The Appraisal

by Anna Porter

  There was another photo of Géza in civvies with Gertrude wearing a wide-skirted floral dress cinched in by a wide belt, puffy white sleeves, knee-socks, ballet slippers, and a ribbon in her pleated hair. She had an oval face with finely drawn eyebrows and a pert little mouth. She looked shy or frightened.

  The recording of a conversation between Gertrude Lakatos and Géza Márton was made in January 1956. He was suggesting a trip to Trieste; she didn’t want to go and doubted they could get a permit, even if they were on a honeymoon.

  Attila’s cell phone had buzzed as soon as he arrived at the Archive. It buzzed again now, and he turned it off. He was tired of Tóth.

  The report on Géza stated he was in the Killian Army Barracks in Budapest when the revolution began in 1956. There was no mention of his whereabouts when the army joined the rebels, but his father was arrested in 1957 for activities promoting civil disobedience and for taking part in the attack on the Communist Party’s headquarters in Budapest. The photographs taken at the scene were horrific, especially the one of a group of seven young men with their hands up in surrender and a second one, taken a moment later, of their bodies falling, riddled with bullets. One of them was already on the ground, lying face up, soaked in blood, eyes still open.

  There were no photographs of either Géza or Károly Márton at the scene, although there were a lot of pictures of others, including a woman helping to string someone from a lamppost and people in white coats, carrying stretchers, running toward Köztársaság Square. There were several more bodies lying under the trees at the edge of the square. Attila had seen most of these photographs before.

  Géza Márton had crossed the border into Austria in late December 1956.

  Károly Márton was tried and condemned to death in March 1957. His sentence was commuted to life in 1959. He served only two more years in jail. In September 1961, he was allowed to return to his home but not to his job. He ended up working on a pig farm near Debrecen. His wife joined him. There was no further mention of their listening to Radio Free Europe or Voice of America.

  The only report filed on the Mártons’ activities at the farm was written in pencil. It stated that Márton Sr. was a good worker and Mrs. Márton helped in the kitchen. The person who supplied the report, identified only by the number 507, said he or she had attempted to involve them in discussions of the Soviet army unit in the Debrecen barracks and of local youths taking part in the ’56 “Counterrevolution,” the official word for the Revolution.

  The Mártons had made no comment on either topic.

  The most interesting part of the file for Attila was the notes showing that surveillance of Géza Márton continued after he settled in Canada. They detailed his rejection of the State Police’s request that he report on his fellow refugees. There was a handwritten notation on the margin of the request for continued surveillance stating that this man is an enemy of the state. A woman, identified as M379, had told Géza Márton that things could go very badly for his father if he continued to refuse. There were a lot of recorded conversations with M379. She made sure he knew of his father’s incarceration at Recsk, one of the nastiest forced-labour camps for convicts.

  Géza was kept under close observation for a year to determine whether he was sending anti-government letters home. He wasn’t.

  There was a note about his investment in 300 acres of land north of Toronto in 1965, more notes about his land development scheme for housing in a place called Vaughan, and, later, his building two shopping malls, a two-level underground parking garage, four old-age homes, and an extension of Toronto’s York University. In all this time, he showed a complete lack of interest in joining the post-’56 community, or taking part in events at the Hungarian House in Toronto. Twice a year he sent packages of food and clothing to his parents and sister. The packages were opened and nothing but food and clothing was ever found in them. In the late 1970s, he started sending money transfers.

  He married a Croatian girl named Klara in a civil ceremony in Vaughan in 1968. There was a photograph of the two of them, both looking thin and gawky, she in a long dress with a somewhat ravaged fox stole, he in a sagging suit with a white flower pinned to his top right pocket. In 1975, he joined the boards of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Bank of Nova Scotia.

  Géza visited Budapest in 1977. He claimed that he was interested in building a hotel on the Pest side of the Danube. He took his mother and sister to dine at the Alabárdos. He put flowers on his father’s grave in Kerepesi Cemetery.

  The last entry was from 1987, when Géza was celebrated by both the Toronto Chamber of Commerce and the Vaughan Chamber of Commerce. The brochure advertising the event claimed that he had received an honorary doctorate from York University and that his two children — a boy and a girl — were both York graduates.

  Attila turned on his cell phone but ignored its persistent buzzing.

  The assistant had been standing quietly by the window, watching Attila but not interrupting while he read through the file. He’d pretended not to notice until he had finished. Then he said, “We are also searching for other men from number 442 Gulag. Vorkuta. Mining.”

  She returned with a slim white file and waited while he opened it.

  “Not much here,” she said. “The location and the camp was emptied by 1951. Is there anyone in particular?”

  “I want to know who was in Vorkuta with Márton.”

  In the file, he found a note from the Ministry of Internal Affairs declaring that the contents had been removed or destroyed before the material was handed over to the Archives.

  “Please,” Attila asked, “could you bring me the file on János Krestin.”

  When she hesitated, he added that he thought Mrs. Lévay would have no objections. Attila wondered whether the assistant knew that he and Magda Lévay had been lovers — for a night only, but still. This time she was gone for about half an hour, returning empty-handed but with a new attitude. She was defiantly self-important, her head held high, although her arms were still crossed over her breasts.

  “We have no file on Dr. Krestin,” she said.

  Attila wondered when Krestin had acquired his degree and whether universities now ran courses in bribery and corruption. If so, Krestin would certainly have earned his doctorate. For the assistant’s benefit, he nodded and smiled, hoping she would report that he had known all along and was just testing the system.

  “Any chance you could find the file on Gertrude Lakatos? Or the Lakatos family? They were from Slovakia,” Attila asked.

  This time the assistant didn’t feel she needed to check with anyone. “There is no such file, Dr. Fehér,” she said.

  “But you didn’t look,” Attila said.

  “I don’t have to. There was a request for that file earlier today and we didn’t have it then, so we do not have it now.”

  “Who requested it?”

  “Sorry, we can’t divulge that information,” she said, not sounding particularly sorry.

  ***

  Back outside, in the courtyard, Attila finally checked his phone. There were ten increasingly furious messages from Tóth, the last one, barely coherent, about a dead body at the Gellért.

  “What the fuck?” was Tóth’s opening line when Attila called.

  Attila said nothing.

  “A man was found in a chair near the elevator, and he has been sitting there for at least two hours,” Tóth shouted.

  “Dead,” Attila added.

  “Why the fuck do you think I called you? If he was resting after a long night —”

  “How?

  “Knife in the neck.”

  “Professional job?”

  “How the fuck would I know that?” Tóth spluttered. “You haven’t seen the son-of-a-whore —”

  “Anyone we know?”

  “Maybe one of your friends. His face was battered a while back, nose broken,
but not today. I don’t know him.”

  “What floor?

  “The third. Where that fucking woman’s room was. The one you haven’t been able to keep track of. Right?”

  “Any ID on him?”

  “None. A hundred euros. Two hundred forints and change. Car keys.”

  “You found the car?”

  “Son-of-a-whore parked right in front of the Gellért. They had the car towed.”

  “I guess he didn’t expect to stay long,” Attila said. “Registration?”

  “Car was stolen last night. The owners were having dinner in that fancy place near Hösök Square. Guy reported the car missing at ten forty-five last night.”

  “The Gündel?”

  “Yes. Never been there. Can’t afford it on my salary,” Tóth said.

  What about the bit you take on the side? Attila thought. “They have parking attendants,” he said. “Why didn’t he use them?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” Tóth yelled.

  “The coroner has the body?”

  “He is here.”

  “Anything unusual about it?”

  “He’s had some teeth replaced with gold,” Tóth said. “Does that tell you anything?”

  “Russian,” Attila suggested. “Or Albanian? Maybe Ukrainian?”

  “Not Ukrainian,” Tóth said.

  “Oh?”

  “Get your ass over here.”

  “There is always a chance he is Bulgarian. Or a Turk.” Attila hung up before Tóth became seriously unhinged.

  He called the Gellért’s front desk and was informed that Ms. Marsh had checked out.

  He sat in his car for a while, thinking about the strands tying these people together and Helena Marsh’s interest in Old Master painters.

  He googled her name and got several hits from sites in the USA and UK but nothing from Hungary. She was born in Vienna, went to university in Montreal, studied art history. She later trained in art restoration at Montreal’s Musée des Beaux Arts and at Christie’s in London. She had been awarded research grants by the Social Science Research Council of Canada and the Ministry of Culture, Monuments, and Fine Arts Office of Venice. She had worked as a restorer at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice, and there were colour photos of a few paintings her team had restored, both before and after, including several of the Giotto frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, some of the frescoes in the Church of San Salvador, a niche in the twelfth-century church I Gesuiti, and one of Titian’s Gonzaga portraits. She had curated a 1998 Titian retrospective at the Alte Pinakothek in Vienna. Her biography also listed twenty articles she had written about various artists, including Titian, Raphael, and Giorgione. She had worked for the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, had been consulted on the identification of paintings taken by Goering for his personal collection, and had spent 1994 at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, authenticating its collections of Titian and Raphael. She had been a speaker at several conferences on the restitution of Holocaust-era artworks. She had been called as a witness in the case of Laurent v. the New Gallery in Vienna for the recovery of two paintings by Egon Schiele.

  Kis was right. The woman was well-known in the business. She had a ton of credentials. What Attila couldn’t figure was why a bunch of Ukrainians would be so eager to have her leave the country that they were happy to pay Tóth the kind of bribe the Hungarian police demanded for such services.

  CHAPTER 9

  Helena checked in to the Tulip Hotel as Marianne Lewis at 2 p.m. She left her Marianne Lewis passport with the manager, telling her she was going shopping for those “wonderful Hungarian sausages and zsemle” they sold at the Great Market Hall. She didn’t go there, but bought a canary-yellow dress at Pixie on Váci Street, the dress shop recommended by the manager. When she reclaimed the passport, she asked for a wake-up call at 4 p.m., explaining that she needed to sleep off the long flight from New York via Munich. To make sure the manager would remember her, Helena pulled the yellow dress out of its package and held it in front of herself. “My first Hungarian purchase,” she said in her best imitation of a New York accent.

  The manager remarked that Marianne (“If I may call you that? Americans all use first names only, don’t they?”) showed no signs of fatigue. The manager, an overly made-up woman with hennaed hair, said that she too was exhausted and needed a long rest. She hoped to have a long-overdue holiday in Chicago, where her brother was in the building trade. She seemed disappointed that Marianne didn’t know him.

  In her room, Helena took off the Marianne Lewis wig, changed into her black outfit, and put on the makeup but not the blond wig she’d worn earlier. By now, staff at the Gellért would have found the dead man, and whoever had hired him would know more about her than was good for her health. If the police were looking for her, they would be watching for a blonde. The sooner she could get her hands on the painting and take it out of the country, the better.

  She slipped out of the hotel while the manager was chatting with another guest and headed for the Kis gallery a short distance away. She stopped for a quick espresso at the Anna Café and watched the street for a couple of minutes in case that policeman came by to ask Kis about her. It was only a few steps from the Anna to Kis’s. She pressed the bell, was buzzed in, and entered to the pleasant accompaniment of a tinkly bell.

  “You have an appointment?” asked the small man sitting behind the large mahogany desk. At least that was what Marianne thought he had said. She spoke only a few words of Hungarian, so she was just guessing.

  “I have an appointment,” she said in English, “with Mr. Kis.”

  “Mr. Kis,” said the little man in reasonable English, “is tied up at the moment, but perhaps I could make you an appointment for another time. May I ask what this is concerning?”

  “Tell him it’s Ms. Marsh.”

  When the man hesitated, she sat on the edge of his desk, picked up his white phone, and offered it to him. “Now.”

  He seemed more surprised than offended. He backed up as far as his chair allowed and glared at her, but then he took the phone and rang upstairs.

  “You may wait here,” he said, indicating a round-backed armchair. Instead of sitting down, she wandered about the gallery, glancing at the paintings without really looking at them. They were not worth a second look.

  Kis came in, his hand outstretched, blue jacket buttoned, glasses perched over his teased hair, cravat and smile in place. He stopped a few steps into the room. “What . . . ?”

  Helena said she didn’t have much time, so they could dispense with the niceties. “The merchandise is acceptable,” she told him.

  “You . . . ?” Kis said, his hand had dropped to his side and the smile had turned into something much less friendly but still uncertain. “And you are?”

  “Marsh. Helena Marsh.”

  “You look different today.” He was looking at her closely. “Your hair . . .”

  “I had it cut, Mr. Kis. And I don’t have time to chat with you now. We need to make the exchange. The funds have been transferred to me. All we need to do now is for you to hand over the item and I will release the money.”

  “I am not sure that can be done in a day,” he said, looking at her even more closely. “There are some formalities.”

  “Exactly as we agreed,” she said. “No formalities. I will take the item and transfer it as and when I determine. Not your problem.”

  “I don’t think you understand,” Kis was regaining his composure. “There are complications.”

  “Not my concern,” she said flatly.

  “I disagree. It is your concern. Or your client’s concern, assuming that you are authorized to make the purchase.” Kis pursed his lips.

  Helena told him to phone Géza Márton in Toronto. Kis waved his assistant out of the gallery.

  It was about midnight in Toronto, but Kis called anyway
. People buying Titians were not fussy about time. He described the new Helena — none too flatteringly — and told Márton he didn’t trust her with the merchandise. He listened for a few moments then hung up.

  “Don’t you want to see it at least?” he asked.

  “I have seen it,” she said.

  “Dr. Krestin has made arrangements. We could go to the house tonight, if you like.”

  “I just told you, I have seen it,” she said. “I will take delivery at 2 p.m. tomorrow in front of the Café Ruszwurm up in the old town. Take it out of the frame and wrap it in oilcloth. I will have a van.”

  “That is not possible,” he said. “A painting like that cannot be taken out of its frame. It could be damaged. No one who understands paintings of such value would even suggest —”

  “It is not the original frame,” she said. “It’s a good imitation, but it’s not the real thing.”

  “I am not responsible for the frame,” he said. “But no serious collector would want the canvas removed.” He sighed in obvious frustration. “It is simply impossible.”

  She stepped closer to him. “And why would that be?”

  “There are, as I said before, complications.” He was gazing at the door down to the street.

  She was now so close to Kis, she could smell his acrid red-wine breath. He must have enjoyed a fine lunch today. He backed up, but she again stepped into his personal space. “As a rule,” she said, “I do not believe in complications.”

  “There is another party interested in the painting,” he said at last.

  “Mr. Kis, in the world we inhabit, our word is our bond.”

  “I don’t think you understand,” he suggested. “Another bidder . . .”

  Vladimir. She knew this territory well.