‘So you lived here during the Communist era?’
‘I lived my whole life in Communism. I was a Communist.’
‘Tell me what it was like.’
‘What do you want to know?’
She asked the right questions, kept him talking. She watched him drink while she tried desperately to think of a way to do this. A gun would have been easy but Lucas had denied her that. She didn’t think she could stab him. Perhaps she could hit him with something.
All she had to do was wait until he’d drunk enough that his reactions would be slowed. She sipped at her own drink and allowed him to top it up, but Brodsky was drinking quickly and already seemed groggy when he got up for a second bottle.
‘You didn’t tell me how you came to Budapest,’ she called out as he got the wine from the kitchen. She wasn’t listening to his responses, her brain racing through its own internal dialogue, trying to think of a way to kill him but finding it hard to fix on that target. She was thinking about killing someone, ending a life.
He began to slow down and fell asleep before he’d finished the second bottle of wine. And there it was, offered up to her, but she still didn’t know if she could do it. She walked over to the window, escaping the nausea and the confusion and the responsibility of who she was by looking down onto the empty street.
She’d been there for a few minutes when she heard someone call out, a monosyllable, nothing more, almost lost in the rustling of the trees. She struggled at first to see where it had come from and then noticed the boy standing down below on the opposite side of the street.
She felt an instant happy surge of recognition, only to have it sink away. It couldn’t be Ben—of course it couldn’t. He looked like him, though, even the way he was dressed, the apparition distant enough to cover up the flaws. Slowly, he lifted his arm in a wave. Her spine ran cold, a mixture of having been spotted and the boy’s phantom resemblance to Ben. She lifted her own arm in response but then she heard another voice and dropped it.
She was embarrassed as she saw that someone was leaning out of a window in one of the neighboring apartments. Another teenager. He called a few more words to his friend before disappearing. The boy in the street hadn’t seen her there. Nobody had seen her. Ben was dead. Brodsky had to die.
She closed the windows, the breeze putting up a half-hearted resistance. She walked into the kitchen without looking at him. There was no time for squeamishness; it would have to be a knife. She’d close her eyes, think about what he’d done, drive it into him. She could do it, and had to.
She opened a couple of drawers, the cutlery drawer rattling so noisily that she glanced into the living room to check that it hadn’t disturbed him. As she turned again, her eyes were snagged by the cooker and she stared at it as she gently closed the drawer.
Gas. She could turn on the gas. She remembered someone telling her once that domestic gas wasn’t poisonous. It was combustible, though, and that was a way of doing this without having to fall back on violence. And the death wouldn’t look suspicious either. An accident, an act of God.
She walked back into the living room and carefully picked up one of the large lit candles, carried it into the kitchen and placed it on the work surface. She picked up her wine glass and washed it, then got her bag and took one last look at Brodsky, looking older now that he was asleep, and harmless.
She couldn’t even know for certain that it would work but that made it better somehow, easier. Brodsky was guilty of killing her family, she believed that in her bones, but if this didn’t kill him it would be like someone surviving the gallows or electric chair, an intervention by fate.
She turned on all the burners, a chorus of hissing, and left. She took the stairs, descending quickly, not knowing how long she had. She emerged from the building and slowed instinctively as she spotted the two boys chatting and smoking a short distance away. He didn’t look as much like Ben from down there, his face harder and gaunt. He looked over and she turned her face from him.
She walked in the opposite direction, toward the illuminated backdrop of the parliament building, and at the end of the street she turned left, guessing that she was heading towards the river.
She was waiting, a timer ticking towards detonation in her head. It faltered, though, and she began to have her doubts, knowing all the while that it was too late to do anything about it.