The Budapest Protocol by Adam LeBor

girl pulling a silly face at the camera as she held tightly onto the arm of the proud-looking young man sitting next to her.
    Like several of the people in the pictures, the happy couple looked vaguely familiar, and he supposed them to be distant relatives who had died in the war, for he had never met any of them. He pocketed several photographs and the bundles of letters. The bottom drawer of the desk was locked. There was no key in sight, so he went to look for a sturdy knife in the kitchen. He slipped the knife between the top of the drawer and the cupboard and levered it upwards. The knife bent, but the drawer refused to give way. This was craftsman’s work, handbuilt by artisans, of aged hardwood, solid brass and not about to surrender to some mass-produced socialist blade.
    The problem was, he realised, as he tried to force the desk open, that he was getting in deep here. Now it would be obvious to even the most dull-witted policeman that someone had tampered with the crime scene. Well, he thought, it’s too late to go back now. The drawer creaked, groaned in protest and eventually splintered. The lock had come loose in its setting, and with the remnants of the kitchen knife he managed to lever it out, and the drawer opened.
    Inside lay a pile of yellowing letters, carefully wrapped in a rubber band. Perhaps here then. The envelopes were old, with wartime stamps, and they crackled as he took off the rubber band. He opened one, and read an account of Ruth’s trip to see her aunt in the summer of 1943 in the southern town of Pecs, and how worried she was that all her male cousins had been drafted for forced labour in Transylvania, and hadn’t written home for three months. It was carefully written, in an educated cursive script, and filled with loving endearments. He scanned the rest of the envelopes, all written in the same hand, and put them in his bag before returning to the lounge.
    Books were scattered everywhere, works in German, French, Hungarian, Russian, even a couple of Sherlock Holmes novels in English. Alex sat down in the chrome and leather chair and scanned the titles, spread across the carpet. An intellectual’s books, and there were times in eastern Europe when that had been a dangerous thing to be. He started sorting through the books – perhaps Miklos had hidden something inside one of them, or why would they be strewn all over the floor –
Madame Bovary
,
Crime and Punishment
, a collection of verses by Hungarian poets, works by Camus and Sartre, a history of the Soviet Union, a biography of Janos Kadar, Hungary’s longest serving Communist leader, a copy of the Talmud. Alex picked up a leather-bound edition of the
Karma Sutra
, well read by the look of it, and the telephone rang. He sat up with a jerk and grabbed his mobile phone, but this was the flat telephone ringing.
    Alex looked at his watch. It was 1.10am. Who rang a dead man in the middle of the night? Perhaps it was Natasha. Maybe there was a problem with his mobile and someone was coming. The phone was an ancient contraption, black and curving with a loud, piercing bell that resounded through the flat. His heart began to beat faster. Desperate to stop the noise, he grabbed the Bakelite earpiece and said hallo. There was no reply, only silence.
    “Hallo, hallo. Who do you want to speak to?”
    He tried again, in both Hungarian and English. No reply came. Alex waited a few seconds and put the telephone down, feeling very rattled. He decided to leave in a few minutes, whether or not he found anything. You could push your luck so far, he knew. It had been a stupid mistake, he realised, to pick up the receiver. He had just confirmed that someone was in the flat.
    He flicked through a pile of newspaper clippings on Miklos’ desk. Some of the yellowed strips of paper dated back to the 1950s: Nazi judges appointed to the German supreme court; Nazi doctors appointed professors at universities; Major General Reinhard Gehlen, former chief of