Shadows Reel (Joe Pickett #22)(77)

“They jumped Deputy Schuster in Gillette and took him hostage,” AnnaBelle said. “He told us all about it. They took his uniform, his gun, and his car. The uniform fit Viktór, so that’s what he wore to get in the library. László was the driver. Schuster’s okay, by the way. Like you: cuts and bruises. And a little embarrassed to go back to Gillette.”

“I understand,” Joe said. He did.

“Here’s what the reporter told me for background,” Marybeth said. “Apparently, the Kovács family has been involved in politics in Hungary at a very high level for a long period of time. They’re controversial. She called them right-wing populists, for what that’s worth. Anyway, she said there’s a big election coming up that has completely divided the country. Their father, Zoltan Kovács, could very well be the next prime minister.”

Joe sat back, taking that in.

“Viktór and László could be thought of as the Eric and Donald Trump Jr. of Hungary,” AnnaBelle injected. “They’re that well known.”

“This is nuts,” Joe said.

“It gets better,” Marybeth said. “Their father, Zoltan, is leading in the polls, but there are allegations against him and the entire Kovács family that, if proved true, could cause him to lose. It sounds very heated. And the election is next month.”

“What allegations?” Joe asked.

“Apparently, Zoltan’s opponent says that the Kovácses are tainted by totalitarianism—that it’s in their blood. They claim that if Zoltan was elected, he’d turn into a dictator because it’s in his genes. The phrase used against him, in Hungarian, of course, is that ‘He has extremism running in his veins.’?”

“Based on what?” Joe asked.

“Based on rumors, most of all,” Marybeth said. “The reporter said it’s well known that Zoltan was a teenage communist while the country was occupied, but he’s kind of been given a pass on that because a lot of Hungarians joined the party during those years just to get along. He denounced communism after the Hungarian Revolution, apparently. If that was all it was, the whole ‘extremism runs in his veins’ thing wouldn’t be very persuasive to voters.

“But there’s more,” she said. “And that’s where we come in. This is where it all starts to connect.”

Joe was more than intrigued.

“There have been rumors for years about the grandfather, also named László,” she said. “That he was not just sympathetic to Hitler, but that he was loyal and devoted to him. This wasn’t that unusual, the reporter told me. There were a number of Hungarians who were out-and-out Nazis at the time. But when the rumors came up later, the Kovács family vehemently denied them. They sued newspapers that printed it, and they went after citizens as well, and there’s never been any proof that the allegations were true.”

Joe said, “The album.”

“The album,” Marybeth said. “I must have seen the photos a dozen times when I went through it, but they meant nothing to me. They’re the shots of the Hungarian Youth greeting Julius Streicher with Nazi salutes. A bunch of little Nazi boys wearing uniforms with swastika armbands.”

“I remember,” Joe said.

“Well, the little troop leader for the Hungarian Youth in the photos is László himself. The grandfather. He’s apparently still alive at ninety-five years of age and he’s always denied his involvement. The photo in the album is what Zoltan’s opponents have been looking for all along to prove that the Kovács family has a history of extremism. And all these years it’s been sitting right here in Wyoming. Bert Kizer had something even he couldn’t understand. When the Kovács family found out that these photos existed, they had to find them and destroy them. Viktór and László were sent over here to do just that.”

Joe nodded. “They found out that the album existed when Bert asked John and Connie Sheftic to put the word out. They found out the album itself wasn’t of that much value to collectors, but it was valuable to a certain family in Hungary.”

Marybeth was excited. “The Kovácses would do anything to destroy those photos.”

“Crazy,” Joe said. “But why go to such ridiculous extremes? Why use false identities and come over here in person to take the photo back? Why didn’t they just contact Bert and try to buy it? They didn’t have to torture and kill him for it.”

“I asked Viktór that exact question,” AnnaBelle said. “The family was afraid of raising any red flags that the photo existed. Viktór said that they were afraid the photo might be posted to the internet to start a bidding war with them and that their enemies would see it. They used a private detective to track down the IP address for the Sheftics to here, and then they came up with a plan to arrive in person and take the album any way they could. Viktór said they didn’t expect that Bert would refuse to sell it to them or give it to them. And things just got out of hand from there.”

“Either that, or they didn’t want to leave a single witness,” Joe said.

Marybeth asked AnnaBelle, “Did we forget anything?”

“The sister.”

“Oh yes,” Marybeth said. “From what Viktór said, it was their sister, Hanna, who found out about the album and put the scheme in motion. Hanna is the keeper of the family legacy, and apparently she has political ambitions herself. She’s the one who learned about the press conference online and ordered her brothers to stop it.”