The Appraisal

by Anna Porter

  He had no difficulty finding Gertrude Krestin’s house by the old cemetery.

  She looked as if she had recently suffered a loss. Her eyes were downcast, her hair lank, and her mouth tight, but she had pencilled in her eyebrows. She did not resemble the young woman in the old photographs the police had of her. It wasn’t just that she was older, which she quite obviously was, but there was a sagging sadness about her clothes and her demeanour that seemed habitual.

  “Sorry to bother you so soon after Mr. Krestin’s death,” Attila began softly. “We have only a few questions to ask you.” On the phone, Attila hadn’t mentioned that he was no longer a policeman, and now she hadn’t asked for his identification.

  She ushered him into the living room. It was small and cluttered with worn furniture, including a pink sofa that looked as ancient and saggy as his own. She settled Attila into the sofa, herself into an armchair, and poured tea.

  “You left János Krestin in 1979?” Attila said.

  “In ’81.”

  “But you stayed in touch.”

  “Not especially. He had other . . . interests.”

  “Other women?’

  “Including other women. He married Vera soon after we divorced.”

  “But he sent you money?”

  “From time to time. Not very much. As you see, we live modestly. We can’t afford a better home, and I couldn’t afford a better education for Jenci. That’s the one thing I regret. I couldn’t give Jenci the chance he needs.”

  “Jenci?”

  “My son. He should be home soon.”

  “Does he spend much time with his father?”

  Gertrude looked down at her hands. “He was just a baby when we left,” she said, “but he has had to visit his father from time to time.”

  “So they have met since?”

  “Of course,” she said, “but János does not come here, and we don’t have the money for Jenci to travel to Budapest very often.”

  “But he does go there to see Mr. Krestin?”

  “Yes.”

  “They are not close?”

  “How could they be close? We live here. He lives there. Their only steady contact was over the money he owed us.”

  Attila let that settle for a minute while he looked out the window at the cemetery. “Mrs. Krestin, did your husband know people who had been in the Gulag?” he asked.

  “Why would he?”

  “Because, I am sure, he was also there.”

  Gertrude went to the kitchen. “It’s strange you should ask that question, too,” she said when she returned with a kettle of hot water to freshen the tea. “The woman who came a few days ago also asked me, and I told her the same thing. János never mentioned the Gulag.”

  “What woman?”

  “Her name was Helena Marsh. She was some kind of art expert, and she was working for Géza Márton. It was Géza who called me and asked that I see her.”

  Of course. Helena Marsh again. “What else did Ms. Marsh talk about?”

  “A painting. Why? Do you think János’s death is connected with her? With a painting he bought? Or with the Gulag?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Attila said, “that he bought a painting from a fellow prisoner. When was the last time you saw János?”

  “At least ten years ago. No. More like fifteen.”

  “But you’ve talked to him?”

  “Yes. After the Marsh woman was here, I called him about the money. It hadn’t arrived. He asked me what she had wanted.”

  “And Géza Márton? When did you see him last?”

  Her hand holding the kettle stopped over the teapot, and hot water splashed onto the Formica table. She set the kettle down and looked at Attila intently, as if she had just registered his presence.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I’ve read the state police files, and Géza Márton may have had reason to have your former husband killed. He may even have believed he had more than a reason, that he had justification. János Krestin had ordered his surveillance, testified against his father in a phony trial, had him jailed, and stolen his girlfriend.”

  “He didn’t steal the girlfriend,” Gertrude said in a loud voice.

  Attila noted that she didn’t dispute the other charges.

  “Perhaps not, but you had been Géza’s girl and then you married János.”

  “I didn’t meet János till late ’57. Wasn’t that in the files you read? A year after Géza left. It was pure coincidence.”

  “He hired you to teach him French,” Attila said.

  “There is nothing wrong with that. I gave private lessons for a living. János wanted to learn languages so he’d be ready when the new era came. French and English. He already spoke Russian. He knew what it took to adapt.”

  “He seems to have adapted very well, indeed,” Attila said, “but he must have made a lot of enemies along the way. You knew most of them. Géza Márton, László Tihanyi, a man they called Bika . . .”

  “Gyula Németh,” she said. “And he didn’t hate János. It was me he disliked. Gyula idolized János. They had known each other for many years.”

  “Perhaps since Vorkuta,” Attila suggested.

  “János never mentioned that.”

  “Any idea where Mr. Németh is now?”

  “He may still live in Bratislava. I don’t know.”

  “In Bratislava? When did you see him last?”

  She thought a long time about that. Then she said, “I think I saw him last year. He lived in Bratislava then. But he used to travel to Budapest to see János. He sometimes brought me something from János.”

  “An allowance? Is that why you called Mr. Krestin last week?”

  “Last week?”

  “Monday morning. There were several calls from this number.”

  She went to the kitchen, then called up the stairs. “Jenci?”

  He would have to be in his mid-thirties, Attila thought, given when Gertrude had left her husband. He still lived at home. He still went by Jenci, the diminutive of Jenö. Was there something wrong with him?

  When Jenci didn’t respond, his mother said, “He is still not home. Some days he comes in late. He does odd jobs for other Hungarians. Slovaks would never hire him. It’s tough for Jenci here, living in this little town. And he is such a bright boy . . .”

  He met Jenci as he was leaving. A tall, young-ish man with sticky brown hair, big ears, thin lips, a furrowed forehead, and long arms extending well beyond the sleeves of his loose sweatshirt. He was wearing threadbare pants with baggy knees and grimy running shoes. He smelled of stale sweat and some kind of industrial cleaner.

  Attila was reluctant to shake his hand but he had no option. Damp palms but a firm handshake. He stared at Attila but seemed to be in a hurry to get inside the house. If Attila had questions, he said, he would be in later, but right now, he needed a bath.

  Attila had no trouble agreeing with that.

  It was not until after he had gathered the kids at the circus tent that Attila realized Gertrude had not answered his question about Géza Márton. On the way home, when not playing spot the foreign licence plate, he was thinking about the secretive Helena and why she had travelled to Dunajská Streda to meet Gertrude Lakatos Krestin.

  When he got home, there was a message from Tóth, telling him that whoever had entered Krestin’s study on the afternoon of his murder had wiped all the fingerprints in the study, even those belonging to Vera and Krestin himself. The footprints in the garden all belonged to the gardener. The neighbours had not seen any strangers enter the house or leave it. No one had observed an unfamiliar car on the street. Krestin had set up an appointment with his lawyer for the day after he was killed. Krestin’s secretary cancelled the meeting.

  “Did he say what the meeting was about?”

  �
�The lawyer thought it was about his will.”

  Attila cleared off the newspapers and books from the old sofa, collected the dog from the neighbour, and gratefully accepted her offer of a pot of veal paprikash and a dish of layered potatoes with eggs and sour cream. She said she knew the girls were staying for the night, and she was sure he had not had time to cook. Attila assured her that she was a marvel of clairvoyance and a mistress of culinary arts, but failed to invite her into the apartment. Such invitations, he thought, could lead to a relationship, and he was not interested.

  While Sofi and Anna watched a show demonstrating that Britain had talent (if not good taste), he called the Gresham and left a long message for Helena Marsh. He went to sleep early. Next day, he would have to drive back to Bratislava.

  CHAPTER 30

  Helena got out of the cab at the south entrance to Hviezdoslavovo Square in Bratislava, waited for the driver to turn tail and race back toward the border (Hungarian taxis were not welcome in Slovakia), bought a coffee at a café kitty corner to the renovated National Theatre, then strolled along the pedestrian walkway, stopping now and then to look at the metal sculptures of people sitting on the benches or rising out of the pavement. It’s what any tourist would do, and it allowed her to check if anyone was following or watching her. For Michal’s sake, as well as her own, she couldn’t risk being followed to his shop.

  Michal had been her chief source of identity papers and disguises for more than ten years. Her father had introduced them some twenty-five years ago, when they were on vacation together, travelling throughout Eastern Europe. They had come to Bratislava from London. Simon said he had some business here and had left her for a couple of hours with a bit of local money. She had walked the pockmarked streets and listened to the rustle of Slavic voices. Back then, Bratislava still looked like it was only just recovering from the war. There was a lot of rubble everywhere but also a lot of construction, thanks to the new money pouring in from Western Europe. The Hilton had just opened in place of an old hotel on Hviezdoslavovo Square, behind the eponymous Slovak poet whose thoughtful statue still dominated the square.

  On his return, Simon said he wanted her to meet a man named Michal. “You don’t need him right now,” he had said, “but you may need him sometime, and an introduction by me still counts.”

  The idea that she may one day need anyone her father knew seemed weird, but back then, she hadn’t known that recovering lost works of art would become part of her profession or that such work would expose her to the fury of those loath to give up what they had.

  Her natural reaction to anyone introduced by her father — there had been few such people — had been sullen resistance. She had grown accustomed to his long, unexplained absences and to her mother’s unhappiness. She no longer cared that he claimed she was possibly not even his daughter and had learned to ignore his interest in her art studies. But she had begun to suspect that whatever he did for a living was likely not legal. When he took her to galleries and museums to show her fakes and forgeries, she had thought he was merely contributing to her education. “You may be hired to identify fakes,” he told her, “and no course you take will help you as much as I can.”

  She did not like him much anymore, but she listened.

  She was suspicious when he was cheerful and expansive and liked him even less when he was quiet and conspiratorial. On this occasion he had chosen to be quiet. He took her arm and walked her along Ventúrska Street, then back to Michalská, stopping in front of a couple of boutiques and pointing at sweaters he had no interest in buying. Window shopping, he explained, was a good way to check whether you were being followed.

  Now, she was doing what he had done. She picked a wide window displaying designer dresses because, with her face close to the glass, she could see not only the reflection of the other side of the street but also down both ends. For a moment she thought she recognized the shape of a man studying a placard near the entrance to the university, but he hurried inside before she could take a good look at him. She waited but he did not come out again.

  Michal’s workshop was upstairs from his small posters-only gallery on Ventúrska, where it had been on her visit with her father, except that back then there was no gallery, just a long dark entranceway.

  The two men she had previously met through her father (he had introduced her to both of them as a student, not his daughter) were preening, overconfident, and entirely self-involved. She had expected Michal to be like them. He wasn’t. In the years since, he had been invariably helpful and interested in her latest escapades. He rarely complained about the urgency of the work or about how much she paid. He had not increased his prices since 1990, and his papers were still as professionally prepared as ever.

  A small man with birdlike features, he seemed delighted to see Helena. He was already printing the passports and driver’s licences when he ushered her into his sanctuary. His door was always triple locked, and he had assured her long ago that he kept no records of their transactions. The only records were in his head. He had a remarkable memory for names and numbers; he never forgot an email address and placed all communications in a file labelled “junk,” which he claimed he could discard without leaving a trace. He had told Helena once that there might be a few people in the world who could access what he had deleted, but he had yet to meet one.

  In addition to his other talents, Michal was a computer wizard.

  He gave her a tentative hug and urged her to sit in one of his two “good” chairs.

  “So,” he said in passable English, “Maria has outlived her usefulness. And you are concerned about Ms. Lewis. I had thought they would last a few more years.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how anyone could have identified you inside Maria’s improbable figure, but shit happens.”

  “I didn’t care for her, anyway,” Helena said. “She was a silly woman when she was alive, and I was concerned that some of her clients would seek her out. I wish she hadn’t had such fondness for pink frills and leopard-print leggings.”

  “She had a lot of clients,” Michal said, “but no one went to her funeral.”

  That was Michal’s way of telling Helena that Maria’s clients may have been unaware that she had died, thus making her identity eminently suitable for Helena’s purposes. So long as she didn’t vary the disguise too much, anyone who had known Maria would overlook the change in appearance. When Michal had given Helena the Maria papers and appropriate clothes, he had said, with a grin, “It is possible for a woman to grow out of her persona but not to depart completely from what she was when she was alive.”

  “I think you’ll like Eva more,” Michal now said. “She was about your shape and age. She worked in the history museum, the acquisitions section, middle management. A serious woman, and a conservative dresser. Brown hair, glasses. You still have Maria’s pair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. They will do.” Michal pulled out a bag with a light-brown wig, a dark-brown pant suit, a blue sweater, and a raincoat. He handed her an Austrian passport, health card, driver’s licence, and a Viennese library card, as well as American Express and Visa cards, all in the name of Eva Bergman. “Her accounts are paid up to date,” he said, “but she should still be spending, to keep everything above board. She was a woman of conventional tastes. She bought excellent value. She paid her bills promptly, and I have kept up all those habits after her demise.”

  “Demise . . . how?” Helena asked.

  Michal shook his head. “She died unremarkably,” he said. “She was let go by the museum and went for a long swim off the pier in Bremen.”

  Although the clothes were a bit loose, the wig fit perfectly.

  “Eva will need new shoes,” Michal said. “There is a store five blocks from here. You have cell phones, I presume, in case you run into trouble. I will be here.”

  She paid him in American dollars.

  “Next time, let�
�s retire Marianne Lewis,” she said.

  “By the way,” he asked as he unlocked the door, “do you still speak German with an Austrian accent?”

  “Yes. Did she have family?”

  “Would I give you a woman with family?”

  Helena waited in the gallery for a while, scanning the faces and attitudes of people walking by, then took her time looking at unframed posters. She chose one, paid, and left, carrying a coloured woodcut of old Presburg in a cardboard tube that also held a long-bladed knife, courtesy of Michal. She strolled over to a fashionable shoe store at the end of Ventúrska, where she bought a pair of almost-sensible maroon pumps, then settled at one of the wrought-iron tables outside Tempus Fugit, on Sedlárska. She ordered a glass of wine to celebrate her new alias and kept watching passers-by.

  This was the restaurant her father had chosen for dinner the evening after he bought himself a new set of papers from Michal. He said he liked the restaurant because it was not overdecorated. You could still see its fifteenth-century walls.

  Simon was not much older then than Helena was now. He still prided himself on being fit, and on his extraordinary ability to fool almost everyone he met. It kept him youthful. As Helena knew now, he had been running an exceptionally successful business selling fakes and forgeries to buyers too eager to demand all the papers proving provenance. That day, he had made what he proudly called “a killing.” She didn’t know it then, but the painting he sold that day was the genuine article. Dark, gloomy, but real. The man who had wanted it so ferociously had been willing to pay even more than the exorbitant amount Simon had initially quoted. It would complete his collection of late nineteenth-century portraits, Simon had explained. Poland’s National Museum in Warsaw was still working out the details of how to guard valuable paintings, so stealing the small Aleksander Gierymski had been easy. In the days before video cameras, a man could hide his identity simply by donning a hat or glasses, but Simon was a perfectionist. He didn’t take a chance on someone remembering his lingering near the Gierymski portrait or leaving the museum with a bulky package under his arm. Hence the visit to Michal.