Dohany Street by LeBor Adam

Author:LeBor, Adam
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786692757
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2021-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FOUR

Mariahegyi Way, Obuda hills, 4 p.m.

Karoly Bardossy stood on his terrace and sipped his single-malt whisky as he looked out over Budapest. Far in the distance, past fields and woodland, the city glimmered faintly, as dusk fell. His city.

Sometimes he felt intensely protective of the Hungarian capital. He had reshaped it, moulded the skyline, scraped forty years of dirt off grandiose Habsburg apartment houses, demolished communist-era concrete piles, put up new towers of glass and steel, dragged Budapest into the twenty-first century. Here and there he could make out the faint shapes of Nationwide’ constructions – tall office blocks, residential parks, new museums, shopping centres, gated residential compounds. Whatever was coming – and he sensed that something was – nobody could take away his legacy.

The air here was fresh and clean, sharp with the coldness of winter. The ten-room villa stood high on the top of Mariahegyi – Mary’s hill – and could only be reached by a winding, narrow track through the surrounding woods.

At the end of the track was a security cabin, manned twenty-four hours a day by armed guards. A CCTV network covered the track and the surrounding woodlands, as well as the entrance to the house, the terrace and every room inside, except of course his bedroom and bathroom.

A short tarmacked path led from the security cabin to the entrance of the villa, and the house itself was surrounded by a high wall. There were no neighbours here for several hundred metres in every direction, which is how he liked it. He had designed the villa himself and overseen the construction in conjunction with an Italian architect whose usual clients were Russian oligarchs. All the materials, from the imported marble tiles to the custom-made furniture, and the labour had been run through the construction division of Nationwide. The architect had accepted payment in 500-euro notes from the company’s petty cash.

Karoly turned to look at the house, its angular modernist facade softly illuminated by light-sensitive LEDs. His home had not cost him personally a single forint, which only increased his pleasure.

He took another sip of his whisky when a soft cough sounded to his right. He turned to see Porter, his butler, standing expectantly. ‘Will sir require the jacuzzi later tonight?’

The jacuzzi sat on a raised teak platform and took up most of the corner of the terrace. Thursday nights were his midweek break and time for female company, lately in the shape of two nineteen-year-old countryside girls who claimed to be sisters. He had no idea if that was true, but they certainly seemed very well acquainted.

He had first met them in the VIP suite of his favourite brothel, a villa in the Buda hills, on the recommendation of the madam. Karoly had been a customer there for many years, as was much of the city’s business and political elite. After his wife died last year there was no need for him to spend two hours travelling there and back. Instead he had asked the madam to send the girls to him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.