The Budapest Protocol (7 page)

Feher saw Alex looking at his arm. He inhaled and blew out a cloud of pungent grey fumes. He offered the packet to Alex. “The train journey was indescribable. It took two days. When I arrived they asked me what my profession was. I was a law student. But I could see they didn’t need lawyers there. I told them I was a metal worker. At home I was always in charge of getting the house and office keys copied for my father. Perhaps that qualified me. It was enough. I turned right, my parents and my sister went left,” he said. He raised his coffee cup to his mouth. It rattled against his teeth. “But I’m still here,” he said, smiling as he put his cup down.

Alex did not know what to say. He accepted a cigarette, lit up and breathed in. Something punched him in the throat. Coughing and spluttering, he put the cigarette down. The waitress, laughing, brought him a glass of water, which he sipped gratefully, and tried to sound composed.

“Who do you think killed my grandfather, Peter?” he asked.

Feher shrugged. “I suppose the post-mortem will tell us what he died of. A heart attack perhaps, after being beaten by skinheads who had broken into his flat, according to the speculation in today’s newspapers.”

“Do you believe that?” asked Alex.

“No. Do you?”

“There was a pig’s head in the room, and someone had painted AVO on the wall in red paint,” said Alex, trying not to think of the scene he had discovered. “But he wasn’t in the AVO. He hated communism. The Soviets took his house, his factory, everything the family had. State security officers arrested him after 1956. They put him in prison.”

“And the Soviets liberated him and tens of thousands of other Jews from the ghetto. You should also remember
that
,” Feher said archly, the smoke drifting from his nostrils. “But you are right, mistakes were made. That was another world. The point is, Alex, that your grandfather was a fine man, a brave man. Clearly someone doesn’t want him to be remembered like that.”

Alex nodded.

“So what better way to destroy his reputation than to accuse him of being a snitch for the communist secret police? There are still people here who think all Jews were communists, and even if they were dissidents they must have secretly been communist spies.” Feher opened
Ébredjetek Magyarok!
. “Look. It’s started already,” he said, pointing to a banner headline: “Miklos Farkas: Dissident or Secret AVO Agent?”, above a long article by Balazs Noludi, the newspaper’s editor.

Alex glanced at the turgid prose, a skilful cocktail of lies, smears and distorted quotations from Miklos’ samizdat publications. He shook his head wearily. “Unbelievable.” He paused. “Peter, were you a communist?” he asked, carefully.

“Yes, I was, for a while. The Red Army liberated me from Auschwitz. They fed me and brought me home. It seemed completely natural. We thought we were building a new world then. I argued about it all the time with Miklos. He was right, I was wrong. I left the party after 1956. Tell me, how many members do you think the Hungarian Communist Party had in 1989?”

“I don’t know.”

“Eight hundred thousand. That’s a lot of party cards in a country of ten million people. This was the softest regime in the Soviet bloc, and they still clamoured to sign up.” He flicked through
Ébredjetek Magyarok!.
“Our friend Balazs Noludi was party secretary in his home village. Poor Balazs, he is a quite sad story.”

“Why?”

“He is a Hungarian from a village in northern Serbia. He wrote a novel about countryside life. It was very promising, full of poignant vignettes and good characters: a lonely farmer in love with the village shopkeeper, a mayor whose brother was executed after 1956 who was forced to join the Communist Party, even a Holocaust survivor who was the last Jew in the village.”

“And what happened?”

“He moved to Budapest when the war in Yugoslavia started. He thought he would be invited into the literary elite. But those clever urban liberals ripped his book to pieces. They laughed at the countryside boy with his funny accent. And now he takes his revenge.”

Feher paused and seemed to take some kind of decision. He looked around the room, and moved closer. Alex could smell the cognac on his breath. “He doesn’t matter. This does. In 1944, your grandfather worked as a waiter at the Savoy, with false papers. We had some friends then, not so many, but some. Waiters are invisible, but he watched, and he listened.”

“What did he hear?” asked Alex.

“All through the autumn of 1944, many German and Swiss businessmen appeared at the Savoy. They would stay one or two days, and have long meetings with the Nazis. Then in December the Russians sealed off the city, and nobody could get in or out anymore.”

“What kind of German and Swiss businessmen?” asked Alex.

“The same companies that ran on slave labour then and still control the German economy now, and the Zurich bankers that laundered their blood money. Do you know that the next President of the Federal Monetary Authority will be German? He or she will be able to control the monetary policy of every country in the euro-zone.”

“Yes. But what did Miklos tell you about these meetings?”

“Just that they happened. He wasn’t invited to attend. I worked for the Germans during the war. The conditions were very poor. Most of my co-workers died. The government wrote to me a few years ago, to give me what they called ‘compensation’. One thousand deutschmarks. I tore up the cheque and sent it back.”

Feher’s voice was hard, edged with anger. His hands shook as he lit another cigarette. “Miklos did not die by accident.”

Alex replied: “There were tiny fragments of glass around Miklos’ mouth. He looked almost blue. I smelt bitter almonds. If he died of a heart attack it was induced.”

“Yes, I know,” replied Feher. “The question is, did he decide himself to bite the cyanide capsule, or did someone help him?”

Alex started with surprise. “Is there anything you don’t know?”

“Yes. Why this happened now,” said Feher. He looked hard at Alex. “Go to work.”

*  *  *

Alex stood for a long while that evening on his balcony, staring out at the night-time city. The Hotel Savoy had recently been renovated, and its Art Nouveau façade was softly illuminated. He watched the excited tourists climbing out of their taxis while uniformed porters picked up their baggage, and doormen helped them inside. The Elizabeth Bridge arched gracefully over the waters, casting a golden glow over the Danube. A boat floated by full of tourists on a night-river cruise. He could see the revellers, distant figures eating, drinking, and dancing. He opened a bottle of red wine, and a book of poems by Miklós Radnóti, a Jewish poet who had died in 1944, shot by his Hungarian guards. His body was later exhumed, his last verses found hidden in his coat. His early work was full of joy and light but Alex turned to the end, verses full of death and anguish. Fifty years later, nothing had changed in the Balkans. Alex saw a Muslim home in a remote Bosnian village. It was seared into his brain.

The orthodox cross is daubed on the white wall of the kitchen, a Cyrillic letter ‘S’ in each corner. The letters are an acronym: ‘Only Unity Can Save the Serbs,’ the slogan for Greater Serbia. The whole family is dead: grandmother, grandfather and their daughter where they sat. The old man had thrown himself across his womenfolk in a vain attempt to protect them. The young woman’s husband lies outside, twisted in the dirt, still holding his green prayer beads. Blood seeps from his head. A chicken pecks the ground near his corpse. The little girl is hiding in the barn. Alex covers her eyes as he leads her to the car. She says nothing on the journey into Sarajevo. Even when a bullet pings off the car roof, she just rocks back and forth.

Alex gulped some more wine and switched the television on. The newsreader on CNN announced that a German bank had proposed several senior executives as candidates for the next President of the Federal Monetary Authority. The bank’s press officer stood outside its headquarters. “Our bank is one of the motors of European unity. We believe our personnel can contribute so much more to European financial stability and continent-wide economic integration,” she proclaimed, before being ushered into a Mercedes.

Alex switched to Hungarian television news. A red-faced, male middle-aged newsreader wearing a black armband was speaking. “The Hungarian Parliament has just voted to form a new government.” Alex sat up straight and turned up the volume. The newsreader continued: “Attila Hunkalffy, President of the Hungarian National Front, will be Prime Minister of a minority government, in coalition with the Hungarian People’s Party, of the late Prime Minister Tibor Csintori. Despite the fact that almost half of the People’s Party MPs announced that they will refuse to serve under him, Mr Hunkalffy said he was confident that he would be able to form a cabinet. Opposition Social Democrat and Free Liberal MPs condemned the parliamentary announcement as ‘a stealth coup’, and walked out of the chamber. Interior Minister and National Front MP Csaba Zirta, who served as Interior Minister under Tibor Csintori, will remain in his post, Prime Minister Hunkalffy has already announced.”

The broadcast switched to Parliament where Attila Hunkalffy was standing on the steps of the sprawling neo-Gothic building, dressed in his trademark leather jacket, flanked by two stone lions, several bodyguards and a clutch of aides holding Hungarian flags, and the blue European Union flag, with its twelve yellow stars. “The death of Tibor Csintori was a national tragedy. But I am honoured to have been chosen to lead my country at this vital time, when the eyes of all Europe are upon us, in the coming election for European President,” intoned Hunkalffy.

The newsreader continued, “We’ll be returning to that story as we receive more information. Also today, does Hungary need a new self-defence force to defend its national values? We have an exclusive interview with Istvan Matonhely, the leader of the controversial Pannonia Brigade.”

The screen showed a small village, where Matonhely and several dozen followers stood under a large Hungarian flag, waving placards demanding “No More Gypsy Crime” and “Send the Roma to Work”. A line of police on the other side of the street held back twenty or so Gypsies, who were shouting abuse at Matonhely and his followers. The Pannonia Brigade wore the traditional Hussars’ uniform of black brocaded jacket and riding trousers. Behind the Pannonia Brigade dozens of bikers wearing black leather and German army helmets roared up and down the village main street.

“Please tell us what the Pannonia Brigade stands for, Mr Matonhely, and why it’s needed,” asked the reporter, respectfully. Aniko Kovacs was state television’s star reporter, a pretty blonde from a village on the Ukranian border, who made no secret of her nationalist leanings.

Matonhely, a thin man in his early thirties, was a former Liberal MP. He was dressed in a well cut black suit, a white shirt with a cutaway collar and a striped silk tie in red, white and green. His black hair was neatly styled and he looked like a successful banker. He leaned forward, his voice calm and reasonable. “Pannonia was the ancient name for Hungary. We want a return to those proud Magyar traditions, not the mess we have now. We aren’t against all Gypsies, only those who commit crimes and live off our taxes. We stand for common values, shared by everybody: work, family, discipline and respect for our culture and heritage. I go to work every day. So should the Roma.”

Aniko nodded enthusiastically as he spoke. “Yes, the Gypsy question is certainly very difficult,” she said, as the screen switched to stock footage of Romany children playing barefoot in a village street and a woman in a bright floral headscarf begging on the Great Boulevard. Aniko turned to the camera. “Something certainly needs to be done about Hungary’s biggest social problem, and many people believe Istvan Matonhely has the best answer.”

Alex’s mobile telephone rang. “Can you believe this?” an indignant Welsh voice demanded. “Is this a news report or a recruitment advertisement?”

“Both, I think,” said Alex, laughing. David Jones, Reuters Budapest bureau chief, was Alex’s drinking partner. A veteran reporter with curly red hair and sharp blue eyes, David managed to retain a dry wit, even under fire in Bosnia, where they had first met. They had worked together in war-zones around the world, until Jones’ wife had threatened him with divorce and he had finally asked for a quieter posting. “Thanks for your letter, David. It’s a long time since someone bothered to write to me with a pen and paper,” Alex continued. The Reuters journalist had written Alex a hand-written note, expressing his condolences at Miklos’ death.

“You’re welcome. Some things aren’t for email. Anyway – Aniko is a dangerous little minx. She’ll do anything to get information for Balazs Noludi. I’d love to listen to their pillow talk.”

“Pillow talk?” asked Alex, looking askance at the telephone.

“You are out of the loop, aren’t you? Hungarian TV’s star reporter is the girlfriend of the editor of
Ébredjetek Magyarok!
And now their friends are in power and have the whole country to play with.”

“How are they going to hold a government together, when they only have 185 out of 400 seats? They could get voted down at any moment,” said Alex.

“Think... Csaba Zirta.”

“I see a short fat man with a big moustache who boasts that he has never been abroad. And?”

“Zirta is now a member of Hunkalffy’s party, and has been Interior Minister for six months. That’s six long, leisurely months to take out each MP’s file, and read all about sticky fingers in European Union pies; long-legged secretaries flown to Strasbourg and Brussels for the weekend on business-class tickets at public expense; not to mention the secret portfolios of shares and government bonds secreted away in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.”

“He’s going to blackmail them,” said Alex.

David sighed down the line. “Bingo. Pour yourself another drink. And I owe you one for the heads-up on the Hunkalffy-Sanzlermann poster story. We beat Bloomberg and Associated Press by more than half an hour.” Alex had called David as soon as Natasha had filed her stories to let him know they were going up on the website and emailed him the scan of the poster.