Harvey echoes Holtzman. Here's a slice of a Holtzman monologue from an article I wrote for The New Republic in 1993. Explaining why he was doing business in Eastern Europe, Holtzman said:
You have one-tenth of the population of the world that have nothing and need everything. This is probably one of the most impressionable and pivotal times in the history of the world. To be here and to be part of it, not only to be able to experience it, but to have the added benefit of potentially being able to profit from it too, is really close to the biggest thrill I think I can imagine.
(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.
Article comments
1 - Stephen Frater
As one mentioned in the article as a model for Charles Gabor, all I can saw is that Budapest in 1989-1992 was never as dull and vapid as this book makes it appear. Yes I did buy a major historic printing company and yes it prospered and is still doing so almost a decade and a half later. We maintained full employment, raised quality and pay levels to international standards and won awards for doing so from among others the World Economic Forum. It remains among my proudest achievements. The sense of Hungary's rejoining the Europe and the world after almost a century of strife and fear is lost in the novel's myopic focus on a bunch of one dimensional yuppie louts. It was a time of lights, not shadows.
Stephen Frater