The Budapest Protocol (6 page)

Alex continued: “We need to get this up on the website immediately. Ask the art department to scan it. I need a 500 word news story, and then the same length analysis of what this means for Csintori’s government. This afternoon please, news first.”

“Yes, the government is finished. You will have them both by lunchtime,” said Natasha. She turned and looked at the chaos on the television. An elderly lady sat on the ground, her legs splayed, blood seeping through her white hair. She held her hand to her head and rocked back and forth, pushing away a soldier trying to help her get up. “What are you watching?”

“The Russian air force strafing civilians, somewhere in the Caucasus.”

Natasha bristled. “Russians pilots don’t kill innocent people.”

“Maybe not on purpose, but they don’t care if they do. Did you see Grozny after the Russians’ retook it?”

Natasha shook her head. “I did,” said Alex. “What was left of it.”

“My grandfather was a Soviet fighter pilot in the Second World War,” Natasha replied, her voice tight. “He shot down eleven German fighter planes. The rebels must be using innocent people as cover. They always do.”

“Maybe they are. But Russia is a state. It should observe the rules of war.”

Natasha laughed derisively. “What rules? The Germans shot down my grandfather and sent him to Dachau. He left a wife and three young children, including my mother. They never saw him again. At least you had some time with your grandfather. There are no rules, Alex. Don’t you know that by now?” She picked up the election poster and walked out.

*  *  *

Café Casablanca was a dark hideaway on Akacfa Street, about ten metres long and half as wide, jammed between a shop selling ‘second-hand’ mobile telephones, digital cameras and laptops, and a locked-up garage. A badly-lit restaurant nearby offered a cheap lunch of soup and noodles. No foreign property developers had yet ventured to this part of District VII, which bordered neighbouring District VIII, the Gypsy quarter. The buildings were still gouged with shell and bullet holes from fighting during the siege in 1944, their stucco façades peeling off. A homeless man, his thin, undernourished face encrusted with dirt, lay fast asleep on a bench, hugging a plastic shopping bag with his meagre belongings.

Alex stepped inside the half-empty café. It fell silent, as though a switch had been turned. A clutch of dark-looking men in leather jackets hunched over packets of cigarettes and mobile telephones turned to look at him. The barmaid stared, unsmiling. The air was thick with tobacco smoke, and an Arabic chanteuse crooned in the background. A heavy set man with a shaved head raised his hand in greeting. The room seemed to breathe again, and the conversations restarted. Alex smiled at the barmaid and ordered a coffee. She filled a brass pot with water, spooned in some finely-ground Turkish coffee and put it on to boil. The rich, burnt aroma filled the room. The café’s owner appeared as the thick mix bubbled up.

“Alex, my friend. Come, sit down,” he said, leading Alex to the back of the room.

Mubarak Fonseca was a half-Palestinian, half Cuban leftover from Hungary’s communist era. His father and mother were engineering students, who had met and fallen in love at Budapest University in the 1960s, when Hungary was carrying out its fraternal internationalist duty, educating students from the developing world. His parents had long since divorced, and gone home, but Mubarak had stayed. He had inherited coffeecoloured skin from his father, dark curly hair from his mother and engaging brown eyes from both. Someone along the line of ancestral Palestinians and Cubans had passed him down a business sense as sharp as his dress sense was atrocious. He was wearing pink flared trousers, a tight black shirt, and a maroon velvet jacket.

Mubarak was also a former national karate champion, which had proved useful in his struggle to remain king of Budapest’s black market money changers. Mubarak’s rate was always better than any bank. He never short-changed his customers and always paid off the police on time, which was why they let him stay open. Even the Russians used him, once a peace agreement was drawn up after an unsuccessful attempt to muscle in that ended in several of their foot soldiers returning to Moscow for lengthy periods of convalescence. Very little of significance took place within Hungary’s black economy, and its darker criminal offshoots, without Mubarak’s knowledge. The two men sat down at a corner table.

“Alex, firstly my sincere condolences on the death of your grandfather,” said Mubarak. The barmaid brought a plate of pistachios and coffee in tiny cups. “It is a terrible tragedy.”

“Thank you,” said Alex. He took out his mobile telephone and showed that he was removing the battery. Mubarak followed suit, and reached into the plate of nuts. He cracked one open with his teeth and dropped the shell into the ashtray. He was an addict and usually ate a bag a day.

“I had us swept for bugs yesterday,” he said, gesturing at the ceiling. “But soon they will find a way to listen to us, even without the battery in, you know.”

“Perhaps they already have.”

“You know, you are probably right,” said Mubarak, shaking his head wearily at the difficult ways of the world. They chatted for a while, exchanging pleasantries, as ritual demanded.

“You said you may have some news for me,” said Alex, sipping his coffee.

Mubarak sat up straight, scooping up a handful of pistachios. “I hear things, that money is moving. A lot of money, coming from the west. From Austria, and from Germany especially. Old friends, coming home to where they always felt comfortable, bringing lots of old money, money that nobody even knew they had. Hungary is a democracy now, of course. But still a young one, impressionable. Like a teenager, easily swayed by fast cars and rolls of money. Follow the money trail, my friend,” he said, offering the plate of pistachios to Alex.

Alex took several. “If you know something about my grandfather’s death...”

“Nothing concrete, just my intuition. Something is happening. I just wonder if it is connected,” Mubarak said, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together and crinkling his nostrils. “I know I am a black marketeer, but people need euros and dollars. They don’t want to fill in lots of forms and papers. Who knows on what desk they will land? My rates are reasonable, generous even. And I hand over real money, not rolls of Yugoslav dinars or toilet paper. Of course, the authorities know about me. We have a modus vivendi. I meet a social need. Like George Soros, I am a capitalist building a free market society.”

“And you bribe people,” said Alex, amused at Mubarak’s remodelling of himself as a social philanthropist.

“Well, yes – that as well. But recently my contacts, those who permit me to operate for a percentage, have become so greedy. These people do not think for the future, only what they can get immediately. My margins are terrible. The Socialists were cleverer. They had a long-term view. All those five-year plans give you a perspective. Maybe I will relocate to Cuba. Listen to Buena Vista Social Club, drink rum and smoke cigars with Fidel. They are still communists there, they need dollars.”

Mubarak leaned back, lit a cigarette and blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling. He laid his hand on Alex’s arm and his voice turned serious. “Be careful, my friend.”

Peter Feher knew he looked his age. He walked with a stoop and his skin sagged on his bones, as though he had been wrapped in a casing of soft parchment one size too large. His face was pale, and thin white hair lay in carefully-combed strands over his pink scalp. His huge beak of a nose seemed to precede him by several seconds. Over-exertion triggered a watery rattle in his chest. But his pale blue eyes missed nothing, and the years had not dulled his lawyer’s brain. He scanned the rows of black-clad, sombre-faced mourners, crowded around the grave at Budapest’s Jewish cemetery. The turn-out was impressive: MPs from all the mainstream parties, former dissidents who had landed comfortable posts teaching at the Central European University, the theatre crowd, and numerous journalists, some come to pay their respects, others to report. Even Csintori’s Minister of Culture had turned up. Miklos, you would be proud, Feher thought.

The cemetery was near Budapest’s Keleti, the city’s eastern station. The clatter of the carriages as they trundled along the railway lines, north towards Poland, was a faint murmur in the funeral’s background, carrying over the Rabbi’s prayers as he recited the
Kaddish
, the prayer for the dead. The Rabbi was young and confident, with a clear baritone voice. Feher joined in, carefully reciting the Aramaic words with which Jews have mourned their dead for thousands of years.

“
Yisgadal, veyiskadash
,
shemey rabo
, May his illustrious name become great and holy,” he intoned, and the liturgy still came easily to him. Eight-two years on this earth and how long before it’s my turn, he mused. He watched the Rabbi hand Alex the shovel. Alex took it firmly in his hand. He dug it hard into a pile of earth, before lifting it over the grave and dropping the soil over the coffin. It landed with a quiet thump, spilling over the sides. Alex wiped his eyes. Others followed, until it was Feher’s turn. One by one the mourners thanked the Rabbi, and filed out of the cemetery. Alex and Feher were the last to leave. They stood together by the grave for several minutes, each lost in their own thoughts, and walked back together into the clamour of the lunchtime city. Alex shook Feher’s hand and said goodbye.

“Alex, no, surely you’re not leaving already,” Feher protested. “What’s the hurry? Come and take a coffee, perhaps even something stronger. Of course, if you have the time,” he said, hailing a taxi which stopped a few metres away. Alex followed him to the car.

*  *  *

The Margaret Patisserie stood at the bottom of St Stephen’s Boulevard, near the Danube. Named after the nearby bridge, it offered not just drinks and snacks, but time travel back to the socialist era. Ranks of brightly coloured cakes were displayed in glass cases, all topped with artificial cream, a brilliant, impossible white. The coffee was thick and tepid, a burst of high-calibre caffeine, fired out of an ancient steam-driven contraption into short, stumpy glasses. Blowsy waitresses smoked listlessly at the counter, between flirtatious strolls among the cheap wooden tables and their mismatched chairs. The walls were brown wood, stained with decades worth of nicotine, and the floor a worn linoleum. It was a glorious dinosaur and would probably be a hamburger restaurant within six months.

They sat at a corner table. Feher smiled at a waitress with a black beehive hairdo that seemed to defy gravity. She quickly brought a tray of coffees and glasses of sticky Hungarian brandy, together with a plate piled high with chocolate cake and apple strudels.

“These are on the house. He was a regular here, and we’ll miss him,” the waitress said. Alex and Feher chatted for a while about the funeral. Feher turned his attention to the cakes. Alex tried not to stare as Feher wielded his fork with rapid precision, eating silently with a look of intense concentration. Two pieces of chocolate cake and a slice of apple strudel disappeared in a few minutes. Alex looked up to see an elderly man with thick hornrimmed glasses wearing a threadbare army greatcoat approach their table. He clutched a bundle of different newspapers, some so fresh that Alex could smell the ink.

Feher put his fork down and greeted the newspaper vendor. “My old friend Eduard Szigeti. Good day to you.”

Alex stood up, shook hands and introduced himself, surname first, in the Hungarian manner.

“Farkas. A relative?” asked Eduard.

“He was my grandfather,” said Alex.

“My condolences. I just saw the funeral on television. A fine turn-out.”

“What’s this?” asked Feher, waving at the papers.

“Special edition.
Magyar Tribün
Friday lunchtime extra. Eight pages. Tibor Csintori is no more. Parliament is in emergency session, arguing about how to form a new government. And I’ve got all the others, if you’re interested.”

Alex’s hunch had been correct. “Csintori’s resigned?” he asked.

Szigeti looked amused. “In a manner of speaking. He keeled over in Parliament in the middle of a speech about the European presidential election. He’s dead. A heart attack, they say.”

“A heart attack?” asked Alex, amazed. “He was forty-six.”

Szigeti tapped the newspapers. “Are you buying, or you want all the news for free?”

Feher bought two copies of the special edition of
Magyar Tribün
and asked for that day’s
Ébredjetek Magyarok!.
Szigeti raised his eyebrows but handed both newspapers over. Feher handed one of the special editions to Alex. It was full of long think pieces about what Csintori’s death meant for the future of Hungary, several of which referred to Natasha’s article on the
Budapest News
website about Hunkalffy and Sanzlermann. There was silence for several minutes as they both read. Feher looked thoughtful.

“He was a Professor of Cultural Aesthetics, you know,” he said, sipping from his coffee.

“I thought he was a sociologist,” said Alex, puzzled.

“Szigeti, not Csintori. He taught for forty years at Budapest University. They sacked him last month with two hours notice to clear his office. His replacement is teaching a new course on ‘The Lifetime Achievements of Admiral Horthy.’ Apparently, he had no choice but to ally with Hitler and hand over half a million Jews in six weeks. Well, it’s one point of view,” he said, dryly. “As for Csintori, he had no history of heart trouble, did not smoke and had an excellent ECG reading from his last medical...”

“How do you know?” asked Alex, looking anew at the elderly lawyer.

“I hear things.” Feher took a cigarette from a packet made of cheap white paper. The label showed a cogwheel, and the Hungarian word
Munkas
, worker. A leftover from the days before advertisements and fast-food. Alex noticed a long smear of blue ink on the arm of Feher’s white shirt, near his wrist, as he lit up. He realised the stain was not on the fabric, but on Feher’s forearm. He tried not to stare, but like a roadside car crash, the tattooed numbers drew his eye with an irresistible force.