Invisible Murder by Lene Kaaberbøl Page A

trying to contact Hizb ut-Tahrir for?”
    “What?”
    “You also spent a fair amount of time on hizbuttahrir.org .”
    “Oh … that.…” It stopped him in his tracks.
    He knew that Hizb ut-Tahrir was an Islamic organization. But a connection between them and Tamás? They were hardly in the same galaxy, ideologically speaking. He wasn’t even sure Tamás
had
an ideology, aside from a certain penchant for life’s pleasures. Hedonism. Isn’t that what it was called?
    Gábor leaned in as if he were confiding something, in a way that also made Sándor’s torso instinctively tip forward a couple of degrees.
    “Sándor, listen up. I’m not one of those idiots who believe that the Jews and the Gypsies have teamed up to destroy Hungary. And yet I have to wonder a little when a bright, young law student with a Gypsy mother starts researching right-wing nationalist and Islamist websites at the same time. That seems a little odd. And when that same bright young man suddenly becomes extremely interested in weapons and other potentially destructive items … well, a couple of alarm bells start going off, you know? But I’m sure we just don’t understand. There must be an obvious, natural explanation. So, would you please be so kind as to set my mind at ease?”
    Alarm bells going off? Sándor struggled to understand what kind of threat this NBH man was obviously envisioning. Jews, Gypsies, right-wingextremists, and Islamists? Only slowly did it dawn on Sándor that what Gábor really wanted to know was if Sándor was planning some kind of attack on Jobbik or Magyar Gárda, possibly as part of a Zionist conspiracy that might also hit an Islamic target. An armed defense or maybe even an armed attack.
    He might as well have asked Sándor to explain his relationship with the little green men on Mars.
    “It’s research,” Sándor flailed helplessly. “For a term paper.”
    And so it continued. Occasionally interrupted by lavatory breaks, polite offers of sandwiches and coffee, and a so-called “rest” when he lay on a thin mattress on a concrete floor in a basement room and stared up into the ventilation duct that was humming and flapping above him. No one hit him or humiliated him; in this respect, perhaps he was lucky that this
was
the NBH and not some random police station in Budapest’s suburbs. But the intervals were brief, and then the questions started again.
    When it became clear that they were planning on holding him overnight, he tried to tell them about his exam.
    “We can legally hold you for up to seventy-two hours” was all Gábor said.
    “How? Only under special circumstances. If the detainee is apprehended in the act of committing an offense.…”
    “… or if the detainee’s identity cannot be determined with certainty,” Gábor said. “I used to be a law student, too, way back when.”
    “Identity? But there’s no question about my identity!”
    “Isn’t there? The only record of your birth we can find is as Sándor Rézmüves. As far as I can tell, you’ve been living under a false name for more than fifteen years, and the passport you were issued under the name of Horváth … you don’t even know where it is.”
    “It … was stolen.”
    “If your passport is stolen or lost, you’re supposed to report that to the authorities. You appear not to have done that. Believe me, it could
easily
take us seventy-two hours to establish who you really are.”
    If you find out, please tell me.
    That thought bubbled up from his subconscious along with a crystal clear memory that for some reason always came back to him in black and white. The headmaster’s office at the orphanage. White stripes of light between the blinds. The dusty, dark-brown scent of books and stacks ofpapers, mixed with the strongly perfumed cleaner they used to wash the linoleum floors.
    “Your father has come for you, Sándor.”
    But the man standing there in the stripy light wasn’t Sándor’s stepfather, Elvis. It