Love and Treasure (27 page)

Natalia slapped Krisztián on the arm, and let loose a stream of irritable Hungarian, to which the young man replied in a voice that seemed genuinely confused. After a brief exchange he turned to Natalie and Amitai and said, “I am very sorry if I seem to be anti-Semite, because I am not. Only I am, according to Miss Natalia, an idiot, and I did not know that there were very many Jews, before, in Budapest, and just because one is a Jew does not mean one knows all other Jews. Although, may I say, my mother’s concierge, she is a Jew, and she is also the relative of my colleague at the university, so you see, two of the only Jews I know, know each other. But again, I apologize because, as Miss Natalia insists I must say to you, I am an idiot.”

He looked to Natalia to see how he had done. She nodded, satisfied.

“No, that’s good thinking,” Natalie said. “It can’t hurt to explore the connection.”

“But why?” Amitai asked. “What’s the point? We are looking for the other young lady, remember? And we know she is not Mrs. Schwimmer. Obviously, she is not the prosecutor. At any rate, this prosecutor, he is just a factotum. Mrs. Schwimmer had friends high in the government who arranged for this document to be submitted on Gizella’s behalf.”

Natalie pushed back her chair, crossed her arms over her chest, and glared at him like an angry child. “Well, then what do you want to do? Because I can’t think of where to search next.”

Amitai rubbed his forehead. As much as Natalie wanted to find the woman in the photograph in her locket, he wanted to find the painting more. He had, after all, been searching for years to Natalie’s few days. But he had been doing this work for a very long time and knew the seduction of fascinating stories and exciting leads, most of which turned out to be worthless. The sensible course of action, having discovered that Natalie’s locket had been taken from the Gold Train, would have been immediately to concede defeat. If the woman’s property had been confiscated and ended up on the train, then it was gone. And yet he hadn’t quit. Out of hope, perhaps, or out of curiosity about and attraction to Natalie, he couldn’t tell. Still, he was a professional and should not be wasting his time.

“Perhaps I am not so much the fan of lost causes as you’d hoped,” he said.

Natalia, the Hungarian clerk, interrupted. “I will bring you the file of Einhorn Ignác, yes? You look. Maybe you find in there something.”

More out of politeness than because he shared Natalie’s naïve hopes, Amitai agreed. And so it was that an hour later he was forced to eat crow, albeit only a small portion.

Natalia translated the final entry in Einhorn’s file. “Dismissed from the prosecutor’s office in 1939 pursuant to the second anti-Jewish law. Moved with his family to his birthplace of Nagyvárad!”

“Nagyvárad!” Natalie said triumphantly.

She was all for packing up and setting off for Nagyvárad immediately, but Amitai convinced her that it would be better, first, to consult with the Jewish library at the Dohány Street Synagogue. He had worked in Romania before and tried to find information there, and while the Hungarian Jewish library was hardly a model of organization, it was better than anything he had ever found in the country next door. Moreover, the archivist herself, Anikó Vázsonyi, possessed admirable powers of recall and had often in the past surprised him with her capacity to pluck crucial bits of evidence from beneath teetering stacks of moldering books and folders.

It was Friday evening, however, and Mrs. Vázsonyi observed the Sabbath. When Amitai called, a message cheerfully informed him that she would not be back at work until Monday.

“So what should we do?” Natalie asked.

They had thanked the reference librarian, tipped her well, dismissed
Krisztián, who had to hurry back to the hotel for his shift, and now stood awkwardly at the taxi stand.

“We have to wait,” Amitai said.

“Okay.” Natalie fumbled around in her bag, extracted her wallet. “I guess I should get back to my hotel.”

He nodded. Then, “Is it nice, your hotel?”

“It’s all right. Nothing like yours.”

“The Gellért is very nice. The pool especially.”

“Well, I’d better get going.”

“Do you like to swim?”

“Do I like to swim?”

“As I said. The pool is very nice. If you like to swim, you could swim at the Gellért.”

“Now?” she asked. “You want to go swimming now?”

“I usually swim in the morning. But I suppose if you wanted we could swim now. There are mineral baths also. To soak.”

“Amitai, what are you asking me?”

What was he asking her, he wondered. Not to join him for a swim, as much as he enjoyed swimming.

“If your hotel room is not very nice, you could stay with me at the Gellért,” he said.

“You want me to stay with you because my hotel’s a dump?” she said, gently teasing him. “Is that why?”

“Yes. I mean, I would like you to stay with me. If you want. But if you don’t, no problem.”

“No problem,” she said, laughing.

He glanced up at the sky. The perpetual drizzle cooled his flushed cheeks.

“Yes, Amitai,” she said. “I’d love to stay with you. At your big, fancy hotel.”

“Excellent,” he said. He lifted his arm and, with a curt gesture, waved over the first taxi in the line.

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AFTER RETRIEVING NATALIE
’
S BELONGINGS
and checking out of her indeed dumpy hotel, they walked through the door of the Gellért to find Dror Tamid sitting on one of the lobby’s sofas, in the midst of a heated conversation with Pétér Elek. The day before, after his chance encounter with the Israeli in the baths, Amitai had considered moving hotels. But he would have missed the Gellért’s pool too much, and more important, his pride would not allow him to be driven away. Now he steered Natalie briskly through the lobby, in the vain hope that they would not be noticed.

“Amitai Shasho!” Tamid called out in English. “You’re still here in Budapest.”

“A classic Tamid insight.”

Tamid blinked, struggling against his innate tone deafness to irony.

“And with my lovely former student. Natalie! How are you?”

“I’m fine, Dr. Tamid,” she said, glancing quickly at Amitai.

“Our friend Mr. Shasho isn’t getting you into any trouble, I hope?”

“On the contrary,” Amitai said. “It’s the other way around.”

He nodded at Elek, and turned to cross the rotunda toward the bank of elevators, but Tamid held up his hand.

“And you know, of course, Pétér Elek.”

To Amitai, Elek’s smile seemed somewhat embarrassed.

Tamid continued, “Elek, it is our friend Amitai you should be arguing with, not me.”

Natalie turned to the Hungarian. “Why should Amitai argue with you, Mr. Elek?”

“I’m sure he should not,” Elek said.

Tamid, who had not bothered to rise, said, “Elek and I were debating the proper disposition of the Herzog Collection. Do you know about this, Natalie? It was amassed during the early part of the last century by a very wealthy man, a Budapest Jew, Baron Mór Lipót Herzog. Just now it is the subject of a large and important lawsuit, one that has caused quite a little diplomatic fracas between the Hungarians and the Americans. And also a diplomatic fracas between me and my friend here.”

Elek again smiled, pretending, Amitai thought, not to take offense. “Come, Dr. Tamid,” Elek said. “There is no ‘fracas’ between us. I readily acknowledge the right of the Herzog family to compensation. I merely regret the loss of even more of Hungary’s art treasures to the West. Our country has already lost so much of its cultural patrimony. First during the Depression of the 1930s, when so many collectors were forced to sell and so few in Budapest were able to buy. And then again during the war, when first the Nazis and then the Soviets looted both the museums and the private collections.”

Amitai gazed in wonder at his friend, who had helped him over the years extricate so many individual pieces of his country’s patrimony. Was Elek blustering for Tamid’s sake, or was he suddenly admitting a hitherto unacknowledged objection to the very work in which Amitai was engaged?

As if in answer to the unasked question, Elek said, “This is not a small quantity of jewels or an assortment of valuable coins or stamps or even a single painting. Baron Herzog’s is one of the last great collections remaining in Hungary. If the family prevails in its lawsuit, all that will be lost to us, too.”

Tamid said, “Baron Herzog’s collection was stolen by the Arrow Cross, the same villains who murdered his son and drove the rest of his family from the country. Is his family not entitled to the return of his property?”

Amitai tugged gently at Natalie’s arm, urging her away, but she resisted. She was interested, it seemed, in the debate. He had been carrying her suitcase, and he set it down with a sigh.

Elek said, “As I have told you before, Dr. Tamid, you and I are in agreement on this point. Like you, I find it offensive that Herzog’s El Grecos hang in our fine arts museum, their provenance unacknowledged. And unlike my government, I feel restitution is appropriate. But am I not entitled to regret my country’s loss? First we were raped by the Nazis, then by the Soviets—”

“It is not rape if the woman consents,” Tamid said. “You and I both know how Hungary spread its legs for Hitler. You bent over for Eichmann like a Moldovan prostitute, with a smile on your face.”

Amitai felt Natalie stiffen next to him. Softly, in Hebrew, he said, “Enough, Dror.”

In English, Tamid snarled, “Why enough? It’s always ‘enough’ when it’s us, but to them no one says ‘enough.’ ”

“It’s enough,” Amitai said, in English, “because Elek is a Jew.”

Like a surprising number of the citizens of Budapest—like Budapest itself—Pétér Elek concealed a Jewish history, a secret narrative that was written not in his face, a set of Slavic planes and angles, but in the tiny stature that brought him barely to the tip of Amitai’s chin. A Jew who grew up in Pest, mere blocks from the great Dohány Street Synagogue, he had survived the war because his mother managed to obtain false documents for herself and her son. She had taken an apartment in a non-Jewish neighborhood in Buda, where she masqueraded as a decent Hungarian Catholic woman. But the son, unlike his mother, carried between his legs the evidence that could betray them both. His mother was afraid to have him leave the safety of the apartment, even to go to school. So for two and a half years he had played the role of invalid, confined to his bed. Elek attributed his diminutive size to those years. He once told Amitai, “I went to bed a ten-year-old boy, and a ten-year-old boy I remained, in my body if not my mind.”

At one time Amitai might have been astonished by the strange good fortune that had allowed Elek to survive. But if you worked in his business long enough, you came to realize that every Holocaust survivor represented, by definition, a story of miraculous happenstance, desperate subterfuge, random salvation. Those of whom no such story could be told were dead.

“I am Hungarian,” Elek said now. “But yes, my family is of Jewish descent.”

Tamid scowled. “Worse then. Of all people you should understand and have sympathy.”

Elek bristled, finally indulging Tamid with the fracas that the Israeli had been so eager to provoke. “For whom should I have sympathy? The Herzog family? Aristocrats whose gold allowed them to escape in comfort and safety while the rest of Jewish Budapest tried to keep from being shot and thrown in the Danube? A gang of robber barons who got out with millions and lived to produce a gaggle of squabbling spoiled heirs? Those are the people with whom I should have sympathy? And what about those who were not able to go to America in 1944 when Eichmann came? What about those like my family, who lost everything, though it was so little? To my mother, a new pair of shoes was worth more than an El Greco to a Herzog. Where is her compensation? Why is it you do not argue on her behalf but only on behalf of the wealthy?”

Tamid said, “The rich always benefit more than the poor, Elek. You
must have learned that as a small boy, back in the days of communism. At any rate, that is not a question for me but for Mr. Shasho. I am myself an advocate for all survivors, be they rich or poor, with property or without. It is Mr. Shasho here who helps only the rich.”

Ordinarily, Amitai would have refused to tolerate this fraught and hysterical conversation for even a minute. But Natalie’s presence prevented him from walking away. She looked at him now, as if to say,
Defend yourself!
and he wanted to. He wanted to crack Tamid across the nose.

Tamid continued, “If Amitai were representing the Herzog heirs, he would by now have arranged a quick and quiet sale, proceeds to be split evenly between thief, victim, and dealer alike, and no one the wiser, isn’t that right, Amitai?”

Amitai wondered if he would have been able to accomplish what Tamid claimed. Could he have negotiated a deal with the Hungarian government by which the works would be sold and the proceeds divided? Not, he thought, if Hungary was keen to see its museums and private collections rival those of her fellow European states. Amitai’s successes would always be quieter and smaller. Not national galleries but regional museums, not major collectors but minor pilferers, not El Greco but Komlós.

Amitai shot Natalie a glance. Was Tamid’s attitude toward him making her regret her decision to join him? Tamid had after all been her professor. She shared the Israeli’s emotional investment in the Holocaust, and it was his counsel she’d sought before coming to Budapest.

Natalie said, “This is your fight, Dr. Tamid. It has nothing to do with Amitai.” She turned to Amitai. “Come on. Let’s get me checked in.”

She grabbed his hand and strode off. Gratitude toward a woman was a new sensation for Amitai. Over his shoulder, his delight all out of proportion to the events, he said, “I’m afraid the Herzog fortune is too rich for my blood. I’m strictly small-time.”

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