We pushed our way off at Üllői Avenue and into a light rain. Around us drab lines of apartment blocks rose like grave markers over Pest.
Her contact’s building looked no different from any of the gray slabs scored with balconies. The elevator was out of service. Despite her years I struggled to keep up with Margaret on the ten-story climb. She had fought the fascists and later the Russians, but how the British found her, as with any of her clients, I never dared to ask.
A tidy man introduced as Braintree ushered us into the flat. Margaret had me remove my coat and turned me toward him standing beside the window. Braintree fidgeted like someone uncomfortable with planned housing, either this one or of tenements in general.
“So this is your student,” Braintree said. “She’s pretty enough. Bit older than requested though, isn’t she?”
Margaret lifted my skirt to the thigh and turned me into a profile. “Twenty-three. Not too old. Tall like requested. Brown hair. Typhon does not miss my sweet Helena. Face of a girl, body of a woman.”
“Quite.”
A week earlier I had managed to find a copy of Beggar’s Banquet, and wearing out Margaret’s turntable with the Rolling Stones somehow left me expecting my first live Englishman to resemble a wild-haired and languid Brian Jones. There was no “Street Fighting Man” in Braintree.
I was a street fighter’s daughter. Out the window was a view west, to where the river wrapped around Csepel Island. There the Allamvedelmi Osztaly murdered my father in the last hours of the Revolution and first of the reprisals.
“Still,” Braintree said, “we rather hoped for a professional.”
Margaret lit a pipe and watched him through the smoke. “Tell me when you discover how to get a working girl into a Party social. Helena is Communist Youth, monitored for membership. Smartest girl I have.”
“I relay messages for her,” I said, speaking up to impress. I had finished top of my English class despite the Party elite’s children spending their summers in Britain. “I gather information. True, I am not one of her Mata Haris. Margaret is happy with what I bring even so.”
“Admirable accent, dear girl,” Braintree said. “They’d have you at Selfridges. But as I understand you round up café blather from drunken underlings. Typhon is somewhat up the food chain. And acting on a different set of expectations.”
“She will get Typhon alone,” Margaret said. “Sweet Helena, so pure, but gypsy in her heart. She keeps her head always. She shows you now if you like.”
“You Magyars must have taught the Russians their tricks,” Braintree said. He turned toward me, something not quite benevolent about his grin. “Very well then. Not the first large rabbit Margaret has pulled out of a small hat. Understand, dear girl, that learning Typhon’s name means you leave Hungary tonight.”
I understood that and more. I understood Hungarians smuggled records in and the West smuggled defectors out. I understood that Hungary had few men so special as to lure Braintree from London, fewer still with a weakness for university girls. For Margaret to send me, there was but one. Zsigmond Irinyi, deputy head of Central Control and the AVO’s Butcher of Csepel, packed his bags for the West.
“When you have Irinyi alone,” Braintree was saying, “absolutely alone, deliver this message: ‘Cicilia.’ He will provide a confirmation word. Return here with it straight away. We close up shop at three tomorrow morning. Mustn’t be late for your flight west, not with the great bear and her cubs nipping at your heels.”
“Then you find me a warmer new home?”
Braintree nodded. “I believe we’ve still a few of those about.”
Margaret followed me down as far as the lobby. “Sweet Helena,” she said, grasping my hand. “Tonight I lose my Helena.”
I did not cry. Margaret punished any tears, saying Hungary did not need more silly girls. “You will leave first.”
“Second if you are careless,” Margaret said. “Braintree follows protocol, moves early before the Butcher is found out. Tonight they give us the Butcher on his wrong foot. Tonight, we must be the spark.”
I stepped off the streetcar at the Oktagon and crossed People’s Republic Street—what the people called Andrassy Avenue—for the Party social. Scattered in the shop windows were sun-blanched propaganda posters, American jeans, and French foods. I remembered the morning Russian tanks rolled down the boulevard. The West had been nowhere on Andrassy then.
At the club entrance a guard brushed me away. He made a show of flashing his holstered gun. “Workers’ Party only.”
I gave this toy soldier my KISZ card and invitation letter.
“Helena Szabo, Communist Youth,” the guard read aloud. He put on an oily grin. “You know why they invite the young girls, Helena Szabo?”
“I hoped to dance.”
“You can call it that. Come home with me, Helena Szabo. I’ll be your first dance, huh?”
I reminded him that those the Party invited to recruiting events ranked some levels higher than those tasked with standing in the cold and rain.
“I’ll think of you come the first dance,” I said as I passed inside.
I checked my coat in a grand art deco foyer. Neglected repairs had left the gilded designs scuffed and dingy. Such places were like embers to me, the faded reminders of what Hungary must have been in my father’s time.
Do not move first on Typhon, Margaret had said. That brands you an amateur. Be the liveliest brunette, and Typhon will find you.
Hungarian pop warbled over the sound system, György Korda and Kati Kovács. Soon though, Margaret had promised the curmudgeons would leave for their beds, and the younger bosses would permit uncensored records, the Beatles or Elvis Presley. I longed for anything by the Rolling Stones.
Typhon was ensconced at the bar and chatting over drinks with his retinue. The old man was as bald as a whale, his polished dome gleaming in the light. I angled through the smoky club and found a stretch of open bar to order mineral water.
A middle-aged apparatchik sidled up to me. He smelled of must and looked of unloved husband. “Cigarette?”
I shook my head. Typhon did not like his girls to smoke. I smiled and said to my lonely bureaucrat, “But I love to dance.”
For the next hour I danced with every man who asked and every man who cut in, a parade of faceless political officers with tobacco and vodka on their breaths. Some were bolder than others, but none too bold. When the folk music stopped and the newer records began, we changed to whatever fast dance went with the song. I twisted, I ponied, I did the loco-motion, I thrilled at the heat of it all, and when the men tired the other girls and I go-go danced for them.
It was after the go-go dancing that Typhon approached. He brought with him two coupes of sparkling wine.
“You must be thirsty,” he said over The Byrds. He reached out the wine as if completely certain of my accepting, kissed my offered hand, and said, “The Socialist Workers’ Party appreciates your contributions to dance.”
I saluted him with a sip. The wine tasted of green apples, but not so much to pucker my face. I puckered anyway, Helena the innocent.
Typhon chuckled. “Sovetskoye Shampanskoye. It is what happens when a central committee plans wine. But not so bad for cheap, eh little bird?”
Typhon will expect you to know of him, Margaret had said. And to be flattered by his attention.
“Champagne for everyone,” I said, and fanned my sweat. “Thank you, Comrade Deputy Secretary.”