“No anonymity in office. This is not good, I fear. Please, you must call me Zsigmond.”
Zsigmond Irinyi. Enforcer, traitor, murderer. Despised at home but to be welcomed in the West. “Comrade Zsigmond,” I said.
“And you are Helena Szabo, Youth Party. It concerns us at Central Control that we did not know all the beautiful Party candidates in Budapest. Helena, the beauty of Troy.” Typhon gulped down his champagne and chewed my name along with the wine. “Come, I introduce you to friends. Maybe you start a war.”
He will suspect a rival sent you, Margaret had said. Possibly the KGB. Convince him otherwise.
At our corner of the bar, Typhon was content to drink brandy and listen as his cohorts tested me with oblique questions. Yes, I knew this or that KISZ official. I proved it with personal details that an acquaintance would know. Yes, I heard the Óbuda school superintendent had been sacked. For being spotted at a Lutheran service, I added, feigning shock at clerical reactionists lurking near our children. Ideology tickled the graybeards. No, I did not see General Secretary Kádár speak at my university, because Kádár had spoken not to the students but later, to a private gathering of nomenklatura. One by one the lesser graybeards moved off, leaving Typhon and me a bubble of privacy.
Once Margaret had sworn on her taped-up saints that Satan would be irresistibly handsome. This devil looked fat and tired. In his late fifties, time weighed on Irinyi—think of him as Typhon, Margaret had said—and left him a sagging belly. Crow’s feet etched his temples.
I wanted a turn asking questions, and the ones I fought back were direct. How could anyone send so many to waste away in prison camps? How could he order the deaths of countrymen fighting to free Hungary? He bore the guilt for Csepel more than those he had pull the trigger. The killing was his idea.
Perhaps the devil’s trick was to appear as what we expected least. Perhaps that made me a devil, too.
“You are not drinking,” Typhon said.
“I am sorry, Comrade Secretary.”
Typhon pushed my wine toward me. “Zsigmond, little bird. Do not apologize. Drink! A Magyar does not trust a teetotaler.”
“I cannot drink like you and keep my head.”
“Sip, sip, sip. What good is drinking if we keep our heads? Clear heads are for morning.”
I grinned for my devil and drank the glass down.
“There you are,” Typhon said. “Magyar after all.”
On the record player was a slow song, Dusty Springfield. Typhon showed no inclination to dance, nor did he touch me other than careful brushes with his fingertips. Instead he shared with me secrets of the others around the club. He started with who was whose patron or who was going places in the Party, but after another brandy he began to point out those he derided.
“That man there,” Typhon said, nodding to a prim apparatchik on the dance floor, “should someday join the Central Committee, like his father. But he is homosexual.”
“He is?”
“Thinks we do not know. He should thank his father he is not disgraced. Or worse.”
Irinyi—Typhon, call him Typhon—struggled off his barstool. “They always think we do not know. Do not fly off, little bird. An old man must see to—well. Do yourself a favor. Stay young forever.”
When Typhon wants you alone, Margaret had said, Typhon will leave alone.
None of the men who had danced with me approached after Typhon left. Nothing happened for some time except that the crowd thinned and the records changed to older songs, Bobby Darin and Connie Francis. The new music had been exhausted.
Eventually a man in police officer uniform appeared with my coat over his arm. He had a callow face and crooked teeth, someone who fed off the fear he inspired. I extended my hand for him, but the callow man did not take it. Instead he tossed me the coat and turned on his heel. That I was to follow went unspoken, both the order and the threat.
They will search you, Margaret had said. Stand through it like a girl, tense and ashamed.
The callow man took me down a flight of stairs to a rear door. He stopped me and placed his hands on my ribs.
“Excuse me,” I said, though to me his body search and added grope of my breasts were mere pressure. “I am no criminal.”
“Comrade Irinyi is a cautious man.”
“More expert than you, I should hope.”
The callow man gave me a jaundiced glance. “Not so gentle.”
He led me into the back of a dark Mercedes and slid in beside me. A junior officer drove us through Pest, deserted at one in the morning. The radio was kept off and none of us spoke, the only sounds our breathing and the wiper blades squeaking against the drizzle. The streetcars had shut down for the night.
Soon the Mercedes whisked us over the Danube. Out my window the towers of Fisherman’s Bastion stood like impotent knights watching the river flow. Buda Castle slumbered atop its hill. Further out were the shards of my childhood: Csepel, where my father was found dead in an alleyway, and Budafok, where the AVO came and dragged my mother off to die in a camp.
We drove through quiet neighborhoods and up into the hills, past vineyards and wooded estates. Soon we pulled off at a private gatepost, and a guard stepped out to search the car. He grunted a laugh at me in my floral dress and nylons. I lowered my head, ever the embarrassed girl. He would choke on his laughter if he knew how many Roma eyes watched him from the forest.
A dirt track cut through evergreens and linden trees and ended at a patch of land cleared for a cottage house. No cars were parked in front, but lights burned from the ground floor windows.
The callow man took me inside, into a parlor furnished with volumes of bound books, silver trays, and crystal glassware. A large painting of a hunting scene hung over the mantel. A newly started fire had done little to warm the cottage.
“Upstairs,” he said.
“I have to pee.”
“Do it fast.”
He left the door open and watched me the entire time. That told me what I wanted to know: he was thorough. The callow man would leave no opening to palm a knife or sneak his gun. He would respond quickly to any hint of trouble. I finished in the bathroom, and he showed me to a cramped stairway off the kitchen. “Work hard to earn a patron, Comrade Szabo.”
I took the stairs slowly to keep up appearances. Really it gave me a chance to slow my breath. In the bedroom Irinyi was waiting in what light reached up from below. He poured two shots of brandy.
“Come in, little bird. Cheer an old man with a kiss.”
Somewhere Typhon will have a gun, Margaret had said. Be the first to use it.
I closed the door behind me and crossed through the soup of shadows. Then I gave the devil his kiss. When as hollow as he, there was nothing lost by it.
Irinyi laughed. “I was not sure you would do it.”
“Why not?”
“There are two types of pretty Helenas, I find. The merely pretty and the too pretty to be true. You were invited tonight after a late recommendation from an officer of suspect loyalty. You wanted my attention but did not use it. You did not tease like the schemers or coax me off like the professionals. Now it is just us two, no bugs, no tapes. We drink to plain speaking, then you state your purpose.”
I let the shot burn down into my belly.
Irinyi contemplated me over his brandy. My eyesight had accustomed enough to catch a frown crease his ample cheeks. “Who do you work for?”
“Hungary.”
“Central Control knows the Hungarian spies. Tell me or I give you to Gyuri downstairs.”
“A man named Braintree sent me. He has a message: ‘Cicilia.’”