She headed back to the hotel and asked the concierge for the name of a superior tailor in Budapest. She hadn’t given up on finding the shop that had made the killer’s camel overcoat.
“Someone who makes fine overcoats. I saw one that would be just perfect for my husband’s Christmas present,” she said.
“The best don’t work fast, madam,” the concierge said.
“Oh, I am not interested in speed,” Helena said. “It’s quality I want. A friend in Vienna recommended Vargas. It’s spelled vee—”
“No need, madam,” he smiled in joyful anticipation of the tip. “Mr. Vargas is two streets down, closer to the river. A walk-up. Small sign in the entrance way. Very exclusive. Coats, jackets, all made to measure, for the discerning gentleman.”
Helena thanked him with a €20 tip and asked him to keep the information secret for a few days. She wanted her purchase to remain hidden from her husband and all his friends, until she surprised him at Christmas. She looked around the empty lobby and leaned in closer to the concierge’s ear. “He has spies everywhere. It’s a game we play,” she whispered. “You wouldn’t want to spoil it now, would you?”
In her room, she changed into her black pants, her black wig with the straight fringe, rimless glasses, bulky pullover, and a headband that would serve two purposes: disguising her face and keeping the wig down. The overall appearance would not have pleased Maria Steinbrunner, a woman of expensive tastes who had spent lavishly on blond and red highlights, breast implants, and facial procedures guaranteed to keep her looking youthful. But Maria had been dead for seven years, her body deposited in a vat of acid at a Vienna building site. The police had turned up no new evidence about her killer or killers, though her boyfriend, a local organized crime boss, had remained a suspect. She was not about to complain about the wardrobe choices.
Helena had acquired her passport, driver’s licence, credit cards, and most of her personal history from the best document thief and forger in eastern Europe. He had been introduced to her as Michal — not his real name, of course — by her father, at a time when needing to disguise herself had been a ridiculous idea. She didn’t know then that recovering lost works of art would be part of her profession, or that such work would expose her to danger, and that she, too, would one day need Michal’s services.
At the time, her usual reaction to meeting her father’s acquaintances was sullen indifference. She was only fourteen and still didn’t know he was her father, but she was no longer flattered by his interest in her art studies. Annelise had explained his frequent presence with, “He is a good friend, we’ve known each other a long, long time.” When he didn’t visit for six months or longer, Annelise would become anxious, often tearful, retreating to her own room and smoking. When Helena persisted in wanting to understand why the fuss, Annelise said she worried about him. He went to some dangerous places. At the time, Helena had imagined the rather formally dressed Simon in South American jungles fraternizing with jaguars or in Africa being chased by wild elephants. When she was little, he would bring her small gifts of stuffed toy lions and hippos that did not look like their wild counterparts on television. Once he brought a doll with a blond wig, false eyelashes, and an elaborate wardrobe that Helena imagined would resemble his exotic wife, whoever she was. Simon didn’t mention a wife and when Helena asked him, he laughed. “Not everyone has a wife or a husband. Some of us are quite happy without.”
Annelise maintained that her father had vanished; she said she had never received letters. She knew he was dead only because of what he had left them in his will. There was a live-in housekeeper, and Annelise enjoyed her travel, always first class, and usually to Europe. She would spend several weeks away from home, and when she phoned, she sounded much happier.
By the time she was ten, Helena had begun to suspect that Annelise had been with Simon during her long absences. Later, when she returned with gifts for the house — a small Picasso drawing, a Renoir watercolour, a Rubens pen-and-ink — Helena had been pleased that he had such good taste in art. By then his gifts for Helena were books about artists — the life of Michelangelo, Raphael’s life and loves — and museum catalogues with a few paintings highlighted. Having noted her lack of interest in them, he no longer brought her dolls.
Already he had begun to teach her how to identify fakes and forgeries and how easy it was to forge a credible provenance for a piece of art. “If you’re going to succeed in this business,” he had told her, “you must be smarter than they are. And the trouble is, little one, that they are very smart.”
He was talking about himself, but she didn’t know that then. Smart, mercurial, erudite, vain, cheerfully deceitful, restless, peripatetic, and amoral, her father was not unlike his hero, Odysseus, the man who believed he was invincible, that he could outwit even the gods. But, unlike Odysseus, Simon had been unable to fool everybody. And while his travels were not in the jungles, they were no less dangerous. The predators he fraternized with would, eventually, turn on him.
Two years ago, she had scattered his ashes in the Seine.
She located the squat two-storey building on Kígyó Street, a half block from fashionable Váci Street, almost hidden between two restaurants, both of them displaying English menus and pictures of gypsy violinists grinning invitingly at passers-by. There was a women’s fashion boutique, an insurance agency, and a travel bureau on
