The size of the car was estimated, the price was negotiated, the handshakes were delivered, and one bearskin complete with head was salted and stuffed beneath some blankets into the Lada’s little trunk.
A few months later Attila showed up at Uncle Béla’s again, this time driving the UTE hockey van so that he could transport up to ten pelts, if Béla had them available. Attila bought bears for between 10,000 and 20,000 forints ($145 to $290), rams and boars for about 5,000 ($70), and deer for 3,500 ($50). He then turned around and sold them to Hansi in Austria at a 300 percent markup. Sometimes a single trip’s profit, minus expenses, could be up to $1,600.
The drive was a haul, but Attila quickly discovered that delivering animal pelts across three borders had much more cachet than cleaning ice hockey rinks and digging graves. Except for the door-to-door Parker pen and paper sales, which he continued only occasionally and on his own schedule, Attila gave up his other jobs. He was around more for Judit, and he could afford to take her out to concerts (Rod Stewart: she loved it, he hated it) and shows (Hair: he loved, she hated). Attila didn’t hide from her that he was an animal-pelt smuggler; he was proud to be part of the global economy. He was feeling happy and, finally, at home in Budapest, a once-dreary city that was exploding in Technicolor. Patches of the Danube riverbank were dressed and undressed in scaffolding as teams of authentic painters methodically converted the exhaust-stained apartment carcasses into desirable addresses decked in yellows, pinks, and blues. Big black Mercedes sedans and red Pontiac Firebirds cruised the serpentine streets, making the compact Zhigulis and Trabants look like an uncared-for set of collectible Matchbox cars. The old communist street names were X-ed out with red paint and new names placarded to the corners of the city’s buildings. The former East German cultural center reopened as a Porsche dealership.
Money, once such a shameful symbol of Communist Party loyalty that it was enthusiastically renounced, now required flaunting in order to make the same important point: that obviously it was meaningless to you. The best way to illustrate this in Budapest circa the early 1990s was by pushing a stack of chips across a table at one of the sparkling new casinos, eleven of which opened to great fanfare in Budapest between 1991 and 1993. The grandeur of these wildly popular gambling halls, replete with marble colonnades and reflecting pools, was fit for ancient Rome, or at least modern Reno. One of the best-attended casinos, suitably named the Las Vegas, was opened by Sylvester Stallone and the Hungarian-born Hollywood film producer Andy Vajna (the Rambo movies, Terminator 3, I Spy) in the basement of the Hyatt hotel just off the Danube River. Over a three-month period in 1992, the Hungarian newspapers reported, the Las Vegas contributed more tax money to the Hungarian government than the entire metallurgy industry had in about a decade.
There were three types who frequented the casinos: foreigners (particularly the Americans, Western Europeans, and Chinese, all of whom were snapping up an inordinate percentage of Hungary’s resources at bargain-basement prices); the nouveau riche Hungarian politicos and businessmen (who were well connected enough to steer whatever wealth was left in their direction); and the immaculately groomed gangsters, many of them Russians (who had more elaborate methods of making money and who moved from table to table like a buffalo herd under the protection of armed shepherds in sunglasses).
Attila, who was flush with pelt money, also became a casino regular, though he was hard to pigeonhole. The tuxedo-topped-and-lingerie-bottomed waitresses came to know him as UTE’s Panther, who wore silk Italian suits and copious amounts of aftershave, liked his Johnnie Walker straight up, and always sat alone. Of course, they weren’t fools. Anyone who could waste an evening pissing away a few hundred thousand forints (about $4,000) at the roulette table clearly couldn’t be making a living as a professional athlete. But it didn’t matter. All that was required to be accepted into this exclusive club was money—and Attila had it.
As UTE’s 1991–92 season rolled around, it was becoming harder to ignore the grim realities of the Hungarian hockey league. This was partly because the NHL was now available on cable television in Hungary, and watching it for up to four seconds was enough to generate an epiphany that the Hungarian league was penniless, bereft of sponsors, devoid of all but a few quality players, and required fans to freeze their asses off outside on a metal bench in order to see live. If there was a bottom of the barrel, Hungarian hockey seemed to be occupying it.
Not surprisingly, the Three Vodka-Swilling Musketeers had staggered back to Moscow after helping carry UTE to a respectable but disappointing third-place finish the previous season. Even without them, however, the team was showing some promise, at least on the nights the schedule was accurate in its suggestion that a game would in fact take place. Advance ticket purchases were not advised. One contest was called off when the UTE Zamboni broke down and an attempt to tie towels to the back of a Trabant and drive it around the rink proved unsuccessful. Another game ended seven minutes into the second period when the lights at the UTE stadium went out. But the problems weren’t only at UTE. A club out in the eastern Hungarian plains town of Jászberény had lucked into a sponsorship from the Swedish refrigerator company Electrolux (which had bought up the local factory) but announced midway through the season that it could no longer afford to cool its ice to playing temperature.
For the first time, team road trips on the red Ikarus buses with the vertical double-set headlights were more than just a cheap way for the players to loosen their teeth. They could also have their spirits destroyed simply by gazing out the vehicle’s barely transparent windows at the omnipresent IKEA billboards along the road. On the left side of the ad was an image of Karl Marx’s book Das Kapital; on the right, a photo of the IKEA catalog. At the bottom it read, “Which one will make your life more beautiful?” The real question was how IKEA expected to do any business when the cost of a couch, $450, was equal to three months of the average Hungarian’s salary.
Theoretically, the UTE players were still being paid, though their weekly cash allotments were now distributed approximately monthly. All of them were hustling at least one other job to support themselves. Taxi driving wasn’t proving to be the easiest buck; one debt-burdened cabbie some of the UTE guys knew drove to the front of Parliament, doused himself with gasoline, and burned himself to death. George Pék, the UTE captain, stuck with trying to make his 24-hour mini-mart profitable. Bubu found employment that occasionally obliged him to field phone calls at the stadium and sprint from practice yelling, “I have to take care of something quickly!” No one had time for card games after workouts anymore. Only Attila, who hung around in the UTE cafeteria, seemed to have any free time, pumping coins into the complex’s new toy, a slot machine. “Watch this,” he’d say as the guys passed through. “I won on the last one.”
The players found Attila’s bit about smuggling animal pelts amusing, but they didn’t believe he could make any real money trading in dead animals. Most likely, Attila’s teammates figured, the Chicky Panther had found a stable second career running guns or drugs like the others with flashy cars and name recognition at the casinos. It was a real party at the gambling halls to hear Attila tell it—free drinks, loose women—but in truth Attila could go whole nights there without speaking to a single person but the croupier. Judit didn’t like to go, and sometimes when Attila returned home after a long night, pockets empty, he couldn’t remember why he did.
Even though the shiny new Opel Attila drove made it clear that he was now in a higher income bracket than most of his teammates, Attila went out of his way to make sure they didn’t begrudge him his new-found status. There was nothing more important to him than his UTE team, and to prove it, he began inciting his teammates to question his loyalty. What did they want him to do? Run ten laps? He’d run twenty. Buy drinks? Everyone in shouting distance of the bar had a round coming. A thousand leg-sits? Start counting. (Of course, after completing the last challenge, he had to take a few days off from practice, since he was too sore to stand.)
Attila’s archmaniac on the squad was, perhaps unsurprisingly, his attention-starved Székely companion, Bubu. (Karcsi was now married and, though he continued to be among the league leaders in scoring, was generally considered too lazy to chew gum.) Attila and Bubu had a number of ludicrous, vomit-inducing physical duels, such as distance canoe racing during the UTE summer training camps at the Interior Ministry’s Lake Balaton compound. But the two most famous contests between the Székelys took place in the fall of 1992 at the Atlantis pool hall, a dingy red-carpeted dive on an industrial boulevard lined with gas stations and fast-food restaurants. Both matches were well publicized around the hockey grounds by way of diatribes, epithets, and profanity-laced proclamations of billiard supremacy from the contestants. Standard eight ball was the game.
The first match (billed as a three-of-five, but ultimately amended to the strict Transylvanian-style fourteen-of-twenty-seven) was won by Attila. As soon as the final ball dropped, the small crowd pushed forward to watch Bubu begin serving out his impossible wager, a thousand push-ups. He was well into the four hundreds by some reports when his body froze like a crossing guard mannequin and he crashed to the floor on his side. By the time the ambulance arrived, Bubu’s rigor mortis–like symptoms had worsened and he exited the Atlantis on a paramedic stretcher, arms extended toward the ceiling, screaming, “Please, quickly, I think I’m having a heart attack!”
As is often the case with billiards injuries, it was only a muscle tear. It was also great publicity for the rematch, which began a few weeks later after the Friday-morning practice session. Attila had also been to the hospital twice in the interim (sprained knee, chipped clavicle), so it was decided that the grudge match would be a gentleman’s game: the wager was cash, which heightened the pressure on Bubu, since his life savings fit snugly into his left shoe.
The match would go on for three straight days. Attila kept the owner’s palm full of thick tips to see to it that the Atlantis remained open through the night. The competitors ventured out of the hall’s confines only for fresh air and slept on tables in separate corners of the building for a couple of hours each night. Both mornings Bubu was awakened by a pool stick to the gut.
“Is it true you’ve surrendered?”—Attila.
“Not likely.”—Bubu.
By dinnertime on Sunday, Attila had polished off a few gallons of whiskey and purchased seven pool cues from the owner, the remnants of six of which were splintered and scattered around the hall. He was down 600,000 forints ($7,500), his TV, VCR, and stereo. “Double or nothing,” he said.
Double was agreed to mean Attila’s Opel, which had been illegally parked in front of the Atlantis’s entrance for the past fifty-six hours. Some of the witnesses, who had been in and out all weekend, were summoned back for the final game. Girls were prohibited, Attila declared, to no objection from Judit, who had gotten bored and left after the first day of competition. (It was Bubu’s girlfriend Attila found objectionable, whispering hexes on him each time he lined up a shot.)
Attila wouldn’t even get to take a shot in the final game, however. Bubu ended it with one thunderous break, in which he either heroically sunk the eight ball, winning in extraordinary fashion, or tragically sunk not only the eight ball but also the cue ball, losing in extraordinary fashion. Both he and Attila simultaneously raised their arms in triumph as if they’d just picked a lock safeguarding a tunnel of meats, and began to sing the Székely anthem. (“Our ancestors crumble to dust through these wars of nations, as cliffs on rough seas. / The flood is upon us, oh, overwhelming us a hundredfold; Lord, don’t let us lose Transylvania!”)
After order was restored, the de facto judges at the Atlantis declared that the cue ball, which had dropped into a side pocket on Bubu’s break, had done so because of a tap from Attila’s hand. Though Attila would forever dispute the decision, Bubu was declared the victor. Graciously, he let Attila keep his Opel, but he waltzed out of the basement apartment on Villányi Street with the super’s television, stereo system, VCR, and an IOU for a fistful of cash Attila didn’t have.
Finding himself suddenly without financial prospects wasn’t Attila’s only problem. His glamorous high-flying life was a mirage. He was living from pelt delivery to pelt delivery, dead broke by the time of his bimonthly excursions to Csángóföld. Béla’s prices were rising, and so were the costs of gas, Uncle László, Romanian prostitutes, Hungarian prostitutes, Hansi’s prostitutes, Judit’s pop concert tickets, and, worst of all, bribes for the border guards. Sometimes when he emptied his pockets at the bar, calling out for another round, he was spending his last forints. He was so self-conscious of the way his car looked that he had it washed every day even if it meant skipping dinner.
Perhaps worst of all, Attila had all but lost the thing that most defined him: his unpaid day job as UTE’s backup goalie. UTE’s hockey season had been going well enough that General Bereczky had decided he was going to do everything in his power to ensure that the team reclaimed the Hungarian championship. So, a call had been placed to Sergei “the Champ” Milnikov, the legendary anchor of the Soviet Union’s 1988 Olympic gold medal–winning team, who agreed to fly in from Moscow in January to be UTE’s starting goalie for the remainder of the season. Since so many foreign players had been imported into Hungary over the past few years, the league had instituted a team limit of three. No one had to tell Attila what that meant. Bubu, Karcsi, and the Champ would get to play in all the games. Attila, as long as his official papers listed him as a “temporary resident,” would once again be relegated to practice goalie/cheerleader in just a few short weeks.
The outlook wasn’t promising. But as Attila chewed over his hockey and pelt-smuggling tribulations, he realized there was one remedy that could cure both problems: citizenship. The real obstacle preventing him from profiting in his pelt business was the Romanian border guards. They kept jacking up their prices for safe passage—and given that on the outward-bound leg, he was carrying illegal goods and not carrying a passport, he had no choice but to empty his wallet. He’d been on the waiting list for citizenship for four years now. He needed a passport, pronto.
Having hung around with people from the Interior Ministry for the past few years, Attila had become a keen observer of the way things were dispensed with in Hungary. Whenever he got a speeding ticket, which was not infrequently, he went to the liquor store, bought two bottles of Finlandia and Jack Daniel’s, and took them to General Bereczky’s office. Bereczky, who at some point had decided he found his madcap goalie charming, always appreciated the possibility of being stutter-step smashed by 10 a.m. So, on Attila’s days in need, he would show up at Bereczky’s office around breakfast time, hand over the bottles with a wink, and wait while Bereczky put down his cigarette and picked up his “K” phone, for közvetlen (direct), which was wired into Interior Ministry headquarters. “In the matter of Attila Ambrus, ticket number [X],” the general would say, “why don’t we just remove that page from the system.” Then Bereczky, whom Attila now called Uncle Pista, would hang up, exclaim, “Okay, there’s no speeding,” and prepare for the toast.
But Uncle Pista didn’t do passports. After searching his memory for someone he could reliably turn to on the delicate topic of citizenship subornment, Attila recalled that he’d given skating lessons about a year earlier to a girl whose father worked at the immigration office. When her dad had come to pick her up, Attila had made a point of introducing himself. Just before the New Year, Attila got the guy’s number and phoned him up with his proposition. What he needed was citizenship papers and a passport, he said. That was a risky proposition, he was told. But for 100,000 forints ($1,300) it might be possible. “Done,” Attila said.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to be done easily. Aside from Bubu, Attila now owed both Pék and Gogolak for loaning him a couple of hundred thousand forints (a few thousand dollars) to get his car keys back from the Las Vegas Casino, which had been holding them as collateral for a miscalculation Attila had made on black 1
7 at the roulette wheel. Attila was going to have to make one more chancy trip to Béla without a passport. After UTE’s 9–2 loss on Friday, January 15, there was a one-week spell between games during which time Milnikov would arrive in Budapest and Attila would take off for Transylvania. At the Thirsty Camel pub after the game, Attila managed to shake 50,000 forints ($650) out of two more teammates to fund the journey. “You’ll have it back plus ten percent in a week,” Attila promised them, sipping someone else’s drink. And no, they didn’t need a new fountain pen.
On Saturday afternoon Attila went to see the UTE groundskeeper. As per the usual agreement, he handed over 10,000 forints ($130) for the keys to the hockey van—bags, sticks, and helmets included, under which he would hide the pelts. He would leave late that night and have the van back before practice Monday morning.
After squaring away his transportation, Attila jumped back into his Opel, headed to the Margit Bridge, where he crossed into curvy Buda, and drove south toward the volcano-like Gellért Hill, behind which he lived. He was going to pick up Judit in an hour for dinner, then send her home in a taxi, ride back to the stadium for the van, and hit the pelt road. He had 40,000 forints ($520) in his pocket, thirty-eight hours to the next hockey practice, forty-one hours until he could sleep, and less than a week before he would make yet another career change.
For the moment, Attila Ambrus was still a nobody. Soon, he would be a legend.
second Period
Eight
Budapest
One week later
Friday, January 22, 1993
Ballad of the Whiskey Robber Page 8
