by Adam LeBor
ADAM LEBOR
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK LONDON
In memory of my father, Maurice LeBor,
a lover of Budapest.
‘You cannot walk in a straight line when the road is bent’
Gypsy proverb
PROLOGUE
Keleti Station, 6.05 a.m., Friday, 4 September 2015
He lay on his back, his sleeping bag tangled between his legs, the nylon damp against his skin. A loudspeaker crackled for several seconds, paused, fired a long burst of jumbled vowels and consonants, fell silent again. His mouth was thick and dry, his T-shirt drenched with sweat. Where was he?
He turned on his side, looked around and remembered. A thin-faced boy, twelve or thirteen years old, was curled up under a brown acrylic blanket, his dirt-stained hand holding a torn backpack. A mother and baby lay on a sheet of corrugated cardboard at his feet. The child whimpered softly while the mother snored, oblivious, her chubby features serene in her sleep.
Simon Nazir rested his hand on his wife’s back, felt her chest rise and fall, slid his fingers through her black, curly hair, felt the warmth of her skin against his, and closed his eyes. In his head he was still in Aleppo: he could hear the laughter of the shopkeepers in the bazaar, the siren call of the muezzin, smell the ancient dust, coffee and cardamom. He breathed in through his nose. The warm bovine reek almost made him gag. He opened his eyes, reached for his bottle of water and took a deep draught. The drink was stale and tasted of plastic. The sun was already up and the turquoise sky, streaked with fine white clouds, was about to deliver another day of heat and dirt and waiting.
Nazir tried in vain to get more comfortable, to stretch out without banging into another prone body. The human tide spread in every direction, filling the plaza in front of Keleti Station’s main entrance, spilling along the sides. A busy intersection in a European capital was now a giant open-air refugee camp. The ground was covered with discarded food wrappers, cigarette ends, half-eaten sandwiches, rotten fruit, empty bottles of spring water, pairs of shoes taken off for the night. The lucky ones had tents, donated by tourists and music fans who had attended Budapest’s Sziget Festival a couple of weeks earlier in mid-August. Half a dozen white vans were spread among the sleeping crowd, television network names emblazoned on their doors, giant antennae and satellite dishes pointing skywards. It was too early for the journalists but by ten o’clock there would be dozens of reporters here. Nazir watched a middle-aged man, an engineer he knew from home, twitch in his sleep, his arm around his ten-year-old daughter, a small suitcase in front of them.
The robo-voice was still droning in the background – the Hungarian language station announcements were a constant backdrop – but human sounds had pierced his sleep. A voice that he knew, one that he never wanted to hear again. Nazir glanced rightwards. Twenty yards or so away, there was movement, a male crouched, muttering.
Nazir told himself not to panic; to be calm, collected, clever. He was safe here. He was surrounded by people, police, reporters were coming. Nothing bad could happen, except more long days in transit. He and Maryam had been stuck at Keleti Station for five days, a halt in a journey that had lasted three weeks. They had fled Aleppo at night, crossing the frontlines, taken a taxi to Damascus, another to Beirut, flown to Istanbul, then travelled overland by bus and foot through Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary.
And here at least, nobody was trying to gas or shoot them, or even arrest them. They had made it to Europe, not quite the west, but certainly central Europe. The terminus’s yellow paint was fading, its waiting room was dark and gloomy, its roof cracked. But Keleti was still a symbol of empire, and Budapest’s place at the heart of the continent. A couple of days ago, he and Maryam had spent an hour staring at the departure board, dreaming of a new life in the west. On a normal day trains left here for Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Munich. But these were not normal times. Twenty-four hours ago the government had closed the western border to the migrants. All international trains were cancelled, although the local lines were still running. That didn’t matter to the migrants, as they were not even allowed inside the station building. A line of riot police stood in front of the entrance. Every few minutes they moved aside to let the early morning commuters through, then stepped back into place, their arms crossed, their faces impassive.
Nazir drained the water bottle, heard the man’s voice again, and then lay very still. The fatigues and pistol, his long beard, were gone. He was clean-shaven now, wore jeans, blue Nike trainers and a T-shirt, held an iPhone, could have been any one of hundreds of middle-aged men from Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan camped out at Keleti as they trekked through Europe. But it was him – the puckered scar above his right ear, a burn from an incendiary bomb, decided the matter.
Maryam stirred, as if sensing Nazir’s unease, muttered something, then returned to her sleep. Nazir slid deeper into his sleeping bag, hiding his face. He tried to listen, focusing hard, could catch the inflections of the man’s Aleppo accent, but not the words. Nazir watched through half-closed eyes as the two men to whom he was talking sat up and gathered their rucksacks. Where were they going? .
Nazir looked at the line of taxis that stood by the side entrance to the station. The ride to the Austrian border cost 500 euros. He knew three families who had paid. Two had been dumped in the countryside thirty miles from Budapest, picked up by the police and promptly sent to a holding camp. The third had been left fifteen miles from the frontier. They had also been arrested but were released after paying another 500 euros to the police and had made it across. Two days ago the elder son had sent an SMS from Vienna.
For now, there was nothing to do at Keleti except wait and watch. One of the taxi drivers, he saw, was also looking at the three men. Nazir had noticed her on the second day. Firstly, because she was a woman, and seemed to be the only female working the station. She was in her early thirties, Nazir guessed, tall, with shoulder-length dark-blonde hair, brown eyes and an easy smile. Secondly, because she never seemed to have a fare. Every time Nazir looked, she was there, smoking, laughing, chatting with the other drivers. And she was friendly, unusually so. Nazir had exchanged pleasantries a few times with her when he’d gone for a walk. Her name, she said, was Ildiko. Nazir had been a silversmith in Aleppo. The cheap jewellery – rings and bangles – that Ildiko wore somehow did not suit her. The last time they chatted he realised that she was also surprisingly well informed about what was happening at Keleti, the territorial divisions between the Arabs, Africans and Afghans and even the squabbles between the Syrian opposition groups.
The three men were standing now, rucksacks on their backs, he saw. Nazir reflexively brushed his left hand, touched the scar where his little and ring fingers used to be, felt the flush of fear. He watched them turn and start to walk out of the station concourse. He unzipped his sleeping bag, still lying on his side, focused now, no longer wondering about Ildiko the taxi driver, and put his mobile phone inside the pocket of his jeans. He leaned over to Maryam, quickly scribbled a note on a piece of scrap paper with a trembling hand, took a roll of banknotes from his pocket and placed them both inside her sleeping bag.
‘Simon,’ she murmured.
‘I’m going for some food. I’ll be back soon,’ he whispered in her ear, and quickly kissed her head. Maryam reached for him in her sleep. He embraced her through her sleeping bag, his chest against her back, her fingers entwining with his. Even now she smelled the same, of soap and lavender, her breath still sweet in the morning. All he wanted to do, all he had ever wanted, was to hold her and never let go. He kissed the back of her neck, then looked up at the three men. They were walking away from the station now, across Baross Square now, towards Rakoczi Way.
His heart thumped, his left hand throbbed. He
closed his eyes for a moment, drank in the smell of her, swallowed hard, and stood up.
Thirty yards away, the blonde taxi driver dropped her cigarette, ground it out with a swift twist of her foot and began to follow him.
ONE
Republic Square, Friday, 4 September, 9.45 a.m.
The body was gone.
Balthazar Kovacs stood in the middle of the lot and scanned his surrounds again. The ground was covered with smashed bricks, broken slabs of concrete shot through with rusty metal spars, and jagged lumps of plaster. Flies buzzed over a pool of greasy, stagnant water, the remains of a party nearby: blackened wood, an empty condom packet and a quarter-full plastic bottle of Voros asztali bor, red table wine that rarely saw a table. Charred sheets of typewritten paper, yellow with age, and mouldy books were scattered among the rubble. The only thing left standing was the lower part of the back wall, covered with graffiti.
He picked up a large black hardback book. Its binding was cracked and the pages were curled, but the embossed gold letters on the front were still legible: Proceedings of the 26th National Congress of the Communist Youth Organisation, 1983. He leafed through the stiff pages, filled with photographs of earnest youngsters in big collared shirts and wide flares, standing proudly under the banners of Marx, Engels and Lenin, between long articles about the role of youth in building Communism.
He put the book down, feeling the sweat drip down the back of his neck. A peaceful September Friday morning in the backstreets of Budapest, although the temperature already felt like it was off the scale. Birdsong sounded from the trees. A woman in her sixties walked by in a pink leisure suit, cigarette in one hand, yapping terrier on a lead in the other. Children’s laughter carried across the park from the playground. There was a new opposition billboard, he saw, covering two storeys of the side wall of a nearby apartment building. ‘Kirugjuk a komcsikat! let’s kick out the commies!’ it proclaimed above a photograph of the prime minister, his cabinet and business allies bedecked in red flags and linked together in a spider’s web.
The SMS had arrived at 9.05 a.m., in the middle of his first cup of coffee. There were three words: 26 Republic Square, and a photograph. So he was in the right place. But where was the dead man? The photograph showed a thin, brown-haired male, in his late twenties or early thirties. He lay on his side, half-covered with bricks and dust, either dead or unconscious. If he was dead, which seemed likely as his eyes were open, had he been killed here, or brought here? The covering seemed a botched job, as though someone had been interrupted.
Balthazar glanced at the half-demolished wall, stepped closer. It was definitely the same wall. The graffiti was so fresh that the spray paint was still shiny. ‘Bevandorlok haza’, it declared, ‘Migrants go home’, next to a picture of a man wearing a headscarf, hanging from a tree. The tree had been skilfully rendered, its trunk gnarly, black branches spreading like veins. A red tongue lolled from the mouth of the hanged man, his eyes bulging. Three letters underneath, painted in red, white and green, the colours of the Hungarian flag: MNF. Magyar Nemzeti Front, Hungarian National Front.
He took another step and bent down to peer at the ground. There were track marks in the dust, as though a heavy weight had been dragged through the dirt. He took out his telephone and quickly shot a video of the scene, panning from side to side, zooming in on the place where the man had been, then snapped a panorama of several still shots. He slipped the handset back into his pocket when something caught the edge of his vision, glinting in the morning sunshine. He knelt down and looked harder. A SIM card, large, old-fashioned, half covered in dust. He peered inside his shoulder bag: one evidence bag left, and a pair of tweezers. He used the tweezers to pick up the card, dropped it into the bag and stood still for a moment while he pondered his next move.
Each of Budapest’s twenty-two districts had their own local force. This was the edge of District VIII, one of the city’s largest and best known for being home to Budapest’s main Gypsy quarter. In most murder cases the local beat officers found the body. They sealed off the area and called in the crime-scene and forensics team, who would then look for evidence. Then the case was passed to the district police’s investigation team. They naturally wanted to investigate murders themselves, but nine times out of ten they were passed on to the city-wide murder squad, which made for a perpetual turf war. That was good news for killers, less so for their victims. Complications made for mishaps. Files went missing, reports were delayed; sometimes evidence was even ‘accidentally’ destroyed or lost in transit. But had there really been a murder here, or indeed, any crime? So far all he had was a text message and a photograph. Maybe the man was not even dead, just unconscious or drunk; maybe he had recovered and limped home. He certainly was not here any more.
Balthazar watched a bearded hipster on a old-fashioned white bicycle whizz by, heading down Luther Street to Rakoczi Way. He was about to put the evidence bag into his rucksack when he thought better of it. Just as he’d jammed the bag and the tweezers into his back pocket, he felt a pair of eyes on him. He turned around to see a wiry lad, eleven or twelve years old with street-smart eyes, staring hard, instantly calculating whether he was a threat or a potential source of benefit. ‘You’re a cop,’ the boy declared confidently.
Balthazar knew there was no point lying. And who else would be picking up a piece of plastic and placing it in a bag? In any case, Gypsy street kids could smell out a policeman at a hundred yards. The boy had unkempt black hair, coffee-coloured skin, light-brown eyes and a brick in his right hand. He wore an oversized and grubby blue T-shirt, dirty cut-off jeans and a pair of worn-out Nike trainers. Balthazar smiled; a version of himself twenty-five years ago, but the pang in his stomach was something more than memory.
‘Guilty.’ Balthazar looked at the brick. ‘Are you going to hit me with that?’
The boy looked at his hand. ‘No. No, of course not.’ He seemed about to run, paused for a couple of seconds, and tilted his head to one side as he looked Balthazar up and down. Confusion registered on his face. ‘But you’re a Rom.’
‘Two out of two,’ said Balthazar. He extended his hand, introduced himself in the Hungarian fashion, surname first. It was an old trick and nearly always worked. Hungarians were very polite, felt no embarrassment about introducing themselves. Indeed it was considered rude not to do so when meeting new people. Not responding to a person introducing themselves would be a very hostile gesture.
The boy solemnly extended a small hand. hi, Jozsi vagyok, I’m Jozsi.’
‘You can call me Tazi.’ Balthazar lightly squeezed his thin palm. The boy’s fingers were covered with red-brown dust. Balthazar pointed at the brick. ‘Show me that.’
Jozsi frowned. ‘I didn’t steal it from anywhere. It was just lying around.’
‘It’s fine. I just want to take a look.’
Jozsi handed over the brick. Balthazar smiled as he ran his finger over an embossed cogwheel in one corner. Jozsi had a good eye. Communist-era building material, the detritus of the old regime, was now highly prized by interior designers. The brick could perhaps fetch 300 forints, the equivalent of a euro, before it ended up in a villa in the Buda hills or decorating a trendy loft conversion downtown. A pre-1989 street sign for Lenin Boulevard or Karl Marx Square, both since renamed, was worth hundreds.
This was a good place to hunt. The wreckage was all that remained of the former Communist Party headquarters. It was hard to imagine now that this building, which once covered half a block, had once been one of the most important sites in the country. Republic Square, like many landmarks, had been renamed, in this case for Pope John Paul. Hungary’s governments had a mania for renaming streets and squares, as though a change of title could wash away what had happened there. But whatever it was called, this was a haunted place. Revolutionaries had tried to capture the party headquarters during the 1956 uprising. The fighting then, like all civil wars, was brutal. Mobs lynched officers in the AVH, the hated secret police, hanging them upside d
own from lamp posts and setting them on fire. Local toughs hurled Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks, burning the soldiers alive, leaving their charred corpses on the streets. After a long siege, a group of teenage AVH recruits had emerged from the party headquarters with their hands up. A British photographer had captured what followed, frame by frame.
Balthazar carefully put the brick on the ground, placed his foot on top of it.
‘Hey,’ said Jozsi, indignantly. ‘That’s mine.’
‘I know. You’ll get it back.’ He took out his telephone and showed the photograph of the dead man to Jozsi. ‘Did you see him? Do you know anything?’
Jozsi looked at the screen then back at Balthazar, juggling his deep suspicion of the police with his desire to get the brick back. ‘He’s gone.’
‘I can see that. When? How?’
Jozsi looked down at the ground. ‘ dunno.’ ‘I don’t know’ in Hungarian was ‘ Street slang compressed it.
Balthazar crouched down so that he was at eye level with Jozsi, moved the brick up and down with his right hand. The boy knew something, he was sure. ‘Kez kezet mos, hand washes hand.’
Jozsi frowned, thought for a moment. ‘The men came to take him away. They had a van.’
‘Which men?’
‘Men. I don’t know who they were. Really.’
‘Uniforms? Were they cops? Gendarmes?’
‘No.’
‘What kind of van?’
Jozsi shrugged. ‘Nem tom. A white van.’
‘When?’
‘Just after breakfast, around a quarter past eight.’
‘How do you know all this?’
Jozsi stepped back, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. ‘I live nearby.’
‘Where?’
The boy stepped back again. ‘Nearby.’ Jozsi gestured at the brick. ‘Can I have it back, please?’
