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

ended up. It was too late, I think, by the time he had grown up enough to look for them. My father was just a boy, but he remembered some of what had been lost. The furniture, he thought, had been used for firewood. Like I said, it was a long cold winter. He could have reclaimed the house, but what was the point? You couldn’t own a house after the Communists ran things.”

“What was your grandfather’s name?”

“Alfred Klein. I kept his name after I married. Not many do that in Hungary, but since my grandfather lost everything, I thought I would at least keep his name.”

“Wasn’t there a restitution law?”

Zsuzsa shook her head. “My father couldn’t prove anything. There were no photographs of the paintings. There was a box of family photos that had been hidden in the basement, but they were only of people. And most of them had been killed. My father would show me and say their names. I think it was to remind me to remember them after he died.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “He died last year.”

“Did he know anything about the Arrow Cross men who had taken your grandfather?” Helena asked.

“Not really. He was only seven or eight at the time. Hiding in that chest with a bunch of old clothes on top of him. My grandfather assumed the chest would be too heavy to move and the Arrow Cross men wouldn’t think it had much value. My father didn’t come out till he heard the front door bang. He was lucky that one of the neighbours took him in and hid him till after it was all over.”

“Did he take anything?”

“He took a few things. Why do you ask?”

Helena had a pat answer ready: “I always wonder what people take with them when they have to escape.”

Zsuzsa looked at Helena even more closely than before. If she had become suspicious of Helena’s interest in her grandfather’s art, she didn’t say so.

Helena wrote her local cellphone number on a piece of paper, and Zsuzsa agreed to call her if she heard Berkowitz return to his part of the house.

Chapter Twenty-One

The silver SUV was waiting for her around the corner, the engine purring, the front window down. Gennady Abramowitz, Grigoriev’s so-called secretary, was seemingly enjoying the sunshine and the scent of roses. Helena slowed to a walk.

“You will please allow me to drive you to hotel,” Abramowitz suggested in English.

Helena faced the car. Never turn your back on a man with a gun. Particularly if he bears you a grudge as this man still did for his humiliation of a year ago. Helena had come close to breaking his arm when he tried to push her in the elevator on their way to see Grigoriev.

“Mr. Grigoriev says he has information for you, and he hopes you have information also for him.” He was hissing his h’s Russian style.

“I have no information for him,” Helena said in Russian.

“He is not far from here,” Abramowitz said a touch petulantly.

“How did he know where I was?” Helena asked.

“That is not the information he wishes to discuss. It is about the man you are . . . how you say . . . seeking.”

“Tell him I am busy,” Helena said, and she went around the back of the car and took the narrow alleyway between the houses, where the SUV couldn’t follow, came out on Mecset Street, and climbed the steep staircase to an octagonal yellowish building with a grey metal roof. A plaque announced that it was the tomb of Gül Baba, built during Hungary’s Ottoman times. She could see the red-roofed houses of Rózsadomb from the parapet. No sign of the silver SUV. But there was another car at the corner, its driver leaning out the window, peering upward at the Gül Baba monument. She had no trouble recognizing Azarov’s driver, Piotr.

She ran down Rómer Flóris Street to the Danube and Margit Bridge. She crossed to the Pest side and walked down the rakkpart toward the parliament buildings. She took a taxi from one of the riverside hotels and returned to the Astoria. How did both men know she was in Budapest? She had been careful with her appearance. If the man in front of Nagy’s house had been working for Grigoriev, as she had surmised, he may not connect the woman he had encountered with the real Helena. Or would he?

It was not so much how both Grigoriev and Azarov had tracked her down, but why they would do so. Azarov had seen the painting, and if he wanted to own an Artemisia Gentileschi, he could wait for her advice. That advice, if her sense of the painting was correct, may even be detrimental to his personal interests. He would be expected to bid exponentially more than now, while the authenticity was still questionable.

Her room had been cleaned, but her clothes had not been disturbed. The safe was locked. Inside, her second burner phone and various pieces of identification were in the same seemingly random positions she had arranged them.

She called Attila to ask him about Brankovitz.

“You are still in Budapest,” he said.

“Till tomorrow,” she told him.

“Why? You plan to shoot off more testicles?”

Helena took a deep breath. “I did not intentionally shoot that man,” she said.

“Maybe not intentionally, but it seems he is still short a testicle after meeting you. For the first time. God forbid he run into you again. Why?”

“He attacked me,” Helena said. “I had no choice. And, in any event, I did not shoot him. He shot himself.”

Attila didn’t say anything. Helena had saved his life in Bratislava a year ago. She threw a knife into the man’s leg just as he was about to kill Attila. In hindsight, he recognized that he had been uncharacteristically careless, and that he was lucky Helena had been observing the scene.

“I was just asking him some questions. He grabbed for his gun, it