Invisible Murder

AY HIT BUDAPEST like a sledgehammer. You could practically see the pavement and the brickwork cracking under the oppressive heat. Sándor ran a finger under the collar of his shirt, trying to unstick the damp fabric from his back. He dropped the second-hand briefcase containing his most recent exam notes onto the top step, balancing it between his feet as he fished around in his pockets for his house keys. Then he discovered that a key was unnecessary because the door was already ajar. Home sweet home, he thought. Disgruntled, he pushed the sagging door open.

Szigony Residence Hall had a nice new sign, but that was the only new thing about the place. The university had taken over a couple of the old properties on Szigony Street, but since the demolition gangs were more or less waiting in the wings, no one saw any reason to waste money on maintenance and repairs. Some blocks had already fallen to the bulldozers, and soon this last, crumbling corner would also be part of the Corvin-Szigony project. Palatial office buildings, educational institutions, luxury condominiums, and exclusive shopping centers would rise from the ruins of what most Budapesti considered a “Gypsy slum.” Unless the recession puts a stop to the whole thing, Sándor thought glumly as he tried to get the front door to close again. He had to lift it up a little and then give a sharp jerk.… There! He heard the click.

“Waste of energy,” called Ferenc as he came clomping down the stairs. He lived on the same floor as Sándor and was studying music. “I’m going out. You want to try to shut the door behind me?” It was tricky to shut the door from the inside but near impossible from the outside; most people gave up without even trying.

“Okay,” Sándor said.

Ferenc bounded down the last worn steps at an uneven canter. His hair stuck out wildly in all directions, and he was wearing his beloved double-breasted British blazer despite the summer heat. He had once confided in Sándor that women said it made him look like Hugh Grant.

“We’re going out for a few beers at the Gödör,” Ferenc said. “Why don’t you join us?”

Sándor shook his head. “I’ve got to study,” he said.

“That’s what you always say. Come on, call Lujza. Don’t you think that poor girl would like to get out a bit?”

Sándor could feel a numbness at the corners of his mouth. Novocaine-like. He had seen Lujza just four times since the baptism, and none of those dates had been particularly successful. He felt like he was under attack. She wanted to talk politics and human rights and fascism the whole time. It was suddenly terribly important for her to know what he thought, what he felt, where he stood. Was she afraid he was some kind of closet fascist? Up until the infamous baptism, they used to hold hands and kiss and chat and make love; now every date was like a damn debate. The mere thought of it made Sándor feel clumsy and uncommunicative.

“International law is hell,” he said, because he had to say something. “I’ve only got a few more days to prepare, and it’ll be a bloodbath if I don’t know my stuff.”

“Sándor, for crying out loud,” Ferenc groaned. “You always know your stuff.”

“Yeah, because I cram. It’s called self-discipline.”

“Okay, okay. But your dedication isn’t much fun for the rest of us.…”

Sándor held the door for Ferenc and repeated his door-closing ritual—lift and jerk, and wait for the click.

Then he just stood there.

Come on, he told himself. Go upstairs and study.

It was dark in the high-ceilinged stairwell. One of the windows facing the street was boarded up with sheets of plywood. The other still had most of its colorful stained-glass panes. At one time this had been a beautiful, classic Budapest property, built and decorated by the same craftsmen and artisan metalworkers who had created the mansions in the Palace District by the National Museum. The building had been in a state of disrepair for ages, but in recent years the pace of its decline had picked up as if the building was trying to beat the bulldozers to it. Like a man committing suicide to avoid being murdered, Sándor thought. The plasterwork was peeling off in sheets, and it reeked of dampness, brick dust, and dry rot. The rooms still had four-meter ceilings, but the electricity came and went, the water pipes were corroded and smelled like sewage, and after four months of empty promises and sheets of black plastic, he had ultimately given up and had repaired the window in his room himself.

He thought back to the yelling, stomping Magyar Gárda crowd who wanted to “save Hungary” and the newspapers and TV channels that were full of stories about hard times and unemployment and the risk of national bankruptcy. At the university, everyone was talking nervously about what would happen if the government stopped paying salaries and grants. Soon, there might be no such thing as free education. Or free medical assistance. Or pensions.

Everything is falling apart, he thought. We’ve struck an iceberg, and now we’re sinking.

Couldn’t this all have waited just a year or two? He was so close. Soon he would have his bachelor’s degree. If things went to hell then, he might still be able to land a job with a law firm. Perhaps come back for his master’s later or get it through one of the private schools. With a salary, he would be able to move. At least out of the Eighth District, to a place where the buildings weren’t falling apart and people didn’t mistake him for a filthy Gypsy all the time. “Just because you have dark hair,” as Lujza had put it.

He trudged up the stairs, making sure to stay close to the wall where the steps were most solid.

A teenage Roma boy was standing there, leaning against Sándor’s door—long, black hair and a macho attitude, skinny hips and tight jeans, dusty boots and an I-dare-you grin that was wide enough to reveal that he was missing one of his canines.

“Hey, czigány,” the stranger said, and it was only when the boy actually grabbed his shoulders and slapped his back several times that Sándor realized it was his brother.

ON THE DAY of the white vans, Sándor had been eight years old. There had been four vans. One was an ambulance, the second a kind of minivan, and the last two were police cars. But all of them were white.

The vans followed the switchbacks in the road, zigzagging their way down the hillside to the bottom of the valley where the village was. Reddish-yellow dust swirled up around them.

“Look,” Tibor said, scratching his nose with his index finger. “Someone’s coming.”

Sándor gave his fishing line a little tug, but it was depressingly clear that there was nothing on the other end besides the hook he had fashioned out of bent wire.

“What do you think they want?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” Tibor said. “Want to find out?”

Sándor nodded. It wasn’t often that strange cars came to Galbeno. He and Tibor left their fishing poles behind, hopped over the creek, and sprinted down the path that led back to the village.

“We can always come back later,” Tibor said. “Maybe the fish will bite when we’re not looking.”

They weren’t the only ones who were curious. People were craning their necks from the shelter of their porches, and the crowd of men in front of Baba’s house stood up slowly and haphazardly and set down their guitars. Attila, who had been harnessing his gaunt, brown horse to the firewood cart, passed the reins to his oldest son and disappeared into the house. Shortly after, he was back with a couple of empty sacks, which he tossed onto the cart, and gave the horse a slap on the flank that sent it off at a bumpy, reluctant trot down the wheel ruts toward the woods.

The vans bumped their way across the dusty square in front of the school and the local council office and continued a short distance down the village street before they stopped.

“That’s your house,” Tibor said. “What are they doing there? Your stepfather isn’t back, is he?”

“No,” Sándor whispered. For the first time he felt a ripple in his stomach that wasn’t curiosity or anticipation. His stepfather, Elvis, was in the district jail in Szeged and wouldn’t be home for at least another six months. That couldn’t be why the police cars were here. Unless he had escaped?

“Maybe we ought to stay put?” Tibor suggested.

Sándor shook his head. “It’s only me now,” he said. “When my stepdad is away, there’s only me to look after Mama and the girls.”

“And your little brother.”

“Yeah, him, too.” Sándor’s feelings for his one-year-old baby brother weren’t exclusively tender. It had been less obvious with the girls, but his stepfather had been unable to able to hide his excitement at finally having a “real” son. At his baptism they had let the stubby-fingered baby touch one instrument after the other, carefully watching for signs of excitement and familiarity, and when Grandpa Viktor had finally proclaimed that “the boy would be a great violinist like his father,” his stepfather had been bursting with pride.

No one had made that kind of fuss over Sándor.

But now his stepfather was gone, and four white vans were parked outside the house. Sándor could see Grandma Éva telling off two of the men who had got out of the cars. She had positioned herself in the doorway and was trying to fill it completely even though she wasn’t quite five feet tall, and the two men towered over her like giants.

Then more men climbed out of the cars, and Sándor couldn’t see his grandmother anymore. They rolled a gurney out of the back of the ambulance and into the house. Sándor accelerated, sprinting the last few yards down the street. By now there were so many people, the men from the cars and villagers too, that he had to push and squeeze his way through.

His mother was lying on the gurney. The gurney was being rolled back to the ambulance.

For a second, Sándor stood stock still, his heart hammering against his ribs. “Mama,” he said.

Even though he didn’t say it very loudly, she heard him. In spite of the noise and the angry voices, in spite of the engine noise from the vans, whose motors hadn’t been turned off even though they were parked.

“Sándorka,” she said. “My treasure. Come here.”

He ducked under the arm of a man in a gray EMT uniform and made it all the way over to the ambulance and the scratched aluminum gurney. He thought his mother looked the way she usually did. Yes, she had been sick, but why was it suddenly so bad that she had to go to the hospital?

When his other grandmother, Grandma Vanda, whom his oldest sister had been named after … when she had gone to the hospital, she hadn’t come back. She died.

Sándor couldn’t say a word. He couldn’t even make himself ask. He just walked over to her so she could grab hold of his hand.

“Watch out,” the ambulance attendant said. “We’re lifting the gurney now. Don’t get your fingers pinched.”

His mother had to let go of him again.

“It won’t be for very long,” she said. “Then I’ll be home again. You’ll take care of the girls and Tamás until I get back, right? Along with Grandma Éva.”

Then the doors closed, and the ambulance started driving away. The other cars stayed. And it quickly became apparent that the gadje hadn’t come only for his mother.

IT WAS SO wrong to see Tamás standing here, outside Sándor’s room, in the middle of a life that had nothing to do with him. Grown up, or almost—he still had a gangly teenager’s body, and there was a softness to his features that didn’t seem as tough-guy as the rest of him. Couldn’t he at least get his hair cut? Did he have to look so … so Gypsy? If anyone saw him, they would assume he was here to steal something.

“Come in,” Sándor said reluctantly. It was preferable to him hanging around in the hallway.

Tamás turned a slow circle in the middle of the room, checking it out. The proportions were a little odd because a dividing wall had been put up in what had originally been one large, well-lit room. Now Sándor and his neighbor each had half a window and a greater familiarity with each other’s bodily noises than they would have liked, since the dividing wall was pretty much just painted plywood. But apart from that.…

“This is nice,” Tamás said. “You’ve got a lot of books, though.”

“That’s because I’m a student.”

“Right. And which class did you get these for?” Tamás grinned broadly, pointing to a shelf full of well-worn paperbacks. He pulled one of them down, and Sándor instinctively reached out a hand to stop him.

“Morgan Kane,” Tamás read. “The Devil’s Marshal.”

“Don’t damage it,” Sándor said. “They’re really hard to come by these days.”

He couldn’t explain his fascination with the lonely, hard-hitting US Marshal. He was well aware that Westerns were not exactly what Lujza would call “literature,” and he pretended he only ever read them to improve his English. But the books consumed him, and he had followed the entire course of Kane’s life, from vulnerable, orphaned sixteen-year-old to aging, disillusioned killer. Or almost the entire course—there were eighty-three books in the series, and he only had eighty-one of them. He was missing The Gallows Express and Harder than Steel.

“Where’s your computer? You have one, don’t you?” Tamás asked, tossing The Devil’s Marshal onto the bed. Sándor picked it up and returned it to its place on the shelf.

“Why do you ask?”

“Come on now, phrala. Are you my brother, or what?”

Phrala. He had heard people call each other that on the street in the Eighth District, their voices gently mocking, evoking a sense of community that he wasn’t a part of. Hey, brother. Hey, Gypsy. No one called out to him, though. They could tell he didn’t belong.

Take care of the girls and Tamás. But he had only been eight years old. What did she expect?

“What do you want?”

“There’s just something I want to find out. Online, I mean. You have Internet access, right?”

“Yeah,” Sándor admitted, reluctantly.

SÁNDOR HAD TO log him onto the university network with his own username and password, but otherwise Tamás needed no help. He clearly didn’t want Sándor looking over his shoulder.

“What are you searching for?”

Tamás glanced at him briefly. “None of your business.”

“Um, hello? That’s my computer you’re using, right?”

“Okay, okay. It’s a girl. Happy?”

There was a fidgety energy in Tamás’s compact body, excitement or anticipation of some kind. It worried Sándor and made him a little envious. He had never been young the way Tamás was young right now—there had always been so many rules for him to follow, so many unforeseeable consequences if he stepped out of line.

“You can’t sit here and surf porn, just so you know.”

“I’m not! It’s not like that. I’m just going to chat with her a little.”

“Is she Roma?” Sándor blurted out. Knee-jerk reaction, as if that were the most important thing. It would certainly be the first question his mother or grandmother would ask, he thought.

“No, she’s a gadji.”

“What does Mom have to say about that?”

Tamás straightened up and turned around. “Well, it’s really more what Grandma would say. If they knew, but they don’t.”

Tamás’s hands flew over the keyboard. But Sándor noticed that one of them was flying more slowly than the other.

“What happened to your hand?”

Tamás turned it over and studied it for a second, almost as if he hadn’t realized anything was wrong with it until now. The skin was peeling off in big flakes, like a freshly boiled new potato, and the surface underneath the old, dead layer of skin was strangely reddish brown.

“I burned myself,” Tamás said.

“On what?”

Tamás flipped his hand back over. “A motor,” he said. “Now get lost. I can handle this myself. Don’t you have to study or something?”

Sándor did, but it was impossible to concentrate with Tamás in the room. He was a foreign body, and a fidgety one at that. He rolled around on Sándor’s old office chair and drummed his fingers on the worn desktop, humming or whistling softly but constantly. Twice he pulled a mobile phone out of his pocket and spoke into it in a low voice, but it didn’t sound like he was talking to his new conquest.

“You have a mobile phone,” Sándor said, half as a question. Maybe that meant money wasn’t quite as tight as the last time he had been home.

Tamás simply said, “Yes.”

“Does Mama have one, too?”

“No.”

It was quiet for a bit. Then Tamás said, vaguely apologetically, “Here. I’ll write the number down for you. Give me yours, then she can call you, too.”

Sándor gave Tamás his number, even though the idea that his mother could now call him at any time made him feel strangely uneasy. Going back to Galbeno for a few days a year when he thought he could cope with it was one thing. Being … available like this, whenever his Roma family felt like it … that was entirely different.

Added to that, there was the other increasingly urgent problem.

He needed to pee.

His computer was hands-down the most expensive thing Sándor owned. Scrimping to buy the Toshiba had been a struggle, even though it was secondhand and far from state-of-the-art. There was no bathroom on Sándor’s floor. He had to go down two flights of stairs and partway down the hallway. But he didn’t trust Tamás enough to leave him here, even though right now he seemed completely focused on typing and had just hissed a soft, triumphant “Yes!” which might mean his chat romance was paying off.

In the end Sándor didn’t really have a choice. He set down his Roman law compendium and got up off the bed.

“Don’t touch my stuff,” he said. “And if you wreck my computer, I’ll rip your nuts off.”

That was the kind of thing he could never say to other people. To all his Hungarian friends and acquaintances who had no idea that he was half Roma. But Tamás just grinned.

“That would take bigger hands than yours, phrala.”

SÁNDOR HURRIED. BUT of course the lavatory was occupied, and it wasn’t until he had knocked on the door twice that one of his downstairs neighbors came out.

“Yeah, yeah! Give a guy a chance to pull up his trousers.”

“Sorry.”

He locked the door, pulled down his fly and relieved his sorely tested bladder. Someone had tried to improve the smell in the room with a pale-green air freshener hanging off one side of the toilet bowl, but as far as Sándor could tell, it just added an odd chemical sweetness to the considerable stench of sewage and urine.

He was too anxious to take the time to wash his hands properly, just quickly stuck them under the tap and dried them on his trousers instead of the damp, red towel hanging next to the sink.

When he got back, Tamás was gone. Luckily the computer was still there, unharmed, still on and logged in. He pulled the window open and looked down at the street. His brother’s slender yet compact form was heading toward Prater Street.

“Hey!” Sándor yelled.

Tamás turned and danced a couple of steps backward.

“Thanks for letting me use your computer!” he yelled back at Sándor. “See you, czigány.”

Then he turned the corner, and Sándor couldn’t see him anymore.

SÁNDOR TURNED OFF the computer. Now that Tamás was gone, he suddenly wished he had asked more questions about how things were going and what kind of girl Tamás was so terribly in love with that he would travel for five hours on three different buses just for a chance to chat online with her. Surely there was a computer somewhere closer? Didn’t they have Internet cafés in Miskolc?

Maybe the girl lived in Budapest. Maybe that’s why Tamás was suddenly in such a hurry to leave.

Or maybe there was another reason. Sándor suddenly noticed that one of his desk drawers was ajar. It hit him like a punch to the stomach, because even though he had been afraid that Tamás would make a mess or knock something over or pour soda on his computer, at no point had he been afraid that his little brother would take something that was his. You didn’t steal from your own people.

And his wallet was still there. It was his passport that was gone.