About a year ago the once derelict Chelsea Hotel was revamped and re-opened with a good scrubbing done to the ever-funky Spanish restaurant El Quijote, which got rave reviews, including mine, for its food. Now, this year, Café Chelsea has opened across the lobby and brings a new excitement and raffish style to the neighborhood.

         If you like Balthazar and Pastis downtown, Le Rock in midtown and Orsay uptown, you’ll fit right in at Café Chelsea, assuming you can grab a table at this overnight success.  The reasons are easy enough to discern, not only because the hotel itself has again become a hip place to stay but because Café Chelsea is so good-looking in the way it combines the cherished traditional look of a Parisian bistro like Lipp, La Rotonde and Colbert with a New York kind of swagger and genuine hospitality.

         You enter through an almost unnoticed door to find the bar area bustling, with a mirrored backsplash and a wine cooler as big as a baby’s bathtub.  The interior dining room, with another to the rear, has the look of having been here since the 1930s, with all the appropriate Parisian touches of tiles, bottle glass walls, big mirrors, big globe chandeliers, curtains, tables set with white cloths and napkins and curving zinc bar.

         This bonhomie is, unfortunately, curdled by Café Chelsea being ear-splittingly loud with the addition of thundering noise no one would call background music. If they need music at all, better they should hire a strolling concertina player to sing a medley of  Edith Piaf’s hits. At least it would be more authentic than booming programmed techno. The patio outside is your best bet to avoid the noise.

         Food critics should throw up their hands and retire when they no longer look forward to eating French bistro food. I, on the other hand, always am eager to go to a new one and to east beloved classics that range from a tapenade  to a chocolate soufflé. Executive chef Derek Boccagno is out to please us all.

         You begin with some little bites: seasoned chickpea flour panisse  fingers ($9); a croquette de chèvre ($9) to go with the excellent bread and butter on the table, as is the spicy tapenade ($9) with figs and semolina crackers; boudin sausage  ($12), both noir et blanc, are plump and delectable.

         I think every table orders the ravioles  du dauphiné gratinée ($18) filled with rich Comté cheese  and crème fraiche in a sauce of salted butter and vin jaune, which comes as a pretty, golden sheet of the pasta dumplings—a dish you may want to keep all to yourself. Of course there is a good, hearty pistachio-studded pâté ($17) with the sweet balance of apricot and punch of Dijon. The heirloom tomato salad with herbs ($18) is still sweet at this point in the season.

         All the classic dishes from long bistro tradition make up the main courses, including a fine, nicely chewy steak frites ($42) and a loup de mer ($32), an ugly fish but a delicious one, and the pricey Chelsea burger ($32) with herbed raclette cheese, raw onion, Dijon stuffed into a big brioche bun, with a side of frites, had good flavor but was excessive in its architecture and fell apart upon tasting.

         A bistro is always measured by its roast chicken, and Café Chelsea’s, at an easy-to-like $32, is the half of a whole bird cooked on a rotisserie, very juicy, with grilled new potatoes, a mâche salad and sauce vin jaune.

         Yes, bring on dessert! An oozy chocolate soufflé ($18) fit for two, a nicely textured almond pear tart  ($13), and two ice creams ($10 each) served at the right temperature. For some reason they’re charging $14 for strawberry sorbet.

         And so, dining at Café Chelsea, you are reminded yet again that not only does this kind of restaurant never go out of fashion but also that it creates a warm nostalgia and recognition of what solid, impeccably cooked French comfort food can do for the soul. If only they’d turn off the music, it would be just like the originals in Paris.

         It may be a  coincidence, but the restaurant’s phone number, 1813, commemorates the year Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Nations and sent packing to Saint Helena. Nice touch.

Open daily for breakfast and dinner.

 
Parliament building, Budapest

         Upon awakening Katie saw the red light on her phone blinking. She called downstairs and was told an envelope for her had been delivered that morning.  She dressed quickly and went to retrieve what turned out to be a letter from Gorgo Toth’s office.  It read:
         “We are pleased to inform you and to ask if you would kindly join Mr. Gorgo Toth at his country residence in Tata tomorrow, Friday at 15:00.  Mr. Toth says that you will have a better and longer interview there than at his Budapest office.  A car will be provided to transport you from your hotel at 14:00. Please reply as soon as possible.”
         Tata was a town an hour’s drive northeast of Budapest and close to the Austrian border. The concierge told Katie it was a charming small town in the valley between the Gerecse and Vertes mountains, and a popular tourist destination for Hungarians, Austrians and Czechs. Many wealthy Hungarians had country homes there, he said, and he believed it was where Gorgo Toth had his collection of vintage automobiles.
         Katie immediately told David the news. They had a quick breakfast in the hotel and met Janós Frankel for their tour of the city, telling him the news from Toth.
         Frankel smiled and said, “Well, he must be very impressed by you and your magazine. I don’t know any journalist who’s ever been invited there. God, I’d kill to see his auto collection.”
         “Why do you think he’s being so magnanimous?” asked Kat
         “As I told you, Toth needs the international publicity, and I suppose he thinks McClure’s will give him that. It may offer him protection, or at least time, from being ousted by the Russians
         David chimed in. “Katie’s a very well-known journalist in the States, and Toth may have heard of her.”
         “She is indeed,” said Frankel, though I don’t know if you can buy a copy of McClure’s anywhere in Hungary.”
      Katie kept quiet about having Dobell send Toth her less provocative articles about powerful men.
         “Well, until tomorrow, let’s see some of my hometown,” said Frankel, “so we’ll start across the Danube in Buda.”
         As Katie and David had already seen, Budapest had not yet thrown off the decay the Soviets had allowed to creep into the city. Buildings had not been cleaned and the city looked shabby. It would be years before new hotels opened. Still, set as it is on the Danube, the city’s vast sprawl indicated how grand and powerful Budapest had once been among the great cities of Europe.
         Frankel took them across the Chain Link Bridge to Buda’s Castle area, where the National Gallery of Art was slowly being restored and the works of 20th century Hungarian painters once banned by the Soviets were now being hung. Dating back to the 13th century, the Old Town had retained much of its medieval character and the Mátyás Church (above) was undergoing a repainting of every square inch of its intricately patterned interior.
         They had lunch at a local bistro Frankel said was better than average, digging into chicken soup, hortobágyi chicken crȇpes and pig’s knuckles, ending off with an overly rich Hungarian torte and coffee.
         “I want you to come back in ten years,” said Frankel. “Budapest will be one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. Again. Never as powerful as it once was, but very beautiful, very cultural. And less and less influenced by the old oligarchy. You wait and see.”
         The rest of the afternoon, the trio spent on the Pest side of the city, touring the grand boulevards, past the opera house, the Neo-classic Parliament building, Saint Anne’s Church, Saint Stephen’s Basilica (above) and the Great Synogogue (right).  Religion, said Frankel, had blossomed again among the Hungarian Catholic and Jewish populations  after decades of being forbidden to practice it.
         After dinner that evening, the three parted and Frankel wished them luck, again saying he wished he was going with Katie and David.
         “You may come away with a scoop,” he said. “Take some pictures of the car collection if you can.”
         Frankel was still unaware of the full scope of Katie and David’s intentions in interviewing Toth and the car collection was not on their list of interests.

                                                     *                         *                         *                         *

         The next morning Budapest had acquired a light mantle of snow, which made Katie think of The Shop Around the Corner (left), her favorite Christmas movie, a fairy tale  romance that takes place in Budapest, though entirely filmed in Hollywood, where the snowflakes were always perfect and the holiday decorations adorned every shop.  And now, here she was, warming to the cold city and vowing to return on sunnier days. The sense of being in an Old World café for coffee and pastries during the holidays reminded her of how lucky she was to be a writer, a journalist, someone who gets to travel around the world.        
       But a darker cast came over her when she remembered that her last two journalistic adventures had almost gotten her killed. She saw nothing so dire in the one she was now on, feeling that she was getting very close to her original intent, which was to go after Harry Lime. Now, here she was about to interview a Brit turned Hungarian pharmaceutical magnate whom she might ensnare in her story as also being a criminal who had escaped justice for more than fifty years.
         David, who had breakfast in his room, had enormous respect for Katie and felt extremely protective of her. It was not something he felt about his cop colleagues in the old days; those guys could handle themselves. Katie had an iron to her he found in few other women outside the NYPD, and even though she was only ten years younger than he was, he felt paternalistic about her. And maybe it was more that than the romantic infatuation he had taken such joy in since first meeting her three years before. Now, he thought that being with Katie as a great gift to him in retirement.  There was, as it panned out, an aspect of danger that made it all exciting, far beyond what he thought would be routine investigations.
         This current project David was enjoying, first, because it was with Katie again, and, second, because it involved subjects he had a passionate interested about—old movies, especially mysteries and spy films like The Third Man.  In the Al Capone investigation David felt well invested and far more the authority than Katie on the subject; on the Vermeer project he felt way out of his comfort zone in the world of fine art and auctions. With this project he felt on a near-equal footing with Katie’s expertise and actually enjoyed the archival work and reading he’d had to do to get to the bottom of it. This afternoon, he felt, he would help Katie get her vindication and be able to prove her original thesis that there was a real-life person behind the character of Lime, who had come to seem a hovering, smirking presence as time had gone on.
         When David thought about Lime he always saw Orson Welles’s face and the way the actor not only embodied Lime’s amoral duality but, with just a few minutes on screen, made him into one of the most charismatic figures in movie history. At the end of the movie, nobody wanted to see Lime arrested or killed. Everyone wanted to see him escape, if only to come back in a sequel.  Of course, Lime did, in those radio shows in which the disembodied voice of Welles brought him to vivid life again, if only as a shadow behind a radio speaker.

      Katie and David met in the lobby a few minutes early and could tell immediately the two unsmiling men near the door were their escorts to Toth’s.  Both were dressed in black—jeans, peacoats—not thuggish but not welcoming either.
         “Ms. Cavuto, Mr. Greco,” said one of them. “We are to take you to Mr. Toth’s residence. Will you follow, please?”
         “Not very warm and fuzzy,” said Katie.
         “I’ve had warmer welcomes at police commission hearings.”
 the men, who waved away a doorman and showed the Americans into a black Mercedes limousine, lightly dusted with snow.  About the only words the two me said were, “Please,” and any questions Katie and David had for them about where they were going and how long it would take were answered in one or two words.  Apparently the trip would take just a little over an hour. There were bottles of water in the car doors.
         The Hungarian countryside outside of Budapest was mostly flat, but about a half hour out of the city the Americans could see the foothills of the western mountains and then they were climbing for a few minutes before descending into a valley where Tata was located. There was no intention of stopping in the town, however, for the car took a road with no signs on it, well paved, two lanes, with snow starting to stick from the lack of traffic.  After a few more turns onto smaller roads, the Mercedes headed towards a fairly large, lodge-like structure behind a fence with wooden gates. 
         The driver pushed a button on a remote and the gates opened, revealing a gravel road lined with oak and fir trees that banked away into a thick forest and up the sides of the low-lying Gerecse Mountains.
         “This is really beautiful,” said Katie, admiring the way the two-story lodge had been adapted to the natural landscape. “It must be stunning in summer.”
         “Looks like the drug trade pays very well,” said David, thinking that this must be what the Russian rich call their country dachas. Were it iced over, he could imagine Doctor Zhivago and Lara spending the winter there (right). Then again, David sensed that only a hunter would be out here in the winter. The forests looked perfect for deer, bear, probably wild boar, which no one hunted alone. 
         As they exited the car, a large man was already standing in the front door. Katie and David knew from a photo in Frankel’s article it was Toth. He was tall, heavy set, with a gray window’s peak. He was dressed in casual but expensive clothes of a kind English country gentlemen wore on the cover of Country Life magazine—tan moleskin trousers, brown boots, an olive-colored cableknit sweater and pale yellow tattersall shirt.
         “Well, hello!” the man bellowed in a distinct British accent. “Welcome to my little home away from home.” He held out his hand to Katie and said, “Gorgo Toth. So glad you could join me in my favorite place in the world. Please, come inside out of the snow.”
         The interior of the house was far grander than the exterior and looked much larger. While retaining much of the wooden cabin lineaments, the refinement and polish of the décor and furniture showed that an enormous amount of money must have been spent to make it look so impeccably homey, without the heavy, overstuffed look of an Eastern European hunting lodge. There was a stag’s head on one wall and thick wool blankets were carefully folded on the chairs and a leather sofa, but no bear rugs or hanging pelts. There was a billiards table and a long wall of bookshelves and Hungarian objets d’art, along with framed photos, most of them including Toth, dating back perhaps twenty years, many apparently taken in this very room.  Above it all hung a magnificent chandelier of entwined deer antlers.
         David’s eyes were drawn immediately to a rack of beautiful hunting rifles and shotguns—perhaps a dozen—which included at least three Berettas, a Browning, a Remington and a very expensive Famars.
         There was the requisite huge stone fireplace, hissing and popping, and a long dining room table with folkloric carved legs. Beyond that was an open kitchen with a large range and rotisserie oven.  No cook was evident at that hour. There was only a small shelf for wines to be drunk on a daily basis. A doorway to the left led to what was probably a far better stocked wine cellar.
         Above the main room was a mezzanine that wound around the perimeter of the house, showing perhaps six bedroom doors, all reached by a broad central staircase.
         It was now 3:30. Toth said, “I don’t usually drink in the afternoon, but if you’d like a beer or a cocktail, go right ahead.” Katie said she’d wait until after the interview. David said he wouldn’t mind a beer.
         “So, let’s sit before the fireplace and begin the interview, shall we?” said Toth. “We have the rest of the afternoon. By the way, Mr. Greco, do you hunt?”
         David turned off the irony of the question at that moment and said, “I used to be a New York cop, so I did some hunting in my day. But not for animals.”
         “I noticed you were looking at my gun collection.”
         “Pretty impressive.”
         “Yes, they are the best guns in the world, and the wonderful thing about them is that, the more beautiful they are, the better they are made—weight, balance, power, efficiency. There’s beauty in those beasts.”
         Toth took David over to the gun rack and continued to talk about them as among his favorite treasures. Meanwhile, Katie was looking over the long book shelves, which contained mostly volumes in English, histories, biographies and novels.  Among the last she found several of Graham Greene’s works, including a paperback of The Third Man novella tucked in between The Ugly American and The Heart of the Matter. Among the small framed photos on the shelves at eye level she found pictures of Toth in his hunting clothes, most of them with friends, taken over what she assumed was the last decade. A few photos were obviously older, some faded, and there among them Katie saw one with a young man who appeared to be Toth next to a figure who was clearly Graham Greene.
         The photo was taken in winter—both men were in overcoats and the trees were bare—and at the edge of the frame was the blurred rim of what looked to be a Ferris wheel. Katie knew she had to bring this to David’s attention, certain it was a photo of Toth and Greene in Vienna, probably at the amusement park, in February 1948, when Greene was doing research before writing the script of The Third Man. 
         

She thought of asking Toth if she might take pictures of his home, hoping to get close enough to that photo as evidence that Toth was really Harold Neame and was standing with Greene in the exact location where Lime had met with Holley. She felt flushed by the realization.
         “Well, then,” said Toth, “shall we get started?”