The Budapest Protocol (11 page)

“Go on,” he said, waving at Alex and Natasha. “Get out of here. Fucking foreigners.”

Alex’s heart was pounding from adrenalin and nervous tension as they walked down the side of the square towards Groove. Natasha looked calm and unconcerned.

“You did brilliantly. How did you know he would take a bribe?” asked Alex.

“Cops always work in pairs. If you get stopped and the other one moves away out of sight, or doesn’t come forward it means they are open to be bribed. Plausible deniability. The other cop didn’t see anything, because he wasn’t there. The one who pockets the money gets sixty per cent and the other forty per cent.”

“That would make a great article. A guide to bribing Budapest police officers,” replied Alex enthusiastically.

“Yes, it would. But Alex, I must apologise to you,” said Natasha formally.

“What for? I should apologise to you. I nearly got us both arrested,” he protested.

“No, I was wrong. In the office, I was disrespectful of your grandfather, and to you. When I said at least you had some time with him.”

“You don’t have to apologise for anything, but thank you anyway. Let’s have a drink. I think we deserve one,” said Alex, taking her arm and steering her towards Groove.

Natasha walked briskly ahead, pulling her arm forward so his hand fell away. “No thanks, Alex. I have to go home now.”

“It’s Saturday night,” protested Alex. “You were a star. Please let me buy you a drink.”

A group of tipsy teenagers clambered over the playground, laughing and shouting. Natasha shook her head. She took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one, puffing quickly. “Alex, I was glad to help you with this. But I really have to go now. I need to be fresh for the Sanzlermann campaign rally tomorrow.”

Alex shrugged, his face burning with embarrassment and confusion. “You’re right. Call me later tomorrow night and let me know how it went.”

Natasha walked away. “I’ll try if I’m back in time. Or I’ll see you in the office on Monday.”

Alex stood on the grassy shore of Lake Balaton, fighting the wind that violently buffeted his red birthday kite. Miklos watched nearby, smiling and nodding encouragingly. The kite pulled harder, the string cutting into his palm. A sudden gust dragged it away, spinning red across the water as it disappeared into the distance. He felt the tears well up, but when he turned to Miklos he had vanished. Alex woke with a jolt, disorientated, his hand tingling. The clock showed 9.30am. He switched on the radio. Schumann played gently as he lay in bed. A church bell tolled and a tram trundled past along the riverbank. The ambient noise of weekend Budapest was both calming and painful. He had always spent Sundays with Miklos, and sometimes took him out for lunch. He had been planning to show him Kultura. Now the day yawned empty in front of him.

Alex glanced at Miklos’ diary, lying on the kitchen table, next to the book about the Soviet Union. He replayed the previous night in his mind. On a practical level it had been extremely successful. They had got in and out of the flat. They had escaped arrest. Nobody even knew they had been inside, except perhaps whoever telephoned. How idiotic he had been to pick up the handset. But that was not why he felt so low. Part of it was grief, he knew, as it was not even a week since he had found his grandfather’s body. But it was also more than mourning. He stared at the grey, cracked ceiling. He was thirty-nine years old. He had some money in the bank but owned no property; there was a woman in his life, who even said that she loved him, but she was married to someone else. And he was starting to fall in love with her, so it could only end badly. His friends and colleagues were married, with kids, mortgages and obligations. Part of him sneered at that bourgeois routine, and part of him – especially on mornings like this – hungered for familiar faces at the breakfast table. Was this the famed mid-life crisis?

There was a faint smell of Zsofi’s perfume on the sheets. Alex tried not to think of her waking up next to her husband. Istvan Kiraly was right. His relationship with Zsofi was a dead-end. He felt his face flush red with embarrassment as he remembered trying to take Natasha for a drink and how swiftly she had shaken off his arm. One part of him said there was nothing wrong with inviting a colleague for a drink, especially when you had just broken into a crime scene together. But even after their clinch against the wall Natasha had made it abundantly clear that she was not at all interested. Holding him so closely was strictly business, it seemed. In his younger days he would have regarded her froideur as a challenge, a Siberian permafrost to be melted with his oh-so-winning smile and a bottle of wine or vodka. The other part of him remembered another Slavic girl, with longer hair and just as striking cheekbones.

Alex swallowed hard, got up and walked to the bathroom. He stared into the mirror at his stubbled cheeks and bleary eyes. His mouth tasted sour from the whisky he had drunk alone at home the previous evening. “The unexamined life is not worth living” Socrates had written, but there was also a point when the examination became an excuse for not doing anything, he thought. This was not any kind of crisis, but maudlin selfindulgence, he decided. It was time for the hot and cold cure. He sat in the bath, yanking the lever on the mixer tap back and forth as the near scalding then freezing water coursed over him, yelping at the sudden change in temperature. His skin tingled as the pores opened and closed and he willed the gloom away. He would finish with Zsofi. More importantly, he would find out who had killed Miklos, and why.

He shaved, dressed in clean clothes and stood in his kitchen, considering the breakfast possibilities. The pizza slice was still on the work surface. He threw it in the bin, rolled up his sleeves and blitzed the grimy space, scrubbing the dishes, wiping down the surfaces, brushing and sweeping the floor. His reward was a packet of Mubarak’s Turkish coffee, a bag of pistachio nuts and some digestive biscuits he had brought from England, discovered at the back of a dusty shelf. He boiled the coffee in a small brass pot Mubarak had given him and watched the water rise slowly up, ready to foam over. He would spend the day reading Miklos’ testimony. He sat at his desk and reached for the thin grey papers, covered with his grandfather’s elegant, copperplate handwriting.

I have decided to keep a diary. I will write of how we live and die, but I am going to start with a question. One I have been thinking about for a long time. What did we do to these Hungarians to make them hate us so much? We are – were – good loyal citizens. We paid our taxes, built factories, schools, hospitals. We wrote books, plays, films, newspaper articles, poems, founded literary journals. We fought in their wars, died in their revolutions, built up the economy, provided jobs and work. We even made shells and bullets for the Germans and uniforms for the Hungarian army.

What was our reward? That the Hungarians watched and cheered as the Germans rounded us up and send us to Poland, for work supposedly, but none return. And what kind of work can children and the elderly do? No, let me correct myself. The Germans did not round us up. The Hungarians did. Hungarian clerks drew up the lists of Jews for deportation. Hungarian Gendarmes cleared the towns and villages of their Jews, and forced them into ghettos. Hungarian Gendarmes tortured the young and old to find where they have hidden their gold. Jewish gold, of course we have it, even when we don’t, and we collapse bloody in front of them, and still they seek and seek. And still they kill us, even now. Why? Everyone knows the Germans have lost the war. The western Allies are halfway through Europe, on the road to Berlin. The Russians are advancing from the east and have Budapest surrounded. Even the Romanians have changed sides. But not us. No, we have a new government, of the true believers, even worse than the Nazis: the Arrow Cross who murder us for pleasure.

I am writing this in an apartment on Dohany Street, not far from the Great Synagogue, by the gate to the main Budapest ghetto. We live twelve Jews in one room, sometimes more, sometimes less, as people die off and others take their places. Nobody is buried any more, and the frozen corpses pile up in the synagogue courtyard. For light and heat we have a few candles. The walls shake when the American planes drop their bombs, but we cheer inside to hear the sound of the explosions and the thunder of the Russian artillery as the shells fall into the city. My wife Ruth is here with me, working at the communal kitchen – if such is the word for a place from where comes very little food – trying to help as best she can.

We huddle together at night for warmth, young and old, men and women, it doesn’t matter anymore. A few have blankets, but most only their clothes. The air is thick and fetid with the smell of unwashed bodies. When the detonations sound too loud, we hide in the cellar with the rats. There at least we are safe from bullets and shrapnel. A fire burns inside me, that somehow helps keep me alive. I rage against this war, the stupidity of this country’s leaders, and the passivity of its people. Where are the partisans? Where is the resistance? Where are the police and the army while the Arrow Cross runs wild? They have surrendered our homeland to butchers and do nothing to stop them. So much anger, but what do I actually do? I could buy a gun and start shooting. But I do not. I want to live. Does that make me a coward? Perhaps.

I feel calmer today. Perhaps I should still count myself lucky. I am alive, after all, when so many are not. So is Ruth. And some of us at least are resisting. The Zionist youth groups can move across the city between this ghetto, and the so-called International Ghetto, in District XIII, by the Margaret Bridge, using neutral papers. Help came from a most unlikely quarter: the Swedish and Swiss embassies. The Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and his Swiss colleague Carl Lutz are issuing papers placing Hungarian Jews under their protection. They use these papers to move around the city, and print their own forgeries. I even go to work when I can, thanks to our former family butler. Aladar Nagy is now head waiter at the Hotel Savoy, favoured billet of the SS, one of the last places in the city where food, alcohol and tobacco are still available. And he is a member of the resistance. Nagy recruited me as a waiter and arranged something even better than a Wallenberg paper – a laissez-passer from the SS itself. Ironic that I know how to serve the Nazis – precisely how lunch or a cup of coffee should be presented: only a few months ago my needs were still met by servants. Now I live on the Nazis’ leftovers. How the world turns, not just around but also upside down.

Today I again brought coffee to Adolf Eichmann at the café of the Hotel Savoy. He is a strange figure, quite softly spoken. He speaks some Hebrew, which he learnt when he visited Palestine before the war, and knows all the Jewish festivals and customs well. He looks much more like a civil servant than a hate-filled fanatic. Because I am quite skilled in my new occupation, Eichmann asks for me by name, or rather, by the name on my false papers: Miklos Kovacs. “Kovacs,” he announces at 11.00pm, as he strides into the café, expecting me, naturally enough, to jump to his attention, “Coffee! Strong and black!” I would rather pour the boiling liquid over his head. But of course I do not. Instead I try to eavesdrop on Eichmann’s conversations as much as I can, although it is a delicate task, for if he suspected my intentions he would surely have me shot. He was sitting with SS Colonel Friedrich Vautker, and I am sure that Vautker knows I have false papers, for he takes a dark amusement in being friendly with me. He even saved my life once, from the Arrow Cross. Eichmann and Vautker spend much time meeting with businessmen. Considering that the Russians are advancing on the city day by day, they do not seem unduly concerned about the military situation
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The bombardment is getting worse. Corpses lie in the street of the ghetto, sometimes for days, before they are taken away. The Arrow Cross launch drunken raiding parties, and drag out whomever they please, before marching them down Rakoczi Street to the Danube. They are running out of bullets, and tie the Jews together three at a time before shooting one, who topples into the water, taking the others down as well. There are rumours that Wallenberg’s people hide on the riverbank, and then dive into the river to try and untie some of those still alive and bring them out. Not just Jews, but all of Budapest now lives underground most of the time. Tonight I have been summoned to work at the Savoy for a ‘special gala dinner’
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The ‘gala dinner’ was indeed a special occasion. I had not seen such food for months. True to his word, Aladar Nagy gave me a substantial package. I shared the food with Ruth and the others in our flat, and gave some potatoes to a child crying from hunger. There were several men in civilian clothes at the dinner. I looked at the hotel’s guest book – even in the inferno of war bureaucracy still turns – and saw that businessmen from Zurich were registered, together with many German industrialists, the barons of the steel, chemical and car industries. Halfway through the dinner there was a power cut and the only light came from candles. Eichmann was not there, but Vautker, the “friendly” SS Colonel, was. His bony, shadowed face, illuminated by the flickering Flame of a nearby candle, looked as though it contained a terrible secret hidden under the surface, a premonition of a dark and terrible future for mankind
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Christmas Day. I have neglected my diary, but there is little new to report. The Hotel Savoy has closed, and most of the SS have fled. The Russians are advancing steadily, driving the Arrow Cross into a frenzy. They have killed everyone at the Jewish hospital, shooting the doctors and nurses and murdering the patients in their beds. Yesterday I met a young boy, fourteen at most, who had somehow made his way here with his sister from the Jewish childrens’ home on Maros Street on the Buda side. They had hidden in the cellar while the Arrow Cross raided the place and marched the youngsters down to the riverbank where they had set up machine-guns. He had pulled off his yellow star and his sister’s, and walked across the city at dawn to find his parents. Incredibly, he succeeded.