Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  The Orbáns were the Kennedys of Hungarian hockey, such as it was, and they would soon get their Chappaquiddick. Father George, the new UTE coach, was the Hungarian national team goalie in the 1950s and had since become a highly successful coach on the European circuit. After a couple of years heading up a top team in France, he’d returned to Budapest and turned UTE’s rival FTC into Hungary’s new hockey dynasty. George’s elder son, George Jr., still played for FTC, where he was Hungary’s “Goal King,” possessor of an even better slap-shot than Karcsi’s. And George’s younger son, Gábor, had also played under him at FTC and was about to join him at UTE after spending the past year in America failing to make the NHL.

  “Gabi,” as Gábor was known, was a handsome, well-spoken twenty-year-old whose anxious laugh suggested the introspection of someone aware that if his father weren’t the coach, he would be receiving four or five wedgies a week. Aside from two years in democratic France’s countryside when his father was coaching in Annecy on the Swiss border, Gabi had grown up in Budapest. The family lived in its own two-bedroom apartment in a cluster of brown brick and asphalt buildings built by the state bank, OTP. Mother Klára was an internationally acclaimed folk dancer. They owned an East German Trabant. By Hungarian standards, it was a privileged life, which is to say that aside from some monitored travel, it was not much different from anyone else’s. Like any kid who grew up in Hungary in the seventies or eighties, Gabi had studied Russian since grade school and still couldn’t speak it, had an appreciation of classical music, and had read most of Schopenhauer. But he never felt that he could live up to the accomplishments of his famous athlete brother.

  After graduating from high school in 1992, three years after the end of the communist regime, a family friend got Gabi a medical exemption from the army and he joined FTC, where his father was coaching and his brother playing. While brother George drew a livable paycheck as the league’s star, Gabi’s scrub salary was 8,000 forints ($100) a month, about the price of two pairs of Levis. He found a second job as a coroner’s assistant at the city morgue. In his free time, he pondered what he was going to do with his life now that capitalism had created so many opportunities. He soon decided to leave for the United States.

  Leaning on his father’s hockey connections, Gabi crash-landed first in southern New Jersey, hoping to latch on with the Philadelphia Flyers, whose practice facility was nearby. But unable to finagle a tryout, he headed to Florida, where an ex-Hungarian player had been appointed to coach the West Palm Beach Blaze, a minor league hockey franchise in the low-paying, lower-profile eight-team Sunshine League. The club’s Hungarian coach, however, died of a heart attack just as the season was about to begin, and Gabi was deleted from the Blaze’s final roster. In October he returned to his parents’ apartment and got into a Budapest state of mind. He went on the dole.

  Gabi’s father had promised Gabi a spot at UTE that year, which Gabi accepted, despite having come to the understanding that, in Hungary, professional hockey wasn’t a career and was possibly an oxymoron. But if the point of capitalism was to make as much loot as possible, he didn’t know what a Hungarian career was. Gabi was adrift—until a few weeks into practice with UTE. That’s when he started to notice the free-spending Mercedes-driving rookie-berating goaltender. Gabi’s life ambition suddenly presented itself. He wanted to do what the Chicky Panther did, whatever it was.

  Gabi began following Attila around everywhere. He enthusiastically did all of the push-ups and ran all of the laps Panther ordered when he made a bad play. He asked Attila to play tennis, to go out to eat; he laughed at his jokes. And before practice, after practice, and during practice, he waited for the right moment when no one else was listening to blurt out, “Just tell me what you do, I won’t tell anyone, I can be your partner, I’ll do anything.”

  For Attila, it was flattering to have an Orbán fawning all over him. But Gabi was more like a pet than an accomplice. There was no way Attila was letting him in. “I don’t do anything,” Attila told him. “I’m an életmvész,” a Hungarian term that translated as “life artist,” someone to whom working was itself déclassé.

  Attila was in fact in a sort of semiretirement even from his unofficial other career. The near disaster at Ó Street had provided enough thrills for a while. He’d pulled ten successful heists over the past year and a half; he didn’t need to keep up that kind of pace to make the history books. He was only twenty-six. And when he’d stopped to think about it, he realized he was rich. Or at least, he was far from broke. He planned to enjoy himself, relax for a change.

  During the day, when he wasn’t out at the hockey grounds, Attila was usually attempting to rustle up a tennis game, leisurely affairs for which he applied the same mellow enthusiasm he had for hockey. For some reason, it wasn’t always easy for him to find a partner. Once, restless after a snowstorm, he scooped up an unsuspecting Bóta from his home, saying, “I’m sick of couch potatoes.” He then negotiated himself and his friend through thigh-deep uncleared streets to the Interior Ministry facility, where he used a shovel to tunnel a path to the court. He’d become friendly enough with club officials that even on days when he couldn’t find a member interested in being pasted, Attila could purchase ten cans of balls and be allotted a court on which to practice his serve, which clocked at a pro-level 110 mph.

  Attila had also found a smaller, homier new casino, the Globe Royale, which offered complimentary drinks and had a bearskin hanging on the wall and a pool table in back. Of course, he could rarely get himself to leave when he still had money in his pocket, even if it meant buying everyone, including the security guards, a round of drinks. And his nights didn’t always end there. One of his Interior Ministry chums had gotten him on the list at the Cats Club, the new high-class brothel in the ninth-century, cobblestoned artist colony town of Szentendre, an hour north of Budapest. Located in a refurbished mansion on a hill, Cats was as exclusive as a Hungarian whorehouse could be. Though the Russians had all but taken over Hungary’s underworld since the infamous 1991 Magyar Mob Toss (in which a group of Russian mobsters had flung one of their Hungarian counterparts over Budapest’s Margit Bridge), Cats was still Hungarian-owned by Gyula Zubovics, an original Hungarian wiseguy who had cut his teeth in the 1980s in Los Angeles, the Hungarian mafia’s home away from home. Dimly lit and sleekly appointed, Cats was one of Hungary’s premier see-and-be-seen spots for those who didn’t want to be seen: cops, members of Parliament, “used car” salesmen, television personalities, serial bandits.

  “The Chicky Panther!” the goateed, Armani-attired Zubovics loved to shout when Attila walked in.

  “Zubovics!” Attila called back, since he never knew the owner’s first name. “Where did you get that suit?”

  “You couldn’t afford it, my little goalie,” Zubovics would respond. Gangster cred unknown, the Transylvanian goaltender was something of a novelty at Cats, the congenial pauper in the proverbial palace. But it was an equal opportunity palace, and while there, Attila lived like a king. His favorite item on the Cats menu was two girls, any style, in the private room (hot tub and sauna included), where he could do as he pleased while watching the table dancers at the bar through a one-way mirror. For an hour, the prix fixe was 100,000 forints ($900)—a little more than the average Hungarian monthly wage, and at least as much as Zubovics’s designer threads.

  One night while Attila was waiting on the gun-and-coat-check line outside Cats, he discovered another way to spend his hard-earned money. Next to him was one of the principals of the Conti-Car auto dealership, one of the biggest mob-run rackets in Europe, who invited him to visit the group’s lot on the outskirts of Budapest. He headed out a few weeks later and liked what he saw: barely used Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Porsches, Audis, and a full bar crowded with backslapping Cats Club regulars inside the ten-car showroom. Every several months from then on, Attila went back to Conti-Car and traded his wheels for another slightly used, and undoubtedly untraceable, model.

  That fall, afte
r swapping his Mercedes for a red convertible Audi Cabrio, Attila stocked his new ride full of coffee, rice, sugar, candies, and household appliances and headed over the border into Romania like Santa Claus. He hadn’t been home since the end of his frenzied pelt-smuggling days, and feeling accomplished for the first time in his life, he was ready. Regrettably, little had changed in Romania. Though the country was governed by the democratically elected president Ion Iliescu, equal rights for Romania’s citizens was evidently not on the agenda. Romania’s parliament passed a law banning the display of the Hungarian flag, prompting a letter of disapproval from U.S. president Bill Clinton. In Cluj Napoca (or in Hungarian, Kolozsvár)—the western Transylvanian capital that Hungarians venerate the way Americans do Williamsburg, Virginia—the Romanian mayor was tearing down Hungarian statues and even painting dogs with stripes of red, yellow, and blue, Romania’s flag colors. Meanwhile, Transylvania remained best known to the rest of the world for two buildings—one, the soaring medieval Bran Castle on a rural milkweed-strewn lookout; the other a modest two-story home in the colorful sixteenth-century village of Sighisoara that has been renamed Dracula House Restaurant—both of which are believed to be connected to a vampire who never lived anywhere at any time. (The source of the confusion stems from the worldwide popularity of Irish writer Bram Stoker’s 1897 book Dracula, whose vampire was named after a vindictive spear-wielding fifteenth-century Romanian prince, Vlad “the Impaler” Dracul. The Impaler may once have attacked the castle and was most likely born in the Sighisoara eatery.)

  On Attila’s way over the Hargita Mountains, he stopped at the tiny wooden fifteenth-century Franciscan monastery on a bluff in Csíksomlyó, site of the annual Whit Saturday festival to which more than a hundred thousand Hungarians travel each June. He dropped some coins into the well and wished for his continued good fortune, a custom he would follow on each subsequent visit home. It was just a little farther, through the final sweeping turns into the valley, until the white road sign announced Miercurea-Ciuc, and beneath it in smaller letters, the city’s Hungarian name, Csíkszereda. Other indications of communism’s collapse were soon apparent. The streets and parks, once kept clean by city workers, were strewn with garbage. And in the town’s old cobblestoned center across from the Hockey Klub restaurant and bar was a new café, New York Pizza.

  Attila stayed on the couch at his aunt and uncle’s apartment, as in the old days. No one mentioned Károly Ambrus, Attila’s dad (and his aunt’s brother), whom Attila’s relatives occasionally saw pedaling around town on a battered bike. The Dacia had apparently died. According to the local grapevine, Attila’s mother was now a Jehovah’s Witness, living in a nearby village with her seventh husband.

  Attila presented his aunt and uncle with the food staples he’d brought, as well as a new toaster and a color television, explaining his generosity by saying, “Hockey pays well.” And he had the newspaper article to prove it. In the season opener that October (technically, just an exhibition against the junior national team), Attila had played well enough to make the news for the first time, at least as a sportsman. The neatly clipped story he had preserved between the pages of a book was from Hungary’s national sports newspaper, Népsport, and credited Attila with maintaining UTE’s 12–1 victory. “Another goal would have been scored,” Népsport wrote, “but UTE backup goalie Attila Ambrus defended the net with élan.”

  Ninny and Uncle László, who remembered when their nephew’s life dream was to be a professional hockey player, teared up when they saw the paper. Later Attila pulled Uncle László into the kitchen. He knew László hadn’t been able to find work for almost a year. “I could help out, you know,” Attila said, reaching for his wallet.

  “No,” said László, grabbing Attila’s arm. “I couldn’t accept it.” Though he didn’t say it, neither did László accept Attila’s explanation for where the money was coming from. He’d seen cousin Laczika’s Jeep (though no one in town had had the gumption to question how the timorous carpenter had claimed its possession). “But maybe I could come stay with you in Budapest for a while,” László suggested. “Find some real work?”

  Attila tried to dissuade László. “Budapest isn’t so ripe these days,” he said, but László heard only what he wanted: ripe. Unable to turn down the man who had practically raised him, Attila reluctantly agreed to accept a new roommate and hazard the discovery of his oven’s inedible contents. But he wasn’t taking on another accomplice. He’d figure something out for László, and the living-space issue wouldn’t be so bad. He wasn’t around that much anyway.

  Attila had begun spending more time than he’d anticipated with Éva Fodor, the feisty thirty-four-year-old woman with the coquettish smile, who owned the car wash near Judit’s place downtown. For both personal and professional reasons, Attila knew he could never let a woman get too close again. But Éva was always surprising him. In November of 1993, after Attila’s breakup with Judit, he’d stayed at the wash late one night and offered Éva a rare insight into his rejection complex—“Why are you even listening to me? I’m just a hairy-soled Transylvanian”—which was compounded by his inability to get Hungarian citizenship.

  The next time Attila showed up at the wash, Éva told him to buy her four bottles of premium liquor and perfume. “And then what?” Attila asked. “I’ll cheer you up,” Éva said. It sounded worth pursuing to Attila, who never imagined what Éva had in mind: in January 1994, about two months after he’d decided to dedicate his life to robbery, his name was called in a municipal chamber and he was asked to swear to uphold the laws of the land. He lied and was pronounced, at twenty-six, a Hungarian citizen. After trying to get his citizenship for six years, the car wash girl had gotten it for him in two months. Clearly, Éva Fodor was a woman to be reckoned with. Attila was intrigued.

  Wax by wax, Attila was growing on Éva, too. Except for that late night after his breakup with Judit, Attila was cagey about everything. When he told Éva he was a professional hockey player, she just nodded. “I’m also a silent partner in a car dealership,” he said. “Oh,” she said, and let it rest. She knew the deal. She saw forty customers a day who were silent partners and business consultants, and all of them paid in stacks of small notes. They were probably all crooks, but Attila was different. The fact that he wouldn’t talk much about himself spoke volumes. All she needed to know was Transylvania; to her, his birthplace explained everything. She, too, had grown up in a place that she regularly avoided mentioning, a mostly Roma village called Gergely in the eastern Hungarian plains near the Romanian border. She wasn’t poverty-stricken as a child, nor was her family Gypsy. The Fodors lived on a small farm with pigs and chickens; her father owned two general stores. But she knew too well that to be mistaken for or associated with Gypsies could destroy your hope for a better life. It had taken all of Éva’s strength to leave home at seventeen and, against her father’s wishes, head to Budapest. She put herself through night school to become a teacher while working days as a teaching assistant, barmaid, and clothing-store saleswoman. She was briefly married and bore a son, and when the divorce was finalized, she found a contact willing to sponsor her passage to America. She lived for eight months in a Brooklyn studio apartment, working in a Hungarian-owned wig factory that produced hairpieces mostly for Hasidic Jewish women. But after it became clear that she wasn’t going to be able to stay permanently, she moved back to Budapest and cobbled together enough money to buy the twocar stall on Dob Street and turn it into the Quick Wash. Thanks to the growing population of people in Budapest like Attila, she found that she could make a decent living wiping down pleather. With the money from the wash, she also opened a little clothing boutique in the Budapest suburb where she lived with her son in a small apartment.

  When Attila found out that Éva also had a clothing store, he asked if she would help him pick out some clothes. He showed up at the appointed time with Bubu and Karcsi in tow, wanting to know if she might be able to give them a discount. “You know, Bunny,” he whisper
ed, using his new nickname for her, “they have nothing.” That, Éva believed, was the real Attila Ambrus. Not the guy who used to screech up to her curb and yell, “I need it done in an hour. I don’t care what it costs.”

  Eventually, Attila’s flirtation with Éva turned into a casual romance. He never let her stay at his place, but he spent a few nights a week in her two-story apartment building in the quiet, undeveloped Budapest suburbs. He taught her how to play tennis. She cooked him what he professed were among the best bean soups and pig’s feet he’d ever tasted. And when Attila’s uncle László arrived from Transylvania, Éva agreed to give him a job as the night watchman for her car wash. Sometimes Attila had to remind himself to keep Éva at a safe distance.

  For the first time in his life, Attila had a whole crew of admirers. Aside from Éva and the ankle-nipping Gabi, there was also Gabi’s father, UTE coach George Orbán, who was utterly enthralled by his backup goaltender. Coach Orbán had been around hockey a long time and he’d never seen someone as dedicated as Attila. Even though Attila had almost never seen game action, Orbán could see he was a gifted athlete who kept himself in top physical condition. Plus, despite the fact that Attila didn’t even request a paycheck, he was the only member of Office and Home who never skipped a practice. As a former goalie himself, Orbán took an interest in helping Attila develop his skills: playing the angles, staying in the net. He even contemplated appointing Attila team captain, but it just wouldn’t have made sense. Goalies weren’t usually captains, and Attila wasn’t even the starter. But Orbán enthusiastically supported Attila in his unofficial role as the Office and Home disciplinarian, and he got Attila into the games whenever he could.