He’d gone back another wet, cold night. Crept up to the fourth floor, listened outside the door to Imre playing his grand piano while he summoned the courage to knock. Imre had let him in again, fed him again, played Bach inventions for him. He offered the divan, although this time he insisted that the boy take a bath and change into Imre’s own threadbare pajamas. The boy had left a seething nest of fleas and lice the last time he had slept there.
Imre had regretfully explained that he enjoyed the company, but did not have the funds to finance every visit. So Vajda found his own ways to budget time, and crept to his odd haven whenever he dared.
He had barely been able to read, but Imre would have none of that. He was a demanding teacher. History, philosophy, mathematics, languages, Val sucked it all up like a hungry sponge. Besides Hungarian, he already spoke the Romanian of his infancy, and the gutter Italian that he’d learned from Giulietta, his mother’s roommate. Imre taught him more. English, French, Russian. He even tried to teach the boy to play piano, but after some effort, he had to concede that Vajda had no musical talent at all.
As Val grew bigger and vicious enough to intimidate in his own right, when he’d been promoted from picking pockets and selling tail and smuggled cigarettes to heroin dealing, he returned the favor the only way he could—by making it known on the street that anyone who bothered Imre would be gutted like a fish.
Fucking idiot that he’d been. He should have kept his mouth shut.
“Good God, Vajda! Wake up!”
Imre’s indignant voice jerked Val out of his reverie. “Huh?”
He turned to see the old man scowling from the kitchen door, leaning heavily on his cane. “That kettle’s been wailing like a cat in heat for five minutes!” Imre shouted over the din. “Are you drugged? That would explain your chess game, at least!”
“Ah, cazzo.” Val jerked the shrieking kettle off the gas flame.
The familiar ritual of brewing and drinking tea restored a cautious equilibrium between them, but the long silences made Val uneasy.
Finally Imre set down his cup with a decisive click and threaded the tips of his swollen, arthritic fingers together. “Vajda.”
The heavy, preaching way that he pronounced the name made Val brace himself. “Don’t call me that,” he repeated grimly. “I told you.”
Imre waved his hand, impatient. “When I die, you must—”
“You’re not going to die,” Val cut in.
“Don’t be childish,” Imre said sternly. “Let me finish. When I die, do not expose yourself again to come here and bury me. Mourn my death in any way you like—from a distance. I will be safe and happy with Ilona and Tina. Swear it, Vajda.”
Val sprang to his feet, rattling the teacups on the cluttered table, inexplicably furious. “No,” he said. “I swear nothing, to anyone.”
Imre stared at him. His grim mouth was swollen and scabbed at the corner from the split, battered lip his attackers had given him.
Val stalked into the foyer, shrugged on his coat, seething. Imre did not come out of the kitchen to bid him good-bye. It was just as well. There was nothing more to be said, and if Val spoke at all, he would start shouting. He ran down four flights of steps and out into the frigid night air. Snow was falling thickly, just like the night he’d met Imre.
Images rushed unpleasantly back when he saw the black BMW idling on the curb, the driver an anomymous dark shadow. The lock popped as he approached. His stomach clenched. For a horrible half-second, he was eleven years old again, shivering on the curb.
No choice but to get in, and go wherever the car took him.
He hesitated. Detach. He was not that helpless boy anymore.
He spat into the gutter, yanked open the back door and got in. He was big, strong. He wore fine clothes, had an expensive haircut, good shoes, a cashmere coat, money in his pocket and far more in the bank. He’d forgone his guns tonight because they distressed Imre, but he had the knives. He had years of fight training. Eyes in the back of his head.
No, he was far from defenseless. Few people on earth were better equipped for that. And still, getting into that fucking car felt like climbing into a fucking crocodile’s mouth.
Fortunately, that phase of his life hadn’t lasted long. He got his growth fast, and became too big, too scary looking for Kustler’s stable. But they found other uses for him soon enough, on the heroin supply chain.
He hated dealing drugs, with his mother’s track marks and hollow eyes haunting him. He had found her body one day when he was eleven years old, sprawled on the bathroom floor. Choked by her own vomit.
That was the same day that fuckhead Kustler, his mother’s pimp, had come by, looked him over and decided that all was not lost. Vajda was unfortunately dark-complected, but pretty even so. Kustler had decided that the son would do nicely to take over his mother’s job.
He flinched from the memory of that day.
Yes, he hated drugs. But one did not say no to Daddy Novak, or to anyone who answered to him. Not if one liked staying alive.
Though “like” was perhaps the wrong word. He had clung to life out of spite. Staying alive was a fuck-you to the world. Anger kept him alive. Imre had been the only one to show him something beyond it.
It was ironic how the best way to protect Imre would be to not care about him at all. Whatever Val dared to care about was liable to end up dead on the bathroom floor. The more he cared, the higher the probability. He wished he could detach completely. Just float away.
The snow fell thickly now, flakes fluttering through the air, obscuring the cityscape until it was a blank, swirling no-man’s-land. Val stared out the car window, trying to orient himself with childhood landmarks. Each one he identified sparked bleak memories.
As he grew older, without really meaning to, he’d come to the attention of Gabor Novak, the big boss, having distinguished himself as a bright young man with unusual language skills and an aptitude for computers. Useful as Novak’s business expanded and went global. Soon he was exiled from Budapest and sent off to Novak’s country palace on the Danube, far from the distractions of the city, to work on encryption software, Internet marketing, front company documentation, etc. The work was endless. But at least it was not bloody.
On the surface anyway. There was always blood at some level.
Gabor Novak was formerly from Ukraina. He had married a Hungarian woman, taken her name and nationality, and proceeded to set up illicit businesses in cities all over eastern Europe: Budapest, Riga, Prague. Before he murdered her, or so the legend went.
Imre tried to persuade him to break free of Novak’s organization, but Val knew in his bones what Imre would not understand—how far men like Kustler would go to protect their territory. Imre would have had his balls cut off and his throat slit for interfering, if he was lucky. If not, there were things that lasted much longer. Val had seen them with his own eyes, unfortunately. He wished he had not.
No, there was no way out. Until he found PSS and Hegel. Or rather, they found him, eleven years ago, after the orders had come down from Daddy Novak to groom Vajda for arms deals. Vajda’s English was quite good, thanks to Imre. Useful for doing business in West Africa. Sierra Leone, to be exact. His first gunrunning assignment.
The car stopped outside a small café in Belváros. The driver sat without turning or speaking. Val got out of the car and went in.
He found Hegel in a corner, tucking away a large steak tartare, and a heaping plateful of spicy goulash and potato croquettes. He gave Val an unfriendly look as the younger man approached.
Hegel was not a handsome man. He was grizzled, thick and square. His coarse, pitted face was heavy-jowled and scowling.
“You’re