(To hear today's Holtzman, listen to this radio interview.)

Here's a third coincidental character. Harvey's lawyer, Neville, speaks in a "professional BBC voice" and works in an office in one of the villas near the end of Andrassy avenue. Likewise, Holtzman was sometimes represented by Peter Magyar, a smooth-as-silk young British lawyer with an office in a villa near the end of Andrassy. (Further entwining fiction and fact, Magyar is today married to Phillips' sister and is listed in the book's acknowledgments.)

Then there's Charles/Karoly, the suave entrepreneur whose acts provide the spine for the book's action. Karoly shares a limited number of traits with real life Budapest financier-turned-industrialist Stephen Frater. (I only met Frater once, skiing in the Austrian Alps.) Frater, like Karoly, was reputed to hop-scotch between two pronunciations of his name, the Hungarian ID rhyming with "otter" and the Anglophone ID rhyming with "freighter." And, like Karoly, Frater leveraged a chunk of foreign money to buy a printing company from the Hungarian state very early in the privatization process.

All this is idle speculation. I wouldn't put money on my hunches. But I would bet a non-fictional $5 that the club A Hazam is modeled on the legendary Tilos Az A. Why bother with the change? There was only one such place ever, anywhere and the Unicum shimmer and fog of hand-rolled cigarette smoke are undoubtedly the same.

I can't identify any other coincidences in character, trait or action beyond those listed here. And, as I've already noted, I can't guess how conscious the mirrorings are.

But it is worth noting that Prague's first chapter opens with five young expatriates playing "sincerity," a game in which each player makes one true statement and three false, then is rated by opponents on the apparent veracity of each statement. The winner is the person who best conflates fiction and fact in the audience's mind. Was this scene Phillips' invitation to former Budapest expats to play a private game of sincerity... or just another fiction?

(Disclosures: a) I've never met Phillips. But after he left Budapest, I became friends with his buddy Tony Denninger, who is listed first in Prague's acknowledgments. I've since tried to track down Tony but failed. Tony, drop me a line! b) After the New Republic article, Congress temporarily froze government funding of its novel "enterprise funds" for Eastern European. Among other things, Holtzman's roughly $400,000 a year salary, earned working for a wholly owned subsidiary of the US-funded Hungarian American Enterprise Fund, had aroused Congressional interest. Along with the New Republic, prognosis, Budapest Week, Magyar Narancs and the International Herald Tribune — all of which had published versions of the article — I received a letter suggesting a retraction and mooting a possible lawsuit. I had taped everything. The article stood and no suit materialized. c) The recollections in this review were jostled into consciousness reading Rick Bruner's blog.)