Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  And to think he’d actually been almost giddy after the Whiskey Robber’s last strike. The Grassalkovich Street OTP that the robber and his partner had pilfered for the second time was one of the banks that Lajos had successfully persuaded to store marked bills in its safe—and sure enough, the bait was among the 25 million swiped forints. All Lajos had to do, he’d somehow assumed, was be patient and eventually he would reel in his robber. He was, of course, mistaken. When he arrived at the bank and asked the manager what system would be employed to detect the bills when they re-entered circulation, the manager told him simply, “Neither the OTP nor the post offices have the technical capacity or human resources to do such a thing.”

  He’d then interviewed the robbery’s twelve uninjured victims, among whom was Ms. Plóder, a seventy-five-year-old woman who had entered the bank while the crime was in progress. Ms. Plóder described being rudely ordered by one of the perpetrators to get on the floor, which she naturally refused. “I will not,” she had told one of the robbers. “And don’t ever talk to me like that again.” The young perpetrator, apparently the Whiskey Robber’s accomplice, had then apologized and helped her into an armchair. “It almost seemed like a robbery,” Ms. Plóder told Lajos. Then she opened her purse and offered Lajos a small gratuity for his kindness.

  It wasn’t the first time Lajos had been treated like wait staff. Everyone in Hungary knew how badly the police were paid. But he hated the presumption of helplessness. Unfortunately, the kind of tips Lajos wanted were harder to come by and often worth even less. For example, it was a call from one of the casino managers that had led Lajos to don a wig and makeup in search of the roulette-playing taxi driver. But the cabbie’s fingerprints did not match the few prints the police had managed to collect from the Whiskey Robber.

  Despite the trail of evidence and phone book’s worth of tips Lajos had collected on the case in the past two years alone—the videotape, the audiotape, János Kis and Stuttering Józsi, the wig, the rare-edition Levis hat—he was no closer to knowing the identity of the thief than he was when the series began in 1993, twenty-two robberies and more than four years ago. Everything, including the shiny new building in which he worked, was beginning to make Lajos feel like a joke.

  Given his team’s investigative track record, he decided his best chance to catch the robber would be in the act, which at the current rate was almost once a month. He signed up for a course offered by the FBI, a series of weekly trainings role-playing bank-heist scenarios at the Citicorp bank in downtown’s touristy Vörösmarty Square across from the famous Hapsburgera Café Gerbeaud. The rest of the week, Lajos and his team patrolled the top projected Whiskey Robber targets both in and out of Dance Instructor’s concentric circles, stopping in to make sure the employees were properly prepared for their impending melodrama. And they waited for the call to come. But the summer of 1997 passed into the fall and fall became the holiday season, and there was no sign of the Whiskey Robber.

  Twenty-one

  For just 5 million forints ($27,300) in cash, Attila had bought a one-bedroom town house with a small backyard on suburban Rezeda Street in the XX District, straight across the river to the east from his old place on busy Villányi Street. Rezeda was a quiet, unassuming middle-class block in south Pest, all the way on the opposite side of town from his partner’s opulent new digs in the Buda hills. But to Attila, who had never lived anywhere with more than one room since he occupied the couch in his aunt and uncle’s apartment in Csíkszereda, his new home was luxurious enough.

  It was also the first time he was officially living with a woman. And with his winless hockey season—and, dare we say, his robbery career—over, Attila was prepared to make a real transition. It wouldn’t be like last time with Éva. He went shopping with Betty for new furniture—an L-shaped couch, modern Formica dressers, big-screen television, an expensive stereo system—and even let Betty do the decorating. Eschewing the peasant motif of Attila’s Villányi Street pad, Betty selected pastel paints for the walls and a pink carpet. For the small courtyard in back, she went with sculpted fir trees and a gas barbecue grill. It was no place for a bandit. When Betty was done, Attila went out and bought a shark head and mounted it on the peach-colored living-room wall. He was trying. These were big changes.

  As summer arrived, there were still no UTE workout sessions to attend, because the team was in the process of being taken over by new management and coaches. Even General Bereczky had finally left the team. Attila had never had so much time on his hands. He and Betty took another luxury beach trip in June to the Seychelles, where they talked about having kids but agreed instead to raise an animal. When they returned from the trip, they bought Don, a Bernese mountain dog whom they named for the Russian river that flows through the mountains south of Moscow into the Black Sea.

  Attila stayed away from the newspapers and tried to stay out of trouble. He couldn’t go to the Cats Club anyway, because his contact there, co-owner Gyula Zubovics, hadn’t survived his car bombing that May. Attila and Betty puttered around the food court and multiplex of the first American-style shopping center in Eastern Europe, Budapest’s $60 million Duna Plaza, built on a former Soviet military base. At night they hosted Gabi and Marian and Bubu and some of Attila’s other teammates for barbecues. Sometimes they went downtown to the gay bars, where the good jazz and rock bands played.

  But despite the loss of Cats, Budapest was still a city with more casinos—nine—than anywhere in the world except Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and London. And on some days Attila couldn’t resist their call. He would tell Betty he was going out for an errand and end up at the roulette wheel all night, returning the next morning drunk and despondent, pleading with Betty to forgive him for his “illness.”

  The real problem was that Attila was hedging his bets. What if Betty left him? What if he were arrested several years down the line when they had kids to worry about? Or what if those fears were just a distraction meant to keep him from getting too deep into a relationship he didn’t know how to have and a life that was quickly becoming very average?

  As the summer wore on, Attila began picking fights with Betty, once losing his temper upon sighting a spiderweb in the bathroom she was supposed to have cleaned. Betty knew something was wrong, but Attila swore it didn’t have to do with her. One night she awoke from bed to find Attila on the kitchen floor with Don, crying with the dog in his arms. Attila didn’t understand exactly what was going on with him, but he surely did know one thing: he hadn’t thrown all of his guns into the Danube River that day with Gabi. And even though he no longer lived at Villányi Street 112, he’d kept the apartment, where two of his pistols and his robbery encyclopedia remained in the bottom of the oven.

  The hockey season couldn’t come soon enough. It was impossible to say what kind of team would emerge from the ashes, but at least it would keep Attila occupied. At the end of August, when Népsport published the league’s rosters for the season, Attila made a special trip to Frici’s newsstand to check out how his club was shaping up. It took several minutes of scanning the paper before he understood what he saw. After toiling for seven years as an unpaid goalie who’d almost never missed even a practice, no one had bothered to let Attila know he was no longer a member of the team. His name did not appear on the UTE roster.

  December 1997

  Attila’s metallic gray Mitsubishi Pajero wound around a final turn on the thin dirt road and down a small hill to an opening in the trees. There in the clearing was Gabi’s nearly finished Budakeszi dream house, an A-frame, dark wood Swiss chalet with a wraparound balcony on the second floor that looked out onto a December-brown valley. Attila pulled his car into a paved square driveway and parked it next to Gabi’s truck.

  “Don’t you love the air out here,” Gabi said, coming around the corner from the back with Marian. Marian said hello to Attila, who was wearing his black leather jacket over a pair of OshKosh B’Gosh overalls, then kissed Gabi good-bye and climbed into her apple red Opel to ru
n some errands while the former teammates caught up.

  Winter was on its way and a cold wind was blowing through the trees. “Let’s go inside,” Gabi said.

  Gabi hadn’t seen Attila since Attila’s thirtieth-birthday dinner in early October at the Chinese restaurant that had been blown up in a mafia hit the following week. Attila seemed okay then, but Gabi couldn’t say for sure because there were nine of them dining there—Attila, Betty, Gabi, Marian, Éva, Bubu, the grocery clerk Zsuzsa and her daughter, Sylvia, with whom Attila was still friends, and Sylvia’s policeman boyfriend. (Betty had made Attila a cake shaped like a stack of U.S. $100 bills.) The only thing Gabi had gleaned from the evening about his former accomplice was the news that Bubu had scored Attila a goalie position with UTE’s rival, FTC.

  The former partners went through the sliding glass door into the basement, where Gabi and Marian had been living while the construction on the main level was being completed. Piles of dirty laundry were clumped in mounds on expensive, colorful Persian rugs.

  “I don’t know how you live like this,” Attila said, looking around the bar area for a whiskey. There were boxes of old pizza sitting on the counter. The refrigerator smelled like rotten fruit and sour milk.

  “It’s just temporary,” Gabi said. “It should be done in a couple of months.”

  Gabi had forgotten to buy whiskey. He apologized, poured two vodkas on the rocks, and brought the bottle over to the kitchen table, where they sat down.

  Aside from living in squalor, Gabi seemed to be doing well. He had traded his BMW for a Dodge Stealth before he got the truck that was sitting in the driveway. The Stealth was like a spaceship, he said. Once, he was pulled over by the police, who only wanted to see how fast he could go. But he had to get rid of it; it was costing him a fortune in gas. And he needed a truck anyway, to ferry construction supplies to the house. This was his life in a nutshell.

  Attila filled Gabi in about life with FTC. “I’m sure it’s worse than when you and your dad were there,” he said. Gabi could imagine. The three things everyone knew about the Chicky Panther were that he was filthy rich, he’d had two of the worst seasons in Hungarian hockey history, and he was a career UTE guy. That wouldn’t go over well at FTC, where the abhorrence of all things UTE was still so strong that in May, during an FTC-UTE soccer match, FTC fans set the UTE stadium on fire. Even Bubu couldn’t protect Attila from that kind of odium. For the first time in years, Attila had to deal with being called a bozgor—a “worthless homeless guy”—by both his opponents and his gracious new teammates. And the FTC gang invented a new insult just for Attila that he’d never heard before: they called him a bocskoros, a slang word for a Transylvanian-style sandal.

  Attila acted as if he found the whole situation funny. Laughing, Attila told Gabi that he’d gotten so mad on a recent road trip when a teammate claimed Attila was in his bus seat that Attila got out on the M7 highway and hitchhiked home, skipping the game. But he didn’t care, Attila said. He had other plans. “I’m thinking of opening up a 24-hour liquor store,” he told Gabi. “Can you believe they don’t have one in south Buda?”

  “No,” Gabi said. “Really?”

  Both sufficiently drunk by now, Gabi figured it was as good a time to ask as any. Betty had called him a couple of weeks earlier to tell him that Attila was on a gambling binge. It was a sensitive topic, Gabi well knew, but Betty had asked for his help. Plus he had his own reasons for wanting to know if it was true. “So, have you been seeing the casinos?” Gabi asked.

  “Just a little,” Attila acknowledged, filling his glass with vodka again. “Easy come, easy go.”

  “Don’t you think it’s suspicious with you spending so much money there?” Gabi asked, trying not to flinch.

  Attila put his glass back down on the table, empty. “Gabi, don’t keep your money in your pillowcase,” he said. “Have as many experiences as you can. That they can never take away.”

  Gabi could see where his partner was going with the conversation, and as much as it scared him to acknowledge, part of him missed the life. Growing up in the Orbán family, any respect and praise was always directed toward his dad and his elder brother, the goddam “Goal King.” Gabi’s partnership with Attila was the most successful team he had ever been part of. On the other hand, Gabi now had a big house, nice cars. His brother didn’t have that. Gabi was even thinking about asking Marian to marry him. He wanted a family, too; the whole package. He and Attila had had too many close calls. He didn’t want to risk everything all over again. “Betty seems like the type of woman who would be great with kids,” Gabi said, trying to change the subject.

  “Marian’s not what’s going to make you happy,” Attila said, getting up and going over to the sliding glass door. After a minute he came out with it. “I think we should do another job.”

  “I’m going to sell the house,” Gabi countered. “I think I can get at least twenty million forints [$109,000] for it. When I do, I’m going to give you some of the money. You helped me, and I’m going to help you.”

  “You’ll never sell it until it’s completely finished,” Attila said, returning to the table. “You’re going to need a lot more money to finish this place. I already have the plan.”

  “I don’t know,” said Gabi. “You see what’s going on.”

  The papers were full of crime news, portraying a city falling into the grasp of a violent and unforgiving underworld. As evidence mounted that the Russian mob was controlling Hungary’s billion-dollar-a-year oil-importation industry, it seemed as though every new purported witness to the corruption was being silenced; three Hungarian cops investigating the case became victims of suspicious suicides. Another story that led to a strident outcry from several foreign embassies in Budapest involved two Danish businessmen who had picked up two Hungarian women and taken them to eat at a Budapest nightclub. When the dinner bill came, it was for 1 million forints ($4,300), which the Danes stopped protesting when a battalion of muscle-bound men arrived at their table to collect. Crime was becoming an epidemic. Even the hot dog buffet at the Keleti train station was damaged by a hand grenade.

  With national elections just six months away, the government was making pronouncements about strict new national law-and-order programs, which themselves had provoked new violence. The offices of all five of Hungary’s political parties (and Budapest’s mayor’s office) were threatened and in several cases attacked by crude explosive devices that failed to kill anyone but succeeded in helping vault safety past the economy as the public’s number one concern. It also made the Whiskey Robber look like the Tooth Fairy.

  “We can do Grassalkovich again,” Attila said, referring to the OTP in the southern industrial part of the city that they’d already robbed twice.

  “You’re crazy,” Gabi said. “They must have a cop on duty there full-time by now. They’re going to be waiting for us.”

  “Fine,” Attila said, smashing his fist down on the table and standing up. “I can get someone else. But in four or five years, I’m not going to take the blame for the gigs you did!” Gabi watched him leave, raging. Betty would not be pleased.

  The next day Attila phoned his partner. He wanted to apologize, he told Gabi. “I’d like to take you for an ice cream,” he said. Attila’s bluster the previous afternoon had been just that. He’d read about the police’s new Dolphin motorcycle unit that could respond twice as fast to calls; he needed Gabi. But by the time they met for dessert, Gabi didn’t need any convincing. He’d thought about it and decided that Attila was right. The garden in back of his house had been swept away in a heavy rain, and it would take more money than he had to refurbish. He was in.

  Twenty-two

  February 1998

  Lajos sat in his office, holding two new case files in his hands and no new people in his custody. Was it possible? he asked himself. The crimes in question bore every stamp of the Whiskey Robber—two men, good looks, bad wigs, hats—everything but the gunfire.

  The old Lajos would
have found it inconceivable that the first robbery had even occurred at all. He’d been conducting constant business-hours drive-by surveillance of the Grassalkovich Street OTP. Not only had it just been robbed again by two men in Whiskey Robber-esque costumes, but this time one of the perpetrators had squeezed off three shots from a Parabellum pistol. None of them hit anyone; they were all fired at the video camera, prompting, according to witnesses, an argument between the two robbers about following directions. Could the Whiskey Robber’s accomplice have forgotten his spray paint?

  Then, six weeks later, on February 5, 1998, two men with similar physiques, without masks, and said to be wearing hairpieces robbed another city OTP. Again gunfire, though only a single targeted shot this time that destroyed the now serving board. What really set the robbery apart, however, was the shot that didn’t go off: after taking out the service board, the perpetrators had pulled out a wired explosive device and placed it on the counter, announcing that it was a remote-controlled bomb. Actually, it was two premium Cuban cigars wrapped with transistor radio wire to a battery, a bullet cartridge, and the face of a digital watch. But as a bluff, it had worked to perfection. If these gigs were the work of the Whiskey Robber, he’d certainly shown a willingness to up the ante.