Deceptions by Anna Porter (fox in socks read aloud TXT) 📗

because it was the most expensive choice in Budapest stores. Attila rarely drank vodka, and when he did, he couldn’t tell the difference between Chopin and any other brand. But his mother knew. As she seemed to know that the only white wine worth drinking was Olaszrizling and the only men worth knowing were former Party members who had acquired some wealth after the wall came down. At eighty-four, she was still on the lookout for new boyfriends for herself and new ambitions for her son.

“What are we going to do today?” Anna asked as she threw herself into the back of his Škoda. “Not the zoo!” she announced. Only eleven and already past the zoo stage, Attila thought. Another year and she would not want to get into a car with dog hair on the dog-slashed plastic seat. Gustav had stripped the back seat of its fuzzy cover and scratched the plastic into unforgiving strips in a vain effort to soften it.

“We could go swimming,” Sofi ventured to loud derision from her sister.

Attila drove up Castle Hill to Mátyás Square, parked his Škoda in the Hilton parking lot, and suggested they race down to the Chain Bridge, a plan that had no attractive features other than that they had never done it before, so Anna couldn’t say it was boring. It had the singular advantage of being close to where he wanted to look for Adam Biro, the man, Helena said, who sold the painting to the Vaszarys. About halfway down from the recently cleaned and buffed Fisherman’s Bastion there was a park with swings, a slide, and, most important, a couple of round trampolines he thought Anna would find tempting. She was good on them. She could do backflips and aerials, and she had recently asserted that she had never been beaten in a bum war.

Biro’s address, according to the internet, was 5 Fő Street, a new apartment building with a large courtyard. The architect had made an effort to fit it to the area by adding a couple of disappointing winged stone lions at the entrance and a set of marble steps that led to a heavy wooden door. Attila had left the girls at the playground (Anna was focused on the trampolines, and Sofi didn’t care where she was, so long as there were other kids to play with and a slide) and pressed the buzzer for Adam Biro’s apartment.

He spoke into the intercom that he was with the police department and had a couple of questions he wanted to ask Biro. “Semmi komoly,” nothing serious, he claimed. What with inexplicable arrests in the area since the pocket dictator moved his office here, plus parking indictments and bribe collections, most citizens were entitled to feel suspicious when a police officer rang their bell.

The man who buzzed him in was bald, about eighty, wearing fuzzy slippers and a cardigan over checkered pyjama pants. Attila flashed his long-expired police ID and explained that he had a few questions about Mr. Biro’s friend, Iván Vaszary.

Biro insisted that he knew no one by the name of Vaszary, but he was interested enough in the subject that he came out onto the landing to discuss what kind of painting he was supposed to have sold to the unknown Vaszary and why someone would have named him as the man who would have such a painting to sell.

“Who did you say this Vaszary is?”

Attila hadn’t said. “He owns an expensive painting by a woman named Gentileschi that was, I am told, sold to him by you.”

Biro shook his head.

“Could be a year ago. Perhaps you have forgotten?”

Biro shook his head again. “It’s not the sort of thing I would forget,” he said, though Attila assumed at eighty there would be quite a lot of forgotten bits lurking about in a man’s brain. “How expensive is it?” Biro asked.

Attila shrugged. “I have no idea, but it’s expensive enough they want the police involved.” He let that float in the air without an explanation, which was fine, since Biro got the message. To underline the impression, Attila squared his shoulders and affected a menacing look.

Biro shrank back into his doorway. “I know nothing,” he said defensively. Though maybe he was just disappointed to be deprived of further interesting conversation. Perhaps he would have been happy to engage in conversation with anyone at all. Maybe no one had talked with him for some years.

Attila said he would be back and returned to the playground. Anna was already waiting for him at the railing, her feet planted, her arms stretched out, practising push-ups. When he was close enough to see her face, he was surprised by how much she now resembled her mother. “Hol a fenébe voltál?” she demanded in a tone that was unmistakably her mother’s.

“Popped in to see someone,” Attila said. “I was gone for only a few minutes.”

“Mom runs up and down Gellért Hill in only fifteen minutes,” she said. “Flat.”

“Good for her,” Attila said. “Where is Sofi?”

“Sofi?” Anna asked, looking around casually. “No idea.”

He felt that moment of absolute heart thumping, head-buzzing, dry-mouth panic he hadn’t felt since four-year-old Anna jumped into the Dohány Street traffic chasing a strange cat. He ran over to the slide. Three small girls starting down the blue plastic tube, a boy emerging from below, a woman holding a toddler stomping about in a sandbox. “I am looking for my daughter,” Attila stammered. “She was here about ten minutes ago. . . .”

“Twenty,” Anna said. “But who is counting.” She had materialized at Attila’s elbow.

“She is wearing a pink shirt and a skirt. . . .”Attila tried to regain control of his breathing.

“Green.” Anna said.

“A blue parka . . .”

“That one,” Anna pointed at a kid’s blue parka on a bench.

The woman, her eyes darting from Attila to Anna and back, seemed unsurprisingly confused.

Attila ran to the bench and grabbled the parka. He climbed to the top of the slide, his huge feet slipping on the kid-sized