by Adam LeBor
She continued talking, ‘That story is not over. Not by a long way. The borders have collapsed, tens of thousands of people, many of them from Middle Eastern war zones with fake or no papers, including friends of Hejazi, are still using our country as a staging post and we have no idea who they are. Keleti is filling up again. I’m glad you called me this morning, Tazi, and not someone else.’ She turned and smiled at him. ‘I think we make a good team. I like your approach. Very unorthodox. But effective. Let me know if you ever want to move on from the police.’
Balthazar said nothing as he quickly ran through the events of the previous weekend, any of which could end his career and several of which could still lead to a prison sentence: taking home evidence – the SIM card he found on the ground near Simon Nazir’s body – and failing to safeguard it; attending an illegal cage fight with a high-ranking member of the Serbian mafia; publicly tasting cocaine with the city’s most notorious gangster; injuring two Gendarmes in a car crash; destruction of state property; illegal use of a flash bomb; assault; dangerous driving… the list went on and on. And that was without Gaspar’s business activities, which were quite enough to end Balthazar’s police career forever.
‘We do what we have to, Tazi,’ said Anastasia, as if reading his mind. ‘You don’t do anything for personal gain.’
Balthazar glanced up at the driver’s mirror. There was a single car behind them: a black Mercedes. ‘I think we’re being followed.’
‘I would be surprised if we weren’t,’ she replied, completely unperturbed. ‘How about that breakfast? We have a lot to talk about.’
‘Like what?’
Her voice turned serious. ‘Abdullah al-Nuri, for starters. After that, we can talk more about last weekend. Hejazi was just the start. We need to unravel the network that brought Hejazi here, find his contacts, follow the money trail.’
She was right, of course. Hejazi’s death marked the start of his investigation, not the end. And the more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Abdullah al-Nuri’s death was somehow linked.
Anastasia continued talking. ‘We both know that this is about much more than a man being shot dead on Rakoczi Way.’
‘Or another found dead in Gaspar’s villa,’ said Balthazar. He glanced into the mirror again. The black Mercedes was still following, thirty yards behind them now. He looked at the number plate: MEH-025. A government car. MEH stood for Miniszter Elnoki Hivatal, the prime minister’s office. Only one law enforcement agency had access to the prime ministerial vehicles.
SIX
Prime Minister’s office, Hungarian Parliament, 7.45 a.m.
Reka led her chief of staff to the corner of her office, her leather portfolio in her hand. She sat in one of two Biedermeier chairs that faced a heavy round mahogany table, and gestured for him to do the same. The furniture, like the decor, was not to Reka’s taste. The Biedermeier style dated from the mid nineteenth century. Its ornate curved woodwork and plush upholstery striped in gold and green indicated prosperity, stolidity and good bourgeois values, as did the elegant Zsolnay coffee set, gold-rimmed with a dark-green glaze, laid on the table. Her office, like the building, was ridiculously oversized. She could still remember the statistics recited by the guide on her first visit here, when she was a teenager: twenty-seven gates to serve a complex of 691 rooms that was almost 300 yards long, fanning out in two symmetrical wings from the central hall. Reka planned to redecorate and refurbish the prime minister’s suite, replace the whiskery old men on the walls with modern works by young Hungarian artists, the old-fashioned chairs and tables with pieces by local designers. She made a mental note to check out the trendy art gallery she had recently discovered on Brody Sandor Street, in the part of District VIII they now called the Palace Quarter. What was the owner’s name? Flora… Flora something. The gallery was called Rainbow. It had some very nice pieces by young local artists. Assuming, that was, that she could get through the next few days.
Reka poured them both coffee and waited for a moment while Akos helped himself to milk and sugar. He lifted the cup, looked at it for several seconds, then at Reka. ‘Dark green. You got here at last.’ There were four colours among the ministries and civil servants: plain white, for junior and middle-ranking officials, light blue for senior officials with the rank of assistant secretary of state, as Akos had held, dark blue with gold trim for actual secretaries of state, and the dark green with gold that was reserved for the prime minister’s office.
‘Yes,’ said Reka. ‘And I intend to stay for a while.’
‘I’m glad to hear that,’ said Akos. ‘Last week I was being threatened with prison. For following your instructions.’ He looked around, nodded to himself, ‘Now I’m helping to run your government. Quite a turnaround. May I speak frankly?’
Reka nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘I was surprised when you asked me to be your chief of staff.’
Reka let a glimmer of a smile flicker over her face, tried to stifle a yawn. Not because she was bored – on the contrary, this had certainly been the most interesting week of her life – but because she was exhausted. Running a country was more work than she had ever imagined and especially when she was fighting for her political life.
‘Why?’ she asked.
Akos raised his eyebrows, thought for a moment before he answered. ‘Well, we do have quite a… history.’
She sipped her coffee, grimaced slightly. It was tepid and slightly bitter, the old-style Hungarian institutional blend. She really would have to bring in her own, a mix of Ethiopian and Colombian that was ground for her in a small shop near her home in Obuda, on the other side of the river. ‘Yes. We do, in the Ministry of Justice.’
‘Which means that I don’t have my own roof here, in the prime minister’s office.’ Roof was slang for protection.
Reka smiled, wider now. ‘But you do, Akos. You do.’
‘Apart from you.’
Reka nodded. There would have to be a wholesale purge, sooner or later, of Pal Dezeffy loyalists, she knew. But that could wait for now. She leaned forward as she spoke. ‘Akos, you are smart and capable enough to make this work.’
He nodded slowly. ‘I hope so.’
The truth was, she had no other options. She and Akos could each bring the other down. But it would be a mutually assured destruction. It was in both of their interests that she survived in office. And the Bardossys had faced testing times before. The Bardossys, like several Hungarian noble families, had hailed from present-day Slovakia before moving to Budapest in the mid-nineteenth century after the failed revolution of 1848. They had rapidly built themselves into the political world, but mostly as advisers behind the scenes, rather than public figures. Her ancestors had stood in this room, dispensing counsel, whether to the ardent revolutionaries of the short-lived Soviet-style workers’ republic of 1919, under the quasi-democracy of the dim-witted Admiral Horthy who ruled Hungary until the Nazis invaded in 1944, and a succession of Communists, right up to the wily reformers of the late 1980s. Of all the Communist parties in the former Soviet bloc, the Hungarians had moved fastest. The wily Magyars had long realised that Communism was doomed, simply because the Soviet-backed state-controlled economy did not work. It was human nature to trade, turn a profit, improve one’s lot. Janos Kadar, Hungary’s leader after the failed 1956 uprising, had followed the advice of Reka’s great-uncle Geza that social peace and stuttering economic progress was best assured by turning Leninism on its head, under the unstated motto of ‘those who are not against us are with us’. That was still good advice, she knew, especially for a prime minister under siege, as she was. Reka opened her portfolio and skim-read the agenda. ‘Akos, we have a lot to discuss. I assume you want to continue working together.’
Akos warily sipped his coffee. ‘Of course, Madame Prime Minister.’
Akos had been the point man in the passport scam, liaising between the Ministry of Justice and the people-traffickers. A week ago, Akos had been summoned to the British e
mbassy by a diplomat called Celestine Johnson. She had presented Akos with evidence of his involvement – and young mistress – and had tried to blackmail him into spying on his colleagues, including Reka. Now that Reka was prime minister the equation had changed. The pressure was on her. Both the British and the American ambassadors had paid a courtesy call earlier in the week, congratulating her on her appointment. Amid the usual courtesies and promises of future cooperation and encouragement for investors, both ambassadors had dropped subtle references to the deadline next Monday for Reka to hand over the information she had about her husband’s role in the scandal that had brought down Pal Dezeffy and the flow of dirty money from the Gulf to Hungary. Information that would certainly bring her down as collateral damage.
But she was running Hungary, not the Americans or the Brits. Or so she told herself.
For a moment she back inside Buda Castle at Pal’s grand reception last Friday, speaking to the Qatari business development director. They had spoken for a few minutes, much of which he had spent looking at her breasts. She glanced at her watch. Her mother’s Patek Philippe had gone back into her jewellery box, replaced by a minimalist Skagen that looked sleek but cost a fraction of its predecessor. The Qatari was due here at 8 a.m. As for Pal, he was gone now, at least from public life. He had resigned four days ago, on Monday morning. But Pal was a graduate of the same political school as Reka: two children of the former Communist dynasties that had ruled Hungary for decades. After the change of system in the early 1990s, the party had desultorily purged a few hardliners and renamed itself the Social Democrats. But the networks of power politics and finance, the Pal Dezeffy and Bardossy dynasties, had first endured then grown rich and even more powerful. Pal, she was sure, would fight back as hard as he could. Because not only had she destroyed Pal’s career, removed him from public life and cancelled every government contract with his companies, she had also exiled him from her bed.
Reka reached into her folder and slid a sheet of paper towards her chief of staff. ‘As we agreed. It clearly states how everything you did for me in relation to the passports was done on government orders, as a means of gathering intelligence about the network and its connection to the people-traffickers and Islamists. You are given retrospective diplomatic status – solely in regard to this matter – and legally absolved from any potential sanctions.’
Akos read it once, quickly, then again, slowly. ‘It’s not signed.’
Reka sat back. ‘I will sign it. Once you hand over what I asked for.’
Akos reached inside his briefcase and took out a clear plastic bag containing a narrow black oblong, four inches long, broken at one end and tapering sharply at the other. He slid the bag across the table. Reka glanced at the shiny sides, grimacing as she saw a patch of something brown, thick and matted around the tip. She picked up the bag by one corner, walked over to her desk and placed it inside a drawer, next to the silver memory stick. She signed the paper, added an official stamp from the prime minister’s office – no piece of paper in Hungary, anywhere in central Europe, had any weight without a stamp of some kind – and handed the document to Akos. He looked it up and down, nodded and put it away in his briefcase. They both sat back and the atmosphere eased.
Akos said, ‘Thanks. I’m glad we finally got that out of the way.’
‘So am I. Now to today’s business. What time is he due here?’
‘At 8 a.m. We offered him a breakfast meeting, in one of the private rooms, but he said coffee would be enough.’
A few seconds later, Reka’s mobile rang. She looked at the screen and took the call. Akos watched as she listened, saying nothing until the caller had finished speaking. ‘Where? What was he doing in a place like that? OK, don’t answer, it’s obvious.’
Reka ended the call, placed her handset on the table, closed her eyes for several seconds before she spoke.
Akos asked, ‘What’s obvious?’
‘It doesn’t matter. He’s not coming.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he is dead.’
Filler Street
Balthazar watched in the driver’s mirror as the Mercedes drew nearer and a brief toot sounded. He turned around to see a familiar near-shaven head and tattooed neck at the wheel of the car. A few seconds later he felt his telephone ring in his pocket. He took out the handset, glanced at the screen which displayed Unknown number. He looked in the mirror again. Attila Ungar was holding a mobile telephone to his ear.
Balthazar answered the call, put it on speaker. ‘It’s illegal to drive while holding a handset.’
Attila laughed. ‘Then come and arrest me.’
‘What do you want?’
‘A chat about old times, Tazi? We are recruiting. Salaries at least twice what the cops pay. Triple, for you, as we go back such a long way. Plus bonuses. We pick up all sorts of things along the way. State-of-the-art equipment. Legal immunity. Fantastic canteen, steak every day. Hot waitresses. Sports centre. Thai masseuses. What more could you want?’
‘Nothing, from you.’
Attila’s voice turned hard. ‘Your choice, Tazi. Tell your friend to pull over.’
‘Why?’
‘You’ve seen the plates on this. It’s armoured. If you don’t pull over I’ll ram you.’
Balthazar glanced at Anastasia. She shrugged. They could, he supposed, take the risk and ignore Attila. But his former partner was not only prone to bursts of violence – which was why Sandor Takacs, the commander of the murder squad, had finally advised him to leave before he was sacked – he was also extremely dogged and blessed with a powerful sense of street cunning. So it was easier to get this, whatever it was, out of the way. He nodded at Anastasia and she pulled onto the side of the road, fifty yards from the end of Filler Street. There was enough space for two cars.
Attila parked behind them. He got out of the car, a squat, heavy figure, about five feet six tall, with a shaven head and oversized biceps. He carried a large-screen Samsung mobile telephone as he walked towards the Skoda. He was out of uniform and wore black jeans and a tight white T-shirt that emphasised his overdeveloped musculature. A tattoo of black talons crept up the side of his neck. ‘Jo reggelt, good morning,’ he said.
Anastasia stared at him. ‘It was. We’re going across the river. I can drop you at the Four Seasons Hotel if you like.’
Attila’s face twisted in anger. His body stiffened and his fingers waved in the air as though seeking something to squeeze and knead. The previous Saturday night he and a squad of Gendarmes had tried to arrest Reka Bardossy and Eniko Szalay in the foyer of the hotel. But Sandor Takacs had despatched a small army of regular police to protect them. First the police had destroyed the Gendarmes’ vehicles parked in the hotel forecourt, taking sledgehammers to their windscreens and slashing their tyres. Then they surrounded the Gendarmes in the foyer. Attila and his men had left empty-handed. The CCTV footage of the Gendarmes waiting outside the building, their vehicles half-destroyed, until more were despatched, had been leaked and quickly went viral on the Internet. Attila closed his eyes, recovered his composure. ‘No, thanks. I have my own car.’
Balthazar said, ‘So we see. What do you want, Attila?’
‘I told you. To help.’
‘I’m waiting,’ said Balthazar.
‘Here? On the street?’ said Attila. He glanced at Anastasia. ‘Don’t you want to do this in private?’
Balthazar said, ‘This is private enough.’
Anastasia said, ‘Get in.’
Attila opened the door and sat on the back seat. He smirked at Anastasia, caught her eye in the mirror. ‘The Duchess and the Gypsy. A real Hungarian scene. Someone should paint you both. It would make a lovely picture.’
‘Shut it, Attila,’ said Balthazar. ‘And get on with it.’
Attila reached forward, extended his arm and let Anastasia’s hair slide over his fingers. He sniffed as he spoke, ‘Mmm, that smells good. Better than you ever did, Tazi.’
In one seamless move
ment Anastasia pulled away, opened the glove compartment, extracted a Glock 17 pistol, whipped around, the gun in her right hand, and pointed it at Attila’s head. ‘Sit back. Hands up.’
He did as she ordered, his palms high in the air, facing the sides of his head. ‘Whoa,’ he said, his small eyes flitting from the gun to Anastasia and back. ‘Take it easy, Duchess.’
Balthazar watched, saying nothing but impressed with the fluidity of her movements. Anastasia’s face was calm but he could see the cold fury in her eyes as she spoke. ‘Be careful, Attila. Guns can go off accidentally.’ She moved her hand up and down and the weapon rose and fell. ‘A few inches here can make a big difference at your end.’ She let the gun point downwards, at Attila’s groin.
‘Message received. I’m going to reach into my pocket now for my telephone. Please be careful with the gun.’ Attila’s voice was calm as he spoke, his body language open and unthreatening.
Anastasia relaxed slightly for a moment, responding to his apparent surrender. At that instant he leaned to the right, away from the weapon. His right hand shot out, grabbing the barrel of the Glock. He bent his wrist back and pushed the weapon up against the roof of the car, his arm locked, the gun now pointing at the top of the rear windscreen. Anastasia raised her right fist, ready to slam it into the crook of his elbow. Such a blow would bend, even break the joint and give her a chance to take back control of the Glock. But they both knew the inside of a car was no place for a struggle over a firearm.
