Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue From the Cold War

SPARKS TO THE BEAR’S HIDE BY ROBERT MANGEOT

In Budapest the streetcars were painted yellow. Sometimes I believed that was all the color left in Hungary. Margaret, my foster mother, said that the cars had been painted yellow before the communists took over and would be yellow after the communists fell. To her, the color was a spark.

We jerked and swayed along with the other people crowding the line out to Little Pest. At each stop the January wind cleared the air thick with body heat and drying wool.

“See?” Margaret said, a smile on her leathery face. “The men drool over my sweet Helena. Saint Jerome is with us.”

Margaret was Roma and a closet Catholic. For her the world was as piled up with signs as the snow against her farmhouse. After knowing her eighteen years, I found that she had a way of creating the signs she credited to her saints. On a streetcar full of workers heading back to their tenements, I was the only young Budapesti wearing an Italian overcoat and with my hair styled for evening. I was the only girl in a floral dress, one Margaret had me sew tight to catch Typhon’s eye.

We pushed our way off at Üllői Avenue and into a light rain. Around us drab lines of apartment blocks rose like grave markers over Pest.

Her contact’s building looked no different from any of the gray slabs scored with balconies. The elevator was out of service. Despite her years I struggled to keep up with Margaret on the ten-story climb. She had fought the fascists and later the Russians, but how the British found her, as with any of her clients, I never dared to ask.

A tidy man introduced as Braintree ushered us into the flat. Margaret had me remove my coat and turned me toward him standing beside the window. Braintree fidgeted like someone uncomfortable with planned housing, either this one or of tenements in general.

“So this is your student,” Braintree said. “She’s pretty enough. Bit older than requested though, isn’t she?”

Margaret lifted my skirt to the thigh and turned me into a profile. “Twenty-three. Not too old. Tall like requested. Brown hair. Typhon does not miss my sweet Helena. Face of a girl, body of a woman.”

“Quite.”

A week earlier I had managed to find a copy of Beggar’s Banquet, and wearing out Margaret’s turntable with the Rolling Stones somehow left me expecting my first live Englishman to resemble a wild-haired and languid Brian Jones. There was no “Street Fighting Man” in Braintree.

I was a street fighter’s daughter. Out the window was a view west, to where the river wrapped around Csepel Island. There the Allamvedelmi Osztaly murdered my father in the last hours of the Revolution and first of the reprisals.

“Still,” Braintree said, “we rather hoped for a professional.”

Margaret lit a pipe and watched him through the smoke. “Tell me when you discover how to get a working girl into a Party social. Helena is Communist Youth, monitored for membership. Smartest girl I have.”

“I relay messages for her,” I said, speaking up to impress. I had finished top of my English class despite the Party elite’s children spending their summers in Britain. “I gather information. True, I am not one of her Mata Haris. Margaret is happy with what I bring even so.”

“Admirable accent, dear girl,” Braintree said. “They’d have you at Selfridges. But as I understand you round up café blather from drunken underlings. Typhon is somewhat up the food chain. And acting on a different set of expectations.”

“She will get Typhon alone,” Margaret said. “Sweet Helena, so pure, but gypsy in her heart. She keeps her head always. She shows you now if you like.”

“You Magyars must have taught the Russians their tricks,” Braintree said. He turned toward me, something not quite benevolent about his grin. “Very well then. Not the first large rabbit Margaret has pulled out of a small hat. Understand, dear girl, that learning Typhon’s name means you leave Hungary tonight.”

I understood that and more. I understood Hungarians smuggled records in and the West smuggled defectors out. I understood that Hungary had few men so special as to lure Braintree from London, fewer still with a weakness for university girls. For Margaret to send me, there was but one. Zsigmond Irinyi, deputy head of Central Control and the AVO’s Butcher of Csepel, packed his bags for the West.

“When you have Irinyi alone,” Braintree was saying, “absolutely alone, deliver this message: ‘Cicilia.’ He will provide a confirmation word. Return here with it straight away. We close up shop at three tomorrow morning. Mustn’t be late for your flight west, not with the great bear and her cubs nipping at your heels.”

“Then you find me a warmer new home?”

Braintree nodded. “I believe we’ve still a few of those about.”

Margaret followed me down as far as the lobby. “Sweet Helena,” she said, grasping my hand. “Tonight I lose my Helena.”

I did not cry. Margaret punished any tears, saying Hungary did not need more silly girls. “You will leave first.”

“Second if you are careless,” Margaret said. “Braintree follows protocol, moves early before the Butcher is found out. Tonight they give us the Butcher on his wrong foot. Tonight, we must be the spark.”

I stepped off the streetcar at the Oktagon and crossed People’s Republic Street — what the people called Andrassy Avenue — for the Party social. Scattered in the shop windows were sun-blanched propaganda posters, American jeans, and French foods. I remembered the morning Russian tanks rolled down the boulevard. The West had been nowhere on Andrassy then.

At the club entrance a guard brushed me away. He made a show of flashing his holstered gun. “Workers’ Party only.”

I gave this toy soldier my KISZ card and invitation letter.

“Helena Szabo, Communist Youth,” the guard read aloud. He put on an oily grin. “You know why they invite the young girls, Helena Szabo?”

“I hoped to dance.”

“You can call it that. Come home with me, Helena Szabo. I’ll be your first dance, huh?”

I reminded him that those the Party invited to recruiting events ranked some levels higher than those tasked with standing in the cold and rain.

“I’ll think of you come the first dance,” I said as I passed inside.

I checked my coat in a grand art deco foyer. Neglected repairs had left the gilded designs scuffed and dingy. Such places were like embers to me, the faded reminders of what Hungary must have been in my father’s time.

Do not move first on Typhon, Margaret had said. That brands you an amateur. Be the liveliest brunette, and Typhon will find you.

Hungarian pop warbled over the sound system, György Korda and Kati Kovács. Soon though, Margaret had promised the curmudgeons would leave for their beds, and the younger bosses would permit uncensored records, the Beatles or Elvis Presley. I longed for anything by the Rolling Stones.

Typhon was ensconced at the bar and chatting over drinks with his retinue. The old man was as bald as a whale, his polished dome gleaming in the light. I angled through the smoky club and found a stretch of open bar to order mineral water.

A middle-aged apparatchik sidled up to me. He smelled of must and looked of unloved husband. “Cigarette?”

I shook my head. Typhon did not like his girls to smoke. I smiled and said to my lonely bureaucrat, “But I love to dance.”

For the next hour I danced with every man who asked and every man who cut in, a parade of faceless political officers with tobacco and vodka on their breaths. Some were bolder than others, but none too bold. When the folk music stopped and the newer records began, we changed to whatever fast dance went with the song. I twisted, I ponied, I did the loco-motion, I thrilled at the heat of it all, and when the men tired the other girls and I go-go danced for them.

It was after the go-go dancing that Typhon approached. He brought with him two coupes of sparkling wine.

“You must be thirsty,” he said over The Byrds. He reached out the wine as if completely certain of my accepting, kissed my offered hand, and said, “The Socialist Workers’ Party appreciates your contributions to dance.”

I saluted him with a sip. The wine tasted of green apples, but not so much to pucker my face. I puckered anyway, Helena the innocent.

Typhon chuckled. “Sovetskoye Shampanskoye. It is what happens when a central committee plans wine. But not so bad for cheap, eh little bird?”

Typhon will expect you to know of him, Margaret had said. And to be flattered by his attention.

“Champagne for everyone,” I said, and fanned my sweat. “Thank you, Comrade Deputy Secretary.”

“No anonymity in office. This is not good, I fear. Please, you must call me Zsigmond.”

Zsigmond Irinyi. Enforcer, traitor, murderer. Despised at home but to be welcomed in the West. “Comrade Zsigmond,” I said.

“And you are Helena Szabo, Youth Party. It concerns us at Central Control that we did not know all the beautiful Party candidates in Budapest. Helena, the beauty of Troy.” Typhon gulped down his champagne and chewed my name along with the wine. “Come, I introduce you to friends. Maybe you start a war.”

He will suspect a rival sent you, Margaret had said. Possibly the KGB. Convince him otherwise.

At our corner of the bar, Typhon was content to drink brandy and listen as his cohorts tested me with oblique questions. Yes, I knew this or that KISZ official. I proved it with personal details that an acquaintance would know. Yes, I heard the Óbuda school superintendent had been sacked. For being spotted at a Lutheran service, I added, feigning shock at clerical reactionists lurking near our children. Ideology tickled the graybeards. No, I did not see General Secretary Kádár speak at my university, because Kádár had spoken not to the students but later, to a private gathering of nomenklatura. One by one the lesser graybeards moved off, leaving Typhon and me a bubble of privacy.

Once Margaret had sworn on her taped-up saints that Satan would be irresistibly handsome. This devil looked fat and tired. In his late fifties, time weighed on Irinyi—think of him as Typhon, Margaret had said — and left him a sagging belly. Crow’s feet etched his temples.

I wanted a turn asking questions, and the ones I fought back were direct. How could anyone send so many to waste away in prison camps? How could he order the deaths of countrymen fighting to free Hungary? He bore the guilt for Csepel more than those he had pull the trigger. The killing was his idea.

Perhaps the devil’s trick was to appear as what we expected least. Perhaps that made me a devil, too.

“You are not drinking,” Typhon said.

“I am sorry, Comrade Secretary.”

Typhon pushed my wine toward me. “Zsigmond, little bird. Do not apologize. Drink! A Magyar does not trust a teetotaler.”

“I cannot drink like you and keep my head.”

“Sip, sip, sip. What good is drinking if we keep our heads? Clear heads are for morning.”

I grinned for my devil and drank the glass down.

“There you are,” Typhon said. “Magyar after all.”

On the record player was a slow song, Dusty Springfield. Typhon showed no inclination to dance, nor did he touch me other than careful brushes with his fingertips. Instead he shared with me secrets of the others around the club. He started with who was whose patron or who was going places in the Party, but after another brandy he began to point out those he derided.

“That man there,” Typhon said, nodding to a prim apparatchik on the dance floor, “should someday join the Central Committee, like his father. But he is homosexual.”

“He is?”

“Thinks we do not know. He should thank his father he is not disgraced. Or worse.”

Irinyi—Typhon, call him Typhon—struggled off his barstool. “They always think we do not know. Do not fly off, little bird. An old man must see to — well. Do yourself a favor. Stay young forever.”

When Typhon wants you alone, Margaret had said, Typhon will leave alone.

None of the men who had danced with me approached after Typhon left. Nothing happened for some time except that the crowd thinned and the records changed to older songs, Bobby Darin and Connie Francis. The new music had been exhausted.

Eventually a man in police officer uniform appeared with my coat over his arm. He had a callow face and crooked teeth, someone who fed off the fear he inspired. I extended my hand for him, but the callow man did not take it. Instead he tossed me the coat and turned on his heel. That I was to follow went unspoken, both the order and the threat.

They will search you, Margaret had said. Stand through it like a girl, tense and ashamed.

The callow man took me down a flight of stairs to a rear door. He stopped me and placed his hands on my ribs.

“Excuse me,” I said, though to me his body search and added grope of my breasts were mere pressure. “I am no criminal.”

“Comrade Irinyi is a cautious man.”

“More expert than you, I should hope.”

The callow man gave me a jaundiced glance. “Not so gentle.”

He led me into the back of a dark Mercedes and slid in beside me. A junior officer drove us through Pest, deserted at one in the morning. The radio was kept off and none of us spoke, the only sounds our breathing and the wiper blades squeaking against the drizzle. The streetcars had shut down for the night.

Soon the Mercedes whisked us over the Danube. Out my window the towers of Fisherman’s Bastion stood like impotent knights watching the river flow. Buda Castle slumbered atop its hill. Further out were the shards of my childhood: Csepel, where my father was found dead in an alleyway, and Budafok, where the AVO came and dragged my mother off to die in a camp.

We drove through quiet neighborhoods and up into the hills, past vineyards and wooded estates. Soon we pulled off at a private gatepost, and a guard stepped out to search the car. He grunted a laugh at me in my floral dress and nylons. I lowered my head, ever the embarrassed girl. He would choke on his laughter if he knew how many Roma eyes watched him from the forest.

A dirt track cut through evergreens and linden trees and ended at a patch of land cleared for a cottage house. No cars were parked in front, but lights burned from the ground floor windows.

The callow man took me inside, into a parlor furnished with volumes of bound books, silver trays, and crystal glassware. A large painting of a hunting scene hung over the mantel. A newly started fire had done little to warm the cottage.

“Upstairs,” he said.

“I have to pee.”

“Do it fast.”

He left the door open and watched me the entire time. That told me what I wanted to know: he was thorough. The callow man would leave no opening to palm a knife or sneak his gun. He would respond quickly to any hint of trouble. I finished in the bathroom, and he showed me to a cramped stairway off the kitchen. “Work hard to earn a patron, Comrade Szabo.”

I took the stairs slowly to keep up appearances. Really it gave me a chance to slow my breath. In the bedroom Irinyi was waiting in what light reached up from below. He poured two shots of brandy.

“Come in, little bird. Cheer an old man with a kiss.”

Somewhere Typhon will have a gun, Margaret had said. Be the first to use it.

I closed the door behind me and crossed through the soup of shadows. Then I gave the devil his kiss. When as hollow as he, there was nothing lost by it.

Irinyi laughed. “I was not sure you would do it.”

“Why not?”

“There are two types of pretty Helenas, I find. The merely pretty and the too pretty to be true. You were invited tonight after a late recommendation from an officer of suspect loyalty. You wanted my attention but did not use it. You did not tease like the schemers or coax me off like the professionals. Now it is just us two, no bugs, no tapes. We drink to plain speaking, then you state your purpose.”

I let the shot burn down into my belly.

Irinyi contemplated me over his brandy. My eyesight had accustomed enough to catch a frown crease his ample cheeks. “Who do you work for?”

“Hungary.”

“Central Control knows the Hungarian spies. Tell me or I give you to Gyuri downstairs.”

“A man named Braintree sent me. He has a message: ‘Cicilia.’ ”

Irinyi went still. “One word. One simple word you could have delivered at the club.”

“Braintree insisted we be alone. At the club someone might overhear. Or be recorded.”

“Probably true.” Irinyi braced himself on the dresser and stood. “Time is short. As is trust. You must come with me as far as Budapest, little bird. Braintree tells you where to fly?”

“The British lie the same as the Russians, but in nicer suits. They have made a habit of abandoning Hungarians. Please, make them take me with you.”

Irinyi waved away the suggestion. He opened a closet, turned on its bare bulb and hefted out a suitcase. Age had robbed the devil of strength, the brandy of his balance. I would kill him with a lamp cord, a broken bottle, with my bare hands if necessary.

“Trust can be demonstrated,” I said, and where I placed his hand on my body left no doubt of my meaning.

“I prefer never to risk what Roma girls plan during such demonstrations. Flying to the West is no simple matter, little bird. We fly as the British say, no variation.”

“They will not take me without a confirmation word.”

“ ‘Echidna,’ ” he said. “Tell them ‘Echidna’ and they see that my bird flies.”

Irinyi opened his bag and shuffled through travel documents and stacks of American money. Tucked in the suitcase lid was a pistol, its aluminum polish catching the closet light. Aluminum meant a PA-63, its loaded magazine holding seven shots.

“How will we get clear of your men?”

Uncertainty flickered in his eyes, and he began rummaging through his case faster.

“Hit me.” I grabbed my dress at the collar and tore it open to expose my brassiere. “Hard. For us both it must look like I fought you. Otherwise, why leave now, unsatisfied? Just please, get me back to Budapest alive.”

Irinyi nodded. He swung a flabby hand at me, weak but catching my lip with his ring. I screamed and tumbled bawling across the bed. My skin burned where he struck me. I tasted blood, felt it dribble down my chin.

Heavy feet pounded up the wooden stairs. Irinyi spun toward the sound, preoccupied readying his story for the guard. He did not see me reach for the gun.

The callow man burst through the door and turned on the overhead light. “Comrade Deputy?”

“Little bitch likes to bite,” Irinyi said. “Take me to—”

I rolled off the bed and fired twice at the callow man. Both bullets hit the center of his chest. Any noise he made before dying did not carry over the ringing in my ears.

“Fool!” Irinyi said. “You have damned us! If all the hills did not hear, the guards will—”

I turned the gun toward Irinyi. “More likely they are already dead.”

The rage drained out of him. My devil rubbed his face while he collected his silver tongue. “The West pays far better than terrorists. Come with me. The British want me badly enough to grant anything. I can see you are more than comfortable.”

There never was much in me to charm. “The British can rot as they let us rot.”

Irinyi gave a resigned grimace and stood up tall, seeking more dignity in death than ever he had granted. “They do not stop hunting those who cross them. Hope they find you before my friends do. The British kill faster.”

“Not so fast as a Hungarian.”

I put three bullets into Irinyi. The first was for Csepel, a shot to his bald forehead. The last two I put in his heart, one for each of my parents.

I shut off all lights except the front room. Next I unlocked the doors and raised a shade one-third off the windowsill. From the woods a flashlight blinked its reply.

A minute later Margaret slipped inside the house. She inspected the pistol and wiped it over her coat. “Show me.”

Upstairs I let Margaret pace the bedroom and prod both dead men. She spat on Irinyi’s corpse.

“The saints make us their sparks,” Margaret said. “My Helena, brightest spark of all. One hour yet to reach the safe house. Flash the light twice and head for where I signaled. Braintree will be hard on you. Be just as hard.”

“Margaret—”

“Do not go stupid on me now. What did I ask when you first came to stay with me?”

“If I wanted to fight.”

“Then fight,” Margaret said. “Play out your part. Swear you left the Butcher alive. Spare the others Braintree comes for if he is not convinced. See he gets you out before the bear is awake. Go, and someday Saint Jerome leads my Helena back home.”

I waited until out of the cottage before crying, my tears mixing with the soft rain. Margaret deserved more than to see that from me. I was halfway to the tree line when she pulled the trigger and returned her spark to Hungary.