Government Organs of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919) II. “M.”
Records of the Hungarian Working People’s Party (MDP) and the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP) VII. “N.”
Archivum Regnicolaris (1222–1988) I. “O.”
Judicial Archives (13th century–1869) I. “P.” Archives of Families, Corporations and Institutions (1527–20th century).
And the list went on.
Jessie pushed through the next door, where a large room was filled with catalogs, tables, and, along the walls, perhaps a dozen counters. At each counter was an archival clerk, whose job was to deal with requests from members of the public and certified researchers alike. Over one counter was a sign in English, indicating that it was an information desk for English-speaking visitors. There was a short line in front of the desk, and she watched a bored, coarse-featured clerk deal with his supplicants. As best she could tell, the “information” he dispensed consisted largely of explanations of why the information sought could not be provided.
“You’re telling me that your great-grandfather was born in Székesfehérvár in 1870,” he was saying to a middle-aged Englishwoman in a checked woolen jacket. “How nice for him. Unfortunately, at that time, Székesfehérvár had more than a hundred and fifty parishes. This is not enough information to find the record.”
The Englishwoman moved on with a heavy sigh.
A short, round American man had his hopes dashed almost as summarily.
“Born in Tata in the 1880s or ’90s,” the clerk repeated, with a reptilian smile. “You would like us to look through every register from 1880 to 1889?” Sardonicism turned to umbrage. “That is simply impossible. That is not a reasonable thing to expect. Do you understand how many kilometers of material we house? We cannot do research without something far more specific to guide us.”
When Jessie reached the counter, she simply handed him a sheet of paper on which she had neatly written precise names, locations, dates. “You’re not going to tell me you’re going to have a hard time finding these records, are you?” Jessie gave him a dazzling smile.
“The necessary information is here,” the clerk admitted, studying the paper. “Let me just make a call to verify.”
He disappeared into an inventory annex that extended behind his counter, and returned a few minutes later.
“So sorry,” he said. “Not available.”
“How do you mean, not available?” Jessie protested.
“Regrettably, there are certain … lacunae in the collections. There were serious losses toward the end of the Second World War—fire damage. And then to protect it, some of the collection was stored in the crypt of St. Steven’s Cathedral. This was meant to be a safe place, and many files remained there for decades. Unfortunately, the crypt was very damp, and much of what had been there was destroyed by fungus. Fire and water—opposites, yet both formidable enemies.” The clerk threw up his hands, pantomiming regret. “These records of Count Ferenczi-Novak’s—they belonged to a section that was destroyed.”
Jessie was persistent. “Isn’t there some way you could double-check?” She wrote a cell phone number on the paper and underlined it. “If anything turns up, anywhere, I would be just so grateful … .” Another dazzling smile. “So grateful.”
The clerk bowed his head, his frosty manner beginning to melt; evidently he was unaccustomed to being on the receiving end of a young woman’s charms. “Certainly. But I am not hopeful, and neither should you be.”
Three hours later, the clerk called the number. His pessimism, he confessed to Jessie, had perhaps been premature. He explained that he had sensed that this was a matter of particular importance to her, and thus made a special effort to ascertain that the records had indeed been lost. Given the vastness of the National Archives, after all, a certain amount of misfiling was inevitable.
Jessie listened to the long-winded clerk with mounting excitement. “You mean to say you’ve turned them up? We can get access to them?”
“Well, not exactly,” the clerk said. “A curious thing. For some reason, the records were removed to a special section. The locked section. I’m afraid access to these files is strictly regulated. It would simply be impossible for a member of the public to be allowed to see this material. All sorts of high-level ministerial certifications and documents of exception would be required.”
“But that’s plain silly,” Jessie said.
“I understand. Your interests are genealogical—it seems absurd that such records are treated like state secrets. I myself believe it to be another instance of misfiling—or miscategorization, anyway.”
“Because it would just break me up, having come all this way,” Jessie began. “You know, I can’t tell you how grateful I’d be if you could see a way to help.” She pronounced the word grateful with infinite promise.
“I think I am too softhearted,” the clerk said with a sigh. “Everyone says so. It is my great weakness.”
“I could just tell,” Jessie said in a sugary tone.
“An American woman alone in this strange city—it must all be very bewildering.”
“If only there was somebody who could show me the sights. A real native. A real Magyar man.”
“For me, helping others isn’t just a job.” His voice had a warm glow. “It’s—well, it’s who I am.”
“I knew it as soon as I met you … .”
“Call me Istvan,” said the clerk. “Now, let’s see. What would be simplest? You have a car, yes?”
“Sure do.”
“Parked where?”
“At the garage across the street from the Archives building,” Jessie lied. The five-story garage complex was a massive structure of poured concrete, its ugliness compounded by the contrast with the splendors of the Archives building.
“Which level?”
“Fourth.”
“Say I meet you there in an hour. I’ll have copies of these records in my briefcase. If you like, we might even go for a drive afterward. Budapest is a very special city. You’ll see how special.”
“You’re special,” said Jessie.
With a reluctant mechanical noise, the elevator door opened on a floor two-thirds filled with cars. One of the cars was the yellow Fiat she had parked there half an hour ago. It was shortly before the appointed time, and nobody else was around.
Or was there somebody?
Where had she parked the car, anyway? She’d come up a different elevator this time, on the opposite end of the lot. As she looked around, she noticed in her peripheral vision a darting motion—someone’s head ducking down, she realized a split second later. It was a hallmark of bad surveillance: being noticed by trying too hard not to be. Or was she jumping to conclusions? Perhaps it was an ordinary thief, someone trying to steal a hubcap, a radio; such thefts were prevalent in Budapest.
But these alternate possibilities were irrelevant. To underestimate the risks was to increase them. She had to get out of there, quickly. How? The odds were too great that someone was watching the elevators. She needed to drive out—in a different car from the one she had taken in.
She casually walked between an aisle of cars, and suddenly dropped to the ground, cushioning her fall with her hands. She crawled, at tire level, arms and legs moving together. Flattening herself toward the ground, she made her way between two cars to the adjoining aisle and scurried rapidly toward where she had seen the ducking man.
She was behind him now, and as she approached, she could see his slender figure. He was not the clerk; presumably, he was whomever the clerk’s controller had arranged to send in his place. The man was standing upright now, looking around, confusion and anxiety written on his middle-aged face. His eyes moved wildly, from the exit ramps to the elevator doors. Now he was squinting, trying to see through the windshield of the yellow Fiat.
He had been tricked, knew it, and knew, too, that if he did not reclaim the advantage, he would have to face the consequences.
She sprang up a
nd flung herself at him from behind, throwing the man down on the concrete, vising his neck in a hammerlock. There was a crunch as his jaw hit the floor.
“Who else you got waiting for me?” she demanded.
“Just me,” the man replied. Jessie felt a chill.
He was an American.
She flipped him over and dug the muzzle of her pistol into his right eye. “Who’s out there?”
“Two guys on the street, right in front,” he said.
“Stop! Please! You’re blinding me!”
“Not yet I’m not,” she said. “When you’re blinded, you’ll know. Now tell me what they look like.” The man said nothing, and she pressed the muzzle in harder.
“One’s got short blond hair. Big guy. The other … brown hair, crew cut, square chin.”
She eased up on the pressure. An interception team outside. Jessie recognized the basics of the stakeout. The thin man would have a car of his own on this level: he was here to observe, and when Jessie drove to the exit ramp, he would be in his car, a discreet distance behind her.
“Why?” Jessie asked. “Why are you doing this?”
A defiant look. “Janson knows why—he knows what he did,” he spat. “We remember Mesa Grande.”
“Oh Christ. Something tells me we ain’t got time to get into this shit right now,” Jessie said. “Now here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to get into your car and drive me out of here.”
“What car?”
“No wheels? If you won’t be driving, you won’t be needing to see.” She pressed the pistol into his right eye socket again.
“The blue Renault,” he gasped. “Please stop!”
She got into the backseat of the sedan as he got into the driver’s seat. She slumped low, out of sight, but kept her Beretta Tomcat pointed at him; he knew that the slug would easily penetrate the seat, and followed her commands. They sped down the spiraling ramp until they approached the glass booth and the orange-painted wooden lever-gate blocking the way.
“Crash it!” she yelled. “Do just what I said!”
The car rammed through the insubstantial barrier and roared out onto the street. She heard the footsteps of racing men.
Through the rearview mirror, Jessie was able to make out one of them—crew cut, square-jawed, just as he’d described. He had been stationed at the other end of the street. As the car hurtled in the opposite direction, he spoke rapidly into some kind of communicator.
Suddenly the front windshield spiderwebbed, and the car started to careen out of control. Jessie peered between the two front seats and saw a large blondhaired man several yards off to the side in front of them, holding a long-barreled revolver. He had just squeezed off two shots.
The American at the steering wheel was dead; she could see blood oozing from an exit wound in the rear of his skull. They must have figured out that what had happened was not according to plan—that the thin man had been taken hostage—and resorted to drastic action.
Now the driverless car drifted through the busy intersection, cutting across lines, rolling into traffic. There was a deafening cacophony of blaring horns, squealing brakes.
A tractor-trailer, its powerful horn blasting like a ship’s, missed hitting the car by a few feet.
If she kept down, out of range, she risked a serious collision with onrushing traffic. If she tried to clamber to the front seat and take control of the vehicle, she would likely get shot in the attempt.
A few seconds later, the car, moving ever more slowly, rolled through the intersection, across the four lanes of traffic, and crashed gently into a parked car. Jessie was almost relieved when she felt herself slammed against the back of the bucket seats, for it meant that the car had come to a stop. Now she opened the door on the side nearer the street—and she ran, ran along the sidewalk, weaving in and out of groups of pedestrians.
It was fifteen minutes before she was absolutely convinced that they had lost her. At the same time, the requisites of survival had trumped the requisites of investigation. Yes, they had lost her, but the converse was also true, she realized with a pang: she had lost them.
They rejoined each other in the spartan accommodations of Griff Hotel, a converted workers’ hostel on the street Bartók Béla.
Jessie had with her a volume she’d picked up somewhere along her wanderings. It was apparently a sort of tribute to Peter Novak, and though the text was in Hungarian, there wasn’t much of it: it was basically a picture book.
Janson picked it up and shrugged. “Looks like it’s for die-hard fans,” he said. “A Peter Novak coffee-table book. So what’d you find out at the Archives?”
“A dead end,” she said.
He looked at her closely, saw her face mottled with apprehension. “Spill,” he said.
Haltingly, she told him what had happened. It had become obvious that the clerk was on the payroll of whoever was trying to stop them, that he’d sounded the alarm and then set her up.
He listened with growing dismay, bordering on fury. “You shouldn’t have done it alone,” Janson said, trying to maintain his equipoise. “A meeting like that—you had to have known the risks. You can’t go freelancing like that, Jessie. It’s damn reckless … .” He broke off, trying to control his breathing.
Jessie tugged on an ear. “Am I hearing an echo?”
Janson sighed. “Point taken.”
“So,” she said after a while, “what’s Mesa Grande?”
“Mesa Grande,” he repeated, and his mind became crowded with images that time had never faded.
Mesa Grande: the high-security military prison installation in the eastern foothills of California’s Inland Empire region. The white crags of the San Bernardino Mountains visible in the near horizon, dwarfing the small, low-slung beige-brick buildings. The dark blue outfit the prisoner had been made to wear, with the white cloth circle attached by Velcro to the center of his chest. The special chair, with a pan beneath it to catch blood, and head restraints that were attached loosely to the prisoner’s neck. The pile of sandbags behind, to absorb the volley and prevent ricochets. Demarest had faced a wall, twenty feet away—a wall with firing ports for each of the six members of the squad. Six men with rifles. The wall was what he had protested most about. Demarest had insisted on execution by firing squad, and his preference had been accommodated. Yet he also wanted to be able to see his executioners face-to-face: and this time he had been refused.
Now Janson took another deep breath. “Mesa Grande is where a bad man met a bad end.”
A bad end, and a defiant one. For on Demarest’s face there had indeed been defiance—no, more than that: a wrathful indignation—until the volley was loosed, and the white cloth circle turned bright red with his blood.
Janson had asked to witness the execution, for reasons that remained murky even to him, and the request had reluctantly been granted. To this day, Janson could not decide whether he had made the right decision. It no longer mattered: Mesa Grande, too, was part of who he was. Part of who he had become.
To him, it had represented a moment of requital. A moment of justice to repay injustice. To others, so it appeared, that moment meant something altogether different.
Mesa Grande.
Had the monster’s devoted followers gotten together, somehow decided to avenge his death all these years later? The idea seemed preposterous. That did not, alas, mean it could be dismissed. Demarest’s Devils: perhaps these veterans were among the mercenaries that Novak’s enemies had recruited. How better to counter one disciple of Demarest’s techniques than with another?
Madness!
He knew that Jessie wanted to hear more from him, but he could not bring himself to speak. All he said was “We need to make an early start tomorrow. Get some sleep.” And when she placed a hand on his arm, he pulled away.
Turning in, he felt roiled by shadowy ghosts he could never put to rest, however hard he tried.
In life, Demarest had taken too much of his past; in death, would he now
take his future?
Chapter Twenty-four
It was three decades ago, and it was now. It was in a jungle far away, and it was here.
Always, the sounds: the mortar fire more distant and muffled than ever before, for the trail had led them many miles away from the official combat zones. Immediate proximity made the sounds of mosquitoes and other small stinging insects louder than the immense blasts of the heavy artillery. Cheap ironies were as thick on the ground as punji sticks, the sharpened bamboo stakes that the VC placed in small, concealed holes, awaiting the unwary footfall.
Janson checked his compass once again, verified that the trail had been leading in the correct direction. The triple-canopy jungle left the ground in permanent twilight, even when the sun was shining. The six men in his team moved in three pairs, each spaced a good ways apart, the better to avoid the vulnerability of clustering in hostile territory. Only he traveled without a partner.
“Maguire,” he radioed, quietly.
He never heard the response. What he heard, instead, was automatic rifle fire, the overlapping staccato bursts of several Combloc carbines.
Then he heard the screaming of men—his men—and the barking commands of an enemy patrol party. He was reaching for his M16 when he felt a blow to the back of his head. And then he felt nothing at all.
He was at the bottom of a deep, black lake, drifting slowly along the silt like a carp, and he could stay there forever, swathed in the muddy blackness, cool and close to motionless, but something began to drag him toward the surface, away from his comforting and silent underwater world, and the light began to hurt his eyes, began to sear his skin, even, and he struggled to stay below, but the forces that drew him up were irresistible, buoyancy dragging him up like a grappling hook, and he opened his eyes only to see another pair of eyes upon him, eyes like bore holes. And he knew that his world of water had given way to a world of pain.
He tried to sit up, and failed—from weakness, he assumed. He tried again, and realized that he was tied, roped to a litter, rough canvas stretched between two poles. He was stripped of his trousers and tunic. His head swam and his focus wavered; he recognized the signs of a head injury, knew there was nothing he could do about it.