Page 28 of Shadowfox

We walked farther up the hill, toward the Castle District, where the streets narrowed and the buildings leaned in a little, as if they, too, were keeping secrets.

Every alley whispered.

Every window seemed to blink.

I kept my shoulders relaxed, my eyes wide—an American abroad, enchanted and only slightly out of place. Inside, I was tracking every reflection in every window we passed.

I knew Thomas was, too.

There was a restaurant around the corner from the Gellért—quaint, dimly lit, full of wood paneling and lace curtains, the kind of place where politicians had their mistresses and Soviet informants keep long notebooks.

The maître d’ greeted us with a polite but perfunctory nod and led us to a small table near the front window. The menu was in Hungarian and Russian. The silverware was mismatched.

Thomas studied the wine list like he was reviewing a legal brief.

“Red or white?” I asked.

“Whichever gets us through this without food poisoning.”

“Ah, so red, then.” I winked. “Better camouflage if it turns out to be a trap.”

He didn’t laugh.

We ordered a modest meal—goulash for him, something unpronounceable for me, which I ordered just to annoy him. He muttered something about intestinal regret and then changed the subject to train schedules.

Midway through the second course, I excused myself to the restroom, not because I needed to go, but because I needed to check. The countersign was supposed to be something “in view but overlooked,” something public enough to be hiding in plain sight but clever enough to avoid suspicion.

Lark’s reply, assuming he’d left one, would be found at an old newspaper stand across from the Chain Bridge—one of those half-rotted wooden huts with a posterboard on the side for political pamphlets and state-approved messaging. Lark was to tack a flier advertising a jazz concert from three years ago, featuring a now-dead American saxophonist, to the wall of posters. We’d picked that particular handbill because the Soviets had banned jazz in public spaces, calling it decadent Western noise. No one would dare post something like that—unless they wanted to get a message across.

I stepped outside into the night, my breath misting in the cold air. The kiosk stood where it had that morning, beside the tram stop. A dozen pamphlets fluttered in the breeze, but one that hadn’t been there earlier caught my eye.

A curled image of a horn player, mid-blow. Most of the piece was in Hungarian, but I recognized a city’s untranslatable name: New Orleans.

Glancing about, I snatched the flyer off the corkboard and shoved it into a pocket.

I returned to the restaurant, nodded to the waiter, and resumed my seat with a practiced smile.

Thomas raised an eyebrow. “Everything come out all right?”

“Oh, you’re hilarious,” I replied, reaching for my wine. “Did you know Budapest has a thriving music scene?”

His other brow rose.

I grinned and fished the pamphlet out of my pocket, then handed it across the table.

“Who knew Hungarians loved American jazz?” I smiled, as though I’d made a discovery of alien life on Earth. Thomas huffed a half laugh and glanced down at the paper.

“New Orleans? In Budapest? These days?”

I shrugged. “Like I said, quite the music scene. Want to go?”

Thomas made a show of reading the playbill. “Sounds . . . interesting. Why not?”

He folded the flyer as though it had lost his interest, then, as if on a last-second whim, opened it and looked at the back. As quickly as he’d unfolded the paper, he refolded it and shoved it into his own pocket.

“Think they’ll have a sax player?” I asked, unsure how to even phrase, “Was there a spy hookup on the back?” without tipping off anyone who was likely listening.

Thomas—the fucker—grinned. “There will most definitely be a sax player. If he is the one I recall, he is world class. The show begins at nine o’clock.”

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