“A Tourist.”
“Einner?”
Drummond didn’t answer.
“This is why I won’t have time later to find out who was using my name in Budapest. Because I’m finished. I quit.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I really am, Alan. Find your mole on your own, and enjoy working for Senator Irwin. I hear he gives a brutal Christmas party.”
Milo switched off his phone, then steered with his knee as he took it apart. He was careful about it, because he didn’t want to have a wreck. He didn’t want anything to go wrong-he’d had enough of that.
19
When, just over the Hungarian border, he tried to withdraw forints from an ATM, the machine told him the transaction had been denied. He’d expected this, which was why he’d taken out euros in the airport, but he’d hoped that Drummond would drag his feet. The truth was that he actually liked the man and believed his excuses. Drummond had arrived in a department already so morally twisted that he’d had no choice but to follow suit until old cases were settled. Milo had hoped that Drummond might empathize enough to let him keep his cards a little longer. He was wrong.
Despite what Schwartz had learned from her source, Milo had last been to Budapest four years ago, in 2004, under his real name. He’d brought Tina and two-year-old Stephanie for a vacation. It was Tina’s first visit to the land that once lay behind the Iron Curtain, and she was taken by the imperial architecture rising through the bright late-summer light. She’d puzzled over the language-gyogyszertar, the Hungarian word for pharmacy, had particularly stunned her-but fell in love with the grandiose bridges crossing the Danube.
As he came gradually into town, open fields were replaced by huge shopping centers-IKEA and Tesco-where, despite his money situation, he stopped to pickup a cheap change of clothes, losing sixty euros all at once. The stores were soon replaced by sooty Habsburg buildings that, under the winter sky, held less charm than they’d had in the summer of 2004. It was still light when he crossed the Danube from Buda to Pest and checked into the Ibis Budapest Centrum’s tiny, nondescript room. He would have chosen an upscale hotel along the water, but his money wouldn’t last long. Besides, he was alone now, and wanted to maintain as low a profile as possible.
He visited one of the many cafe-bars along Raday utca, which had been renovated to better accommodate the increase in prosperous customers, then ordered an aperitif of Unicum, that mysterious herbal liqueur Hungarians pretend has medicinal qualities. In the rear of the bar were three computers with Internet access.
Very quickly, he tracked down a biography of Henry Gray posted on a blog with the dubious name “Random Looks Inside the Inside” that focused on news items backing up its conspiratorial worldview. Additional information came from a more professional source-the American Society of Journalists and Authors-and a personal essay from 2005 penned by Gray himself. He even found a Budapest address for him, on Vadasz utca.
Gray was a Virginia native who in his teens began traveling on student exchanges-Germany, Yugoslavia-and had quickly been bitten by the travel bug. By the time he was twenty-five, he had turned to freelance journalism and packed a suitcase. Thinking, no doubt, of Hemingway and Henry Miller, he flew to Paris, where he failed to find any regular work. This was in the early nineties, when the Balkans were exploding, so he packed again and headed for Belgrade, but the climate for Western journalists wasn’t favorable. After the Serb secret police, the UDBA, kicked in his door and held him for an hour in the local militia station, Gray fled north to the relative tranquility of Budapest, where he could report on the entire region from a safe distance.
His reputation was built largely upon one piece, reprinted in many major newspapers, on the airbase in Taszar, Hungary, unimaginatively named Camp Freedom. There, the U.S. military trained three thousand Free Iraqi Forces, which they hoped would make their upcoming invasion look like natives returning to reclaim their birthright, rather than Western imperialism. Like the name of the camp, it was a failed exercise in optimism.
Many of the other clippings he came across, besides mundane pieces on trade deals in Central Europe and the Balkans, were less impressive: “The 9/11 Conspiracy-What the Commission Doesn’t Want You to Know” and “One World Government-Does It Represent You?”
Yes, there were mainstream articles attributed to Gray, but they drowned in the mass of his conspiracy pieces littering the Net. He took on bottled water companies, which had, assisted by the American government, convinced the world that they should be paying for what nature considered a free resource. He speculated on the Bilderberg Group, an annual secretive meeting of influential business-people and politicians that, according to him and some similarly minded people, were working steadily toward the implementation of a world government. Gray had no doubt that the CIA was behind 9/11, a proposition that Milo, despite his ambivalence about his soon-to-be-ex- employer, found unbelievable. Not because someone at Langley couldn’t have dreamed it up-some were paid solely for their ability to dream up the unthinkable-but it was unimaginable that the Company could have pulled off such an enormous ruse without getting caught; its track record wasn’t encouraging.
In the end, the picture he gained of Henry Gray was of a paranoid, rootless investigator into conspiracies, who hoped that they might someday explain away the dissatisfaction of his own life. People like that were a dime a dozen. Which raised the question: Why did someone using Milo’s name want to find him?
Even with such opinions, Gray would have friends in Budapest, because expat circles, particularly journalistic ones, are tiny. Milo gathered a list of British, Canadian, and American stringers based in Budapest, with addresses and phone numbers.
Though Schwartz had said Gray had been in a coma, Milo found very little to back this up beyond a brief mention in a sidebar of the August 8 edition of the Budapest Sun: “Local journalist Henry L. Gray is in serious condition in Peterfy Sandor Hospital after a fall.”
Of Gray’s girlfriend, Zsuzsanna Papp, there was little. He found some of her Hungarian-language articles for the tabloid Blikk. These, as far as he could tell, covered the tensions between the nationalist Fidesz party and the socialist MSZP party, which now held shaky power.
Then he ran across Pestiside.hu, a satirical English-language news outlet on all things Hungarian, which spent as much time ridiculing the Hungarian character as it did the expats that filled its capital. February 28, 2008, yesterday: “Journo-Stripper Ends Humiliating Sideline; Quits Journalism.”
Fans of Zsuzsa Papp’s biting Blikk commentaries on political targets such as right-wing nut job Viktor Orban and fey communist liar Ferenc Gyurcsany will soon have to discover their political opinions unaided. According to Blikk management, Papp has left the paper in order to pursue her first love, undressing in front of drunk English hooligans at the 4Play Club. Who ever said there was no such thing as journalistic integrity in Hungary? Not us.
20
In the morning, he took a bus to Oktogon Square, where he mixed with Saturday pedestrians around the gray Central European intersection. They leaned against the wind, smoking or hurrying to the next warm cafe. Milo faced the winds along the boulevard that marked a Pest-side circular route cut in half by the Danube, then turned right onto Szondi utca. Szondi was less kept up than the boulevard, and years of soot lodged in its crevices, but the buildings had an undeniable charm.
Number 10, one block in, was hidden by scaffolding swathed in black plastic netting to avoid tools falling on pedestrians’ heads. It wasn’t the only building undergoing renovation, and when he looked he saw these occasional black masks all the way down the street. He checked the buzzers and pressed the one with parkhall stamped on it. After a moment, a weary “Igen?” sounded over the speaker.
“Mr. Terry Parkhall?”
“Yeah?”
“Sorry to bother you. My name’s Sebastian Hall, and I’m looking into the disappearance of an associate of yours. Henry Gray. You think you could spare a minute?”
