on a small course in the Buda hills. Bela played tennis on Margits Island, even though he was known mostly for hitting the ball over the fence.”
“Dad used to go there. Both places.”
“And of course diplomats could buy the kinds of books that the state stores weren’t even allowed to display. So could well-connected people from the Party. The Szondis could sell those books because they had friends in high places.”
“They were collaborators?”
“There has always been talk that they were informants. In the early eighties, Ferenc was caught smuggling fifteenth-century manuscripts to West Germany. But instead of his being punished, it was hushed up. What does that tell you?”
“Didn’t that hurt them when everything finally changed?”
Laszlo smiled ruefully.
“With enough money you can avoid the trouble that others are susceptible to. The Szondis rebranded themselves as businessmen who had craftily outlasted Communism. Bela became a patron of the arts, a donor to charities. If you have a cause, Bela will lend his name. But if you run afoul of one of his business concerns…” Laszlo shrugged.
“So their past has never caught up to them?”
“A few people have tried to hold them accountable. But apparently the Szondis have seen to it that nothing remained on paper. The last person who dared to question their earlier conduct ended up with a million-forint judgment lodged against him in the courts.”
So this was the family my father had let me run errands for, errands that had been part of Ed Lemaster’s courier network. Now here I was preparing to meet Bela, with no idea of what he might be willing to tell me. Not much, according to Laszlo, unless I could come up with some sort of incentive.
“You think I am exaggerating,” Laszlo said. “I can read it in your eyes.”
“It’s not that. It’s just that, well, I work in Washington public relations. I’m used to dealing with the lowest of the low, if you know what I mean.”
“So your clients in Washington, they often send enforcers around? To make threats, or to slash the tires on your car? Or worse, perhaps?”
“Well, no. I thought you said they filed lawsuits?”
“That is one of their methods. Those three men I mentioned, who came asking for you. One of them works for the Szondis. A handyman.”
“A leg breaker?”
“Here, I will show you.”
Laszlo put his cell phone on the table and punched in a few commands. A newspaper website popped onto the screen, with a photo of Bela Szondi at a ribbon cutting for a new children’s health center.
“The man to Bela’s right.”
The shot was in profile. The fellow indeed looked like a rough customer-a human bowling ball draped in a black wool coat, with close-cropped hair, the unsparing eyes of a shark. The kind of man you’d instinctively give a wide berth to in the street.
“Would you like to see pictures of the other two men as well?”
“They were also in the paper?”
“No. But when they came into the store I had Lukacs come and wait on them while I pretended to make phone calls. I took their photos with my phone.”
“You’re very good at this, Mr. Laszlo.”
Laszlo took the compliment in stride, then clicked to the photos. The first was a shot of Ron Curtin, mullet and all. The second was his apparent new ally, the old KGB man whom I knew only by his nickname of Hammerhead.
“You know them?” he asked.
“Somewhat. And they’re not friends, in case they come asking for me again. When were they here?”
“Five days ago. One came in the morning, the other in late afternoon.”
So, not only had they been following me, at times they’d been a step ahead of me.
“Thanks,” I said. “You’ve been a huge help.”
He waved away the praise.
“I will erase these now. I kept them for you to see, but I do not wish to keep them any longer.”
“Understandable. You said you also know about Lothar Heinemann. I was wondering, though, if you’d ever come across his book. It would be in the form of a galley from a small press in Frankfurt. An Advance Reader Edition, I believe they call them now.”
“Lothar is an author?”
“This would’ve been years ago. Early to mid-seventies.”
Laszlo shook his head.
“I only know him as a collector, a procurer, and quite an outstanding one. He has a nose for these things. I was not aware he was ever a writer. This book, it would be of great value?”
“Not to most people. But it would be to me.”
I handed him one of my Ealing Wharton business cards. I considered scribbling the number for my new cell phone, then thought better of it.
“Shoot me an email if you spot it.”
“Of course.”
Laszlo seemed relieved to be back on the more familiar ground of bookselling. It reminded me of the parcel, and I put it on the table.
“How did you end up with this?” I asked.
His face darkened. He reached for his cigarette.
“Someone dropped it through my mail slot last Sunday. I found it early Monday. A small note was attached saying to hold it for you. There was no name, no address, no number. I didn’t know if you would be here in days or months. Or ever. Then, when all those men came calling, asking about you, well, I didn’t know what to think. Do you know what is inside?”
“A book, if it’s like the others. Probably with a message. Should I open it now?”
Laszlo waved away the idea.
“I think my involvement has gone as far as I would like. In fact…” He checked his watch. “Nothing personally against you, of course. But I should return to my store.”
He rose from his chair, as if worried I might open the package anyway. I stood, too. In parting, Laszlo offered another handshake. I watched through the plate glass as he emerged outside. He peered up and down the street before setting out for his store.
Laszlo’s caution was contagious. I found myself scanning the cafe for Szondi’s thug before I opened the parcel, and I held the package beneath the marble table as I tore open the butcher paper. As expected, there was a book inside. It was marked in two places.
The title, Night of the Short Knives, was pretty obscure nowadays, a 1964 novel about spies in the corridors of NATO military headquarters. The author, J. Burke Wilkinson, was quite familiar to me. He had come to our house in Vienna with his wife, Franny, for a small dinner party, probably around seventy-one, when I would have been fifteen and my father in his late thirties.
Wilkinson, who’d served earlier in the State Department, was twenty years older than Dad, but it was easy to see why they’d hit it off. They were the product of the same schools, the same circles. They even spoke the same form of expat English, an erudite blend of British and American slang.
Wilkinson was a wonderful raconteur, with great material. He’d been a schoolboy classmate of spymaster Richard Helms, and a Cambridge contemporary of Kim Philby’s. Later in Paris he knew Hemingway, Waugh, and Gertrude Stein. In addition to his novels, he’d written a biography of the spy novelist Erskine Childers. It was from Wilkinson that I learned the extraordinary news that Childers, a late convert to Irish nationalism, had himself been hanged as a spy.
That long-ago evening had made quite an impression on me, and as I read the marked passages, Wilkinson’s words rose to me in the gentlemanly cadences of his dinner table conversation. It felt as if he was sitting next to
