Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  In several hundred spins of the roulette wheel, there went the bar, the family, the quiet suburban life. Of course he was sorry, but as much as he’d legitimately considered settling down with Éva, he couldn’t help that it freaked him out. That, or he was simply a schlemiel. But he knew from experience that relationships didn’t always work out. And when he’d thought about it, co-owning a bar in the ’burbs didn’t seem particularly more secure than his robbery career, which at least he could control on his own. In some ways the prospect of pouring drinks for people was even more frightening to Attila than robbing banks. He wanted to be somebody, not somebody’s bartender. The Black and White Club wasn’t for him, either. Attila gambled instead that his best chance of making something of himself was to continue pursuing work as a modern-day bandit.

  If there was anything for which Attila had a particularly well honed talent, it was recognizing the forces and tides of his environment. Several years of religiously reading the newspapers and running from the law had made him an expert on the Hungarian People’s predilections. In the current milieu, American pop star Madonna’s book Sex was being translated and marketed for the Hungarian market as Slut. The International Bodyguard and Secret Service Association had recently held its first-ever meeting in Budapest and proposed inaugurating a biannual Olympic-style Bodyguard Games. And just in time for the country’s millicentennial celebrations—eleven hundred years since Árpád made his famous ride—the mafia was beginning to kill people with car bombs, more than thirty of which would go off like fireworks around the capital that year. People were needy and scared—and there was no one left to believe in.

  Broke and single again after Éva promptly dumped him, Attila got to thinking. With a little extra planning, he could easily be a prime-time player. The table was set just right. Hungary would soon be rejoicing in the gentleman bandit’s return.

  László Juszt’s program began as it always did, with a suspenseful drum-and-bass soundtrack playing over a blue-backgrounded montage of slow-motion images traced from footage of SWAT team–like police shoot-outs and car chases. Then the words innocent until proven guilty appeared in yellow letters across the screen. After the opening sequence, Juszt appeared, bespectacled and bemused, in a double-breasted suit behind a podium in a monitor-filled newsroom. “Good evening. I kiss your hand,” he said, using the old-fashioned Hungarian address that was his trademark.

  Juszt informed his guests that he had landed a special guest that night whose profile was on the rise: Colonel Lajos Varjú, who had been promoted to chief of all of Budapest’s robbery divisions in January. The colonel, Juszt told his viewers, had been busy the past couple of weeks chasing the robber whom Kriminális viewers would remember from a segment the previous summer, when the thief had been caught on camera in a Lajos Varjú getup cleaning out a bank on Lajos Street. After eight months off, the bandit had re-emerged and knocked off the post office next to the Gellért Hotel, walking out with nearly 10 million forints ($65,000), a new personal record.

  Of particular note during this robbery, however, was that the thief had entered the bank carrying a bouquet of red roses, which he’d handed to one of the tellers before announcing that he was there to rob the place. He’d then rounded up the six female employees in the back room and told them, “I don’t want to cause anyone trouble, but no one can leave the room for two minutes. Viszlát.” Bye. When Lajos’s men arrived, they found the familiar hand-lettered sign on the front door: CLOSED FOR TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES. PLEASE EXCUSE THE INCONVENIENCE.

  Before beginning his interview with the robbery chief, Juszt gave his audience what he called a “robber’s-eye view” of the day in question. He rolled a segment that took viewers on a narrated tour of the heist, beginning at the famous fish restaurant Szeged, where the thief had been seen drinking whiskey for an hour before the robbery, then on to the flower stand next to the Gellért Hotel, where he’d bought the roses, and then to the post office for the main event.

  When the piece ended, the camera returned to Juszt, now seated on a soundstage in a leather armchair. After he welcomed his guest, the shot jumped to Lajos, smiling uncomfortably in the hot seat, dressed as if he were there to screen-test for a role in Miami Vice. A pair of tinted, gold-rimmed aviator-style glasses sat on his nose, above which his bushy eyebrows sprouted like alfalfa. A silver clip held his royal blue tie to a lime green shirt.

  “There have been seventeen post office robberies in the country since January, a total sum of twenty-three million forints [$150,000],” Juszt began. “Nine of them happened in Budapest on a Thursday. Are we correct in our hypothesis that if it’s a Thursday, it’s a post robbery?”

  Lajos leaned over his right elbow, awkwardly perching his broad head on his hand. “If you look at just these eight or nine, probably, but it’s not always the case…,” he said, sweating under the set’s bright lights. This wasn’t Lajos’s thing, television, but if it might help solve the Lone Wolf case, he’d do anything.

  Juszt turned the discussion to the serial robber, steering Lajos head-on into the question he’d been waiting all week to stick to the robbery chief: “Do you have any idea who this guy is?”

  “Yes,” Lajos said, “we’re not so stupid as to have no idea.” He paused as if considering how to sum up the preponderance of nothing he knew. “He’s done not only post offices but also banks,” he continued. “Over the past several years, he’s taken more than twenty million forints [$130,000] himself.”

  Juszt leaned in toward his guest and, referring to the bouquet of roses and the fact that the thief had previously disguised himself as Lajos, asked, “Is it annoying that he’s playing a game with the police?”

  Lajos sat back in his chair. How should he put it? “At the beginning it was annoying,” he said. “Then it became very annoying. And now,” he said, turning his right palm up, bobbing his head and rolling his eyes, “it’s extremely annoying.”

  Juszt turned back to the camera. “We would like to offer something to the perpetrator,” he said, whom he correctly assumed was watching. “If you’re going to do a job next Thursday, we’ll have a crew standing by to cover it.”

  Things were getting interesting again for Attila. One morning he made sure to arrive early for a weight-training session at UTE and pretended to be reading the newspapers at his locker when his teammates arrived. BANK ROBBERY WITH A BOUQUET OF FLOWERS was Blikk’s front page headline; YEAR OF THE ROBBERS, announced Kurír. “Look at this guy,” Attila said, pointing to his heroic portrayal in the papers. “He’s making fools of the police.” Indeed, his teammates agreed, the city’s “gentleman robber” was an outstanding chap. In fact, it was somewhat thrilling just to be able to say so. Under communism, supporting a criminal was just as unthinkable as reading about a likable lawbreaker in the state-controlled media.

  Attila’s comeback had been perfect—except for one little thing. He couldn’t take any credit for it. What a deal. Of all things, his career choice required a commitment to the one he’d spent a lifetime running from: anonymity.

  It was 1996, and once again a specter was haunting Hungary—the specter of another UTE hockey season. Attila’s old friend George Pék had accepted a plea from an emasculated General Bereczky to come back and coach, but after the previous season’s Panther-led debacle, it wasn’t going to be an easy assignment. The team was negotiating with the cough drop manufacturer Halls for a new sponsorship, and whatever it was worth would constitute UTE’s entire budget. The Interior Ministry, which had continued to offer a minimal level of financial support for UTE up to that point, had severed the cord entirely. If anyone thought the locker room smelled now, wait until the next time the pipes burst.

  Needless to say, the players who remained at UTE were running out of reasons for doing so. Among them was Gabi Orbán, who still lived with his parents in an apartment building not far from Attila’s place and was just as clueless as to how he would ever be able to afford to move out. Well, he still had one idea.

&n
bsp; One summer morning after a workout, Gabi persuaded Attila to give him a ride home. “I’d do anything for a car like this,” Gabi suggested as they rocketed through the streets in Attila’s new red Alfa Romeo.

  “Anything?” Attila asked.

  At exactly nine o’clock in the morning two Sundays later, twenty-two-year-old Gabi Orbán was standing outside Attila’s building. He’d arisen at 6:00 a.m., told his parents he was going for a run, and run he did—straight to the bus to the no. 61 tram that snaked south through the grass-lined middle-class suburb to the XI District, where his father’s favorite goalie lived. Gabi had been standing there at his life’s crossroads for over an hour. He knew Attila’s position on punctuality, and he was in no mood to run laps.

  Before Attila agreed to share his secret with Gabi, Attila asked him to spend two weeks thinking about whether he was really ready to change his life. Gabi spent the fortnight sleeplessly shuffling through images like a school filmstrip on choosing a career: drug smuggling… maybe… contract killing… he’d prefer not… stealing cars… that could be something. The common illustration that followed each clip was a smiling Gabi seated behind the wheel of a Mercedes 190E. Gabi was more than ready. He already felt guilty.

  He looked at the wall of buzzers outside Attila’s building. Panther had said his was the bottom one on the left. Of the six, it was the only one without a name next to it. Gabi rang and was buzzed in. When he got to Attila’s door, down a small flight of stairs to the left, Panther’s hazel eyes were peering out at him from behind it. Without a word, Attila pulled open the door and Gabi stepped into Panther’s secret world—a little too quickly. Attila, wearing an Adidas sweatsuit, put his hand against Gabi’s chest like a cop, stopping him in his tracks.

  “Shoes,” Attila said.

  “What?” Gabi asked.

  “Take off your shoes.”

  Once appropriately outfitted, Gabi entered Panther’s dwelling, a cool and dark room with only a narrow ray of natural light streaming in from the kitchen. A soccer game flickered on the large television in the corner. The red-and-black-checkered carpet was spotless, and there was no Uncle László to be found. (Éva had been too good-hearted to fire Attila’s uncle from her car wash after the pub debacle, but László was also accustomed to Attila’s occasional requests to clear out for a day or two so he could “entertain a lady.”) On the wall was the black bearskin and Attila’s favorite painting, which he had bought in Transylvania with his pelt money in 1992, portraying a peasant farmhouse on the plateau at sunset.

  “You want a drink?” Attila asked, pulling out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red from behind the white flower-patterned cover that draped his antique mahogany study table.

  “No,” Gabi said, sitting down on a wooden chair. “I don’t drink.” Not to mention that it was 9:00 a.m.

  Attila poured himself a tall glass of whiskey and took a gulp. “So are you ready to hear about this, then?” he said.

  “Yes,” Gabi said.

  “Then there’s no going back,” Attila said.

  “I’m ready,” said Gabi.

  Attila went into the bathroom, from which Gabi could hear him rummaging around in plastic bags. When Attila returned, he was holding several newspapers in his hand. He opened a copy of the tabloid Reform to a centerfold where a double-sided story appeared, illustrated by half a dozen police sketches. He said nothing as he set the paper down on the study table in front of Gabi.

  Gabi looked over the photos and the story of the man the newspaper was calling “Budapest’s own private bank robber.”

  “You want to do something like this?” Gabi asked.

  “Look again,” Attila said.

  Gabi turned his eyes back to the paper. “What?” he asked.

  “That’s me,” Attila said, pointing at the sketches. “I’m the one they’re talking about.”

  Gabi couldn’t believe it. He looked at the drawings again, but they looked nothing like Panther. He turned back to see Attila bouncing up and down on his toes like a child who’s just been told the toy store is about to open. Attila then dropped into a tuck and somersaulted across his living room until he hit the far wall, then reversed his direction and tumbled all the way back. “It’s me!” he shouted from his back, kicking his legs in the air. “It’s me!”

  Sixteen

  Having disclosed his secret to the coach’s kid, Attila was stricken by his own stupidity. It had been three years since he had let anyone into his shadowy world, and his memories of his two accomplice experiences—with Karcsi and with his cousin László—weren’t particularly reassuring. But at least with them, Attila felt relatively comfortable that they wouldn’t blab—or that even if they did, they would only sound like another incomprehensible Székely spinning fairy tales. Gabi, on the other hand, knew a lot of people in Budapest. And it wasn’t difficult to imagine the little squirt bragging around town about his new career in the limelight.

  After mulling it over, Attila decided he needed to come up with a litmus test for Gabi’s trustworthiness, even if it was a smidgen late. He invented a new birthday for Bubu and a coming-home party for another teammate and invited Gabi out for a series of boozy nights on the town. He made sure to bring along many hot women, cool teammates, and the city’s celebrity hockey fan, Gangsta Zoli—the only Hungarian rapper (who was at work on a soon-to-be-bestselling album, Helldorado, about what he called “the wild, wild East”). Then Attila would see to it that Gabi got blitzed and would follow him around to see if he talked. It wouldn’t be a scientific assessment, but it would have to do.

  On their first evening, at the LeRoy Café, Gabi, intoxicated not only by the attention he was receiving from Attila, picked up a woman whom he thought he could impress by downing several triple shots of pear pálinka. After a few rounds he put one of his shot glasses back on the bar and tried to sit back on his barstool but missed, leaving Attila in a familiar predicament: lifting an unconscious partner off the floor. He carried Gabi out to his car and drove him home. But Gabi didn’t talk out of turn that night or on any of the others. He’d passed the test.

  A few weeks later, in the deadening heat of an August hill sprint, Attila told Gabi he’d pick him up at a bus stop a few blocks from the stadium after practice. When Gabi arrived at the appointed station, Attila collected him and drove them to a busy intersection in southern Buda, where a post office sat in the middle of a diagonal row of corner shops.

  Attila nodded ahead. Gabi looked across the street. “You want to do a post office?” he asked with obvious disappointment.

  “You’re not ready for a bank,” Attila said.

  “Don’t I need a gun?”

  “Leave everything to me,” Attila said. “Be at my apartment at six a.m. sharp next Thursday. And don’t shave between now and then.”

  When Gabi arrived the following week, Attila’s formerly spotless apartment looked like a costume shop on the eve of a masquerade ball. There were wigs, glasses, hats, coats, and ties all over the checkered carpet and the bed, which hadn’t been folded up. There was also a big plate of smoked sausages, raw onions, goat cheese, and several rashers of bacon, which Attila paid to have shipped from Uncle Dénes in Fitód. “See this, Gabi,” Attila said, sitting down at his small table with a glass of whiskey. “Soon you’re going to be eating from the bowl of life with the biggest spoon.”

  After they ate, Attila went to the kitchen to get his notebook out of the oven. He came back and opened it to the page featuring the post office they had observed from the car the previous week. Gabi looked in amazement at Attila’s densely inscribed book.

  “This is a serious business, Gabi,” Attila said. “Don’t forget that.”

  Attila had rated the Fehérvári Street post office a 2 because of its distance from the police station and its surplus of worthy escape routes. Gabi’s job, Attila explained, was to wait in line for a teller until Attila found the right moment to begin, then pull his gun at Attila’s word: rablás (robbery). From then on, Gabi wa
s to guard the door and keep track of the time. Anyone trying to enter was to be allowed in and then immediately made to get on the floor. No one was allowed to leave, for any reason. At three minutes Gabi was to yell out the time—but never was he to use Attila’s name or nickname.

  “How long do we have?” Attila asked.

  “Three minutes.”

  “How long?”

  “Three minutes.”

  “Say it a hundred times.”

  While Gabi reiterated his instructions, Attila went into the bathroom. His stomach was bothering him. After a while he returned to the living room and dangled a gun in front of his partner. “No matter what, you don’t shoot at anyone,” Attila said, yanking it back just as Gabi reached for it. “Understand? If anything, you shoot at the ceiling.”

  “So the idea is to create a panic, right?” Gabi said, snatching the gun.

  “No,” Attila said, annoyed. “Listen to me, Gabi. If you create a panic, the situation gets out of your hands. You always have to be in control. This is very important. You have to be strong enough and fast enough to scare them, but they must always believe you are in complete control of the situation. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “That means you don’t use the gun.”

  “What do I do with it?”

  “Point.”

  At 1:00 p.m. Attila told Gabi to go to the bathroom and shave everything but his mustache. “And shave your sideburns—all the way to the top,” Attila said. That way the color of the wig wouldn’t clash with Gabi’s real hair. While Gabi was in the bathroom, Attila emptied the bullets from his pupil’s gun.