Budapest, Hungary
2315 4 February 2007
The silver, two-month-old, top-of-the-line Mercedes-Benz S550 drove regally across the Szabadság híd, and on the other side of the Danube River turned left toward the Hotel Gellért, which was at the foot of the Gellért Hill.
Budapest, which began as two villages, Buda and Pest, on opposite sides of the Danube River, had a long and bloody history. Gellért Hill, for example, got its name from Saint Gerard Gellert, an Italian bishop from Venice whom the pagans ceremoniously murdered there in 1046 A.D. for trying to bring the natives to Jesus.
Buda and Pest were both destroyed by the Mongols, who invaded the area in 1241. The villages were rebuilt, only to suffer rape and ethnic cleansing when the Ottoman Turks came, conquering Pest in 1526 and Buda fifteen years later.
By the time the Szabadság híd was built in 1894-96, the villages had been combined into Budapest, and Hungary had become part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Emperor Franz Josef personally inserted the last rivet—a silver rivet—into the new bridge and then with imperial immodesty named the structure after himself.
The bridge itself was dropped—like all the other bridges across the Danube—into the river when the Russians and the Germans fought over Hungary during the Second World War. It was the first bridge rebuilt after the war by the Soviet-controlled government and named the Liberty Bridge. When the Russians were finally evicted, it became the Freedom Bridge.
The silver Mercedes-Benz turned off the road running alongside the Danube and onto the access road to the Hotel Gellért, then stopped.
Gustav, a barrel-chested man in his fifties who appeared to be a chauffeur but served as a bodyguard and more, got quickly out from behind the wheel and opened the rear passenger door.
A tall man, who looked to be in his midsixties, got out. He adjusted a broad-brimmed jet-black hat—one side of the brim down, the other rakishly up—and then turned back to the car, bending over, leaning into the car. When he came out, he had two Bouvier des Flandres dogs.
The larger, a bitch, was several times the size of a very large boxer. The other was her son, a puppy, on a leash. The puppy was about the size of a small boxer.
As the man had taken them from the car, another burly man in his sixties had gotten out the other side of the car, carrying an ermine-collared black leather overcoat.
The burly man’s name was Sándor Tor. In his youth, Tor had done a hitch—rising to sergeant—in the French Foreign Legion. On his return to Budapest, he had become a policeman. He had been recruited into the ÁVH, the Államvédelmi Hatóság, Hungary’s hated secret police, and again had risen to sergeant.
When the Russians had been driven from Budapest, and known members of the Államvédelmi Hatóság were being spat on and hung, Mussolini-style, en masse from any convenient streetlight, Tor had found sanctuary in the American embassy.
And only then had the CIA revealed to the new leaders of Hungary the id
entity of the man who had not only saved the lives of so many anti-Communists and resistance leaders—by warning them, via the CIA, that the ÁVH was onto them—but also had been one of the rare—and certainly the most reliable—sources of information about the inner workings of the ÁVH, which he’d gained at great risk to his life from his trusted position within the secret police.
Thus, the best that Sándor Tor could have hoped for had he been exposed was a quick death from ÁVH torture rather than a slow one.
Tor was decorated by the Hungarian government and appointed as inspector of police.
But that, despite having triumphed over the forces of evil, didn’t turn out to be a movie scenario in which he lived happily ever after.
There were several facets of this. For one, his peers in the police, reasoning that if he had been keeping a record of the unsavory activities of the ÁVH, it was entirely likely that he would keep a record of theirs, both feared and shunned him.
And Tor didn’t like being a cop without an agenda. He had done what he had done not only because he hated the Communists generally, but specifically because his mother and father and two brothers had been slowly strangled to death in the basement of the ÁVH headquarters at Andrássy út 60.
Getting back at the Communists was one thing; spending long hours trying to arrest burglars—for that matter, even murderers—was something else.
And his wife, Margo, had cancer. They had had no children.
He applied for early retirement and it was quickly granted.
Sitting around the apartment with nothing to do but watch cancer work its cruelty on Margo was difficult.
Then Tor heard of the return to Budapest of the German firm Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H. The company’s intention was to reclaim the properties—farms, a brewery, several vineyards, a newspaper business, and other assets—seized from them by the Communists.
He also heard they were looking for someone to head their security.
After he filled out an application form at Gossinger G.m.b.H’s newly reopened downtown offices, he heard nothing for three weeks, and had decided that they weren’t interested in his services.
Then there was a telephone call saying that if he was still interested, a car would pick him up in an hour, and take him for an interview. He almost didn’t go; Margo had insisted and he went.
The car—a new, top-of-the-line Mercedes with Vienna plates—took him to the legendary Hotel Gellért, at Szent Gellért tér 1, overlooking the Danube River from the Gellért Hill.