Deceptions Anna Porter (top 100 books to read .TXT) 📖

She left a voicemail for Attila on his cellphone: “Please head home.” She left no callback number since she was now using her other burner phone. She bought a bag of groceries — bags of groceries were always a good disguise — and walked along Rákóczi Avenue, a grittier part of the city where tourists rarely ventured and the gentrification that had overtaken much of the downtown core had not yet mounted an offensive. The building where Attila lived still had some leftover bullet holes from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, or perhaps from the war.

No one paid attention to her opening the outside door with the point of a knife poking out of her sleeve. The long passageway to the wrought-iron elevator was dark, damp, and stank of stale cabbage and dog shit. Helena took the stairs to the apartment, settled on the top stair with the grocery bag next to her, and waited.

She could have opened his door in less than a minute, but she thought that would be overly intrusive, and, while their unusual relationship would give her the licence to intrude, the idea offended her sense of propriety. When she was last here, she had shared Attila’s bed with him and his long-haired dachshund. At first, she hadn’t noticed the dog at the end of the bed, or the books piled in the corners, the boxes full of dishes, the yellowing curtains, the torn-up couch, his clothes strewn over every surface. The next morning it began to bother her. She had found it all too unkempt, too redolent of disappointment. “Detritus of a recent divorce,” he had explained. An evening that had been romantic, their frantic lovemaking the night before, seemed slightly embarrassing in the morning, her sleeping among the leftovers of his marriage.

Attila and his two daughters arrived shortly before eight. Laughing and yelling, the girls raced each other up the steps, and ground to a sudden halt when they saw Helena. “Hello,” the smaller one said in English, panting from the exertion of trying to beat her sister.

The older one studied Helena suspiciously, her mouth turned down, her cheeks flushed, before she said “Szia” and edged past the grocery bag to reach the door to Attila’s apartment. It had been about a year since she had last seen Helena. Chocolate ice cream with whipped cream at the Four Seasons while their father talked with Helena. Anna hadn’t liked the way her father was looking at her.

“You have grown,” Helena said, and continued to sit on the stairs as Attila, dishevelled, panting even more than his daughter, came into view. “I hope you don’t mind my visiting,” she said. “I called to tell you I happened to be in Budapest.”

“Hey,” he said when he recovered his breath. “I didn’t expect you . . .”

“I didn’t expect me either. But there was an art dealer I had to see. . . .”

“Biro?”

“The same.”

“That’s crazy. I went to see him.”

“I know,” she said, “but I need information from him that you wouldn’t know how to get. Or what to look for when you found it.”

Attila told her that Biro, according to his impeccable source, was dead, and that the man she had met couldn’t have been Biro.

“I didn’t meet anyone in the apartment,” she said, “but I did look around, and whoever the guy is, whether he is alive or dead, he is, or was, an art dealer. He had paintings, drawings, some sculpture, all helter-skelter, not well stored, in fact not stored at all, out in the open, displayed like he had been in the process of selling everything. Not a collector: they are much more careful with what they have. This man was not careful. It may not even be all his own stuff. He is perhaps someone else’s agent. And yes, it’s quite possible he sold the painting to the Vaszarys. He may even have a provenance somewhere. I didn’t stay long enough to find out. How long has he been dead? And who lives in his apartment now?”

“He’s been dead about six months, and I have no idea who lives in the apartment,” Attila said. “Yet. But I will find out. I actually met the guy. Would you like to join me and the girls for some supper? I have salami, sausage and bread, and peppers.”

“I don’t think so,” Helena said.

“My place looks so much better than it did a year ago. . . .”

Helena laughed. “I believe you. And I have tomatoes, grapes, croissants, and some sort of chocolate dessert, very Hungarian. I will leave it for you and the girls. I can’t stay. I came only to find out about Biro and a couple of people in your parliament.”

“Not my parliament,” Attila grumbled. “Hasn’t been my parliament for a few years, and I very much doubt it will ever be mine again. My guys do not get elected. Who do you want to know about?” He started rummaging through her bag, looking for the tomatoes. “They would be great in a salad,” he said. “You really have to stay. If you don’t like the salami, I could make you Hungarian eggs, with cheese, paprika, and green peppers. I have become quite the cook since you were here last.”

“Árpád Magyar, Géza Németh. Maybe Zoltán Nagy.” These were names from the doorplates Helena had photographed in the parliament buildings.

“Why would you be interested in these guys? As far as I know they are not art collectors.”

“Perhaps not,” Helena said, biting into a croissant from her bag. “But they may have an interest in Gizella Vaszary’s lawyer or in the painting I was hired to assess. I followed a man from Biro’s apartment all the way to the parliament buildings. Watched him go in at the official entrance. I am fairly sure he went into one of these offices.”

“You tracked him,” Attila said. “How did you get into the building?”

“It was astonishingly easy,” Helena said, “for a well-guarded place.”

“And you picked