“The Fascists and the Communists both. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in late ’forty-four and early ’forty-five after the Arrow Cross took over. Remember, these Arrow Cross were people who thought Horthy was too lax! True homegrown Hungarian Nazis. When the Red Army took control of the country, you had another round of purges. Hundreds of thousands were killed, again. Enemies of the revolution, right? People like Ferenczi-Novak were caught in a pincer. How many instances are there of that kind of ideological whiplash—a country switching from far left to far right to far left again, with nothing in between?”

“So we’re back to the old question: How do you bring a child into that world? Maybe these guys thought they couldn’t. That any child of theirs would have to be hidden.”

“Moses in the basket of bulrushes and pitch,” Janson mused. “But that raises a lot more questions. Novak tells the world that these are his parents. Why?”

“Because it’s the truth?”

“Not good enough. A child like that would have been raised to be afraid of the truth, to regard the truth as a very dangerous thing—for Christ’s sake, he might not even know the truth. That’s the thing about a child: you can’t tell him what he can’t deal with. In Nazi Germany, when a Jewish toddler was hidden by a Christian family, the child wouldn’t, couldn’t, be told the truth. The risk was too great: he might say something inappropriate to his playmates, to a teacher. The only way to protect him from the consequences of a potentially deadly truth was to keep him in ignorance of that truth. Only later, when the child was grown, would he be told. Besides, if Novak’s parents were who he said they were, this Gitta Békesi would know about it. I feel sure of it. I don’t think they had another child. I think she told us the truth: Peter Novak, the count’s only son, died when he was little.”

Shadows lengthened into long narrow stripes as the sun dipped behind the distant peak. Minutes later, clearings that had been golden suddenly turned gray. On a hillside, sunset came quickly and with little warning.

“This is getting to be a goddamn hall of mirrors, like the one Grandma Gitta talked about. Yesterday, we were wondering whether some impostor had taken on Peter Novak’s identity. Now it’s looking more and more like Peter Novak himself took on somebody else’s identity. A dead kid, a wiped-out village—and, for somebody, an opportunity.”

“Identity theft,” said Janson. “Beautifully executed.”

“It’s genius, when you think about it. You choose a village that was totally liquidated in the war—so there’s practically nobody around who’d remember a thing about his childhood. All the records, certificates of birth and death, destroyed after the place was torched.”