Ballad of the Whiskey Robber [antikvár]

PrologueBudapestSaturday, July jo, 1999^J-he sweet smell of a triple-creme torta hung in the air like a good idea. It was morning, summer, and by the time the narrow streets awakened to the Kalashnikov rattle of the newsstand gates, already humid and warm. Up and down the Danube riverbank, old men in sagging underwear and sleeveless shirts hobbled barefoot onto cracked cement balconies, gazing blankly at the sun streaks stalking the rank, still water. At the north end of chestnut-lined Andrássy Boulevard, wisps of steam puffed from the thousand-year-old springs beneath the Széchenyi bathhouse like an eternal Chernobyl.From the faded royal Hapsburg palace on Castle Hill to the plump pool-green dome of St. Stephen's Cathedral downtown, the opportunities to imagine that nothing was amiss here in the Hungarian capital were indeed everywhere. That was about to change.Károly Benkő startled from his guard post, a peg-legged chair at the end of a musty hall, and trundled down the jail's pale corridor. Starving and exhausted from a shift that had begun at 6:00 a.m. the previous day, the balding thirty-two-year-old jail guard called out the number of each cell he approached in a nasally semiconscious drone. "Three-oh-nine, three-ten "It was time for the morning walk.