Jeffery Deaver - Ice Cold

“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.