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“Friendly neighborhood,” I said, motioning with my eyes toward our obvious tail.
Thomas joined me and shook his head, as if he’d hoped we wouldn’t have a minder wiping our asses the entire time we were in Hungary.
It was a false hope, and he knew it.
Manakin referred to our contact by his code name, “Lark.” He explained that Lark had worked with Hungarian resistance cells during the war, and now operating independently to smuggle out information—and possibly people. We had no photo, no last name, not even a fake name. All we were given was a signal phrase and a location for a drop.
Thomas opened his case and pulled out a thin strip of wax-coated rice paper that was barely thicker than a matchstick. On it, he wrote a short message in Hungarian, words Manakin made him memorize before we’d left.
“Visitors arrived. Requesting tea. Tomorrow nine o’clock?”
The signal phrase was innocuous enough. If Lark found it, he’d reply at a secondary location.
The drop point was a bronze lion’s mouth at the foot of the Chain Bridge, just across the Danube, a centuries-old tourist feature repurposed for espionage.
I grinned and whispered into Thomas’s ear, “I love a little drama with my tradecraft.”
“You would.” Thomas rolled his eyes as he folded the paper into a cigarette. Once rolled, the note looked like any other smoke. He slid it into his silver case beside a few real ones.
We left the hotel with the calm precision of seasoned diplomats. We held no urgency, no lingering glances. Thomas spoke about supply chains and bureaucratic inefficiencies as we strolled along the banks of the Danube, past rusted streetlamps and rain-washed benches. Had we not been playing roles, avoiding Soviet minders, and planning for a terrifying mission, the trek might’ve been romantic.
My eyes scanned, taking in doorways, alley mouths, reflections in shop windows.
Was the man at the café scribbling in his notebook a student? Or a spotter?
Was the boy on the bike just riding in circles, or waiting for a signal?
Every face could’ve been a handler, every bystander an informant. The Soviet grip on Budapest was as much psychological as it was logistical. One didn’t need to be followed. One merely needed tothinksomeone trailed close behind.
We reached the lion at the bridge’s base. Tourists often slipped letters and coins into its open mouth for good luck. Now it swallowed something far less innocent.
Thomas stood to one side, lighting a cigarette. I pretended to fuss with my shoe. In a smooth motion, he flicked the decoy cigarette downward, where it landed just inside the lion’s carved mouth.
We stood for a moment, watching the river, Thomas pretending to smoke.
As much as I might’ve enjoyed watching the river drift by, we didn’t linger. We turned, retraced our steps, and vanished back into the city’s stone face.
And all the while, I felt the weight of eyes on our backs.
We spent the afternoon acting, which is to say, we pretended not to be ourselves.
Which, in a way, meant we were being exactly who we were.
Thomas and I strolled the streets of Budapest like a pair of diplomatic oddballs set loose in a city we had no business understanding. We lingered in shopfronts we didn’t care about, pointed out buildings we already knew the blueprints of, and let ourselves marvel at things that, under different circumstances, might’ve actually stirred awe.
I played the wide-eyed American with all the subtlety of a Broadway star.
“Oh, would you look at that cornice,” I said loudly as we stood at the foot of the Várkert Bazár. “Is that . . . is that Baroque? Neo-Baroque?”
Thomas glanced at me from beneath the brim of his hat. “That’s a retaining wall.”
“I’m sorry you’ve forgotten how to feel joy, Charles,” I replied, stepping back to take in the buttress. “But the rest of us are doing our best to appreciate Hungary’s rich cultural tapestry.”
“You’re making a scene,” he muttered.
“You usually like it when I make a scene,” I said.
He didn’t answer, but I saw the corner of his mouth twitch. Which, from Thomas, was basically a belly laugh.