Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

He visited one of the many café-bars along Ráday utca, which had been renovated to better accommodate the increase in prosperous customers, then ordered an aperitif of Unicum, that mysterious herbal liqueur Hungarians pretend has medicinal qualities. In the rear of the bar were three computers with Internet access.

Very quickly, he tracked down a biography of Henry Gray posted on a blog with the dubious name “Random Looks Inside the Inside” that focused on news items backing up its conspiratorial worldview. Additional information came from a more professional source-the American Society of Journalists and Authors-and a personal essay from 2005 penned by Gray himself. He even found a Budapest address for him, on Vadász utca.

Gray was a Virginia native who in his teens began traveling on student exchanges-Germany, Yugoslavia-and had quickly been bitten by the travel bug. By the time he was twenty-five, he had turned to freelance journalism and packed a suitcase. Thinking, no doubt, of Hemingway and Henry Miller, he flew to Paris, where he failed to find any regular work. This was in the early nineties, when the Balkans were exploding, so he packed again and headed for Belgrade, but the climate for Western journalists wasn’t favorable. After the Serb secret police, the UDBA, kicked in his door and held him for an hour in the local militia station, Gray fled north to the relative tranquility of Budapest, where he could report on the entire region from a safe distance.

His reputation was built largely upon one piece, reprinted in many major newspapers, on the airbase in Taszár, Hungary, unimaginatively named Camp Freedom. There, the U.S. military trained three thousand Free Iraqi Forces, which they hoped would make their upcoming invasion look like natives returning to reclaim their birthright, rather than Western imperialism. Like the name of the camp, it was a failed exercise in optimism.

Many of the other clippings he came across, besides mundane pieces on trade deals in Central Europe and the Balkans, were less impressive: “The 9/11 Conspiracy-What the Commission Doesn’t Want You to Know” and “One World Government-Does It Represent You?”

Yes, there were mainstream articles attributed to Gray, but they drowned in the mass of his conspiracy pieces littering the Net. He took on bottled water companies, which had, assisted by the American government, convinced the world that they should be paying for what nature considered a free resource. He speculated on the Bilderberg Group, an annual secretive meeting of influential business-people and politicians that, according to him and some similarly minded people, were working steadily toward the implementation of a world government. Gray had no doubt that the CIA was behind 9/11, a proposition that Milo, despite his ambivalence about his soon-to-be-ex-employer, found unbelievable. Not because someone at Langley couldn’t have dreamed it up-some were paid solely for their ability to dream up the unthinkable-but it was unimaginable that the Company could have pulled off such an enormous ruse without getting caught; its track record wasn’t encouraging.

In the end, the picture he gained of Henry Gray was of a paranoid, rootless investigator into conspiracies, who hoped that they might someday explain away the dissatisfaction of his own life. People like that were a dime a dozen. Which raised the question: Why did someone using Milo’s name want to find him?

Even with such opinions, Gray would have friends in Budapest, because expat circles, particularly journalistic ones, are tiny. Milo gathered a list of British, Canadian, and American stringers based in Budapest, with addresses and phone numbers.

Though Schwartz had said Gray had been in a coma, Milo found very little to back this up beyond a brief mention in a sidebar of the August 8 edition of the Budapest Sun: “Local journalist Henry L. Gray is in serious condition in Péterfy Sándor Hospital after a fall.”

Of Gray’s girlfriend, Zsuzsanna Papp, there was little. He found some of her Hungarian-language articles for the tabloid Blikk. These, as far as he could tell, covered the tensions between the nationalist Fidesz party and the socialist MSZP party, which now held shaky power.

Then he ran across Pestiside.hu, a satirical English-language news outlet on all things Hungarian, which spent as much time ridiculing the Hungarian character as it did the expats that filled its capital. February 28, 2008, yesterday: “Journo-Stripper Ends Humiliating Sideline; Quits Journalism.”

Fans of Zsuzsa Papp’s biting Blikk commentaries on political targets such as right-wing nut job Viktor Orbán and fey communist liar Ferenc Gyurcsány will soon have to discover their political opinions unaided. According to Blikk management, Papp has left the paper in order to pursue her first love, undressing in front of drunk English hooligans at the 4Play Club. Who ever said there was no such thing as journalistic integrity in Hungary? Not us.

In the morning, he took a bus to Oktogon Square, where he mixed with Saturday pedestrians around the gray Central European intersection. They leaned against the wind, smoking or hurrying to the next warm café. Milo faced the winds along the boulevard that marked a Pest-side circular route cut in half by the Danube, then turned right onto Szondi utca. Szondi was less kept up than the boulevard, and years of soot lodged in its crevices, but the buildings had an undeniable charm.

Number 10, one block in, was hidden by scaffolding swathed in black plastic netting to avoid tools falling on pedestrians’ heads. It wasn’t the only building undergoing renovation, and when he looked he saw these occasional black masks all the way down the street. He checked the buzzers and pressed the one with parkhall stamped on it. After a moment, a weary “Igen?” sounded over the speaker.

“Mr. Terry Parkhall?”

“Yeah?”

“Sorry to bother you. My name’s Sebastian Hall, and I’m looking into the disappearance of an associate of yours. Henry Gray. You think you could spare a minute?”

“You press?”

“No.”

There was a moment of static. “Then what are you?”

“A private investigator. Gray’s aunt, Sybil Erikson, hired me.”

“I didn’t know he had an aunt.”

“A lot of us have them, Mr. Parkhall.”

The heavy front door buzzed, so Milo pushed it open as Parkhall said, “Third floor. Take your time; I’m not dressed yet.”

The stairwell was a mess of dust and chunks of concrete and loose steel pipes left behind by construction workers out for the weekend. He mounted the stairs and tested the railing, but it wouldn’t hold a child if it came to it, so he continued up with his hands clasped behind his back.

He’d settled on the cover story during his walk here. Originally he’d thought that introducing himself as a new freelance journalist would do the trick, but on reflection realized that this would take too long-inevitably the way to greet a newcomer is to take him out and get him roaring drunk, not to answer questions about a missing colleague. Nor would honesty work-this man might have met the previous Milo Weaver, and wouldn’t believe that he had been fooled before. So a private investigator came to mind, and an aunt that would take days for Parkhall to realize didn’t exist.

There were two doors on the third floor, both with barred steel gates on the outside, but only one of these was open, so he stepped up to it and rapped on the wooden door. “Mr. Parkhall?”

From behind him, a male voice. “Wrong way.”

He turned to see a tall, thin man in a robe and pajama pants standing behind the bars opposite, rubbing his disheveled hair. He went to Parkhall as the door he’d knocked on was unlocked and an old woman peered out. “Mi van?”