“Ah, so your boss knew that my boss recorded everything.”
“You mean his notes?”
“No. I mean his recording of his client meetings. He kept voice recordings of all the meetings. He would never say he was recording, but he didn’t trust his memory on those delicate matters. Une situation delicate, ça, n’est pas? Very sensible, n’est pas? ”
Attila nodded vigorously. “Of course those would not be in his files.”
“Of course.” Monique smiled prettily.
“So, they were not turned over to the police.”
“No. They were not.”
“But you know where they are.”
“I did a lot of work for Monsieur Magoci, and he trusted me to be absolument discrète.”
Attila nodded even more vigorously but with less conviction than before. It seemed unlikely that Magoci would have taken this young woman into his confidence, but given the vagaries of human nature, it was possible. “Mr. Vaszary would be grateful if you would let him have the recording.”
“How grateful?” Monique asked, her pretty smile in place.
Attila had no idea what would be on the recording — was there more than one? — since Vaszary had not told him about his meetings with Magoci. And now he was beginning to wonder why Iván hadn’t said he knew Magoci. He thought it had been Gizella who had hired Magoci to meet with Helena on her behalf. “It depends,” he said at last. “He would have to know which meeting . . .”
“All the meetings.”
All? How many times could he have met this guy when Vaszary hadn’t been here in Strasbourg for more than a few weeks. “And Madame Vaszary?”
“No,” Monique said. “They met only once for coffee, here, in this restaurant, and I assume it was about the same matter. You think not?”
“Really, mademoiselle, I don’t know what to think,” Attila said quite honestly.
“But you will talk with your boss and he will tell you, right?”
Extremely unlikely, Attila thought. “Tell me what?”
“What he thinks those recordings are worth to him.”
“Did you have a figure in mind?”
“A figure?”
“A sum of money.”
Monique gazed out the window and sipped her wine. “This place always reminds me of Paris,” she said. “I would like to live there in an appartement. But not too small, with a big bay window and a little patio garden, only one bedroom, I am not greedy. Maybe on Île Saint-Louis. I love those old buildings with their inner courtyards and their wide balconies overlooking the Seine. What do you think, Attila?”
“That sounds very pleasant,” Attila said.
“My mother took me to Paris when I was a little girl. We stayed at a hotel called Louis or Saint Louis or Louis the Second in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. We had to carry our own suitcases up four floors to our room at the top of the stairs, but our view was wonderful. Rooftops and garden patios with flowering trees — it must have been spring. We walked along the Seine in the evening, looking at all the boats and the book vendors and thousands of swallows wheeling about our heads. It was magic. Here, the river is too narrow and not deep enough.”
He was pondering how he could get more information from Monique without admitting that he was not here for Vaszary — at least not as far as he knew, and he was now sure he did not know enough about the Vaszarys’ dealings with Magoci. Never had known. The recording could be the key to Magoci’s murder.
“You are married?”
“What?” Attila had been planning his next attempt to find out more about Vaszary’s business with Magoci, and not thinking about his marital status.
“Are you married?” Monique asked. “I mean now, are you married now?”
“No.”
“I am also not married,” Monique confessed.
“Oh.” This may be the opening he needed, but maybe not. Still, worth trying. “A beautiful woman like you and not married.”
“Haven’t found the right man,” she said. “You?”
“I was married,” Attila said, “but it didn’t last.”
“Why?”
“I think she had other ideas for how she wanted to live.” Well that at least was truthful even if it didn’t give away much. Perhaps in this cozy atmosphere, she would think it was her turn to reveal something. “I will take your message to Mr. Vaszary, of course, but maybe you can tell me a little about the recording. For example, whether it is about a painting.”
Monique tsk ed and wagged her finger at him. “What do you think? Naturellement, it is about the painting. Please tell me tomorrow what Mr. Vaszary says. I will be here again in the morning. They have a good café au lait and pain au chocolate. Say, eight o’clock?”
Chapter Eighteen
Helena walked along the Danube, organizing her various bits of information. She wanted to decide what her next steps would be before she returned to Strasbourg and contacted Gizella Vaszary again.
The killer worked for one or more of the bureaucrats who resided on Rózsadomb. If he hadn’t gone to one of their offices when she had been chasing him, he could not have arrived back at the guard booth so fast. He must have passed the young guard often enough for them to have become friendly. They didn’t have to look up his number to call him when she told them she had something to give him.
Why there would be a lone Russian thug sitting outside Nagy’s residence was a mystery. His assertion that he worked both for Nagy and for someone else would fit the notion that Grigoriev was somehow involved. But the man who had signed up for archery classes could, as easily, have been Russian as Ukrainian.
Today’s Budapest News — the only English-language daily paper in the city — had nothing to say about the Russian, not even that he was Russian. All it reported was an accident in Rózsadomb, where the victim had been hurt but was in hospital and expected to recover. The implication was that there had been a car involved.
