Invisible Murder

ÁNDOR HAD HIS half of the window wide open, but it didn’t seem to do much good. There was hardly any draft, just lots of construction dust and street noise. He had taken off his shirt and trousers and was sitting on his bed in just his underwear, studying. Sweat trickled down his chest from his armpits, and the paper stuck damply to his fingers every time he turned a page.

He had left his door ajar to admit at least a trickle of cross ventilation; to Ferenc, that was obviously an invitation.

“When’s your big exam?” Ferenc asked.

“Thursday.” Sándor was hit by a surge of nerves at the mere thought. But he had it under control, he told himself. He knew his stuff. He just needed to take another look at—

His thoughts were interrupted when Ferenc suddenly grabbed hold of him. “Good. We of the Sándor Liberation Committee have officially nominated you the best-prepared student in the history of this university. And we’ve also decided that it’s high time we intervene to prevent your body’s ability to metabolize alcohol from atrophying completely. Put some clothes on, pal.”

Sándor found himself standing in the middle of his room, still wearing only his underwear and desperately clutching Blackstone’s International Law.

“Knock it off, Ferenc. I can’t—”

“I’m afraid the Committee’s decision cannot be appealed. Please don’t force us to resort to violence.”

Ferenc wasn’t alone. Out in the hallway stood Henk, a Dutch exchange student who was studying music like Ferenc, and Mihály, who was in Sándor’s class. And also Lujza.

Ferenc threw Sándor’s trousers in his face.

“Here. Hop to it, or you’re going as you are.”

Sándor’s whole body was stiff with passive resistance. It’s just for fun, he told himself, relax. But he couldn’t force the appropriate you-guys-are-crazy grin onto his face, and his lack of response gradually caused the others’ broad smiles to fade.

“Come on, Sándor,” Ferenc said.

He finally “hopped to it,” as Ferenc put it. He could move again. He set Blackstone on his desk and then balanced awkwardly on one foot while he tried to stuff his other foot into his chinos.

“You guys are crazy,” Sándor grumbled, and their smiles returned.

Ferenc patted him on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit,” he said in the fake British accent he was cultivating because it went so well with his Hugh Grant style. Lujza smiled at Sándor, candidly and warmly like in the old days before the baptism.

I can always get up extra early tomorrow, Sándor promised himself. After all, he was better prepped than anyone else he knew.

WHEN THEY GOT downstairs, there was a police car parked across the street from them. Two officers were just getting out.

Sándor was trying to close the defective front door without much luck. The others stopped to wait for him.

“Just leave it,” Ferenc said. “In five minutes someone else will come out, and then it’ll be wide open again.”

Sándor gave up. When he turned around, the two police officers were a few meters away. The older one, a muscular man whose light-blue uniform shirt had big sweat stains under his arms, checked a printout he had in his hand.

“Does a Sándor Horváth live here?” he asked.

Sándor froze. The other four also suddenly went still, their laughter faded, their faces stiffened.

“What seems to be the problem, officer?” Ferenc asked politely.

“That’s him,” the other officer said, pointing at Sándor.

“Turn around,” the first one said sharply. “Hands up against the wall. Now!”

When Sándor didn’t move, remaining rigid and mute, they grabbed his arm, spun him around, pushed him up against the wall, and kicked at his ankles until he was leaning against the sun-baked bricks at an angle. If he moved his hands, he would fall over. They frisked him quickly and matter-of-factly.

“What are you doing?” Lujza yelled at them. “Let him go! What is it you think he did?”

“None of your business, little lady,” the one with the sweat stains replied.

“You can’t just.…” Lujza yelled. “Stop!”

Sándor couldn’t see her. He couldn’t see anything except a couple of square meters of crumbling sidewalk and the drop of sweat that was trickling down his nose.

“Sándor,” Mihály said suddenly. “You ask them. If you ask, they have to answer. The detainee must be informed of the charges and all that.”

But Sándor couldn’t say a thing. His tongue was just a lump of flesh, his jaw was so tight he might as well have had lockjaw. The officers cuffed his wrists with plastic cable ties and bundled him across the street and into their squad car. He didn’t put up any resistance.

“Sándor!” Of course it was Lujza who was yelling. “We’ll file a complaint. Don’t let them do this to you. There must be someone we can complain to.…”

“Call 1-475-7100,” the older of the two officers said placidly. “It’s toll-free.”

ONCE WHEN HIS stepfather Elvis went to record a CD with a band called Chavale, Sándor had been allowed to tag along. That was back when they were playing enough gigs to actually earn a little money, and his stepfather still believed firmly in his Big Break, as he called it. It was also before Tamás was born, so his stepfather would sometimes take him places without referring to him as “Valeria’s kid from before we got married.” Sándor could still remember the feeling of sitting quiet as a mouse on a chair that could spin around, but squeaked when you did it, so you couldn’t. He could remember the men’s concentration and laughter, the smell of their cigarettes, the multitude of buttons on the mixing board, and the pane of glass between the studio and the recording equipment.

The memory popped into his head now because the room they put him in reminded him of that studio. The gray, insulated walls, the pane of glass facing the hallway, and then of course the fact that they were recording everything he said.

“Where were you born, Sándor?” said the man who had introduced himself only as Gábor.

“Galbeno. It’s a village near Miskolc.”

“And your parents?”

Did he mean who were they or where were they born? Sándor’s brain felt as thick as porridge.

“My father was born in Miskolc.”

“Name?”

“Gusztáv Horváth. He’s dead now.” Gusztáv Horváth had keeled over in front of twenty-seven dumbstruck physics students at the Béla Uitz School on a warm day in September almost three years ago.

“And your mother?”

There was that stiffness in his jaws again, as if all his chewing muscles were in spasms. He was having a hard time opening his mouth, and every last bit of spit had evaporated. He didn’t dare lie. This was the NBH. Nemzetbiztonsági Hivatal, Hungary’s National Security Service. These days, they might have a fancy home page and a press secretary and even several ombudsmen who were supposed to keep tabs on things and ensure openness and protect the legal rights of the individual, but they were still the NBH.

“Ágnes Horváth.”

The man whose name might be Gábor sat quietly, calmly, and expectantly, and the silence somehow forced Sándor to add the correction. “Or … well, she’s my stepmother.”

Gábor didn’t reveal in any way whether he was satisfied or dissatisfied with the response. He was still waiting. A man in his late forties with light, amber-colored eyes and graying, short-cropped dark hair. Shirt and tie. Strong, rounded shoulders, neck slightly too thick. His broad, calm face was almost gentle, and it wasn’t physical violence that Sándor feared. This was not a man who would push people’s heads into water-logged plastic bags.

“My biological mother’s name is Valeria Rézmüves.” The words tumbled out of his mouth one by one, oddly disjointed. It sound like one of those computerized phone voices, he thought. You have. Selected. Zero four. Zero eight. Nineteen. Eight five.

“Gypsy?”

“Yes.”

Rézmüves was a typical Roma name, so it didn’t take any secret archives or supernatural abilities to guess that. Still, Sándor felt exposed. Poorer by one secret.

There’s no reason for people to know about that, Ágnes always said. You’re mine now. That other thing—we don’t talk about that. Do you understand?

He wasn’t even nine yet, but he had already learned that silence was the only reasonably safe response, so he didn’t say anything. And she had just nodded, as if that was precisely what she wanted from him. A child who could keep his mouth shut.

Gábor stood up.

“Excuse me a moment,” he said politely. “We’ll continue in a little while.”

And then he left.

Sándor sat there on the gray, plastic chair with his elbows resting on the table. It was warm in the room, but not as hot as in his overheated room in the Eighth District. The temperature in here was not governed by such variables as sunlight and outside air. It was warm because a dial had been set to make it so.

Sándor felt strangely weightless. An astronaut with a severed lifeline, floating above the Earth. He could see it, could see life down there, knew there were people laughing, talking, working, making love, taking baths, arguing, living normal lives. He knew they were there, but he couldn’t reach them. Just a few hours before he had believed he could be like them, but now he knew that would never happen.

He still hadn’t asked them why he was here. Hadn’t said a word that wasn’t in response to their questions. He knew that wasn’t normal. That if it had been Lujza sitting here, or Ferenc, or Mihály, they would have protested, kicked up a fuss, demanded lawyers and explanations. He also knew that if he wanted to seem like a normal person, he should do the same.

But he couldn’t.

WELL OVER HALF an hour passed before Gábor came back. He had a piece of paper with him that he placed on the table in front of Sándor.

“Does this mean anything to you?” he asked.

It was a list of URLs. Some were Hungarian, others were various dot-com sites: unitednuclear.com, fegyver.net, attila.forum.hu, hospitalequip.org. He didn’t recognize any of them.

“No,” he said.

“That’s strange,” Gábor said. “Because we can tell from your computer that you’ve visited all of them and spent rather a long time at each.”

It took one long, freezing cold instant. Then the realization hit him like a bomb blast. Tamás. Tamás must have done it, that night when he was pretending there was a girl he was desperate to contact. Sándor looked down at the list again. United Nuclear? Fegyver.net? That must be some kind of gun site. Attila Forum sounded like one of those right-wing extremist pages Lujza would get so worked up over. But hospitalequip.org? What on earth was the connection there? And why had Tamás come all the way from Galbeno to Budapest to mess around with stuff like that?

“I … I don’t really remember,” Sándor said desperately. “I’ve been studying for exams lately. I use the web when I’m studying.” It sounded pathetic and evasive, even to his own ears.

“I see. And which class are you trying to contact Hizb ut-Tahrir for?”

“What?”

“You also spent a fair amount of time on hizbuttahrir.org.”

“Oh … that.…” It stopped him in his tracks.

He knew that Hizb ut-Tahrir was an Islamic organization. But a connection between them and Tamás? They were hardly in the same galaxy, ideologically speaking. He wasn’t even sure Tamás had an ideology, aside from a certain penchant for life’s pleasures. Hedonism. Isn’t that what it was called?

Gábor leaned in as if he were confiding something, in a way that also made Sándor’s torso instinctively tip forward a couple of degrees.

“Sándor, listen up. I’m not one of those idiots who believe that the Jews and the Gypsies have teamed up to destroy Hungary. And yet I have to wonder a little when a bright, young law student with a Gypsy mother starts researching right-wing nationalist and Islamist websites at the same time. That seems a little odd. And when that same bright young man suddenly becomes extremely interested in weapons and other potentially destructive items … well, a couple of alarm bells start going off, you know? But I’m sure we just don’t understand. There must be an obvious, natural explanation. So, would you please be so kind as to set my mind at ease?”

Alarm bells going off? Sándor struggled to understand what kind of threat this NBH man was obviously envisioning. Jews, Gypsies, right-wing extremists, and Islamists? Only slowly did it dawn on Sándor that what Gábor really wanted to know was if Sándor was planning some kind of attack on Jobbik or Magyar Gárda, possibly as part of a Zionist conspiracy that might also hit an Islamic target. An armed defense or maybe even an armed attack.

He might as well have asked Sándor to explain his relationship with the little green men on Mars.

“It’s research,” Sándor flailed helplessly. “For a term paper.”

And so it continued. Occasionally interrupted by lavatory breaks, polite offers of sandwiches and coffee, and a so-called “rest” when he lay on a thin mattress on a concrete floor in a basement room and stared up into the ventilation duct that was humming and flapping above him. No one hit him or humiliated him; in this respect, perhaps he was lucky that this was the NBH and not some random police station in Budapest’s suburbs. But the intervals were brief, and then the questions started again.

When it became clear that they were planning on holding him overnight, he tried to tell them about his exam.

“We can legally hold you for up to seventy-two hours” was all Gábor said.

“How? Only under special circumstances. If the detainee is apprehended in the act of committing an offense.…”

“… or if the detainee’s identity cannot be determined with certainty,” Gábor said. “I used to be a law student, too, way back when.”

“Identity? But there’s no question about my identity!”

“Isn’t there? The only record of your birth we can find is as Sándor Rézmüves. As far as I can tell, you’ve been living under a false name for more than fifteen years, and the passport you were issued under the name of Horváth … you don’t even know where it is.”

“It … was stolen.”

“If your passport is stolen or lost, you’re supposed to report that to the authorities. You appear not to have done that. Believe me, it could easily take us seventy-two hours to establish who you really are.”

If you find out, please tell me.

That thought bubbled up from his subconscious along with a crystal clear memory that for some reason always came back to him in black and white. The headmaster’s office at the orphanage. White stripes of light between the blinds. The dusty, dark-brown scent of books and stacks of papers, mixed with the strongly perfumed cleaner they used to wash the linoleum floors.

“Your father has come for you, Sándor.”

But the man standing there in the stripy light wasn’t Sándor’s stepfather, Elvis. It was a man he had never seen before.

Sándor didn’t say anything. You couldn’t contradict the headmaster, he had learned that very quickly. But there must have been some mistake.

“Hi, Sándor,” the man said, holding out his hand for an oddly adult handshake. “You’re coming home with me now.”

Then Sándor finally understood who the man was. His Hungarian father, his gadjo father, the man whose fault it was that he wasn’t his stepfather Elvis’s son, but just Valeria’s-kid-from-before-we-got-married. And he also understood the rest—this man could take him, and he wouldn’t need to stay at the orphanage anymore.

“If you would just sign here, Mr. Horváth,” the headmaster said.

“What about Tamás and the girls?” Sándor blurted out. “Aren’t they coming?”

Mr. Horváth squatted down in front of Sándor, so that Sándor actually had to look down a little to look him in the eye.

“No, Sándor,” he said in the tone that Grandma Éva used whenever she had to explain that something or other wasn’t possible because his mother was sick. “They’re not my children, but you are.”

And so Sándor had gone with the man, out of the office, down the dark, wide staircase, and out into the parking lot in front of the main building where a little blue car was parked. He crawled into the back seat when he was asked to and let Mr. Horváth buckle his seatbelt with a click. Then Mr. Horváth got into the front seat, started the car, and smiled at him in the rearview mirror.

“We’ll get to know each other after a little while,” he said.

Sándor didn’t say anything. He just sat there quietly as the car rolled down the drive and turned onto the paved road, leaving Tamás, Feliszia, and Vanda behind in the cold, gray buildings on the other side of the fence.

THE NBH INTERROGATED Sándor for three to four hours at a stretch, three to four times a day, for a little over forty-eight hours. He didn’t tell them about Tamás. How could he?