Kossuth Square

by Adam LeBor

  Anastasia turned to him. ‘I’m sorry, Balthazar. But you needed to know. And it’s better that you find out from me.’ Her hand dropped down and squeezed his arm. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine. Please show it to me again,’ he said.

  Anastasia held her iPad in front of him. The film was about thirty seconds long. It was shot from a distance, but clearly showed two men talking to each other in a drab room. One was Mahmoud Hejazi. The other was Gaspar. Balthazar could see his brother’s face, his heavy bulk, the way he leaned forward, his head jutting out from his thick shoulders when he talked business. The sound was muffled and rough but clear enough for Balthazar to recognise his brother’s voice.

  Balthazar said, ‘I can’t hear the conversation properly. Just a few words: Border, transport, euros. What exactly are they talking about?’

  ‘Those, in essence. Our tech people tried to recover the sound but they couldn’t get everything. But the gist of it seems to be Hejazi asking about some kind of VIP service, for him and two other people. How safe is it, how do they cross the border? Gaspar says he needs to meet the other two, Hejazi’s companions, and then they can discuss everything. Hejazi says there is no need, they can arrange everything now. Gaspar says no, he needs to see the people he is moving, meet them in person first. Gaspar and Hejazi agree to meet, but we could not get the time or place. We don’t know if that meeting took place. That’s what we need to find out. Immediately.’

  Balthazar leaned back and rubbed his eyes while he thought for a moment. Gaspar. How could he be such a fucking idiot? What the hell was he doing with Mahmoud Hejazi? Gaspar had promised, repeatedly, that all he was doing was dressing the migrants as Gypsies and moving them out to Austria. A straightforward business arrangement, he had said. But nothing was ever straightforward with Gaspar. He could never resist a chance to make more money, no matter what the risk, and how dangerous his partners were. He had no idea how out of his depth he was. Or maybe he did and just did not care. Or he even enjoyed the risk. Perhaps it was something in their people’s culture and history. When you have been treated like dirt for centuries, then carpe diem, not just the day, but the hour, the moment, to leverage something, anything, turn a profit, put one over on the gadjes. Balthazar asked, ‘Are you sure it’s genuine? Maybe it’s photoshopped or something.’

  ‘Photoshop is for photos, Balthazar. Static images. This is a video clip. And we have had it analysed. It’s genuine, raw and unadulterated footage.’

  ‘When was it shot? What kind of camera?’

  Anastasia shrugged. ‘We don’t know exactly, but recently, certainly. Hejazi was only here for a few days before he was killed.’

  ‘Weren’t you following him? That report you showed me last week was incredibly detailed. You were all over him.’

  The previous Friday Anastasia had given Balthazar a copy of her ABS report on how Mahmoud Hejazi had crossed the Serbian border into Hungary. Hejazi had been monitored every step of the way to the hotel near Keleti where he had stayed. Anastasia herself had followed him down Rakoczi Way, following in the path of Simon Nazir, the Syrian migrant whom Hejazi had later killed.

  Anastasia sounded rueful. ‘We were. Then we lost him. We had him somewhere out in District X. He was in a white Opel in a car park of an abandoned industrial estate. Then six cars identical to the one in which he was travelling appeared, and all seven then went off in different directions. We only had two vehicles.’

  ‘And the number plate?’

  ‘All the cars had the same number plate, Balthazar, and a single passenger sitting next to the driver. It was very well organised.’

  Balthazar thought for a moment, his hand back outside the window, the rain spattering against his palm. ‘Six cars, all identical, with the same number plate and a passenger pretending to be Hejazi.’ He turned to Anastasia. ‘That’s a lot of cars. And cost. Who’s helping him?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out. Pal is the obvious suspect. Maybe it was part of the deal with the Gulf investors. As prime minister he would have access to those kinds of resources.’

  ‘Where was this film taken?’

  ‘We don’t know exactly. Somewhere in Budapest, we think. Near a main road. The technicians pulled out the sounds of background traffic. There are muffled sirens going quite regularly, so maybe there is a police station or hospital nearby. The metadata has all been scrubbed. It’s quite easy to do that.’

  ‘The source?’

  ‘We don’t know that either. It was left in my taxi some time this week, on a memory stick. We found it when we brought the car back from Keleti.’

  Balthazar looked at the street. Two white vans were parked outside the front door of the family apartment building at number fifteen, enough to transport sixteen people or so. Big Laci and Little Laci, burly brothers who were distant cousins of Balthazar, stood nearby, leaning against the wall and smoking, one on either side of the street, mobile telephones in their hands. Both wore black vests and black jeans. Their arms were covered with intricate floral tattoos. The brothers both worked for Gaspar and were keeping a lookout for trouble. They had both immediately spotted the parked Skoda and began to walk over to investigate until they saw Balthazar and Anastasia inside. They acknowledged Balthazar with discreet nods and returned to their posts.

  An elderly lady in a pink housecoat was carrying a bag of shopping, stopping every twenty yards or so to get her breath. She put the bag down and the clink of glass bottles sounded down the street. The rain was easing off now, a summer deluge that had passed quickly. A slight breeze blew through the car. He turned to Anastasia: ‘So you don’t know where Mahmoud Hejazi went when he escaped your surveillance, who he met or what he did. You don’t where or when this video was shot. What do you know?’

  Anastasia fixed him with her green eyes. ‘That the other person there was your brother, Balthazar.’

  Balthazar exhaled. Someone had hand-delivered this information to Anastasia. But who, and why? A business rival? Gaspar had enough of those. The streets around Keleti, the park on John Paul II Square, were thick with people-traffickers, fixers, hustlers, drivers offering a passage to the border. Or perhaps it was a rival pimp seeking to take over a chunk of the family business. But this footage was a different league of criminality. Pimps and people-smugglers were not usually working with terrorists.

  Balthazar sat back. ‘M and M.’

  Anastasia shot him a puzzled glance.

  Balthazar continued talking. ‘Means and motivation. Who has the means to make the video and who has the motivation to pass it on to you?’

  ‘The means to record a meeting like that: probably a state actor.’

  ‘Isn’t that you, or your colleagues?’ asked Balthazar.

  ‘Not me, personally. But maybe someone else in the ABS. I don’t know everything that’s going on. Pal still has his allies. He’s down but definitely not out.’ She paused for a few seconds, remembering how ‘Access Denied’ had flashed across her computer monitor that morning.

  Balthazar glanced at her, saw that she was frowning. ‘What’s bothering you?’

  ‘I tried to access Antal Kondor’s file a couple of hours ago. I was refused. Even though I have the second-highest level of clearance.’

  ‘Reka Bardossy’s head of security. What does that mean?’

  ‘Maybe that something else is going on. Something I don’t know about.’

  Balthazar smiled. ‘Is there anything you don’t know about?’

  Anastasia shot him a look, half amused, half curious. ‘The details of your new job?’

  ‘I’m not sure about that yet,’ replied Balthazar.

  ‘But you’ll take it?’

  He thought of Virag and the photograph of her on his bookshelf. ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Good. Let me know if I can help.’ Anastasia, he saw, was wearing a light touch of mascara, the first time he had seen her with make-up on. She held his gaze, as if to say, ‘Yes, a bit of make-up, and what of it?
’ Instead she said, ‘I’ll share if you will.’

  ‘It’s a deal. Meanwhile, talk me through Gaspar’s plan again.’

  Anastasia’s voice turned brisk. ‘Gaspar and Fat Vik are moving the next batch of migrants at five o’clock. They are from Syria and Iraq, about twenty people, mostly women and children. They are posing as a group of underprivileged Hungarian Gypsy families from Transylvania on an outing. From there it’s a quick drive onto the M1, all the way to the Austrian border and the crossing at Hegyeshalom. There are still no proper checks on Hungarian vehicles. In any case, everything has been arranged at the crossing.’ She gave Balthazar an ironic look. ‘He’s quite the businessman, your brother.’

  ‘He is. Unfortunately he trades in people.’

  ‘And he needs to stop. But for now the priority is to know everything about Mahmoud Hejazi and his two friends. Where Gaspar met Hejazi, who arranged it, who else was there, anything he knows about the two men that were travelling with Hejazi, everything.’ She paused, remembering the new information she had about the men travelling with Hejazi, and for a moment laid her hand on Balthazar’s arm. ‘We have more on Hejazi’s companions.’

  ‘More information that you can share with me?’

  Anastasia paused for a moment, took a decision. ‘I’m not supposed to. But I will.’ She gave Balthazar a quick recap of what she had learned earlier that day.

  Balthazar looked out of the car window. This got worse and worse. He remembered watching a news report from Halabja, the dead bodies lying twisted in the dust. Not only was his brother somehow connected to one of the world’s most wanted Islamic terrorists, he was also linked to a mass murderer and his bodyguard. Who had probably gone underground somewhere in Budapest. Balthazar asked, ‘Do you think they are still here, in Hungary?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it’s definitely possible. Both men know the city, speak Hungarian. Maybe Hejazi was planning something, either here, or somewhere else in the west. We need anything we can get on them. Adnan Bashari is a chemical weapons expert. His precise area of expertise is non-weapons-based unorthodox distribution systems.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘At Halabja they used bombs and shells. The bombs and shells exploded. The gas or nerve agent was released and the victims died. But Adnan knows how to release the nerve agent through air-conditioning systems, for example. This is as serious as it gets, Balthazar. We can send someone else to talk to Gaspar, if you prefer. Or I can go in.’

  Balthazar yawned, the movement still sending small aches across his shoulders and chest. ‘No. Gaspar won’t talk to you, or anyone else. Only me.’

  ‘If you need to persuade him further, you can show him this,’ said Anastasia, as she opened a new file and handed him the iPad. ‘Adnan’s handiwork in Halabja. I’m sorry – they are pretty horrible.’

  Balthazar glanced through several of the shots: one showed a mother cradling a baby, lying on her back in the room of a house, another several small bundles in the middle of the street. The bundles, he realised, were children, killed in the middle of a game. He closed the file. ‘How do you want to do this?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve changed the duty personnel and the protocols on the border. Gaspar’s contacts have been sent home. We’re monitoring their phones. They’ve already called him to let him know. The new orders are to check all vehicles and to specifically check for migrants travelling in Hungarian- or Romanian-registered vehicles. Gaspar will know that by now. He’ll be anxious. He needs to get this group across. Word will quickly get out if he can’t deliver. And he will have to give the migrants their money back.’

  ‘And if he agrees to help?’

  ‘Then we’ll let them through. This time. But this is the last group. We’ve checked them all. Families from Syria and Iraq. Nobody of any interest to us. I’m sorry – I know how difficult this is for you.’

  Balthazar asked, ‘Do you have a brother?’

  ‘Two. One older, one younger.’

  ‘But neither of them are pimps or people-smugglers.’

  ‘One of them works for a Swiss bank in Zurich, managing accounts for non-tax-resident, high-net-worth customers. The other lives in New York and runs a hedge fund. It invests a lot in the arms trade.’ She looked at him, a half smile playing on her lips. ‘Is that better or worse?’

  Balthazar laughed. ‘Dunno. Tough call.’

  She handed him an iPad mini and a Nokia burner. ‘The video is there. So are the photos of Hejazi’s companions.’ Balthazar watched her as she leaned across him and opened the door, her ponytail sliding down the side of her neck. She looked at him, a rueful smile on her face. ‘Keep the burner. I’ll call you on it later. Off you go, then.’

  Balthazar stepped out of the car and walked through the open front door and into the building. Every step was full of memories. Balthazar had grown up here and each return brought a sweet pain. His family had been poor. He wore hand-me-downs, often went to bed half hungry after a meagre dinner of zsiros-kenyer, bread and dripping. But what the Kovacs clan lacked in money, they made up for with a special kind of joie de vivre. His childhood had been happy, with an ever-present clamour of relatives, always celebrating a birthday, name day or Christian festival, praising, feeding, sometimes berating, shouting and laughing. Balthazar, his parents and siblings, had lived in a cramped three-room flat on the third floor, with a toilet in the courtyard. The apartment house was comparatively small, with four flats on each of the four floors, two on either side of a central staircase. The first and second floors had a balcony overlooking the courtyard, while the smaller flats on the third and fourth floor were reached directly from the staircase. The apartment house had been built at the end of the nineteenth century when Budapest was rapidly expanding. That was the city’s golden age, when writers, painters and poets fuelled a flowering of culture, art and literature, and even everyday homes in District VIII had stained-glass windows on their staircases, granite tiles in their courtyards and fine metalwork along their balconies. But there was little money for renovation under Communism, unless it was for the plush Buda villas of the party elite. Over the years, Number 15 Jozsef Street, like its neighbours, steadily deteriorated. The stained-glass windows broke and were replaced by plain glass in ugly aluminium frames, the courtyard tiles cracked and shattered, the handrails on the balcony wore loose.

  Then the one-party state collapsed and for a while nothing proper took its place during the early-1990s years of vadkapitalizmus. Laszlo, Balthazar’s father, had started with a handful of joy girls handed on from his father. They worked out of a flat near Mikszath Kalman Square. The change of system, the opening of borders, suddenly brought an influx of money, especially hard foreign currency. Hungary, like its neighbours, was a sex-tourism destination. Laszlo realised that the new punters, coming in from Vienna and other Western European capitals, had money to spend and would pay for a more upmarket service. He bought a nightclub that offered strippers and clean, comfortable private cubicles for private dances and more intimate encounters. The money started to pour in, much of it in cash. One evening Balthazar had found $500 in $20 bills stuffed down the back of the sofa at home. Laszlo soon bought up every flat in the building and by the end of the decade the whole place was occupied by members of the Kovacs clan and their friends, such as Fat Vik, Gaspar’s consigliere. Now the building had been carefully restored to its former glory. The courtyard was painted every other year, the cracked tiles replaced and even the windows had been restored with copies of the original stained glass.

  The centrepiece of the courtyard was an oversized white leather sofa, where Gaspar usually sat in front of a low coffee table. The sofa served as his de facto office, and once a month, on boritek Pentek, envelope Friday, he sat there dispensing single or multiple 10,000-forint notes to friends and neighbours. Today the sofa had been pushed to one side. Gaspar was standing by the staircase, his mobile telephone by his ear, hunched and tense.

  Balthazar walked across the courtyard to his
brother. The smell hit him first, the same odour of unwashed bodies that now filled the underpasses and closed spaces around Keleti Station. He glanced across the courtyard to where the migrants were huddled together. For a moment he thought of a book he had read at school, The Smell of Humans by Erno Szep, a memoir of Szep’s time in the wartime Budapest Jewish ghetto and in a labour camp. Szep had been correct. Corralled humans, especially in the heat of an Indian summer, smelled like corralled animals: rank and stale. A plump mother wearing a black-and-white hijab handed biscuits to three squabbling young children, while two gangly teenage boys in worn T-shirts and filthy jeans, with jet-black hair and wary eyes, squatted on their rucksacks, watching. Other family groups sat nearby, sleepy and dusty, the adults guarding sleeping mats and woven nylon shopping bags that contained their lives’ possessions while children slept on their shoulders or played nearby. Balthazar watched a young girl, perhaps twelve or thirteen, and her younger brother bounce a tennis ball back and forth.

  Gaspar abruptly ended his conversation when he saw Balthazar and the two men quickly embraced. Balthazar looked his brother up and down. A familiar mix of emotions surged through him: anger, annoyance and an unbreakable urge to protect him, and he knew there was no point trying to fight or block any of them.