Peter Novak, the count's only son, died when he was little."
Shadows lengthened into long narrow stripes as the sun dipped behind the distant peak. Minutes later, clearings that had been golden suddenly turned gray. On a hillside, sunset came quickly and with little warning.
"This is getting to be a goddamn hall of mirrors, like the one Grandma Gitta talked about. Yesterday, we were wondering whether some impostor had taken on Peter Novak's identity. Now it's looking more and more like Peter Novak himself took on somebody else's identity. A dead kid, a wiped-out village - and, for somebody, an opportunity."
"Identity theft," said Janson. "Beautifully executed."
"It's genius, when you think about it. You choose a village that was totally liquidated in the war - so there's practically nobody around who'd remember a thing about his childhood. All the records, certificates of birth and death, destroyed after the place was torched."
"Making himself an aristocrat's son was a good move," Janson said. "It helps deal with a lot of questions that might have arisen about his origins. Nobody has to wonder how he could be so well educated and worldly without an institutional record of his schooling."
"Exactly. Where'd he go to school? Hey, he was privately tutored - a count's kid, right? Why was he off the radar? Because this aristocrat, this Janos Ferenczi-Novak, had tons of enemies and good reason to be paranoid. Everything fits, real tight."
"Like dovetailed planks. Too tightly. The next thing you know, he's a big-time currency trader."
"A man with no past."
"Oh, he's got a past, all right. It's just a past that nobody knows."
He flashed on the philanthropist's Gulfstream V, and the white cursive letters on its indigo enamel: Sok kicsi sokra megy. The same Hungarian proverb Novak had repeated on the news segment. Many small things can add up to a big one. It was a proposition that held for benefaction - and for deception. Marta Lang's words, in that jet, returned to him with a chilling resonance: Novak's proved who he really is, again and again. A man for all seasons, and a man for all peoples.
Yet who was he really?
Jessie stepped easily over an immense bough that lay in their path. "Thing I keep going back to is why? Why the trickery? Everybody loves him. He's a goddamn hero of the age."
"Even saints can have something to hide," Janson parried, choosing his path more carefully "What if the man came from a family that had been involved with Arrow Cross atrocities? Again, you've got to imagine a country where people have long memories, where reprisal is a byword, where whole families, including children and grandchildren, were killed or deported because they were on the wrong side. These cycles of revenge were a motive force of twentieth-century Hungarian history. If there was evil like this in your past, you might very well want to escape it, leave it behind you, by whatever means necessary. Grandma Gitta isn't the only person who lives in the past around here. Think about it. Say that this man came from an Arrow Cross family. No matter what he did, it would come up again and again - in every interview, every conversation, every discussion."
Jessie nodded. " 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set at edge,' " she said. "Like it says in the Book of Jeremiah."
"The motivation could be as simple as that," said Janson. Still, he suspected that nothing about it was truly simple. Something - not an idea, but an inkling of one - hovered indistinctly in his mind, just out of reach, but dartingly present, like a tiny insect. Faint, nearly imperceptible, and yet there.
If only he could focus, shut everything else out and focus.
A few moments elapsed before he recognized the sound that drifted up the hill. It, too, was faint and nearly imperceptible, and yet as his senses tuned to the auditory stimulus, he recognized the source, and his heart began to thud.
It was a woman screaming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Oh Christ, no!
The thorny privet and overgrown vines whipped and scratched at Janson as he raced down the winding hillside path. He was mindful only of his footfalls as he vaulted over boulders and burst through bushes; a misplaced step in the treacherous terrain could result in a sprain or worse. He had ordered Jessie to return to the Lancia posthaste: it would be a disaster if their enemies reached it first. Her trek was uphill, but she ran like a gazelle and