by Adam LeBor
Balthazar frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Al-Nuri was due to have breakfast with the prime minister. She was lobbying him to keep the Gulf investment package in play. But without the passport racket.’
‘Was he interested?’
‘Like a lot of men, he was definitely interested in her. But yes, he had agreed to talk about it.’
‘Oh. That explains a lot.’
‘Everything, I would say. Unless he really did have a heart attack. The question is, why was he killed in your brother’s brothel?’
Balthazar thought for a moment before he answered. ‘It was the easiest place to get the job done, I guess. A shooting or a hit and run on an important foreigner would draw too much attention. But how the hell does Attila have the video footage of him entering, leaving and us meeting?’
‘The Gendarmes are on the war path. Especially after last weekend. They have all sorts of new equipment. Even drones. They are filming everything. And they will be leaking it whenever it suits them. All they need to do is post it on YouTube.’
For a moment Balthazar was back on the pavement outside the brothel, listening to the distant buzzing sound before it faded away. ‘That explains it. I kept hearing a noise this morning like a swarm of bees in the distance.’
Anastasia nodded. ‘That was the drone. Or drones. This is going to get really dirty, Balthazar. It’s not clear who will win.’
Balthazar smiled. ‘We will.’
They were sitting waiting for breakfast at a corner table in the front room of Bajnok, a gloomy bar on the corner of Mikszath Kalman Square in the western part of District VIII that bordered District V, the centre of the city. Csongi, the owner, was in the kitchen cooking them both breakfast. Csongor Falusi was a former flyweight boxer and childhood friend of both Balthazar and Gaspar. He had bought the bar more than a decade ago. It had been redecorated once, in various shades of cream and brown, and been untouched since. The colours, which had now merged into one, were stained with years’ worth of nicotine. Csongi’s trophies were lined up on a small shelf above the bar and the walls were decorated with framed, faded clippings of his fights. A red-and-blue paper tablecloth covered the surface of the Formica table. A plastic bread basket stood in the middle, next to two small ridged-glass salt and pepper shakers.
Balthazar looked out onto the square as he reached for a slice of bread then shook some salt over it, childhood memories running through his mind. When he was a kid, growing up on Jozsef Street, a ten-minute walk away, this part of District VIII was as rough and run-down as his neighbourhood, a place of grimy tenements and streetwalkers, several run by his father. The patch of grass was rough and untended, the apartment buildings dark and crumbling. He had come here on one of his first dates – if date was the word for an hour or two stolen from both their parents’ monitoring. They had sat on a rusty bench with cracked wooden slats and eaten ice cream. Balthazar closed his eyes for a moment. The face of a Roma Madonna. Eyes you could dive into. Fingers that slid so easily into his. He could still remember the look on her face, the beautiful innocence, as she talked about her childhood dream, to be a teacher. In most families, that was an everyday ambition. But their families had different plans. Then another memory filled his head and he closed his eyes for a moment, trying to banish it.
Anastasia touched the back of Balthazar’s hand. ‘Wake up, sleepyhead.’
Balthazar blinked. ‘I’m not asleep. I’m thinking.’
‘OK, thinker. What about?’
Those memories were not for sharing. An edited version would do. ‘I used to come here as a kid. It was a quarter of an hour’s walk, straight down Jozsef Street, across the boulevard. Near enough to get to easily, but far enough not to bump into friends or relatives.’ He pointed at a balcony on the first floor of a pristine apartment building, newly painted cream. ‘See that?’ The balcony was a mix of marble and delicate wrought ironwork.
Anastasia looked where he indicated. ‘Yes. It’s beautiful now. I think that building belongs to the church.’
‘It did. They sold it. That’s a 750-square-foot flat behind the balcony. How many people used to live in it, do you think, until the developers moved in?’
Anastasia shrugged. ‘I don’t know. At 750 square feet, probably two bedrooms and a lounge. Four, five, six?’
Balthazar laughed. ‘Twenty-six. Three generations of one Gypsy family. Parents, children, grandchildren. They were part of the Lakatos clan.’
Anastasia was amazed. ‘Where did they sleep?’
‘They managed. We have a different concept of personal space.’
‘How different?’
‘It doesn’t really exist. But now look – we are in hipster central.’
They looked out at the square for a moment. In one corner a large statue of Mikszath Kalman, one of Hungary’s best-loved writers, looked out onto his eponymous square. The ground was neatly tiled and a curved island, topped with a lush garden, stood in the middle, all bordered with rounded bricks. A young woman in her late teens, wearing a black miniskirt and a pink halter top, sat by the base of the stone statue. Two young mothers, tending pushchairs with sleeping infants, chatted by a tiny espresso bar in a caravan, beside a small double door at ground level that was firmly bolted.
He tapped the table. ‘Apart from Csongor, who is still holding out.’
Anastasia raised her coffee cup. ‘And long may he do so.’
‘Did you ever go there?’ asked Anastasia, pointing at the closed entrance.
Balthazar laughed. ‘Tilos Az A? I tried, once, but they would not let me in.’
‘Because you are a Gypsy?’
‘No. They didn’t care about that. Because I was barely fourteen.’
During the early 1990s, when the city’s young people were still intoxicated with freedom, but starved of decent party places, the doors had opened into a cellar club that was the centre of bohemian nightlife.
‘I tried as well,’ said Anastasia.
‘And?’
‘I got in. I had just turned sixteen, but I looked older.’ She smiled, looked wistful for a moment, her eyes alight. ‘That was another world in the 1990s. We were all so hopeful, almost high on freedom.’
‘Yes, we were. Even the Gypsies,’ said Balthazar.
Balthazar had graduated from Fazekas High School, itself a rare achievement for a Gypsy boy from the backstreets of District VIII, and had then won a place to study law and politics at Budapest’s Eotvos Lorand University. His education had divided his parents. His father, Laci, had angrily dismissed Balthazar’s studies as a waste of time. His first son, he insisted, would anyway follow his father and his grandfather into the family business of pimping and running girlie bars. But Balthazar’s mother, Marta, had other ideas. When Laci raised his hand to her, she batted it away, stopped cooking for him and made him sleep on a sofa in the lounge. He soon relented. Balthazar had then taken a Masters degree in Nationalism Studies at Central European University, a small but well-renowned graduate college in downtown Budapest.
His telephone rang and he looked at the screen. It was Sarah, his ex-wife.
Anastasia said, ‘Aren’t you going to take that?’
Balthazar nodded.
‘Work or personal?’
Balthazar gave her a wry smile. ‘Sarah. My ex-wife.’
‘I’ve leave you to it, then. I’m going to wash my hands,’ she said, stood up and left.
Balthazar took the call, wondering what Sarah wanted so early in the morning. Something from him, that was for sure. Balthazar had met Sarah Weiss while they were both students at CEU. She was a pretty Jewish girl from New York, but her brains and self-confidence had attracted him as much as her looks. They quickly fell in love, quickly moved in together, and got married. Balthazar started his doctorate on the Poraymus, the devouring, as the Roma called their Holocaust. The work went well and after a couple of years his supervisor had strongly hinted that he was in line for a junior lecturer’s position, and w
ould, if that went well, rapidly be granted the holy grail of academia: tenure, a job for life. He and Sarah had a child, a boy named Alex. Life was good: they lived comfortably in a large flat on Pozsonyi Way in District XIII. Sarah also started a PhD, in Gender Studies, focusing on the inner dynamics of Roma families. But as he and Sarah discovered that passion and finding each other exotic were not enough to build a life and home, the marriage wobbled, then collapsed. Sarah decided she was a lesbian and left Balthazar for a German postgraduate student from Tubingen called Amanda. Balthazar left academia and joined the police force, to the horror of Sarah and her uber-liberal friends.
Sarah usually called just before Balthazar was due to have Alex over or take him somewhere, with some kind of reason – usually fictitious – why the meeting had to be postponed or cancelled. Power and control were very important to Sarah. At one stage she had been so obstructive that after two weeks of not seeing Alex, Balthazar had been reduced to borrowing an unmarked police car and parking outside the American school in Nagykovacsi, a village just outside Budapest, that Alex attended, just for a glimpse of his son. This week, though, she had been more amenable than usual and had brought Alex to meet Balthazar the previous Sunday, and even let him stay over. This was, he thought, in large part because she needed something.
They exchanged greetings. Balthazar paused and did not say anything. Sarah blinked first. ‘It’s about Saturday, Tazi.’
For a moment Balthazar’s stomach flipped. Surely she was not going to cancel? He, Sarah and Alex had arranged a day trip, leaving at 8 a.m. on Saturday morning to Nagyszentfalu, a village just south of Budapest where a group of Gypsy women had set up a weaving collective. It was precisely the kind of project that Sarah needed to write about to finish her PhD. And without Balthazar she would have no means of communicating with the weavers. Sarah had, at most, a few dozen words of Hungarian, and knew none of the Roma dialects. Best of all, because she needed Balthazar, Sarah had agreed that the trip would not be counted against his monthly time with Alex of two overnight weekend stays and one evening a week.
‘What?’ asked Balthazar. ‘It’s all planned, everything is set up for you. Don’t tell me you’re cancelling.’
‘No, of course not. It’s about Alex. He just told me that you bought him a burger on Sunday. And a milkshake.’
Balthazar frowned. ‘I did. Teenage boys like burgers. Is that a problem?’
‘Actually, potentially, yes. Do you know the provenance of the beef?’
He closed his eyes for a few seconds. From a dead cow, he wanted to say. Like most beef. Instead he answered, ‘No. Should I?’
‘Ideally, yes. We only want Alex to eat organically reared beef. And the roll is a problem. And the milkshake.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘We think he might be gluten and lactose intolerant.’
‘We?’
‘Amanda and I. You know we’re both vegan now. We don’t approve of him eating meat.’ Amanda was in awe of her partner, and felt guilty about the whole tangled German–Jewish relationship and so acceded to whatever Sarah wanted. But Amanda was not the issue.
Balthazar sighed. Coming back to this part of town was stirring a lot of memories today – memories and emotions. That and the events of the morning. And the weight of his family. His brother, again. Gendarmes on his trail. And now he had to deal with his ex-wife’s obsessing about Alex’s non-existent food intolerances. ‘Alex wolfed it down. And he loved the milkshake. No complaints afterwards, no tummy ache, nothing. He even wanted another burger afterwards.’
‘You didn’t,’ said Sarah, her voice alarmed.
‘No. Of course not. But sure, next time I’ll ask about the beef, or find somewhere organic.’
‘Vegetarian would be better. Or even vegan.’
‘Leave it with me. Anything else I can help with?’
‘Thanks. I wanted to ask something about Saturday.’
‘Go ahead.’
Sarah, Balthazar knew, was angry and frustrated that her academic career was stalling. Gender Studies was a new and modern discipline, sneered at by some as an artificial construct to keep sub-par academics employed by critiquing each other’s work. Her mistake had been to choose a specialisation – the role of women in Roma family dynamics – into which, without Balthazar, she had no point of entry. That had worked fine when they were together. Balthazar had introduced Sarah to his family, of course, taken her around the slums and tenements of Districts VIII and IX, out to the settlements on the edge of villages, where Roma families lived in shacks with no running water or electricity. But once they had split up, Sarah had no means of entering that world, which was closed and suspicious of outsiders. Apart from Balthazar, she did not know any Gypsies, and his family, obviously, were not going to help her. Which for Balthazar was a good thing, as it gave him some leverage in what was otherwise a very unequal battle for access to his son.
Sarah said, ‘My new supervisor has asked me to look at the question of transitioning in the Roma community. He says it would add a whole new dimension to my thesis. And you know there is this associate professor post coming up in Gender Studies. It’s a brilliant opportunity for really original research. Do you know any Roma people who are transitioning? It would be so helpful.’
Transitioning. For a moment he heard the voice of Eva neni, after Balthazar had explained to her what Sarah did for work: ‘From this she makes a living?’ The memory made him laugh, but kept his voice deadpan as he answered.
‘Yes, of course. I’ve met several. It’s popular now. Lots of people are trying.’
He could hear Sarah’s excited intake of breath as she answered, ‘Oh, that’s so amazing. Do you think they would talk to me?’
‘Sure, why not?’
‘Will you ask them?’
‘Sure.’
‘Thanks, Tazi. Thanks so much. Were they successful, the transitions?’
‘Not usually, no.’
‘Oh. Why not?’
‘Because as much as they self-identified as a gadje, tried to behave like one, even if they were light-skinned, everyone still knew they were a Gypsy.’
Sarah’s voice became tight. ‘Very funny, Tazi. We’ll see you on Saturday morning.’
Sarah hung up and he put the telephone down. Anastasia appeared and sat back down. ‘You’re laughing. Good phone call?’
Balthazar smiled. ‘Sarah wants me to find a Gypsy who is transitioning from one gender to another. Apparently it would help her with her PhD thesis.’
‘And can you?’
‘Probably not. I told her I knew a lot of Gypsies who were trying to be gadjes. She didn’t think it was funny. You know us Roma. Our family models are still pretty traditional. We are quite behind the curve.’
‘Not always, Balthazar. And not all of you,’ said Anastasia, with a smile that reached her eyes.
‘Thanks. I’ve been thinking, as we are working together, there’s something else you might be able to help me with.’
‘Such as?’
‘There’s an old case I might re-open.’
‘How old?’
‘Twenty years or so.’
‘That’s a very old case. Why now?’
‘I’d rather not say for the moment. I’m still thinking about it. But if I do… your service has a much wider repertoire available than us plodding cops.’
‘You mean we can break into places and bug telephones?’
‘Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.’
‘Are there any national security implications in this case?’
Balthazar shook his head. ‘None.’
Anastasia asked, ‘This is personal, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Very.’
She gave him a knowing, almost affectionate look. ‘In that case, of course. Whatever you need or want.’ They shook hands, her palm cool in his. ‘Now, back to business.’
EIGHT
555.hu office, corner of Rakoczi Way and Grand Boulevard, 8.30 a.m.
‘I
still don’t get it, Eni. Why didn’t you go?’ asked Zsuzsa Barcsy. ‘I thought you really wanted to. You could have finally met Alex as well. That’s a big thing that he asked you along with his son. You never met him while you were together.’
Eniko and Zsuzsa were standing on the corner of the wrap-around balcony of the imposing sixth-floor apartment that served as the offices of 555.hu. The balcony reached higher than their waists, its pale stone wall thick and wide, topped with a curved granite lip overlooking Blaha Lujza Square. Eniko looked down, did not immediately answer her friend. The city was spread out below them. Behind them, Rakoczi Way stretched to Keleti Station; in front of her, it crossed the Grand Boulevard at Blaha Lujza Square, before slicing through downtown towards Astoria and the Elizabeth Bridge.
‘I couldn’t, Zsuzsi,’ said Eniko. ‘I was working.’ Even as she heard herself articulate the words she thought she did not sound very convincing. She watched the traffic lights change colour as the traffic slowed then stopped on Rakoczi Way, before the vehicles began to move along the Grand Boulevard, driving through Blaha Lujza Square. It was hard to imagine that just a few days ago this downtown plaza had been the centre of every news bulletin, not just in Hungary, but around the globe.
Now Blaha Lujza Square looked as it did on an everyday Budapest morning. Pedestrians and commuters rushed back and forth between trams, buses and the entrance to the metro. Eniko’s favourite pensioner, Maria neni, who came into town each day to sell flowers from her village outside Budapest, was in her usual place by the entrance to the metro station. Today she was selling daisies, rather than her usual bluebells, for 300 forints. The sandwich man advertising the Bella Roma pizzeria was walking up and down, handing out flyers and smiling widely at passers-by, many of whom kept a wide berth – smiling at strangers was regarded as very suspicious behaviour. The only sign of the previous weekend’s events was a small noticeboard on the other side of Rakoczi Way, on the corner of the Grand Boulevard, with a photograph of Mahmoud Hejazi, requesting anyone with information about him to contact the police.
