of the less violent Ukrainian oligarchs. Sensibly, he had shown little interest in politics until the demonstrations started in 2013, and then he took no sides except to suggest to the new president and to the press that violence was not a solution to the country’s east–west divide. During the Yanukovych years, he had kept his nose clean and the price of gas constant, and he had not tried to liberate anyone from jail.

  “Fifty thousand dollars to walk away and no questions asked,” he said. “We don’t know what your take-home is on this deal, but I assume your clients are one-timers, not like us. Fifty thousand is good money.”

  “Or vice versa?”

  He chuckled. “Vladimir doesn’t need the money. And you can’t hope for a better deal,” he said. “It’s easier to keep old clients happy than to find new ones every time. It’s all about mutual trust. With trust, business is easier, more predictable.”

  Not to mention that it was easier not to go through his middlemen, she thought. The last time she had dealt with Azarov directly, he had commissioned her to buy him a Renoir from a secretive collector in Croatia.

  “Is he still collecting Renoirs?”

  He looked down his flat nose at her and sniffed. “Renoir? Not this time.”

  “A pity,” she said. Then she told him she needed to finish her lengths. “Exercise is good for the mind.”

  “You need to watch your health,” he said. “Things happen.”

  He emerged from the pool near the entrance to the four other pools, wrapped himself in his bathrobe, crossed his arms in front of his belly, and smiled at her.

  She swam back and forth, now stretched out in a full American crawl, barely turning her face for a short breath every third stroke. Her body cut through the water, softly, like a knife. Miroslav waited while she swam her fifty lengths. “Not bad,” he said. “Working out a lot, are you?”

  Then he watched her climb out at the other end of the pool and whistled appreciatively. “Nice ass,” he said. His voice echoed in the shimmering green dome. “Still,” he added, “who knows how long that will last. You need to think about the future, my lady.”

  She wrapped a white towel over her head and waved at him as she left, her Gellért slippers slapping on the mosaic tiles. She considered Miroslav to be one of Vladimir Azarov’s least objectionable men. She had never known him to be overtly violent, at least not with her, although, as with men of his profession, there was always a first time.

  “You still enjoy music?” he asked her retreating back. “Vladimir likes opera.”

  She turned to look at him.

  “Especially
Puccini,” he said.

  ***

  The man standing at her door rattled the change in his pockets, pretending to look for the key, which, of course, he didn’t have. He was playing for time, waiting for her to disappear into one of the other rooms or to pass him. She did neither.

  Obviously, he didn’t know what she looked like, or he had a different mental picture of the woman he saw coming down the corridor, absently rummaging in her pocket.

  He wore an ill-fitting brown suit, a blue-and-white striped shirt, black lace-ups. His hair was cut short, and he looked almost bald. Mid-thirties. About 230 pounds. He was watching her with a lopsided grin that revealed a gold tooth, maybe two gold teeth. He stopped jangling his loose change and faced her, still uncertain but beginning to think about her size, shape, height. Helena could read it in his face. She kept going toward him till she was close enough to reach him with an outstretched arm. Then she stopped, took a deep breath, planted her feet wider, and waited. Perhaps he would turn away. Perhaps . . .

  Still grinning, he reached under his jacket and pulled out a handgun with a silencer. She waited for a moment, in case he wanted to ask her something. He didn’t. The gun was almost at her chest-level. She kicked him in the gut with the side of her right foot, in the back of his knees with her left, then hit his temple with her fist as he fell. He rolled onto his back, an expert roll, showing no reaction to the pain, and raised the gun with both hands. He was not nearly quick enough. She ducked. The bullet whizzed by her neck and lodged in the wall. She hit him hard across the nose with her heel and again in the gut. She spun, kicked the gun out of the way and smacked him in the neck under the chin with her other foot. He grabbed her ankle and twisted, his hands slippery with the blood from his nose. She yanked her leg up and out of his reach, her fingers already closing on the hilt of her knife. She dropped to her knees and slid the point in just under his ear. He stopped thrashing for a second then tried to grab the knife, but his fingers slid off it. He reached to where he must have thought his gun was, but he was wrong. She slid the knife in farther. He lay very still, his breathing shallow. Then he stopped breathing. His tongue lolled out of his mouth, as if he was licking his lips.