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Back The Double Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. Acknowledgements

The hard consonants pierced his skull, and he sucked in his breath. Though he couldn’t understand their meaning, the words were clearly an insult. Something about his father being a pig… though how would he know that?

Ismail laughed as Libby tugged his arm, leaving Vidor to wrestle with the mysterious rage coiled in his chest. How dare he show up here to taunt me?

23

With little more than a sketch of Vidor’s history to work with, Gessen’s only option was to seek out anyone who might have known him as a child. There must be someone residing in the vast city of Paris who remembered the Kiraly family in the late fifties and sixties. At the entrance to the Métro at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he sent a quick text to Ursula: Staying in Paris one more day. Call if you need anything.

As he rumbled under the city, he tried to boost his spirits with the hope that buried deep in the municipal archives was a record of the Kiraly family’s address. His online search had revealed that some 12,000 Hungarian immigrants were living in Paris in the late sixties. If luck was on his side, there wouldn’t be too many Kiralys amongst them.

According to Vidor’s somewhat vague recollections, his family had lived in a few different flats in the early years, before settling into their permanent home just after his tenth birthday. Vidor claimed he couldn’t remember the exact address, though he did mention it was within walking distance of the catacombs. A frightening place to a young boy with a lively imagination, so he would go around the long way to avoid the entrance, especially after a school friend told him there were more skeletons of the dead lying under the city than people walking the streets above. In a rare moment of candour, Vidor had openly admitted to Gessen a horror of enclosed spaces and a fear of being buried alive.

A chilly rain splattered the pavement as his taxi pulled up to the mairie in the fourteenth arrondissement. A stone’s throw from the entrance to the catacombs, it was as good a place as any to start. Deaths, marriages, and births would all be recorded here, probably going back to the early days of the Republic. The woman behind the desk gave him the once-over with a jaundiced eye before disappearing into a back room and returning with a printout of the records from 1956 to 1970. He perched on a wooden chair while she went through the names. Kiraly? She pursed her mouth and squinted in the dim light. The beads on her necklace swung as she bent over the files.