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

to track a man who had acquired another man’s Titian. If Biro’s father had murdered Zsuzsa’s grandfather and stolen his paintings, he would have known how to cover his tracks. What Helena found surprising was that he had also managed to position himself as an entrepreneur with good contacts after 1989. Yet that was one of the aspects of regime change that had least surprised Attila. Corruption, he had told her, in eastern Europe is not political. It is governed by loyalties. So long as you stay loyal to your leader, you are safe, protected, but god help you if you deviate.

She did find a file on Alfred Klein and his family. They had been designated suspect individuals because Alfred had been an art collector. There were notes on his son, Sándor, who, when he finished technical school, began to ask questions about Alfred’s art. Sándor did not qualify for a passport and had not been allowed to travel out of the country, even to other Republics of the Soviet Union. He had been denied a request to visit Warsaw. A small notebook contained a handwritten list of a few paintings that Sándor indicated were of interest to him but, since he had become a plumber after his schooling, there was no reason to grant him a visa to see art. According to the agent who had deposited the notebook in the “Alfred Klein” file, this was his list of the art he had planned to see when he travelled.

He had listed a Verrocchio Virgin with three angels and a child, 1476; Van Gogh, Field with Flowers, 1889; Renoir, Girl with Parasol, 1867; a Rippl-Rónai with no date and something in Hungarian; a Gustav Klimt garden, 1882. The last page was headed by several question marks followed by the name Michele Angelo Merigi de Caravaggio. The same handwriting with small slanted letters and almost no space between them went on in Hungarian for two paragraphs. Was it a list made from memory of other things Sándor’s father had told him? Could he have remembered such detail from when he was a boy of seven or eight? Improbable. Much more likely, the notebook was something of his father’s that Sándor had grabbed when he ran from his family’s apartment after the Arrow Cross raid. Later, he would have become curious. That would explain the desire to visit art galleries. It would also explain taking his own daughter to Vienna and Paris and London after 1989, when they could, finally, travel.

Before the woman who had stood guard over her table and the Klein file folder could intervene, she took a photograph of the page.

She was about to return to the hotel, change her appearance again, and wait at the parliament buildings for Berkowitz to reappear, when she got a message from Louise: “Andrea called. She says it’s urgent — she must meet you today.”

“Where did she say she is?” Helena asked.

“She didn’t. But she said she plans to have that fabulous chestnut purée again. And she said eight o’clock. She’ll call me to confirm.”

“Chestnut purée? You’re sure she said chestnut purée?”

“That’s what it sounded like. With whipped cream. She seemed to be in a hurry. And I heard a lot of noise in the background. I thought she might have been at an airport.”

“Please book me an early flight to Strasbourg tomorrow morning. And tell Andrea that I will meet her this evening as she wishes.”

“As?”

“Myself, I think.”

“In Budapest?”

“Well, if she said the best chestnut purée . . .”

Working on the assumption that he would stay at the Gresham Four Seasons if he were in Budapest, she called the hotel and asked to speak with Mr. Azarov. The operator connected her to his room.

Since Vladimir had no problem recognizing her in her Marianne Lewis disguise, Helena again pulled on her Maria Steinbrunner fringed black wig, put on glasses, a bulky sweater, and a headband, and applied the dark red lipstick favoured by Maria. The man at the front desk gave her only a fleeting once-over, but Helena thought if she were going to continue to tangle with dangerous people, she’d better update her disguises. It would take another trip to Bratislava where Michal would construct another identity for her. These two had been perfect, down to the last detail of clothing and shoes that the deceased women would have worn, but there was no point in using an identity that no longer fooled those it had been intended to fool.

Helena locked her other passports in the safe, took the back stairs down to the lobby’s back entrance, and emerged on Kossuth Lajos Street near the kitchens. Fortunately, Maria Steinbrunner had worn her hooded raincoat, because it was raining hard and steady all the way up to Szechenyi Square. She commiserated with the two wet doormen about the weather (“It’s what we expect in October”) and marched into the massive lobby, her feet making unmistakable sloshing sounds on the marble as she advanced to the front desk. As with most front desk people at luxury hotels, the uniformed man who was just finishing with complaints about the size of a bathroom in a guest’s suite gave Helena a somewhat disapproving glance.

“It’s the rain,” Helena said in an ingratiating voice. “We hadn’t expected rain,” she added for good measure.

“Yes?” the uniform asked, as if the rain had somehow been Helena’s own fault. Perhaps none of the other guests ventured out on a nasty day.

“I must freshen up before my meeting,” she said, and marched to the women’s (‘ladies,’ in the Gresham, if you please) washroom. She removed her wig and the glasses, pulled off the check pants and replaced them with her own leggings, brushed her hair, dabbed off Maria’s dark makeup, put on a bit of light lipstick, and folded the now-superfluous clothing into her big purse. She walked out and breezed past the front desk with the confidence of a wealthy guest.

“Mr. Azarov is expecting me,” she said to the