District VIII

by Adam LeBor

  ‘Give me that.’ Eniko snatched the telephone from her friend’s hand. She stared at the screen. ‘Oh, God, how did they get that?’ The picture showed Nemeth, a very handsome man in his early thirties, with brown eyes and black hair, leaning forward as he offered Eniko a piece of octopus on chopsticks.

  Eniko handed the telephone back to Zsuzsa. Her friend enlarged the shot, looked closer at Eniko. ‘Considering that half of Budapest would kill to be sitting where you were, you don’t look like you are having much fun.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘Eni, he’s handsome, single, intelligent, straight, not mad or a druggie. What more do you want?’

  ‘Yes. All boxes ticked. But he is kind of... boring. All he wanted to talk about was himself.’

  ‘He is an actor. What did you expect? What did you want to talk about?’

  ‘I was interested in who was backing the play. Where the money was coming from. The company sponsors. The government subsidies. How did the playwright get the commission? And had Tamas read the script?’

  Zsuzsa’s cornflower-blue eyes opened wider. ‘You are joking? You had a dinner date with Tamas Nemeth and you wanted to know about government subsidies?’ She stared at the photograph again. ‘Where are your glasses?’

  Eniko wore loose cream-coloured cotton trousers and a fitted pale-blue T-shirt. She took off her round brown-tortoiseshell spectacles and began to polish the lenses with the edge of her T-shirt. ‘I didn’t wear them. I don’t on dates.’ ‘OK, I get that. How was the octopus?’

  Eniko polished harder, rubbing at a non-existent spot. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How? It was right there in front of you.’

  ‘He missed.’

  ‘He what?’

  Eniko put her glasses back on and turned to Zsuzsa. ‘I can’t judge distances very well without my glasses. I leaned forward. The octopus went past my ear.’

  Zsuzsa tried to stop herself laughing. ‘Did he try again?’

  ‘No. He was too embarrassed. Almost as much as I was.’

  ‘Did he ask you to go on somewhere?’

  ‘No. He called for the bill soon after.’

  ‘Will you see him again?’

  ‘On stage, maybe. Nah, Zsuzsika, I have to work. Have you seen the photo editor? I’m going back to Keleti this afternoon and we need some fresh pictures.’

  Eniko gathered her long dark-brown hair into a ponytail, swept it back off her face, and wrapped it in a plain black hair band. The style made her feel professional and businesslike, but also accentuated her almost Slavic cheekbones, a remnant of a Tartar ancestor, and eyes the colour of sapphires. She wore no make-up and her only jewellery was a tiny silver hoop in the top of her left ear.

  ‘No, I have not seen the photo editor,’ said Zsuzsa. ‘Stop changing the subject.’

  Eniko smiled. ‘I can give you Tamas’s number if you like. He wants to have lots of children. And a good, old-fashioned Hungarian stay-at-home wife.’ Eniko turned to Zsuzsa. ‘Do you want to be a stay-at-home wife?’

  Zsuzsa lightly poked her friend in the arm. ‘If he walks through the door every night, then maybe, yes.’ Zsuzsa Barcsy was pale and pretty with long auburn hair, but self-conscious about her curves. She wore a long, flowery Indian-style skirt, a baggy pink cotton top and two dangly silver earrings.

  For a moment Zsuzsa looked exasperated. ‘Eni, you have to move on. You’re nudging thirty. You can’t keep mooning over a month-long affair that happened half a year ago. And made you run away to London.’

  Eniko looked down into the square again. The Bella Roma man stared upwards at the balcony for several seconds then turned away. Was she being watched? She was certainly stirring things up, and annoying some powerful and not very nice people, that much she knew. Everyone was on edge nowadays, especially after the threats and the video of her colleague. Or was she just paranoid? It was hard to judge. She would think about that later. ‘I did not run away anywhere. It was a career opportunity.’

  Eniko had recently returned to Budapest after a six-month internship at Newsweek, covering British politics. The House of Commons, with its bars, restaurants and long, alcove-filled corridors, and legions of male MPs who were flattered by the attentive interest of an attractive and occasionally flirtatious new reporter, had proved an excellent training ground. It was easy to extract information from male politicians, she soon learned. All you had to do was pretend to be utterly fascinated by what they had to say and occasionally brush off over-eager hands. There was no need to adopt different tactics in Budapest. Only seven of Hungary’s 200 MPs were women and of them, only the minister of justice had any real power. Until last week, few Hungarian politicians took Eniko seriously as a journalist. They did now.

  Eniko had brought down Bela Balogh, the minister of the interior, by revealing he had set up an offshore company in the Cayman Islands to channel EU agricultural subsidies to plant apricot orchards on the puszta, the wide, flat plain in the east of the country. The orchards did not exist. The trees had not been purchased. In any case, the sandy soil of the puszta was completely unsuitable for growing fruit, although it seemed nobody in Brussels had bothered to check. The firm was registered in the name of Bela Balogh’s children’s nanny, with whom he was having an affair. The minister, she had since learned, had merely been the frontman for the scheme, easily persuaded to take part with several Nokia boxes of 10,000-forint notes. He had been instantly sacrificed and was now under house arrest, while the police investigation was underway. The story had arrived in her inbox one morning, complete with documentation, receipts and video footage of the minister and his nanny on the balcony of a boutique hotel deep in the countryside, one known for illicit assignations.

  It was all far too easy, she knew. So easy that she knew she had been used in some kind of internecine government power struggle. She had asked a hacker friend of hers to take a look at the electronic communications. The email address was fake and the sender’s IP address, which logged its path through the internet, had been erased. But still, it was a story and had to be reported. Meanwhile, the refugee crisis had put Budapest on the international news map and hundreds of foreign journalists were in town. Eniko’s phone had barely stopped ringing since she broke the story yesterday about the fake Gypsies. And there was so much more to report: increasing rumours that enough money – tens of thousands of euros -would buy an actual Hungarian passport, a genuine one with a serial number. A corrupt network of government officials, collapsing borders, thousands of people coming in every day, the refugee crisis was the biggest story she had ever covered in her career.

  Her phone buzzed: a message had arrived. She picked up the handset, peered at the screen, frowned for a moment. A WhatsApp message: a photograph of what seemed to be a man asleep on a building site and an address: 26 Republic Square. The old party headquarters. She looked harder. Eeeugh. The man’s eyes were open. He appeared to be dead. Eniko checked the number – not one that she knew and it was not registering as a contact in her telephone directory. Was this some of threat? The refugee crisis had unleashed all sorts of lunatics from the darker zones of Hungarian politics.

  ‘What is it? Show me,’ demanded Zsuzsa.

  Eniko handed Zsuzsa her Nexus 6. The photograph seemed large on the oversized handset. Zsuzsa pulled a face. ‘That’s horrible. Poor man. He looks like he’s dead. Who sent it?’ Eniko shrugged. ‘I don’t know. There’s no name.’

  Zsuzsa looked at the message again and sighed. ‘Look closer. A letter in the message field.’

  Eniko checked again. She had been so unsettled by the photograph she had missed it. A single ‘B’. Eniko kissed Zsuzsa on the side of her face. ‘You are very sweet and a true friend. But now I have to go.’ She walked back into the newsroom and picked up her bag, a determined look on her face.

  Bus 8E, Thokoly Way, 12.10 p.m.

  Balthazar sat back down. The bus was still stationary as he bit into the apple, which was crisp and pleasantly sharp. He looked out of the
grimy window. A new billboard was mounted on top of an apartment building. It showed the dates 1956, 1989 and the word ‘ ?’, ‘Now?’, above the same picture of the prime minister, his ministers and business allies linked together in a spider’s web that Balthazar had seen earlier that morning on Luther Street. Large letters proclaimed, ‘Fejezzuk be a munkat!’, ‘Let’s finish the job!’. The posters were unattributed but were widely believed to be the work of a new conservative opposition party, which claimed that the governing Social Democrats were still Communists in all but name and another change of system was needed. Balthazar’s eye wandered to a long queue of migrants which had formed nearby outside a pizza takeaway which offered a slice of margarita for 100 forints, around thirty pence. Next door, tables had been set up on the pavement outside a kebab restaurant. A large, overweight Gypsy male in his thirties was holding forth on his mobile phone. In front of him sat another man, dark, thin, hunched, a supplicant waiting. Balthazar did a double take. The obese man with the mobile phone looked familiar. Very familiar.

  Was it him? Yes, it was. Viktor Lakatos. Eat Vik, as he was usually known. Second in command to Gaspar, Balthazar’s brother. Lately Fat Vik had been branching out from prostitutes and hostess bars. He was often to be found sitting on an armchair outside one of Budapest’s many BAV shops, the state antique emporiums, with several minions .Whenever someone walked towards the shop with a painting to sell, Fat Vik would send one of his guys to intercept them at the door and try to persuade them to sell to him instead. But there was only one thing being bought and sold in the streets around Keleti now – and it was not antiques. What, Balthazar asked himself, was his brother up to now?

  The sirens finally faded but the bus, still stuck in traffic, did not move. Balthazar’s mind drifted back to his conversation with Sandor Takacs. There was a chance, he supposed, that the dead man might have been killed in a robbery that had gone wrong. It was well known among the muggers and pickpockets of District VIII that the migrants often carried large sums in cash or valuables. But then why had the Gendarmes been there? They had no interest in everyday crimes, unless they affected the prime minister or the political elite. And where had the body gone? This was no bungled robbery, he was sure.

  Meanwhile, there were more personal considerations. He had blithely agreed to talk to his brother, but what if Gaspar was involved in the killing? Balthazar’s career had already cost him dear. His father, Laszlo, had been furious after Balthazar had joined the police. Balthazar’s mother, Marta, had refused point-blank to countenance his demands that her eldest son be ostracised. Laszlo had called a meeting of the Kris, the Gypsies’ communal court. This was a drastic step. The Kris was usually convened to resolve disputes between families, without the involvement of outside authorities, and not to mediate in intra-family feuds. Eventually, the Kris had handed down its judgement: Balthazar could see his brothers whenever he wanted, was allowed to return to the courtyard whenever he liked, but female relatives – including his mother living there – could only meet him with Laszlo’s permission. In addition, Balthazar was banned from all family events and from entering the actual family home without his father’s permission. Balthazar had to pledge that he would never, upon pain of full ostracism, divulge any information to the police concerning any criminal activity he knew about that was connected to any of his relatives. He had agreed.

  Beyond family affairs, there was the whole business of the Gendarmerie. Takacs was right not to go to war with the Gendarmerie, at least for now. The ostentatious motorcade through the middle of the city was a message – that the Gendarmerie had the strongest and most solid roof: the prime minister’s office. The police’s roof, shared with the state security service, the Ministry of the Interior, was lacking several tiles nowadays, not least its minister, Bela Balogh. His downfall had been swift, too swift. Balthazar called up Eniko’s 555.hu story on his telephone and quickly reread it. It was detailed and accurate. The incriminating evidence was overwhelming. Balogh was guilty and deserved to go to prison. But a similar dossier, he knew, could be released about several government ministers, and numerous MPs and senior civil servants. Somebody had fed the dossier to Eniko. But who, and why bring down the minister of the interior in the middle of a refugee crisis?

  His phone buzzed, interrupting his reverie. The text message instantly banished thoughts of migrants and refugees, murders, and threats from the Gendarmes: ‘Hallo, Daddy. I can’t wait to see you this weekend.’

  Balthazar smiled with pleasure as he quickly tapped out a reply and sent it. But his smile faded as he remembered the rest of his conversation with Sandor Takacs.

  If the ambassador makes a request to the PM’s office it will be heeded. Especially after you were officially...

  Officially warned not to park outside the American school in a far-flung suburb of Buda, in an unmarked police car while off duty just to get a glimpse of Alex after his mother had cancelled two visits in a row, Takacs might have said. And doubly warned not to get out of the car when Alex saw his dad, run over with the world’s biggest smile, pick him up and promise to see him the next weekend. Which was anyway unfair on the twelve-year-old boy, as thanks to Balthazar’s lurking, that visit was quickly cancelled, and the next one after it. But then, Takacs was happily married with three grown-up children who still came home every Sunday for a family lunch, two of them with their own youngsters.

  Takacs’s advice needed to be heeded. Sarah seemed to delight in torturing Balthazar, randomly cancelling his midweek visits and weekends with Alex, often with just a couple of hours’ notice, or even less. Three weeks earlier he had been standing outside the front door of her apartment building on Pozsonyi Way in District XIII, when the text arrived: ‘Sorry, Alex has a fever. We have to delay.’ It was all he could do to control his temper and not take the lift upstairs and force his way inside. He realised, of course, that nothing would have delighted Sarah more. Lately though, Balthazar had a new ally: Maria, Sarah’s cleaning lady. Maria was a Gypsy, possibly even a distant relative. She had grown up around the corner from Jozsef Street and fed Balthazar a stream of information about Sarah and Alex, sometimes even telephoning him when she was at the house. Sarah could not speak Hungarian, let alone the rapid-fire mix of Hungarian, Lovari, the main Gypsy dialect, and street slang that Maria spoke, so had no idea what she was talking about.

  Balthazar had met Sarah at Central European University in downtown Budapest. Founded by the philanthropist George Soros, CEU was a small postgraduate college. Balthazar was the first in his family to enter higher education. As the eldest of three brothers and two sisters, he had been expected to leave school at fourteen, or sixteen at the latest, and eventually take over the family business, a position now filled by Gaspar. But Marta had other ideas, as did a sharpeyed teacher at his primary school. Marta had stubbornly insisted to Laszlo that her eldest son would not follow in his footsteps. Instead, he would go to university. Laszlo laughed, shouted, slapped her back and forth. But Marta also had her arsenal. After two weeks without conjugal rights, and the opportunity to cook his own meals, Laszlo surrendered.

  The primary-school teacher arranged for Balthazar’s transfer to Fazekas, the country’s best high school. Despite Fazekas’s location in District VIII, Balthazar was the only Roma pupil in his year. He had graduated with the highest grades in his class and studied law and politics at Budapest’s Eotvos Lorand University. From there he had moved to Central European University where he and Sarah quickly fell in love. The Hungarian Roma and New York liberal intellectual had found each other exciting and exotic. They moved in together, sharing a studio flat in District VII, the old Jewish quarter. After a passionate few months, Sarah fell pregnant. They decided to get married in a quick civil ceremony with just a couple of friends as witnesses. Balthazar’s family had been furious. Partly because he had married a gadje, a nonGypsy, although Sarah was Jewish and Jews and Gypsies were traditional allies, but mainly because they had not been invited or allowed to hold the usu
al massive celebration.

  After graduating with a Master’s degree in nationalism studies, Balthazar was deluged with job offers. A lucrative and not especially taxing world beckoned, he realised, where he could build a career as a professional Roma. Charitable foundations, international organisations, government departments, multinational corporations were all desperate to hire intelligent, presentable Roma people, especially when they were fluent in English as Balthazar now was, to burnish their liberal credentials. Balthazar had been a talented student and his professor at CEU had made it clear that there would be an easy path to a PhD, followed by a lecturer’s position, assistant professorship, then even on to department head. Balthazar started a doctorate, specialising in the Poray-mus, the Devouring, as Gypsies called their Holocaust.

  After a couple of years, Balthazar had had enough of libraries and archives and extermination. He also realised that he had no desire to be a diszczigany, a decorative, token Gypsy. In a region convulsed by change, riddled with corruption, run by a political class interested mainly in self-enrichment, the law, he believed, offered the only guarantee of liberty. The law had failed him – and someone very close to him -once before. He would make sure it did not do so again. So, at the age of twenty-nine, he joined the police. In the politically correct, uber-liberal circles in which Sarah now moved, a policeman husband was beyond the pale. Sarah, by then an associate professor of gender studies, decided she was a lesbian and moved in with Amanda, a German student from Tubingen, taking Alex with her.

  Balthazar read his son’s message once more and slid his telephone into his pocket. He stood up as the 8E bus reached the stop by Keleti Station, glancing at the scene at the side of the station, where several refugee families had set up an ad hoc camp. One elderly lady was even boiling water on a portable stove. A line of taxi drivers stood watching and smoking. One in particular caught Balthazar’s eye: a woman in her early thirties, tall, dark blonde, with her hair tied back in a ponytail. Where had he seen her before? The bus jolted to a halt. There were several flyers on the floor by the door and he picked one up before he got off, breaking his train of thought about the blonde taxi driver. He stood still for a moment, looking at the sheet of A5. The flyer was printed on heavy, glossy paper in full colour. A banner headline across the top declared ‘Defend our homeland’ on one line and ‘Magyar Nemzeti Front’ – ‘Hungarian National Front’ – underneath. A racist caricature of a black man groping a blonde, white young woman took up most of the rest of the page. ‘Stop the migrant flood: Join the patriots’ revolution’ was printed along the bottom edge, together with an email address: info@mnf.hu.