The Budapest Protocol (20 page)

“At some unspecified time next week, inspection teams will arrive at the office for a full audit of the last year’s books. They want to check all VAT receipts since we launched. They want to see the customs importation documents for every computer, or an official VAT receipt if we brought the machines here, and an individual licence for every software programme that we are using. I’m starting to think that someone doesn’t like us,” said Ronald.

“But this is ridiculous,” said Edina. “Nobody can produce all that documentation.”

“Where did you get your Photoshop software from, Edina?” asked Smith. She resumed her lens polishing and mumbled something unintelligible.

He looked concerned. “Is it the case, Ronald, that this newspaper is produced using pirated software?”

Ronald sighed. “It’s not all pirated. We do have some legal copies.”

“How many?”

“Er, one copy of Microsoft Word, circa 1996.”

* * *

Cassandra Orczy swung her RX-7 through a tiny gap between two cars, sped down the wrong side of the road, and turned into an eighteenth century courtyard. The Museum of Catering and Domestic Science, on the far side of the Castle district, was obscure enough to be discreet. He was waiting for her, leaning against the window in the first room, as agreed, reading the
Financial Times
. The paper’s Budapest correspondent had filed a detailed story about the steady slide in value of the Hungarian currency, run next to similar reports from its correspondents in Zagreb, Bratislava and Bucharest. The forint had recently dropped from 240 to the euro to almost 400. The Croatian kuna, Slovak koruna and the Romanian lei were also plunging in value, while the Polish zloty and the Czech koruna were starting to slip. The reports from the security service economics section were increasingly alarming. Foreign money was pouring in, buying up commercial property, as the region turned into a bargain basement for those paying in euros.

She greeted him, and they kissed each other on the cheeks. “Why are you wearing sunglasses?” she asked. “It’s November. And we are indoors.”

“I’ll tell you soon,” he replied. They walked up to a glass display case. Inside was a curiously shaped pair of small tongs. He bent over to read the caption. “It’s for curling your moustache.”

“I don’t have a moustache. At least I hope not.”

He pretended to check. She brushed him away, laughing. “Doesn’t this remind you of our student days?” he asked. “All these pots and pans, and recipes.”

“You know, I don’t remember that either of us cooked very much. We lived on cheese and salami. When we remembered to buy anything to eat.”

“A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thee. Omar Khayyam said it best. You still look as youthful and as beautiful as ever,” he said, reaching for her hand. She blushed, and gave his hand a long squeeze before extricating hers. She looked around the room before she spoke. “Tell me what you are hearing. The economy is going haywire.”

He took off his sunglasses. Cassandra gasped. She leaned forward to touch Mubarak’s face, but he jerked back. His right eye was a slit in a brown and green mound of bruised puffy flesh.

“A doctor told me that with luck I will eventually be able to see out of it.”

“Who did it?”

“The Gendarmes raided the Sphinx last night. I thought it would be the usual routine, a quick trip to the station, pay off the captain and I would be back at the Sphinx for dessert. Not this time. They held a telephone book to the side of my head and hit me with a truncheon. Then they removed the book.”

* * *

It was a bracing winter afternoon; the kind that Budapest did well. The Habsburg apartment blocks looked stately and majestic, the Danube grand and sweeping. The sun shone brightly, white cotton-wool clouds scudding across a turquoise sky. The wind was clean and sharp. Alex’s cheeks tingled as he walked down the Grand Boulevard to the Margaret Patisserie. He passed a legless man sitting in his wheelchair, holding out a battered hat to the passersby. One or two dropped him a few coins. Alex gave him 200 forints. A crowd had gathered around a nearby stall, its walls plastered with posters of Sanzlermann and Hunkalffy shaking hands. It was less than two weeks to the start of the Presidential election. Alex walked over to the stall. Well-dressed young men and women were handing out campaign baubles: badges, canvas bags and coffee mugs. Many of those walking away stared at their wrists, now proudly bearing a plastic Sanzlermann campaign wristwatch.

The welcoming aromas of roasting coffee, cakes and tobacco greeted him at the café. Peter Feher sat perusing a newspaper, a
Munkas
cigarette smouldering erratically in the ashtray by his coffee cup. The coffee machine hissed and wheezed in the corner, and Eva the waitress waved at him. Alex sat down and picked up Feher’s newspaper. A two-day old copy of the
Daily Telegraph
, open at the Court and Social page. Her Majesty the Queen was taking tea with the Prime Minister of Tonga, it announced.

Feher smiled, and gestured at Eva. She quickly brought two coffees, and glasses of brandy.

Feher smiled ruefully at Alex, and they clinked glasses. “To the memory of your grandfather,” said Feher. “I miss him every day,” he sighed.

Alex drank the brandy, enjoying its welcome glow. “So do I,” he said, smiling ruefully.

Feher folded the newspaper up. “I usually read the sports pages first, but there’s no cricket today. I went to Lords once. On a cultural delegation to Britain. What a game,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “You have cricket and ‘Court and Social’. We have this,” he added, handing Alex that day’s issue of
Ébredjetek Magyarok!.

A two-page feature was headlined: “The Enemy Within: The Immigrant Menace Among Us.” Written by Balazs Noludi, it called for all asylum seekers and would-be immigrants, legal or illegal, to be immediately interred in strict-regime detention camps, to be built in isolated areas as soon as possible. Children would either be interred with their parents, or taken into care. Attila Hunkalffy was liberally quoted: “We can no longer allow our countries to be used as a back-door to Europe for potential criminals and terrorists such as the so-called Immigration Liberation Army.” There were supportive quotes from Frank Sanzlermann, the Croatian President Dragomir Zorvajk, Slovakia’s Dusan Hrkna and the recently elected Romanian President, Cornelius Malinanescu.

“I’ve been in Slovakia. I just got back,” said Alex, pointing at a photograph of Dusan Hrkna. “I went to meet some Gypsies. In Novy Marek. Something strange is happening there.”

“How did you get into Novy Marek? I read it had been sealed off.”

“It is.”

Feher looked hard at Alex. “And?”

“The Romany women I spoke to think they are being sterilised by Slovak health officials. They give the women injections after they have given birth. And then a course of pills.”

“I can believe that. How do they make them take the pills?”

“There is a special room at the welfare office where the women receive their social benefits. The money is only handed over after one of the officials watches them take them. They check the womens’ mouths afterwards to check that they don’t hide the tablets under their tongues, and have definitely swallowed them.”

Feher sipped his coffee. “Like children and their medicine. But rather gruesome in this case. If you can prove it, it will make a powerful article.”

“I hope so. If we don’t get closed down by the financial police. They are coming to raid us next week.”

“You too,” said Feher. “Some friends of mine are expecting a visit today.”

Alex nodded, his mind on Novy Marek. “The company that makes the pills is called Birkauchen Pharma. It’s strange. I couldn’t find anything about them on the internet, or on the newspaper databases. I called up the
Sentinel’s
medical correspondent and the business desk, and nobody had ever heard of them.”

Feher dropped his cigarette. “
What
did you say the name was?”

“Birkauchen. Birkauchen Pharma.”

“Josip Birkauchen was the chief of the drugs research branch of AF Weizen industries. He was an ethnic German from Croatia,” said Feher, picking up the smoking stub from the table and taking a long drag. “AF Weizen was Germany’s biggest chemicals conglomerate before the war, specialising in pharmaceuticals, dyes and disinfectants. After Hitler came to power they moved into pest-eradication products. All Jews, Gypsies, disabled and anti-Nazis falling into that category. Birkauchen and AF Weizen ran a special ‘medical research’ institute at Auschwitz. All its records mysteriously disappeared in 1945. So did he and everyone working for him. The Allies supposedly wanted to arrest them all for war crimes, but there was plenty of interest in its ‘research’ in Washington and Moscow. Some journalists kept trying to investigate but with all the evidence gone, they got nowhere.”

“Isn’t there some kind of historical connection between KZX and AF Weizen?” asked Alex. “Same headquarters in Munich, same interests in chemicals and pharmaceuticals before KZX expanded into industry?”

Feher laughed. “There’s nothing historic about it. KZX
is
AF Weizen. The Allies supposedly broke up AF Weizen after 1945. But that was just PR. AF Weizen continued business as usual, but was renamed and reconstituted as KZX. German industry was a necessary bulwark in the Cold War, don’t you know? Most of the managers who ran the slave labour camps simply went back to work, with the Allies’ blessing. KZX did a lot of business in Iraq, when Saddam was in power. You know what happened to the Kurds at Khalabja? Methods invented by AF Weizen. The commercial attaché at the German embassy used to work for KZX.”

“How do you know all this?” asked Alex.

“Most of it is public knowledge, if you know where to look, or are interested enough. I was supposed to be transferred to Birkauchen’s institute. Luckily the Russians arrived two days later,” said Feher, his hand shaking as he puffed on his cigarette. “Nobody ever came out of there alive.”

Alex leaned forward. “I’m very glad you came home safely. So was my grandfather. You were his best friend, you know.” He squeezed Feher’s hand and gave him an envelope. “Miklos’ postmortem results. They are very late. They arrived this morning.”

Feher unfolded the letter inside and slowly read it. “They cut you open and pretend they don’t know what killed you.” He exhaled slowly as he put the paper back down. “An open verdict.”

“It doesn’t tell us much,” said Alex. He slowly rubbed his fingertips together, remembering the feel of the glass crystals.

“It tells us that now they want the matter forgotten. I don’t think they realised how much publicity Miklos’ death would get, especially in the international press. A verdict of unlawful killing would trigger more news stories,” said Feher, sipping his coffee. “A suicide also. An open verdict, who knows? He was old, maybe his heart just gave out.”

“Because he crunched a cyanide capsule,” said Alex.

“Yes, I know. The question is, why? I think you have some of his effects.”

Alex looked at Feher. Was he talking about Miklos’ testimony?

“There were some things your grandfather would never speak of. That much I know. Also that there are many ways to hide information. Alex, you will have to excuse me, I have another appointment,” he said, summoning the waitress. “Eva, bring us the bill please.”

* * *

Alex sat at his desk, flicking through the new edition of the
Budapest News
. It was 8.00pm and the office was empty. The crisp winter day had ended with a thunderstorm. A driving wind lashed rain against the windows, rattling the glass, and jagged lightning streaked across the sky, illuminating the city for a split-second as though someone was switching a giant lamp on and off. The printers had just dropped off an early bundle of papers, fresh from the presses. The front page proclaimed ‘
Sanzlermann plans Europe-wide compulsory DNA tests
.’ It was a brilliant scoop but he couldn’t concentrate on the story. His brain was a kaleidoscope, spinning with fragments of memories and images: his grandfather’s ghetto diary, Novy Marek, his conversations with Peter Feher, KZX.

But how to put the pieces together? By starting with what you know, he told himself: names and places, dates and times. Dates and times, he thought. Miklos had died the night that Sanzlermann had arrived. An image flashed into his mind and he sat bolt upright. The Gendarme captain at Kultura. Why had the Gendarmes carried out an identity check at the bar he was at, preventing him from leaving precisely when he was supposed to be at his grandfather’s? Alex stood up and walked over to the window. He stared out at Nyugati station, its intricate glass and iron façade now awash with water. An enormous boom erupted and he jumped reflexively, his heart suddenly thumping rapidly. Calm down, he told himself. This was just thunder. But what of the Gendarmes at Kultura? Was the raid another coincidence? Maybe, or just paranoia. Was it paranoid to think that the whole bar was checked as a cover, to stop him leaving? He remembered the Gendarme captain speaking on his mobile phone when Alex approached, looking at him, and saying “Yes, yes.” Was he saying, “Yes, yes,” Alex was still there?

He took out his notebook and drew a line down the middle of a page, writing Places on the left and Players on the right. The main players were obvious: Sanzlermann and Hunkalffy. But who was backing their campaigns behind the scenes? He wrote KZX and Volkstern, underlining both. Where was the money coming from? That was what he needed more information about: the role of the two conglomerates, especially if KZX was really AF Weizen reborn. Under places he wrote Munich, Novy Marek, Kosice, Budapest. He paused and scribbled Auschwitz? when his telephone rang.

“If you’ve got copies of the new edition, then the news is out, so I can put it on the wire,” David Jones demanded.

“How do you know that I have?” demanded Alex, laughing.

“Reuters knows everything. Especially when your delivery man is our receptionist’s brother-in-law.”

“Ok, here’s the deal. The website team come in at 4.00am. I’ve asked them to call me as soon as Natasha’s story and the interview transcript are up. That will be around 5.00am. I intend to be asleep then, so I’ll divert all calls to your number. Then you can put it on the wire. And what do I get for not extending this favour to AP and Bloomberg?”