Verena’s face turned sad. “Shit, you’re really going, aren’t you.”

“I told you, I have to.”

“Well,” she said regretfully, “don’t expect me to be here when you come back.”

• • •

Jasper had never been to Budapest. As a young man he had always looked west, toward America. Besides, all his life Hungary had been overcast by the gray clouds of Communism. But in November 1988, with the economy in ruins, something astonishing happened. A small group of young reform-minded Communists took control of the government and one of them, Miklós Németh, became prime minister. Among other changes, he opened a stock market.

Jasper thought this was astounding.

Only six months earlier Karoly Grosz, the thuggish chief of the Hungarian Communist Party, had told Newsweek magazine that multiparty democracy was “an historic impossibility” in Hungary. But Németh had enacted a new law allowing independent political “clubs.”

This was a big story. But were the changes permanent? Or would Moscow soon clamp down?

Jasper flew into Budapest in a January blizzard. Beside the Danube, snow lay thick on the neo-Gothic turrets of the vast parliament building. It was in that building that Jasper met Miklós Németh.

Jasper had got the interview with the help of Rebecca Held. Although he had not previously met her, he knew about her from Dave Williams and Walli Franck. As soon as he got to Bonn he had looked her up: she was the nearest thing he had to a German contact. She was now an important figure in the German Foreign Office. Even better, she was a friend—perhaps a lover, Jasper guessed—of Frederik Bíró, aide to Miklós Németh. Bíró had fixed up the interview.

It was Bíró who now met Jasper in the lobby and escorted him through a maze of corridors and passageways to the office of the prime minister.

Németh was just forty-one. He was a short man with thick brown hair that fell over his forehead in a kiss curl. His face showed intelligence and determination, but also anxiety. For the interview he sat behind an oak table and nervously surrounded himself with aides. No doubt he was vividly aware that he was speaking not just to Jasper, but to the United States government—and that Moscow would be watching, too.

Like any prime minister, he talked mostly in predictable clichés. There would be hard times ahead, but the country would emerge stronger in the long run. And yadda yadda yadda, thought Jasper. He needed something better than this.

He asked whether the new political “clubs” could ever become free political parties.

Németh gave Jasper a hard, direct look, and said in a firm, clear voice: “That is one of our greatest ambitions.”

Jasper concealed his astonishment. No Iron Curtain country had ever had independent political parties. Did Németh really mean it?

Jasper asked whether the Communist Party would ever give up its “leading role” in Hungarian society.

Németh gave him that look again. “In two years I could imagine that the head of government might not be a Politburo member,” he said.