It was the type of end that people call ‘peaceful’: the old woman, skeletal after months of wasting, suddenly absent, the breath gone out of her mouth, her eyes shut like a pharaoh’s. A brief, apparently untroubled translation. But at the instant of her going he had been shaken by the sense that in that cramped and curtained space at the end of the ward something revelatory had taken place, sacred even, and he had clutched at it in the hope that his grief could be meaningful, a noble effort to reconcile himself to the will of the transcendent. But the moment didn’t stay. He was too much of the materialist, brought up on dialectics, the True Path, the Victory of Socialism. He had no grounding in religion, no child-learned texts with which to dress the moment up in language, no consoling images of souls in flight. So her death, like that other, earlier death, in Budapest, had remained untransfigured, and merely what it was: an enigma that outstared reason, and left him for a while in a perfection of loneliness that had frightened him badly.
Afterwards, when the formalities were done, the papers signed and the porters had taken her to the morgue (a little flower of bruises on her wrist where the drip needle had been), the brothers had clung to each other in the corridor outside the ward, two middle-aged men, unshaven, raw-eyed, foreigners in a rage with death, while either side of them the nurses went about their business, walking on soft-soled shoes that seemed to make no noise at all.
‘Bitte?’
His food had arrived: a slab of pork surrounded by a mess of green which, consulting the menu, he discovered to be creamed spinach. He picked up his fork, afraid that it would look suspicious if he made no attempt to eat what he had ordered, but after the first mouthful he decided that it would look more suspicious to eat such food, and he pushed aside his plate, glancing up from the table at the very instant his contact emerged through the swing-doors.
She had cut and dyed her hair (auburn) and was dressed in faded jeans and a man’s blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, but there was no mistaking her: Emil’s friend, though shorn of that aura of severity which, in Paris, had shivered from her skin like smoke. She looked now like someone’s favourite niece – his, perhaps! – smiling and crossing to his table with a confident swing of the hips. Over her shoulder she carried a bag identical to his own, though from the tautness of the strap, the way she lowered it carefully to the floor beside his chair, it was evidently much heavier.
She kissed his cheeks. ‘You had a good trip?’
‘Thank you,’ he said.
She sat opposite him and lit a cigarette. When the waitress came she ordered a Coke.
‘You should eat,’ she said, looking at his plate.
László shrugged. ‘The heat…’
‘There may be a storm later,’ she said.
‘You think so?’
He would have liked to have known what the rules were here, whether he was to assume they could be overheard, despite the fact there was no one at the tables either side of them, and there was music, the inevitable dreary waltz, seeping from speakers hidden in the walls. He thought they should have given him some training in Paris. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself.
He leaned towards her. ‘Will you be coming with me?’
‘No,’ she said. Then with a trace of her old impatience, ‘Of course not.’
She drank her Coke and crushed an ice cube between her teeth. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘The Budapest train leaves at fourteen-twenty. When you reach the city you will stay at the Hotel Opera on Révay utca. Do you know it?’
‘I know the street. Near the Basilica.’
‘Correct.’
‘And what do I do there?’
‘You go sightseeing.’
‘For how long?’
‘Two, three days. Leave the bag in the hotel safe.’
‘Wouldn’t it be safer to keep it with me?’
‘It is important that you do exactly as we ask. Nothing more and nothing less. When everything is ready you will be contacted.’
‘How?’
‘That is for others to decide.’
She tapped out her cigarette, then reached down, very casually, to take hold of the strap of his bag.
‘You have everything you need?’
‘But that depends on you,’ said László.
She allowed herself the briefest of smiles. ‘Enjoy your vacation,’ she said. He wanted to ask her whether they would meet again, but already he felt quite sure that they would not. He was sorry for it. Having so thoroughly disliked her at their first meeting, he now decided she was admirable, pure as a blade, though he suspected it was a purity that might one day feel justified in leaving a device in a crowded bar. Charlotte Corday, Ulrike Meinhof. Joan of Arc! How odd he should find himself her confederate in this affair. He watched her walk away. Was she ‘Françoise’? It was a long time since a woman had interested him like this. He was pleased to find it was still possible.
He signalled for the bill, paid in cash and left a tip, but when he came to lift the bag the weight of it astonished him. He had to adjust his grip, bend at the knees a little, hoist the thing on to his shoulder. How much money felt like this? Quarter of a million? Half a million? Impossible, of course, to guess the value without knowing the currency. Deutschmarks or dollars, presumably. Krugerrands? Perhaps. Whatever it was, the donations of the diaspora had obviously been generous, though many of them were gastarbeiter and must have felt the loss of what they gave. For the rest, a tycoon like Bexhet Pacolli could have made the bag heavier without much sacrifice. So, too, those who had become wealthy in more sinister ways (the heroin racket in Zurich was said to be run by Albanians, and the capos there might have welcomed the chance to buy influence). Unlikely that Emil and his friends would be greatly worried by the provenance of the money. In times of need, hard currency could always justify itself.
He bought his ticket in the station hall, collected his pilot’s bag, and went on to the platform, where the train (the ‘Bela Bartók’) was on time, the engine and a score of dusty carriages creeping in under the afternoon shadows of the station. László boarded and edged down the aisle until he came to a compartment emptier than the rest, with two unoccupied seats facing forward. Here, he stowed the blue bag on the overhead rack and sat on the seat by the window, the black bag at his feet, one loop of the strap wound around his wrist. Behind him, two Hungarian voices, city accents like his own but with an argot he didn’t always understand, discussed the latest Ferencváros game. The carriage was stifling – old rolling stock with no air-conditioning – and he longed to sleep, but waking up in Budapest with the bag missing would be a very expensive mistake indeed. It might, quite literally, be more than his life was worth.
A whistle blew, a child was held up to wave goodbye, a little air began to eddy in at the tops of the windows. He sat back, took, or tried to take, a deep breath, but his lungs were sticky, and when he tried a second time, forcing it, there was a pain, like a ravel of irritated nerve ends threaded through his ribs in a line beneath his left armpit. Now here was another thought to play with. After all, there would be nothing extraordinary about a man of his age having a coronary on a hot day, travelling. In casualty they would open the bag looking for his medication, or just made curious by the weight of it. A pity he would not be there to see their faces.