don’t got worse than that.”
“That’s what I keep hearing,” I said. “But I can’t spend my life behind a locked door.”
“You want to have a life to spend,” the bartender said, “you’ll walk out right now.” He put his hand on my forearm to emphasize the point. It was heavy, like a block of wood. I lifted it off, took my money back.
“I’m pretty sure someone here can help me. If you won’t.”
“Mister,” he said quietly, “this is not a game. You gonna get yourself killed.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m not walking away. I don’t let people get away with murder.”
“You don’t let...?” he said. “Do you hear yourself? People get away with murder every day.”
“Not of my friends,” I said.
He leaned close, so that I could hear but no one else. “You’re young. You’re American. You don’t know. During the war...you know which war I mean?”
A Hungarian man in his seventies? I knew which war he meant.
“I was on Szechenyi Utca, the street where my family had a house,” he said. “This was 1944. I saw them take my sister, the Arrow Cross, they took her to the Danube, put a gun to her head, and they shot her, just like that.” He made a gun of his forefinger and thumb, touched his fingertip to my temple, pushed gently. “You say you don’t let. It’s not up to you to let or not let. There are things you can’t stop, and you can’t punish either. You understand? The Arrow Cross soldiers, I wanted to kill them—I wanted to
“You were a child,” I said. “You must’ve been—”
“That’s right. I was twelve years old, with a six-years-old brother to take care of, and if I’d done anything, we’d both be dead too. Floating in the Danube with our sister. So I walked away. I took my brother’s arm and we walked away.”
“That’s awful,” I said.
“What they did to our sister? Or that I walked away?”
“You were twelve.”
“And you’re what, twenty-four? Twenty-five? A bullet kills you just the same. Listen to what I am telling you. You’re a young man, you got a life ahead of you. Walk away.”
There was a part of me that wanted to. It was the part of me that had walked away three years ago while Murco Khachadurian and his brutal son were climbing upstairs to Miranda’s apartment. I’d known what they were going to do. I’d made it possible for them to do it. In that instant I’d even thought I wanted them to do it. But I’d been dreaming about it ever since, reliving it every night. You can’t walk away from some things.
“I appreciate what you’re trying to tell me,” I said. “Really. I do.”
“But you won’t do it.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t.”
I pushed back the stool I was on, walked to the center of the room. There was a table with one empty chair. I pulled it out, stood on the seat. I took Jorge Ramos’ wallet from my pocket. Held it up over my head. Conversations petered out one by one.
“I have something here for Ardo Fekete,” I said. “For Black Ardo. It belongs to a man he sent to kill me. Which of you can tell me where to find him?”
There was silence in the room. I’d never heard such silence. The dripping of the beer taps, the creak of a chair leg. Breathing. Shallow, shallow breathing.
“Which of you,” I repeated, “can tell me where to find him?”
I turned, took in the room. Looked every man in the face. At the far end was one of the men sitting alone. He still had half a glass of beer and as I watched he drank it down. He set the glass down on his table with a crack that sounded like a gunshot.
He raised his hand. He had the longest fingers I’d ever seen.
Miklos rose from his seat, came forward. Even standing on the chair, I was only half a foot taller than him. He held his hand out, that enormous mitt like a basketball player’s, and I dropped the wallet on his palm. He didn’t look at it. His eyes were locked on mine.
Suddenly I felt hands at my elbows, gripping tightly, lifting me into the air. More hands at my back, on my shoulders. They set me jarringly on the floor. Then a piece of heavy fabric came down over my face. A bag, maybe burlap. It stank of spilled whiskey and wet rope. Someone cinched it at my throat, the drawstring digging into my skin. I felt a hand on my chest, pressing, turning me around, then around again. My head spun. I tried to say something but I couldn’t make myself heard. The bag was muffling my voice, blurring it.
I shouted, “I’m a private investigator. The police know where I am—” But even to me, the words were unintelligible, echoing inside the bag. My face was sweating and I was finding it hard to breathe. I felt myself steered across the floor, then down a pair of steps. For an instant, it was cooler—I felt a breeze.
I had no sense of direction, hardly even a sense of time. How far did we walk? Led through the dark, my nose filled with the stink of damp burlap, my heart pounding against my sore ribcage, I couldn’t say. We walked. That’s all I knew.
After a time, I was led by the wrist across a short distance—were we still outside?—and then along an echoing corridor and down a flight of stairs, stumbling twice. Only the grip on my arm kept me from falling.
I was shoved into a chair, a wooden ladderback from the feel of it. Someone tied my feet to the legs and my arms behind the back. Blackness turned to a diffuse honey color when they turned a light on.
“So,” a voice said. The bag distorted it, but I could hear an accent. More mild than the bartender’s but similar. “So. You wanted to meet Ardo.”
Someone stepped in front of me, blocking the light. I felt metal against my neck. The side of a knife blade, then the point. Not breaking the skin, just tracing a gentle line. I fought to stay calm, to slow my racing pulse, tried to fight the pressure building in my bladder.
I’d faced worse. That’s what I kept telling myself:
But he hadn’t had me tied to a chair, hand and foot, with a bag over my head and a knife at my throat.
I found myself gagging from the stink of the bag. “Please take the bag off,” I said.
There was no response.
I spoke louder. “I’m going to throw up if you don’t take this bag off.”
I heard a sentence in Hungarian and the knife went away from my throat. The string holding the bag closed was roughly loosened and the bag was whipped off my head. My glasses came with it, landing on the floor a few feet away. I blinked against the sudden light.
In front of me was a chair and a man was sitting in it, but they were both blurs.
“Give him back his glasses,” the man said.
Someone retrieved my glasses from the floor and pressed them into place on the bridge of my nose.
Now I could see it was Miklos standing in front of me. In one hand he was holding a long kitchen knife with a slight curve to the blade, the sort you see chefs on TV use to filet meat. He moved to one side and I got my first look at the man in the chair.
He sat with one leg up on the seat, one arm draped over the knee. His shoulder-length hair looked filthy, a yellowish gray. He had a fat mustache that hung down over his upper lip, concealing it almost completely. His features were broad, heavy, a little like the bartender’s: wide eyes deeply sunken in their sockets, swollen cheeks, a spade for a jaw. His eyelids hung like curtains, but beneath them his stare was merciless. He might have been a gypsy king, a savage old wolf watching an enemy squirm before him.
“So,” he said again. “I understand I tried to have you killed. Explain to me, then, why you aren’t dead?”
It took me a moment to find my voice. “I got lucky,” I said.
He stared at me and after a while his lips spread in a cavernous grin. “Yes. Just look at you. I’ve never seen anyone luckier.”
I strained against the rope holding my hands together. It didn’t give at all.
