Deceptions by Anna Porter (pride and prejudice read .txt) 📕

much paprika and pork fat. “My mother’s recipe,” she would say. “Good food is the direct route to a man’s heart. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Attila would nod sagely and try to make a quick getaway. Today was easier than usual because his phone was ringing and buzzing, and Gustav was aggressively pulling on his leash. “Csókolom,” he shouted over his shoulder and answered his phone. Csókolom was an old-world greeting that covered both hello and goodbye. It referenced the old custom of hand-kissing, something Attila had never done and was not likely to start now. His grandfather had been the last hand-kisser in the Fehér family.

“Where the fuck are you?” Tóth shouted by way of a greeting.

“Rakoczi Ut,” Attila said reasonably.

“Not in fucking Strasbourg, then,” Tóth shouted again.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You told me to be back today.”

“Did not!”

“You did!”

“You had better get your ass in here.” Tóth yelled before ending the call.

Attila took Gustav down to the street for a quick constitutional, encouraging him to lift a leg and leave a small deposit under the only tree left in front of the apartment building. The others had all been dug up in preparation for a sidewalk extension no one wanted or needed but, since it was paid for with EU funds, had provided an opportunity for state-sanctioned grand theft, irresistible to those with ties to the ruling party.

After Gustav’s pensive tree exploration and a small memento of his visit, they went back up to the apartment in the hopelessly rickety wrought-iron elevator cage, ate some chicken, and Gustav listened resentfully as Attila apologized for having to leave again. After just a few months of their new bachelor life, Gustav had acquired some of the ex’s tendencies. She, too, had worn her resentments on her face.

Twenty minutes later, Attila was at Árpád Bridge, approaching the Police Palace (so named after the government added a steel-and-glass tower to try to make the place more suitable for these proud-of-our-heritage times), showing his ID on demand to the uniformed woman who had known him for at least twenty years. It was as if he had changed his identity now that he was no longer a police officer. She then made a production of watching his wallet progress through the x-ray machine and examined his police-issue handgun as if she disapproved of his continued licence to carry it.

“Lovely to see you, too, Margit,” Attila said with a broad grin as he collected his stuff from the conveyor belt. “Always surprised that you have made it through one more gruelling day.”

“Hrummph.” Margit pointedly turned her attention to the long corridor where Tóth was already waiting. He had acquired a large belly (delightfully larger than Attila’s own) since his promotion but had not yet accepted the fact that his shirts needed to be replaced. Perhaps also his pants. Hard to know about the jacket since he wasn’t wearing one.

“Your phone was off,” Tóth began.

“Charging,” Attila said, though that didn’t quite explain why he had left his phone off after he arrived from Paris. He had needed some time to think, and it was hard to think with the phone demanding attention.

“You should be in Strasbourg, where you are supposed to be on assignment from this department, where you have an actual job, where you were sent to be useful . . .” Tóth’s voice rose as he accumulated all the reasons why Attila should not be in Budapest.

“Right,” Attila said patiently. “But you told me to be here for a briefing this afternoon.”

“Plans changed. Everything changed. Your orders changed. How the fuck was I supposed to tell you if your phone was off?” Tóth led the way to his office — the one that used to be Attila’s — and slapped his bum into what used to be Attila’s chair. “So, you don’t know what happened in Strasbourg?”

Attila sat on the lower chair facing his old desk — he had made that arrangement himself, as low chairs made most criminals feel self-conscious — and waited.

“I assume you haven’t had time to watch the news, but a man was killed on a tour boat. He was shot. Son of a bitch was sitting right next to a woman who jumped out of the boat and ran off.”

“She is the shooter?”

“No. She is not the shooter, but she does interest the local police and should interest us if our man was interested in anything other than his belly.” They were both staring at Attila’s belly, which, Attila noted again with satisfaction, even from this vantage point, was not as large as Tóth’s. “He was shot from a bridge above the boat. But she was next to him when it happened and instead of waiting for the police, she jumps out of the boat and hares off somewhere. The French police are all over the case, wanting to know who she is and why she left the scene, the guy bleeding to death right next to her.”

“Why does that have anything to do with us?” Attila composed his face into as curious yet unaffected an expression as he could manage.

“Because the dead man was the Vaszarys’ lawyer. That’s why they are calling me. Plus, as I said, they now want to know who she is.”

“We don’t know who she is,” Attila said. He breathed in and out slowly, trying to relax. It couldn’t be Helena. Could it?

“I may not know who she is, but I have a hunch — no more than a hunch, mind — that you had something to do with this.”

“I did? How?”

“Because you were our man in Strasbourg.”

“But I wasn’t even there!”

“Maybe not, but you might know this woman.”

“Why the fuck would you think that? There are thousands of women in Strasbourg I don’t know.”

“But this one is some kind of art expert. And your job with Vaszary includes watching over stuff he took with him when he left here — including that painting.”

“You told them . . . ?”

“That we know who she is? No. But as her