Invisible Murder

HEY RELEASED SÁNDOR four hours before his exam. He stood on Falk Miksa Street in the morning sun, outside the vast concrete beehive that was the headquarters of the NBH, and it felt like the sidewalk was swaying beneath his feet. He had been wearing the same clothes for almost three days, and he knew he reeked. People in suits and business attire rushed past him, skirting around the first meandering tourists with skill and irritation. The antique stores were just opening up. Traffic slid by, shrouded in a cloud of gas fumes.

He was an island in the middle of this stream of everyday activity and normality. No, not an island, an island was big and solid. He was just a foreign body, neither a Hungarian nor a tourist. A filthy Gypsy still stinking of the sweat of the interrogation room.

Pull yourself together, he told himself. But there wasn’t much conviction to his internal voice.

He took the streetcar home. It was faster than a cab, despite the distance he had to go on foot on his wobbly rubber legs, but that wasn’t why. He would have gladly sacrificed the extra minutes and also the money if he had believed he could sit in peace in the air-conditioned back seat and be treated like a human being. A paying customer, a member of society.

He didn’t run into anyone he knew on Szigony Street. Even the bathroom was empty, and he stood there under the warm, yellowish stream of water for almost half an hour. The foam formed fleeting, white coral shapes around his feet. He lathered himself up again and rinsed, lathered and rinsed, and finally the drain couldn’t handle any more. He had to turn the water off to avoid flooding the floor.

He shaved meticulously and splashed two handfuls of aftershave lotion onto his cheeks, chin, and neck. The alcohol stung as if the bottom half of his face were one big scrape, but that didn’t matter. Then the deodorant. He lingered in front of the mirror and suddenly thought the crop of thick, black hair in his armpits and on his chest looked offensively beastlike. He quickly slathered himself with shaving cream and attacked it with the razor, clearing pale swaths through the thicket of hair, first one way, then the other, until there was only a shadowy stubble left. He cut himself twice, small stinging nicks because he was being too fast and too vigorous, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t want to look like an animal, not even under his shirt.

Then he got dressed. The suit he had worn to the baptism, a bright white shirt, a tie, black socks and shoes—despite the heat. He slicked his hair back with the expensive gel he used only rarely and looked in the mirror one more time.

You don’t even look like a Gypsy, Lujza had said. But he didn’t look like an average Hungarian, either. He looked like what he was—a mixture. Right now, his suit most of all ressembled a costume.

He thought about Tamás and the defiant confidence he radiated, from the pointy tips of his boots to his long, black hair. I don’t even have that, he thought. Not even that.

There was a slip of paper on his desk. CALL, Lujza had written in big, desperate capitals. There were also more than twenty unanswered calls on his phone, but he wasn’t up to that right now. Did she know they had released him? Otherwise she was probably on her way to the prosecutor’s office with a loaded paint gun, or at least a letter of protest and a mass of signatures she had collected.

All that would have to wait, he decided. The most important thing now was passing his exam.

THERE WAS A pervasive smell of cheroots in the high-ceilinged office. Legal texts and books in tall mahogany bookcases, the heavy green velvet curtains, the moss-green carpet, everything was impregnated with cheroot nicotine. The professor was smoking with an arrogant disdain for the university’s no-smoking rules. The office was his and had been for twenty years; any claim that it was actually public property was meaningless.

In honor of the occasion, there were a couple of folding tables and chairs for the students who were preparing for their oral presentation. The flimsy steel and plastic constructions looked completely out of place in the midst of all the sturdy mahogany, and none of the three examination victims looked like they felt particularly welcome either.

“Sándor Horváth.”

Sándor gathered his notes and got up from his own plastic chair. There was no chair for the candidate being examined. He or she stood on the floor in front of the professor’s desk, armed solely with the handful of sweaty notes compiled during the preparation period. Mihály had once said that he imagined himself pleading a case in a courtroom when he took his exam. That made standing up feel different—it was a way of gaining authority and rhetorical power, instead of a constant reminder that you were worth less than the examining professor. Sándor tried to employ this pleasant concept, but without much success.

Professor Lorincz regarded him with hostile eyes, Sándor thought. They hadn’t had much to do with each other before. Sándor was one out of maybe 150 students who had attended a series of lectures, that was all. Lorincz was about fifty, a skinny man with long hands, long fingers, and slicked-back, medium-brown hair that was almost as Hugh Grant-like as Ferenc’s, albeit a version more advanced in graying. He had a habit of holding his slender Spanish cheroot between the little finger and the ring finger of his left hand, which was apparent from the discolored condition of his skin. He was good, but intellectually arrogant, and students who faced him ignorant and unprepared received no mercy.

But you are neither, Sándor reassured himself. What was it Ferenc had called him? The best-prepared student in the history of the law school?

“Say what you have to say.”

The order was short and sudden. No greeting, no pleasantries, not even a question. Sándor was thrown completely off balance. Say what he had to say? Of the two oral exams he had witnessed while he was preparing for his own, he had gotten the impression that Lorincz style was more of a cross examination.

A vaguely condescending grimace slid over the professor’s face, as if silence was what he had expected. He raised his fountain pen and made a note on the yellow pad that lay in front of him. Sándor had the sickening sense that this was hopeless, that nothing he could say or do would alter the professor’s verdict.

The man raised an eyebrow.

A tiny, defiant spark of rage ignited somewhere within Sándor. He had worked for this. And he knew he could do it. Or, at least some of the time he knew that, when he wasn’t allowing himself to be reduced into a speechless, nervous wreck just because a man behind a desk looked at him with disdain.

He took a nervous, gasping breath and ventured into an explanation of supranational legal theory. His account was concise, well-structured, and laid out in order of priority. He put treaty law over common law, debated peremptory norms with himself, put forward hypotheses and arguments, drew conclusions. He talked and talked, and the professor didn’t interrupt him even once. He spoke for so long that he lost his sense of time, but eventually he sensed a certain restlessness among his fellow students seated behind him. Was there anything else to add? Not without moving off-topic, he decided. He repeated a couple of his main points by way of a summary, and then fell silent. Relief had already begun to spread through his body, and he was not without admiration for the arrogant, old academic behind the desk. With his seeming indifference, he had forced Sándor to give an independent presentation at a very advanced level, instead of steering him around the circus ring with questions. Sándor’s performance had been better for it, he conceded. But dear God, it had been uncomfortable in the beginning.

The professor made another note on his yellow pad.

“Fail,” he said, without looking up.

Someone behind Sándor dropped a pencil. He could hear the crisp little smack as it hit the table, followed by a clicking roll.

“Excuse me?” Sándor said, thinking he must have misheard.

The professor ripped the yellow page off the pad, folded it carefully, made another note on a grading sheet that was waiting next to him, and placed both sheets into a manila envelope. He pushed the envelope across the mahogany desk toward Sándor.

“If you have any questions, please direct them to the guidance counselor,” he said, his eyes already moving on to the next student. “Dora Kocsis.”

The girl stood up. She was deathly pale, and her skin looked clammy. Sándor could see the disbelief he himself was feeling reflected in her face. Maybe she was wondering what you had to do to pass if Sándor had failed.

“Please leave the premises,” the professor told Sándor. “Don’t forget your envelope. It contains important information about your situation.”

Sándor took the manila envelope with numb fingers.

“I don’t understand.…” he began, but he could tell from the steeliness of the arrogant face that his initial impression had been right: It didn’t matter at all what he said or did today. The outcome had been determined in advance.

It wasn’t until he reached the door that he received something that resembled an explanation. “Horváth.”

Sándor turned halfway around.

“A law degree is a weapon. The law itself is a weapon.”

Sándor still didn’t understand, not until the professor added:

“What makes you think Hungary wants to arm someone like you?”

HE DIALED LUJZA’S number and then found he couldn’t force himself to speak.

“Sándor? Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God. Are you … did they release you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

He didn’t say anything. There was so much distance between him and those words, between her and him. Someone like you.

“Where are you?”

“Home.”

“I’m coming over. Don’t go anywhere.”

“No. I mean, no, don’t come.”

“Sándor! Why not?’

“Because … I’m not going to be here by the time you get here.” Now it was her turn to be silent. He sensed her confusion, her hurt feelings.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just have to go home for a while.”

“Now? Don’t you have your exam?”

“No.”

He hung up, because he couldn’t bear to explain. She called back again right away, but he turned off his phone.

He sat on the bed, in just his underwear again. He had hung his suit neatly on a coat hanger; even now habit took over. He unfolded the three sheets of paper that had been in the manila envelope again.

One was a copy of the official grading sheet, where after Evaluation it succinctly said Fail. The second was the sheet with the professor’s notes from the examination. It said only two things. In the name field, the professor had written Sándor Rézmüves, not Sándor Horváth. And underneath that there was just one sentence: Has nothing relevant to say.

The third sheet was an official letter from the university informing him that since he was no longer enrolled, they had to ask him to vacate his room at the Szigony Dormitory by May 15. The name Horváth was crossed out and replaced with Rézmüves. He wasn’t sure if the administration office had done that or the professor himself.

He stood up and went over to his desk. All of his books and notes were gone, and the police had also confiscated his computer, but Tamás’s mobile phone number was still sitting on the slip of paper he had tacked to his bulletin board. He turned his phone on again. He supposed he ought to be glad they had let him keep that.

Tamás answered after two rings.

“Yes?”

There was static and motor noise on the line, and Sándor had the impression Tamás was in a car or a bus. “What the hell are you up to?”

“Sándor? Relax, phrala, it’s just a bit of—”

“You little shit. I’m on my way to Galbeno. And when I find you, I’m going to wring your fucking neck.”

Tamás just laughed and hung up.

“I mean it,” Sándor said to the empty room, which was no longer his.