Woman in the Fifth

in once to grab a chair. His colleague — certain that Mother wasn’t moving — ran out as well. There was more shouting — then the cop holding me lifted me up and frogmarched me outside.

‘First light was in the sky — and what I saw there I will never forget. My father — his hands behind his back, a rope around his neck that had been suspended from a tree — was being forced to climb on top of a chair placed right under the tree. When he refused, one of the plainclothes cops grabbed him in the crotch and squeezed so hard that Papa doubled over and the two men forced him on the chair, and I was crying and trying to turn away, and the same officer who’d grabbed Papa in the crotch shouted to the cop holding me, “Make her watch.” So he grabbed my ponytail and forced me to see the other plainclothes guy kick the chair, and Papa wriggling and jerking and coughing up blood as …’

Margit stopped and sipped her whisky.

‘It must have taken him a good two minutes to die. And do you know what one of the plainclothes officers — they were Secret Police — told me? “Now you know what we do to traitors.“’

‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘I never knew …’

‘Because I never told you.’

‘How the fuck could they have done that to you … a little girl … ?’

‘Because they were bastards. And because they could do this. They had the power. They made the rules. They could force a seven-year-old-girl to watch her father being lynched.’

‘What happened after?’

‘They bundled me into a car and took me off to a State orphanage. A hellhole. I was there for three weeks. Refused to leave my bed, except to go to the bathroom. Refused to speak to anyone. I remember they sent doctors to see me. I said nothing. They were always talking in whispers to the nurses and the orphanage people, saying things like, “She’s traumatized … She’s in shock … She has to be fed.” But I refused to eat. So they eventually tied me down to a bed and stuck needles in my arms and fed me that way.

‘After three weeks, one of the matrons of the orphanage came in and said, “Your mother’s here. You’re leaving.” I didn’t feel elation. I didn’t cry with happiness. I felt nothing but numbness.

‘Mother was waiting for me in the director’s office. Her face had only half-healed. One eye was half-closed, the other … she was never able to use that eye again. She came over and put her arms around me, but there was no strength to her hug, no comfort. Something had been killed in her. She was accompanied by two men in suits. When I saw them I immediately recoiled — and hid behind my mother — because I was certain they were the same sort of men who had killed my father. Even they were embarrassed by my fear of them, and one of them whispered to my mother who then whispered to me, “They want you to know they will do you no harm.”

‘But I still refused to come up and face everyone until Mother crouched down beside me and said, “We have been given permission to leave Hungary. These men will drive us to the Austrian border, and there we will be met by other men who will bring us to a city called Vienna. And we will start a new life there.”

‘Again, I said nothing. Except, “Those men who killed my father … will they hurt us again? ”

‘One of the suits crouched down and spoke to me. “No, they will never hurt you again,” he said. “But I can promise you they will pay terribly for what they did.”

‘As I found out from my mother some years later, those men with her at the orphanage were also from the Secret Police. My father’s death had been something of a big deal. One of the uniformed officers who had been on the scene when he was murdered had a crisis of conscience, and made contact with the Reuters correspondent in Budapest. The story went everywhere — especially the bit about me being forced to watched Papa’s execution. The fact that the cop who yanked my ponytail to make me keep my eyes open was the same one who ratted out his colleagues and went to the Western press … well, I suppose it shows that even the police sometimes have a conscience.’

‘What happened next?’

‘There was a small international cause celebre. It was the height of the Cold War, and the press outside of Hungary jumped on the story — Communist savagery and all that. Anyway, the Kadar government were under a lot of pressure to “solve the problem”. So they offered my mother and me free passage out of the country and a little money to start a new life in the West.’

‘And what happened to the two plainclothes officers?’

‘Their names were Bodo and Lovas. After we left Hungary they were put on a big public trial and sentenced to many years of hard labor. But through sources in the country, I found out that, after the trial, they were secretly transferred out to the intelligence division of the Hungarian Embassy in Bucharest … which, I suppose, was a prison sentence of sorts. Two years later, they were back working in Budapest in big jobs.’

‘And since then … ?’

‘Dead.’

‘You know that for a fact?’

She nodded.

‘And the cop who ratted on his comrades?’

‘After he leaked everything to the Reuters man, he did what every true soldier would do who betrayed his cause. He went home and blew his head off. The ethical ones among us often pay a very high price.’

Silence. She finished her cigarette. I topped up her whisky glass. She didn’t touch it. I tried to take her hand in mine. She pushed me away.

‘You expect me to accept your sympathy?’ she asked.

I ignored her anger — as I knew she would want me to — and instead asked, ‘How could you have ever gotten over something like that?’

‘You can’t — and I didn’t. But to those bastards, it was war. And when it’s war you can do whatever you want. And I don’t really want to say anything more about this, except … now you know why I hate any man who hits a woman in the face.’

Then, ‘You are going to have to kill Yanna’s husband.’

‘Are you insane?’ I said.

‘He will kill you.’

‘Only if Sezer tells him to. And if Sezer has me bumped off, the cops will immediately know that he was behind it—’

‘If the cops even care. You could “disappear” and who would notice?’

‘I’m not killing Yanna’s husband,’ I said. ‘I could never kill anyone.’

‘Everyone is capable of murder, Harry. You must remember that Yanna’s husband is a thug — and one whose pride has been damaged by the fact that you fucked his wife. Where he comes from, that’s up there with genocide and pedophilia in the catalogue of human horrors. Sezer might hold him off for a while … but he is going to kill you. Be absolutely certain about that.’

After leaving Margit’s apartment, I took the metro over to Les Halles and a sporting goods shop that I passed once in that subterranean shopping center, and was open late this evening. I stopped a clerk and said, ‘I know this probably sounds very American, but you wouldn’t happen to sell baseball bats by any chance?’

‘Straight ahead, then turn right,’ he said.

So much for me thinking I’d have to explain what a baseball bat is.

Ten minutes later, I walked back into the metro at Les Halles, carrying a full-sized Louisville Slugger. Yes, several passers-by did stare at me — no doubt wondering what I was doing with such a threatening object in a metro — but I didn’t care. If Yanna’s husband — or any of his goon friends — did try to jump me, at least the baseball bat would give me a fighting chance (unless, of course, he used a gun).

As I walked out of the metro at Chateau d’Eau — baseball bat in hand — several people actually crossed the road when they saw me coming toward them. I took a different route to work, dodging the rue de Paradis, cutting down some small back alleys, and always carrying the bat up against my chest, while spinning around every twenty paces to see who was following me.