by Adam LeBor
‘Yours or his?’
‘His. I don’t have any. I don’t like it. It makes me jittery. And Eszter told me no drugs, especially tonight.’
Balthazar took out an evidence bag, held it open over the edge of the cabinet and swept the white powder inside. He sealed the bag, then placed it in his back pocket. ‘And the rest?’
Kinga shrugged. ‘Dunno. Maybe he used it all.’ Her voice brightened. ‘Perhaps that’s what he died of.’
‘Nice try. Where’s the bag, or box, or whatever it was in?’
‘I told you. I don’t know.’
‘Try again.’
She pulled her robe tighter. ‘What’s this about? I thought you were here to sort things out. Not accuse me of taking drugs. I already told you, I don’t like it,’ she said, her voice rising in indignation. ‘Look, I know what you think of me. I’m only doing this for a couple of years, to help my family and get some money together. Then I’m moving to London. Lots of my friends are there already. I’ll get a proper job, with a law firm.’
Balthazar stepped nearer. Kinga was a bad liar. ‘I’m sure you will. But meanwhile, I know someone who got six months for having a single joint in their sock. Coke is at least double that, probably triple. And if there’s enough to deal, then it’s years.’ He paused, looked her in the eye. ‘And you can forget any ideas about a legal career.’
She glared at him, walked over to the top drawer of the cabinet, reached inside to a corner at the back, took out a small transparent bag, silently handed it over. He weighed it in his hand. At least ten or twelve grams, about €1,000 worth of cocaine. The cost of a night in the VIP salon, half of which went to Kinga. He placed the bag on top of the cabinet next to the Viagra pills. ‘Anything else you want to tell me?’
Kinga shook her head, trying hard to meet and hold Balthazar’s gaze. Far too hard. He looked at the dead man again. Something about him… he stepped nearer the bed and looked again at the man’s right hand. He took out his pen again, lifted the wrist and looked closer. He was right. The flesh on the middle finger was indented at the bottom, a pale strip a quarter of an inch wide.
Balthazar lowered the dead man’s wrist and turned around. Kinga was watching him. He asked, ‘Really? From a dead man?’
She blushed. ‘But I didn’t…’
He held his hand out, said nothing. She reached inside her gown pocket, handed him a large gold ring, with an onyx stone mounted in the centre. ‘Who would know? Maybe it fell off. We could sell it, split whatever we get.’
Balthazar stayed silent, tilted his head to one side, his hand still outstretched. ‘Trying to bribe a policeman? That wasn’t your smartest move, Kinga, especially for a law student. That ring is evidence. Your prints are on it now.’
Her face fell. ‘Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. Can’t you wipe it down?’
‘Maybe. Tell me again what happened,’ said Balthazar. ‘And no more BS.’
Kinga shrugged. ‘OK. It was just the usual stuff. He took the pills, snorted the coke. We did it for a while, nothing special. Then he slept for a couple of hours. So did I. He woke me up and we started again.’ She gestured at the bed. ‘Like that. He just went on and on. I was getting sore. So I did the ripple. That usually does the trick. He was shouting, so I did it tighter. Then he started groaning and shaking. I thought that was it. I was relieved. My back was hurting.’
‘And after that?’ asked Balthazar.
‘At first I thought he had, you know… finished. He stopped moving. But completely. He felt really heavy. When I turned around, his head was resting on my shoulders. He wasn’t saying anything and he had gone all floppy. I slid out from underneath. He fell forward and he stayed like that.’
She smiled and looked him in the eye, let the wrap slide open an inch or two. ‘I saw you on the Internet. Arresting that Arab terrorist on Rakoczi Way. That was amazing.’
‘No it wasn’t. That’s my job. Let’s focus on the here and now, Kinga. A man died underneath you. Was he nervous? Agitated?’
Kinga saw that her flirting was not working. She pulled her robe closed. For a moment Balthazar saw her for what she was: a village girl alone in the big city, where her sexual appeal had drawn her into deep and potentially dangerous waters. ‘Did I kill him?’ she asked nervously. ‘Am I in trouble now? I’ve never killed a punter before. What do you think?’
‘I think you should stop talking. Go and clean yourself up and put some clothes on.’
He watched Kinga walk out, glanced again at the dead man and the damp patch on the bedsheets, lost in thought. After three years in the Budapest police murder squad he had seen his share of corpses: shot, bludgeoned, poisoned, half-crushed. He had once found a torso with all four limbs sheared off. The indignity of death, the sudden hollowing-out of a body, the rushing greyness, the void where there was once life but now only stillness, still unsettled him. He looked at the dead man again, had a powerful urge to ease him down onto the bed and straighten his body out. The dead man’s skin was already turning purple, his lips and fingernails going pale as the blood drained away. Balthazar glanced at his watch. It was 6.10 in the morning. Eszter, the brothel’s manager, had called him an hour ago. That meant Abdi had been dead at least that long. In three hours or so rigor mortis would set in. Abdi had to be moved out before then, before his body locked and the smell, bearable now, became overpowering. But where?
For now, though, he needed to find out who Abdi was. The brothel, obviously, did not take its punters’ names and most paid by cash. But most people carried some kind of ID. Balthazar opened the wardrobe door. A blue single-breasted suit was hanging on a clothes hanger, a shirt on another. He ran his fingers through the trouser pockets. There was no sign of a wallet. The fabric had an expensive sheen but Balthazar did not know much about business attire. He had one suit, purchased from Zara for his university graduation, worn at his police coming-out ceremony, his wedding, then more or less untouched. But it was clear from the smooth feel of the dark-blue cloth, the way it rippled through his fingers, that this was an expensive piece of tailoring.
He opened the jacket to see a discreet silk panel on the inside advertising a Savile Row tailor, smiled to himself. Definitely not a Gypsy then: his people preferred well-known labels to advertise their wealth, would wear them like badges or shoulder patches if they could. But there was something stiff inside the jacket’s breast pocket. He took it out and stepped away from the wardrobe. The booklet was a passport, maroon in colour, embossed with Arabic script. He looked at the dead man then back at the photograph page. Abdullah al-Nuri. Born in Saudi Arabia, citizen of Qatar. He looked again at the dead man. It was him, there was no doubt. Balthazar exhaled hard. Mr al-Nuri was bad news. He meant consulates, diplomats, foreign governments who were not bribable. And what if there had been foul play? That meant sealing the room, a proper autopsy and crime scene investigation, sending the evidence for testing. That could not be done on the sly. And that, in turn, meant drawing the attention of the Hungarian authorities.
The door opened a few minutes later and Kinga walked back in. She wore a pink T-shirt and loose blue cotton trousers, her hair loose around her shoulders, her face wiped clean of make-up. The courtesan was gone, replaced by a pretty girl from the countryside. She looked young and innocent, which was, he guessed, part of her appeal.
He asked, ‘Have you been with him before?’
‘No.’
‘Have you seen him before?’
Kinga twisted her wet hair, stepped nearer. She smelled of soap and shampoo. ‘Not here.’
‘Where?’
‘You won’t tell them, will you? That I also work here?’
Balthazar said, ‘Not if you stop talking in riddles.’
Kinga’s face creased in concern. ‘Cause I really don’t want to lose that job. It’s very well paid. And there I don’t have to do anything except smile and serve drinks.’
Balthazar’s voice turned hard. ‘Kinga. Listen to me. There is a dead man in this ro
om. You were the last person to see him, to be with him, while he was alive. If this turns official that will make you a suspect. The prime suspect, actually. So tell me, where did you see him before?’
‘A suspect? But I didn’t do anything.’ Her voice turned tearful. ‘It’s not my fault. They said you would fix everything. And now you want to arrest me.’
Balthazar stepped forward. ‘Please, calm down. Just tell me what happened.’
‘But I did,’ she said, almost pleading. ‘That’s it, everything I know. I promise. Do you know who he is?’
She was, Balthazar thought, telling the truth now. He had seen Kinga lie about the cocaine and she was not very good at it. And she was scared. ‘Yes. His name is Abdullah al-Nuri. So the more you tell me what you know, the faster we can sort this out. Where did you see Mr al-Nuri for the first time?’
‘Last Friday. I was a hostess.’
‘A hostess?’ That word, in Budapest, Balthazar knew, had a multiplicity of meanings.
‘Yes. A proper hostess,’ said Kinga, her voice stronger now. ‘Making conversation. Chatting to people. I can speak English. And French. It was at a reception for Arab investors.’
‘Where?’
‘The Royal Palace, at the Buda Castle.’
Balthazar’s feeling of dread intensified. There was only one person who could use the historic site for entertaining. The call to the ambulance and forensics would definitely have to wait. ‘Who was holding the reception?’
Kinga smiled proudly. ‘The prime minister. The other one. Pal Dezeffy.’
TWO
Bimbo Way, Buda, 6.15 a.m.
Several hills away from the brothel, in a home gymnasium on the crest of Bimbo Way, Attila Ungar was pounding a heavy black punch bag suspended from the ceiling. The slashing guitars, angry lyrics and pounding drums of Arpad, Hungary’s premier nemzeti (national) rock band, filled the room as the bag swung back and forth. The more the singer shouted about the traitors of Trianon, who had taken more than two-thirds of Hungary’s territory in the 1920 eponymous treaty and the filthy komcsis – slang for Communists – the harder Attila punched the heavy bag.
This morning he was working on multiple distance training: a lightning-fast combination of jabs and crosses with arms fully extended, then moving in for some close-quarter hooks and uppercuts, before spinning left and right to deliver a fusillade of high roundhouse kicks, a single one of which would fell most adults. He finished with a barrage of elbow strikes that left the bag swinging back and forth like a hanged man in a windstorm. Panting, drenched in sweat, he stepped back, wiped himself down with a towel and drank almost a litre of water.
Attila had been divorced for more than five years. He lived alone in a spacious flat on the top floor of a four-storey modern development in one of Buda’s most upmarket quarters. The flat cost far more than he would have been able to afford on a policeman’s salary or even that of a Gendarme commander, but nobody was asking awkward questions. The white-walled gym was in the smallest of the three bedrooms. His was the largest, with a king-sized double bed, one half of which was rarely used, except when he called an expensive escort agency. There were two smaller guest bedrooms, one complete with a large flat-screen television and an Xbox, and several drawers full of designer clothes for a sixteen-year-old boy. But Henrik, Attila’s son, rarely visited and had never stayed overnight. Monika, Henrik’s mother, had sent him to a progressive, German-run school that did not believe in disciplining errant pupils. Attila had bought Henrik an iPhone. But the last time they met, briefly in a park, he was still using an old Nokia. To Attila’s horror, he was wearing a rainbow flag T-shirt. He often did not take his father’s calls, and rarely called him back.
A shelf of free weights stood in the opposite corner of the gym, a treadmill on the other side of the room. A small sink and work surface stood near the punch bag. Attila ran the cold tap, cupped his hands under the water, then splashed his face and neck, before towelling himself down again. He glanced at the blender on the work surface, its glass jug a third full with brown, slithery chunks slopping around in a white liquid with pale, floating shreds. The breakfast smoothie – chicken liver and oatmeal in milk and yogurt – could wait.
Much of one wall was taken up with an oversized reproduction of a poster that had appeared around the city a couple of months earlier when the government announced that the Gendarmerie, the pre-war national police force, was about to be reconstituted. The black-and-white poster showed a group of Gendarmes on horseback, wearing their trademark hats with cockades, rounding up a group of Jews in a village in the spring of 1944. The Gendarmes were laughing, the Jews looked terrified. Overlaid on the photograph, in heavy black ink, were the words: ‘No return to 1944, no to the new Gendarmerie’. But the poster, part of a campaign by activists and opposition politicians of all political stripes, had not worked. The new Gendarmerie had been on the streets for a month or so, and complaints were already pouring in from human rights groups about their heavy-handed tactics. Few expected the complaints to have much traction – the Gendarmerie, with its hazy mandate to ‘protect national order’ and ‘guard the dignity of the government and Hungarian nation’ reported directly to the prime minister. The usual oversight bodies – the ombudsman, Parliament’s human rights committee – had no power over the new force.
Attila filled up a water bottle and walked out onto the long wrap-around terrace that encircled most of the flat. He stood there for several moments with his eyes closed, enjoying the cool fresh air, waiting till his heart slowed and his breathing calmed. The modern brutalist blocks of Deli, Budapest’s southern station, sprawled in the centre of the low ground, further downtown, the railway tracks splaying out like the limbs of an octopus. For a moment he was an eight-year-old boy again, taking the train from Deli to Siofok on the south shore of Lake Balaton, excited and overjoyed to be going on his first family holiday with his parents and younger brother. Until the memory slid, as it always did, into a vision of his father, Zeno, drunk at the hotel, screaming abuse at the government, the Communist Party, the whole stinking system, smashing his plate against the floor and the manager threatening to call the police unless they paid and left immediately. They did and returned home to Csepel Island on the outskirts of Budapest. There were no more holidays after that. His father was arrested at dawn the next day. They did not see him for six months, only heard rumours that he had been spotted at one of the villas high in the hills where political troublemakers were taken. Zeno returned home a broken man. Within two years he had drunk himself to death. And if his parents had lived, Attila wondered, had been there for him? If he had grown up in a home, even a meagre panel flat, instead of a state-run orphanage, would there still be such a rage burning inside him? He watched the early morning traffic flow into the city, drinking the rest of the water, when his mobile telephone rang. He quickly walked back and grabbed the handset. The call was short, perhaps thirty seconds long. Attila nodded as he listened, then wrote down an address and walked across to the blender. There he turned the switch to pulse, watching as the brown lumps exploded, sending bursts of blood again and again against the glass, red threads trickling down the sides as the liquid turned into a smooth brown slurry.
Loczy Lajos Street, 6.30 a.m.
Balthazar turned as the door to the VIP salon opened and Eszter walked in. The brothel’s manager was a Roma woman in her fifties whose long black hair was shot through with silver-grey. She wore smart navy trousers and a sky-blue business blouse and carried herself with the brisk assurance of a bank manager about to refuse a loan application. Her deep-brown eyes had seen too much to be shocked any more at the vagaries of human nature. She looked at the dead man on the bed, pursed her lips, then exhaled. ‘He’s still there,’ she said, her voice throaty from years of cigarettes.
Balthazar said, ‘He’s not going anywhere.’
‘No. I didn’t think so.’ She walked around the bed, considering the dead man from several angles. ‘Shouldn’t we straighten
him out? It’s not very… dignified.’
Balthazar shook his head. ‘No. Definitely not. Don’t touch him. We don’t know what he died of yet.’
Eszter was a former oromlany, joy girl, herself. Unlike many of her peers, she had not taken drugs or slipped into a life of petty crime. She was used to handling crises. Given the nature of the business, and human nature, they were to be expected. Threats, sneak thievery by the working girls, punters who tried to evade their bills and complained about the service, even occasional outbursts of violence, all these could be managed, hushed up, smoothed away with wads of banknotes, offers of free return visits, violence, or threats of more violence. But a dead man was much trickier, especially if he was a foreigner.
Eszter turned to Balthazar. ‘He’s not one of ours, is he?’
Balthazar shook his head. ‘No. Not a Gypsy or a Hungarian.’
‘So who is he?’
‘His name is Abdullah al-Nuri. A Qatari.’
Eszter grimaced. ‘That’s a problem.’
The door opened again. A large Gypsy man stepped inside, quickly followed by another, who was even more overweight.
‘Jo reggelt kivanok, batyam – good morning, my older brother,’ exclaimed Gaspar Kovacs in a voice like gravel as he embraced Balthazar. Balthazar breathed in Gaspar’s familiar smell: sweat and tobacco smoke, overlaid with the kajszibarack hazipalinka – home-distilled apricot schnapps – that a relative made for them in the countryside, then stepped back and looked him up and down. Gaspar had probably been up all night but looked like the evening was just beginning. His long black hair was slicked back. He wore his trademark black silk shirt, open almost halfway to his midriff, hanging loose over his substantial belly, a thick gold rope chain and black, shiny track pants over red-and-white Kanye West trainers that cost €500 a pair. His brown eyes, set deep in a doughy face, were clear apart from a faint redness around the rims.
The two men kissed four times, twice on each cheek, as the second man watched. Gaspar pointed at the dead man. ‘Not a bad way to go.’
