Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  The Selected Mug Shots of Famous Hungarian Assassins

  Y COUSIN’S NAME in Hungarian was Imre Ászok, but as “ászok” is Hungarian for “aces” that’s how he was known, fighting anyone who called him otherwise.

  He’d keep me awake, nights when he stayed at our place, with the most fantastic stories. His father, Jancsi Bácsi, was crazily successful, an importer of high-end European cars (BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Porsche), and often away on what he referred to as “business trips,” but which my mother called “parties”—weekends at clients’ homes in the Turks and Caicos, Paris, the Swiss Alps, Hong Kong—scenes into which it was best not to bring a three-year-old.

  That’s how old Aces and I were—I was only three months younger than him—when he began staying over, inching under my bed every night in his sleeping bag thinking he could cry there without being overheard, determined even then to be tougher than everyone else. Later, when he realized that as long as he was talking he could control his homesickness, he’d invite me to join him, and the two of us would fall asleep face to face in the middle of his last murmur.

  I could tell from the frown on my mother’s face whenever I asked that Aces was never left with us for a good reason, and that it wasn’t for her sister- and brother-in-law, but for Aces himself, that she took him in. His parents were away too much for him to be left with a stranger, she reasoned. Once in a while she’d let something slip, “I’d go visit when Aces was two, and he was wearing this diaper that looked like he’d been in it for days.” Or she’d say something like, “I hope Jancsi is having fun sipping margaritas,” when Aces was caught shoplifting and she had to go speak with the manager at the drugstore; or meet with the teachers who said that while Aces was smart when it came to what interested him (wars, revolutions, assassins), he was incapable of concentrating on anything that didn’t (school in general); or take him to rugby practice because, as she said, Aces needed “something in life he was good at too.”

  Me, I loved having Aces over. I missed him when he wasn’t there, and told my mother so, making up things he’d said—how much he loved her paprikás, how our house was as much a home as his own, how we were “brothers.” Whenever I begged to have him back, my mother would always mutter about how Jancsi and Annabella should be grateful for all the “free babysitting” they were getting even as Aces walked through the door holding his little overnight bag, looking bewildered and lost, before my toys and TV and bike rides brought him out of it.

  At twelve, thirteen, fourteen we were still underneath that bed, leaving a window open so we could risk cigarettes, drinking from mickeys of rum Aces smuggled over, even smoking the pot he’d started to sell after he was fired from the Stainesly Marina for trying to make a flame-thrower out of a gas pump. By this point his stories amused me, and I had to exercise extreme self-control not to laugh out loud, because Aces still took them as seriously as ever. “Gyula Hegedus,” he’d whisper, moving closer, our faces inches from the bottom of the bed, “learned the secret art of Mongolian judoka from Tsakhiagiin Tömörbaatar, who later worked for Stalin and the NKVD during the Mongolian Great Purge! Tömörbaatar’s specialty was killing Buddhist lamas, who were no slouches either when it came to martial arts—so you can imagine the action sequences! But Hegedus left Hungary long before the communists showed up, working for gangsters in New York in the late 1930s. Mostly, he did killings. But he had brains, too. He was the first person to see an opportunity in introducing heroin into the music business.” Aces twisted in the dark to fish a photograph out of his jeans. I looked at it in the dim light, old and crumpled, a black-and-white snapshot of a kind I’d seen a million times—an unsmiling face, slicked-back hair, a white shirt, dark suit, eyes glowering with the intent to murder the photographer—pretty much like any other photo of Hungarian men of that generation. But on the back was a list of the ways Hegedus had killed people, along with two columns, one for the proven number of times he’d committed this or that assassination, and one in brackets for the probable number: “With garrotte 15 (42)”; “Gunshot 34 (112)”; “Hand to Hand Combat 2 (93).”

  “Can I keep it?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding?” he snorted, snatching back the picture. “Hegedus is the Wayne Gretzky of Hungarian assassins.”

  There were others, of course. Aces even had women in his collection, such as Elke Gábor, who while in the employ of the Hapsburgs swallowed poisons in ever-increasing doses until she became immune, which brought her to the attention of the tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, who borrowed her from Emperor Franz Josef to infiltrate the anarchist organization Оmравumелеŭ, which had stymied them for years, their agents always coming down with gastric cramps that despite the best Russian doctors deteriorated into full-out haemorrhaging and death. Like Azef and Bogrov, Gábor became a famous provocateur and double agent, joining radical organizations and killing Russian noblemen, which gave the Okhrana just the excuse they needed to crack down on those communists or anarchists or Jews whom they then blamed for the murders. In Aces’ picture Gábor looked about a hundred years old, her face ready to slide off her skull, as if the poisons had damaged her after all, though she was only fifty-two when it was taken, weeks before her execution by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Aces wouldn’t let me have that photo either.

  By far the most disturbing pictures were the children, some as young as eight, who Aces swore were some of the most effective assassins in human history, exploiting the myth of childhood innocence in order to evade suspicion while carrying out the most brutal murders. “Here’s Emile Vaskó,” he said, flipping me a photo from where he was leaning against the chain-link fence in the schoolyard. “He killed other children—exclusively. They called him ‘Stalin’s loyal little soldier.’ He was sent to Vienna, Paris, Rome, London, to befriend the children of ex-Bolsheviks and then kill them. It was retribution for their parents being traitors to Stalin. The amazing thing is Vaskó always came back to Russia.” I looked at the picture, disturbed and fascinated.

  Being with Aces meant security. No one ever went near him—he had a reputation for being crazy—which meant no one came near me. Behind us stood the old school with its cracked bricks, the guys’ bathroom where you would find Aces smoking in his favourite stall; the cavity under the stage where Aces made a nest for himself with old comics and a Playboy and some pillows stolen from the kindergarten class; the tin duct that twisted above the ceiling, and which Aces found a way into, the two of us hunched over, shoes laced together and slung around our necks, sliding along the flimsy tin surface to keep it from reverberating.

  “Vasko built his own weapons.” Aces whistled with respect. “He had great names for them; they sounded like toys: ‘the tarnished star’; ‘the portable crypt’; ‘the pocket bomb.’” Aces looked at me, then pushed himself off the fence with a sudden jerk. “That card you can keep.”

  The stories I loved so much—the Okhrana, Stalin’s purges, Hapsburg politics, New York gangsters—went silent whenever I visited Aces’ house. Even at that age—five, six, seven—I didn’t like the place, and felt sorry for Aces having to live there. It was decorated straight out of some homemaker’s magazine—minimalist chrome and leather furniture, dried flowers arranged in enormous urns, polished concrete floors, abstract paintings jumping off the walls, rustic cabinets artfully scarred—rooms so defined by space, by emptiness, that you were constantly picking up after yourself, scared to leave behind a hair. It was the polar opposite of the unruly mess at my house, my mother screaming at us to pick up our books and Lego and bicycles, and where I felt as if I were wading through a burst reservoir of toys, always something interesting underfoot.

  But while the décor was minimal, everything else in Aces’ house was pure anarchy. I would say that of all my cousin’s losses the worst was simple clarity, the map of days most kids need to figure out where they’re waking, where going to sleep, a parent always there at the promised hour, dinnertime set in stone, someone on hand to help with the homework. The truth
is, Jancsi rarely came home from work before midnight, and often Annabella joined him out there, wherever he was, in the darkened world beyond the living room window where Aces was often found waiting for them by the babysitter (the few times he wasn’t staying at our place), sneaking out of bed to peer into the street beyond the glass. But worse than this were the promises made—I was there enough times to experience it—Jancsi Bácsi always agreeing to what we asked, that he’d take us to the amusement park, skiing, a movie, congenitally unable to say no to anyone whether he actually wanted to do what was asked or not, only to then not show up as expected, or to change the plan in the last second. Later on, when things had really soured, I remember Aces saying about his father and mother: “Any answer is only a temporary answer.” Aces’ home was always a whirling chaos, and he didn’t even have the comfort of being at the centre of it.

  We’d wander through the house and sometimes Jancsi Bácsi would show up with his squinting eyes and quick smile, ready to make fun of us. “Well hello,” he’d say, catching sight of me, “how’s the long-distance runner doing? Managed to run a mile yet? Non-stop?”

  He mentioned it whenever I went there: my first track meet, I was six years old, dead last in the cross-country race, gasping, my hand over a cramp, stopping to stumble along, starting to run again, stopping, running again, long after everyone else had finished.

  “Everyone had already gone home and you were still running, ten feet and half an hour from the finish line,” he laughed.

  But this was a minor humiliation compared to what Aces went through.

  I remember one time we took Aces’ car to a wedding banquet in Whistler. Halfway there, along the Sea-to-Sky Highway, Jancsi roared out of the dark in his Mercedes and passed us on the inside. From there, the two of them—father and son—spent the next twenty minutes shifting lanes, veering between the mountain on one side and the sheer drop on the other, until Jancsi laughed and sped off between two semis travelling side by side. Aces tried to follow, but one of the trucks honked and shifted, cutting us off, and he had to hit the brakes, sending us skidding in circles, spinning between a wall of rock and the chasm.

  I couldn’t count the number of times I had to lose a chess game against Aces because every time he played his father and lost, Jancsi Bácsi would force him to go through the ranks before giving him another shot at the title. Aces had to play his mother, me, my mother, and my father before Jancsi would play him again. It would take weeks. Sometimes, to tease him, Jancsi would finish a game by saying, “Well, that’s the last game we play, Imi. I think I’ll retire as champion.”

  It wasn’t enough for Aces to lose; he had to be reminded of it. When he was fired for not delivering his newspapers on time, Jancsi would always bring it up at the next family get-together—“Can you pass me the salt sometime soon? It’s not a newspaper, you know”—as if humiliating him would produce the best results. Things only got worse once it was known that Aces was selling drugs. “Sorry there’s no wacky tobacky in the cake,” Jancsi said at the family celebration my mother prepared for Aces’ graduation (unlike me, he never finished high school, but my mom coached him through the GED exam that finally got him his diploma), “but news of your graduation already makes me feel like I’m hallucinating.”

  That night Aces asked to stay at our place, but he didn’t invite me under the bed.

  It was the cards that eventually got Aces into trouble. We were in grade nine when it happened. My mother was in the kitchen writing a letter, and I was sitting there doing math (which I always needed help with), when Mrs. Connolly walked in without knocking and threw a packet of photographs onto the table. My mother glanced up from her letter, leaning forward to see where Mrs. Connolly had come from, whether she’d failed to hear the knock or if maybe our front door was missing. “Tard cards,” Mrs. Connolly said, nodding at the photographs as if she couldn’t bear to touch them a second longer. “Do you get it, Mária? ’Tard as in re tard.”

  I managed a glimpse as my mother scooped them up, and recognized among them a photograph of John Harrod, brain-damaged from birth, and notorious for bursting into song as he lurched along the pavement, much to the amusement of the neighbourhood kids who’d follow him requesting songs. John would belt out Springsteen’s “Streets of Fire,” or The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” or Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” his singing a great garble of words you could only understand if you knew the lyrics to what he was howling. He’d also do this dance, though it was more like a series of spasms, his arms and legs flailing at us as we followed, just out of reach, laughing and making requests until we got to his house, into which John would escape, and from which his older brother Sebastian would run, trying to catch us.

  My mother looked through the photos, back and front, shaking her head in disgust.

  “Your nephew,” Mrs. Connolly said, as if my mother had no right to be offended by what she was looking at, “has been making those. Trading them with friends.”

  “No way!” I said. I was right—Aces had never taken part in tormenting John Harrod—and if anyone would have known about him making such cards it would have been me.

  “I’m not speaking to you, am I, young man?” said Mrs. Connolly. No doubt somewhere in there—I’d have bet on it—was a picture of Chester, Mrs. Connolly’s youngest, born with Down’s syndrome, though he was in his late twenties by then, with the unfortunate reputation of trying to kiss every kid he came across whether they wanted him to or not. I’d been kissed by him several times when I was younger, and we’d trained ourselves to be alert for him after mass, at the mall, along the beach, where he’d leap from the shadows and hug you and drench your face in saliva.

  “I think it’s despicable that he’s taken all those poor people with their problems and turned it into a perverted game.” She picked up one of the photographs between her thumb and forefinger. “Have you read what’s written on the backs? Stuff about what their ‘marketable skills’ are—tying shoelaces! swimming without drowning! singing the ‘ABC song’!—and even ‘career highlights!’” Mrs. Connolly let the photograph go. It drifted back and forth and landed on the floor. “I wanted you to hear it from me. I’ve spoken to Father Hammond, I’ve notified the school board, and Constable Eckart will be coming over to take a statement. He says Aces is ‘a person of interest.’ That boy’s staying with you now, isn’t he?” She looked around, sniffing the air.

  “No, he’s not,” my mother sighed. “He’s at home. You can go ahead and speak to the police. I don’t think he has anything to do with it. He’s not interested in those kinds of pictures,” she said, nodding at the stack. “Take them with you when you go.” And with that my mother went back to her letter, not even looking up when Mrs. Connolly slammed the door.

  But my mother looked up afterwards, narrowing her eyes. “I want you to know I believe you,” she said to me. “Aces is not the smartest boy around, but he’s smarter than that. He knows if he did what Mrs. Connolly says he’d never be allowed back into this house.”

  I picked up the stray card, stuffed it into my back pocket, and later that night I opened my bedroom window, reached out for the edge of the roof, swung my legs onto the garage, and was running across it, down the nearby cherry tree, and into the street.

  It took half an hour to get to the police station. It was quiet by then, that time of night, only two other people seated in the front room, one of them holding an ice pack to his eye, and the other, dead drunk, trying to keep from slipping off his chair.

  “I’m here to see Constable Eckart,” I said to the night clerk. He looked up from the Buy and Sell he was reading and raised an eyebrow, then picked up the phone and held his hand over the keypad without dialling, asking what my business was. I rubbed the back of my head. “The ’tard cards,” I said. The night clerk shrugged and punched in four numbers.

  Constable Eckart was there in seconds, holding open the door to a hallway that looked as if it disappeared into another dimension. He stared har
d at me a minute, then beckoned with his finger, leading me a short distance into the building before turning off into a glass-walled room containing two chairs and a table. I sat in one and he sat in the other. There was a fat manila envelope in the middle of the desk that Eckart put his hand over the second he was done taking down my address, phone number, and names of my parents.

  “What do you know about these?” he asked.

  “They’re mine,” I said. There was a minute of silence, and I was so worried he wouldn’t believe me that instead of waiting for his response I dove right in. “I find retards really funny,” I said. “My cousin has these cards . . . of Hungarian assassins, and I thought it would be hilarious to have cards with retards on them.”

  “Uh-huh,” Constable Eckart said, incredulous. “So you made these . . .”

  “’Tard cards,” I said.

  “’Tard cards,” he echoed, and the way he said it I half expected a wedge of raw lemon to fall from his mouth. “You made them to trade with your friends.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But I take full responsibility.”

  “Of course you do,” he nodded. Then, after staring at me another minute, Constable Eckart did something totally unexpected: he reached into the manila envelope, drew a card at random, and hid it behind his hand. “What’s the real name of the re . . . the special-needs person who’s known by the alias ‘The Molester’?”

  That was an easy one. “Chester Connolly,” I said instantly.

  Constable Eckart frowned, reached into the envelope again, pulled out another random card. “What,” he said, “is Cordelia Steen’s ‘Career Highlight’?” The look on his face, it was like he was going to punch me if I got it right.

  I sat there paralyzed, going over everything Cordelia had done, flashing through rumours and stories, knowing I had very little time to get it right. “Stealing a glue stick from the drugstore and sealing her lips shut thinking it was lipgloss.” For a minute I thought I’d gotten it wrong, my heart skipping erratically. Constable Eckart scowled at me before reaching into the envelope again. “Name Stanley Holden’s—” he said.