The Exiled (21 page)

‘
I REMEMBER THAT DAY WELL
,’ Nagy Béla sighed. ‘Far too well. I heard the news the next morning. Somebody telephoned to say Fekete István was dead. Who was it? It was Mihály. That’s right, Remete Mihály. Do you know him?’

Anna nodded.

‘My wife and I drove straight over to your house. We were worried about your mother. And about you children, too, of course. My wife packed some food, as she imagined your mother would be in no fit state to cook for you. You women are like that – you think of these things.’

Anna gave a cheerless smile. ‘What happened to my father?’

‘How much do you know about it already?’

‘All I know is that he was shot while working on an investigation, that the killer was caught, tried, found guilty, and eventually executed. Nobody wanted to tell me any details back then because I was so young. As I grew up I didn’t want to ask.’

‘But now you want to know,’ Béla muttered to himself. ‘It’s perfectly understandable, of course. At some point we all want to know our family history.’

Anna sipped the
pálinka
that the fisherman had poured for them both. It burned her throat so much that Anna had to stop herself wincing.

‘Your father was investigating a case involving the mafia. He’d found out something important about what they were up to. The people he was dealing with were involved in international drug and weapons trafficking. They’d amassed a substantial sum of money from the sale of drugs, and the money was due to be smuggled out of the country and into the West. He’d gone off by himself that evening. That’s the bit I never understood. Your father was a risk taker, but he wasn’t stupid. Why did he go out to that old farm by himself? He must have assumed there wouldn’t be anyone there.
But criminals like that never leave anything unguarded. The place was full of weapons, assault rifles, pistols – you name it. There was enough to equip a small army.’

‘What about the money?’

‘I don’t think they ever found the money. But I’m not sure about that. You’ll have to ask Gábor. He probably knows all about it.’

‘I would have asked him, but he didn’t answer my call.’

‘He was planning on going shopping in Szeged today. I spoke to him on the phone last night about the tailback at the border crossing. You can spend hours queuing, apparently.’

‘Dad would never have gone anywhere by himself,’ said Anna quietly.

‘That’s the strange thing. Anyway, the mafia had a guy on guard, a local gypsy, and he shot your father.’

‘How did the police catch up with him?’

‘They arrested him at his home the very next day. The murder weapon was found in his garden, exactly where he’d hidden it.’

‘If he was a professional criminal, that was a pretty amateurish mistake,’ said Anna.

‘I don’t know anything about that. But it’s a good job they caught the bastard.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Some man living over in Velebit.’

‘I heard a rumour that he might not have been the man that killed my father.’

The fisherman looked at Anna long and hard with his bright-blue eyes, then lit a cigarette and offered one to Anna.

‘You shouldn’t believe everything you hear round here,’ he said and poured them both another glass of
pálinka
.

‘Still, I want to find out whether there’s any truth in it.’

‘I can’t imagine there is. And after all these years it’s pointless trying to find out.’

‘The statute of limitations doesn’t apply to murder. The case will never grow old,’ said Anna defiantly.

‘No, but you will. You need to let things go and live your life – and I hope it’s a longer one than your father had.’

Anna took a sip of
pálinka
and drew on her cigarette before asking her next question.

‘Do you know anything about the smuggling of refugees along the river?’

Nagy Béla scowled at Anna, clearly displeased at the change of subject.

‘No. Why would I?’

‘You told me yourself you’re on the river every day and that you notice everything that goes on there.’

‘No one’s being “smuggled” or “trafficked”. People just use the river to cross the border. It’s much easier than by road, as long as they don’t end up in Ásotthalom.’

‘Why is that?’

‘The mayor there is crazy, a real neo-Nazi. He doesn’t like refugees. Not that many people round here like them either.’

‘It seems the man who stole my handbag was somehow involved in smuggling refugees along the river,’ said Anna.

The fisherman was silent for a moment and lowered his blue eyes. He seems agitated, thought Anna. He’s lying or hiding something.

‘Maybe,’ he said eventually. ‘But I don’t know anything about stuff like that. And now I have to be getting out to the river. If you’d like some more
pálinka
, ask my wife to come and join you.’

‘No, thank you,’ Anna replied.

Together they walked out to the gate. The elderly fisherman looked worried, almost angry, but still he hugged Anna as they said goodbye. As he did so, Anna noticed a grey hair on his shoulder, and something flashed into her mind.

‘I should never have shown you where the body was found,’ said Béla as he opened the latch on the gate. ‘And I regret showing you that photograph, too. You shouldn’t dig into this case anymore.’

Anna couldn’t decide whether this was a warning or a threat.

ANNA WALKED ALONG
the sunny side of Fő utca. She wanted to soak up every last ray of sunshine before returning to the unpredictable summer weather in northern Finland.

She had to travel to Belgrade to get a new passport before it was too late, but the thought of making the long trip by herself felt dismal. Should I ask Réka to join me? she wondered. Her entire holiday was ruined. I haven’t been able to spend quality time with anyone – not Réka, my mother or Ákos. Then there was Péter. Anna reluctantly admitted to herself that she was particularly keen to spend more time with Péter. On the spur of the moment she texted him.
Any chance of joining me for a little road trip the day after tomorrow?
The response came immediately.
I’ll switch my day off with Milo. He owes me a favour. Where are we going?

Anna smiled. Something warm and pleasant bubbled inside her. She told Péter what it was about and he replied straightaway:
Sounds great!

Putting her phone away, Anna noticed a familiar figure standing at the edge of the road, loading up his car. The man was filling his car boot with bottles of water wrapped in plastic; they were piled up on the pavement next to black bin liners filled with clothes.

‘Hi,’ Anna shouted. ‘Are you taking that lot to the camp right now?’

Molnár László stretched his back and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He didn’t look pleased to see her.

‘I could join you if you like,’ said Anna as she approached.

‘I’m sorry, I’d love to take you with me, but I don’t think there’s room in the car.’

Anna peered inside the old Renault and saw that the passenger seat was empty. The back seat was filled with bulging plastic bags.

‘Why don’t you want me to come along? It seems like you don’t want my help.’

‘Well, it’s great that you want to help but…’

‘But what?’

‘It’s nothing. Come on. We can stuff those bags of clothes in at your feet and hopefully you’ll have enough room. I just thought it might be too cramped in the car and you wouldn’t be comfortable. The air conditioning doesn’t work properly either, I’m afraid.’

‘Great. Thank you,’ said Anna. ‘The cramped car and the heat don’t bother me.’

At first glance, the abandoned brick factory on the outskirts of Szabadka didn’t look like a refugee camp at all. It was just a large, bleak, barren warehouse surrounded by grass scorched in the heat. From a distance the place looked deserted, but as Anna and the priest drove closer, the more clearly they saw the human presence. Litter was strewn across the forecourt. Here and there people were sitting hunched against the decaying walls. Anna guessed there would be far more people inside the building, sheltering from the sunshine during the day and the thunderstorms at night.

‘There are more refugees in the woods over there,’ László said, pointing to the tangle of trees and bushes behind the brick factory. ‘They’re the lucky ones: they’ve got tents.’

When the priest parked the car in the factory forecourt, people began streaming out of the building’s doorless openings. Some greeted the priest like an old friend, some kept their distance and stood further off. Two small children ran on to the forecourt, soon followed by an exhausted-looking woman in tattered clothes, a scarf tied tightly round her head.

With a sense of routine the priest began handing out bottles of water. A quiet queue of thirsty people began forming in front of the car.

‘Start sorting out the clothes,’ the priest said to Anna. ‘Put men’s, women’s and children’s clothes in their own piles over there by the wall. Then people can fetch what they need.’

Anna got to work. She lifted the bags out of the car and began emptying them. The children came up to her and watched as she worked. Anna fetched them water bottles. She saw a flicker of a smile on the face of a woman standing in a nearby doorway.

Shorts, T-shirts, skirts, trousers, shoes. Anna looked at the feet of the men standing in the water queue. Many of them had no shoes at all; their feet were swollen and covered in sores. They should get a doctor out here, she thought.

In one of the bags she found a pretty, dark-blue skirt embroidered with golden thread. Anna showed it to the woman standing in the doorway, watching her children. The woman took a cautious step towards her, then backed off again.

‘Come,’ said Anna. ‘This might fit you.’

One of the older children said something to their mother in what sounded like Arabic. The woman smiled and ventured closer to Anna. She warily picked up the skirt and stood looking in turn at the skirt and then at Anna.

‘
Beautiful
,’ said Anna in English.

‘
Yes
,’ the woman replied. ‘
Thank you
.’

Then the woman said something to her children and they all disappeared back inside the warehouse.

‘I’d like to take a look inside,’ Anna shouted to the priest, but then noticed that he had disappeared. The water bottles had all been taken from the boot of the car and the queue of people had dispersed too.

Anna looked around, but the priest was nowhere to be seen. She left the piles of clothes and stepped inside the warehouse.

Inside the hangar-like warehouse the air was cool and almost bearable. Steel girders jutted up from the concrete floor as though the building had been left unfinished. Perhaps the place had been empty for so long that it had begun to return to its constituent parts, to disintegrate layer by layer.

People lay on the floor among piles of junk and rubbish. Anna felt the sceptical gaze of their dark eyes on her body. The woman to whom Anna had given the skirt was watching from a corner. She
pointed towards a ladder leading to a hatch into the upper floor of the building.

Anna climbed up the ladder. Peering through the hatch, she saw the priest talking to three young men. The men all had what looked like brand new smartphones, which they were tapping and swiping as the priest whispered something to them. Numbers. One of the men repeated what the priest had told him. And, as he did so Anna quickly took out her own phone, and typed the numbers into the memory. Then she quietly climbed down the ladder and went back outside to the piles of clothes. They had all disappeared. Two young men were standing in their place.

‘
Where are you from?
’ she asked the boys in English. They looked barely out of school.

‘
Iraq
,’ said one of them. His chin was covered in a thin, downy beard. One of his front teeth was missing. He was wearing a baseball cap bearing the logo of a multinational company.

‘
Have you seen this man?
’

Anna showed them a photograph of Lakatos Sándor, but the boys shook their dark heads and explained in broken English that they’d only arrived yesterday. The boy with the cap pointed to a man sitting by the wall.

‘
He might know. He’s been here longer.
’

Anna approached the man and showed him the photograph. The man nodded and said something in Arabic. Anna asked the boys to interpret for her and discovered that Lakatos Sándor, who people at the camp knew only as Fox, had promised to arrange transport into Hungary for the man and a few of his relatives. He’d taken the man’s money and disappeared. The car he’d promised never turned up. Now the man was out of money. Now he planned on walking into Hungary but said he was tired. He showed Anna his swollen calf. You should rest a while, she told him. Anna tried to give the man all the cash she had, just short of four thousand dinars, but he pushed her hand away.

‘
No
,
no
,’ he said, ashamed.

‘
Please, it isn’t much
,’ Anna implored, because it truly wasn’t a huge sum of money.

Eventually the man wiped his eyes, swallowed his tears and agreed to take the money.

The priest appeared, shook hands with the men standing around Anna and said he would pray for them.

‘Are you ready? We should get going,’ he said to Anna.

‘What were you doing upstairs a moment ago?’ Anna asked as they got into the car.

‘I was talking to a couple of new arrivals and wished them God’s blessing. What about you? What were you talking to those boys about?’

‘I was asking them about my handbag thief. Apparently he’d been here, organising transportation for the refugees and looking for new customers.’

‘Really? I can’t say it surprises me,’ said the priest as he steered the car out of the forecourt. ‘Lots of people are making a quick buck at the expense of these refugees.’

‘His name was Lakatos. Have you ever come across that name before?’

‘It’s a common gypsy surname. I can’t think of anyone in particular, though.’

‘No one at all?’

László looked at Anna for so long that Anna was worried they might end up in a ditch.

For the rest of the journey home he didn’t say another word. Why do I get the impression that all my father’s grey-haired old friends seem to know something? Or that they sense something, at least? Why won’t they open up? Is it because I’m not asking the right questions? Or am I just imagining this?

The grass verge was dotted with blood-red poppy flowers. They made Anna think of Dzsenifer and her skirt. Uneasy thoughts and worries about the girl’s well-being weighed Anna down. She felt as though there was something she had missed. Something simple yet
crucially important, something that would unravel this mess in an instant.

As they drove back towards the town, they saw groups of refugees trudging along the road. There were more than there had been a week ago, far more. Anna winced as she thought of the cows that wandered the fields around Velebit. At least they had shelter every night.