“Making himself an aristocrat’s son was a good move,” Janson said. “It helps deal with a lot of questions that might have arisen about his origins. Nobody has to wonder how he could be so well educated and worldly without an institutional record of his schooling.”

“Exactly. Where’d he go to school? Hey, he was privately tutored—a count’s kid, right? Why was he off the radar? Because this aristocrat, this Janós Ferenczi-Novak, had tons of enemies and good reason to be paranoid. Everything fits, real tight.”

“Like dovetailed planks. Too tightly. The next thing you know, he’s a big-time currency trader.”

“A man with no past.”

“Oh, he’s got a past, all right. It’s just a past that nobody knows.”

He flashed on the philanthropist’s Gulfstream V, and the white cursive letters on its indigo enamel: Sok kicsi sokra megy. The same Hungarian proverb Novak had repeated on the news segment. Many small things can add up to a big one. It was a proposition that held for benefaction—and for deception. Márta Lang’s words, in that jet, returned to him with a chilling resonance: Novak’s proved who he really is, again and again. A man for all seasons, and a man for all peoples.

Yet who was he really?

Jessie stepped easily over an immense bough that lay in their path. “Thing I keep going back to is why? Why the trickery? Everybody loves him. He’s a goddamn hero of the age.”

“Even saints can have something to hide,” Janson parried, choosing his path more carefully. “What if the man came from a family that had been involved with Arrow Cross atrocities? Again, you’ve got to imagine a country where people have long memories, where reprisal is a byword, where whole families, including children and grandchildren, were killed or deported because they were on the wrong side. These cycles of revenge were a motive force of twentieth-century Hungarian history. If there was evil like this in your past, you might very well want to escape it, leave it behind you, by whatever means necessary. Grandma Gitta isn’t the only person who lives in the past around here. Think about it. Say that this man came from an Arrow Cross family. No matter what he did, it would come up again and again—in every interview, every conversation, every discussion.”

Jessie nodded. “‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set at edge,’” she said. “Like it says in the Book of Jeremiah.”

“The motivation could be as simple as that,” said Janson. Still, he suspected that nothing about it was truly simple. Something—not an idea, but an inkling of one—hovered indistinctly in his mind, just out of reach, but dartingly present, like a tiny insect. Faint, nearly imperceptible, and yet there.

If only he could focus, shut everything else out and focus.