Toward the end of winter, Márton and Ashley fly out to Budapest. They’re staying at the Ritz-Carlton. They arrive on a Tuesday evening, and the following morning, they meet the agent at the property.

The agent’s name is Tibor.

The three of them are standing in what is now the central courtyard of the building. At the top it’s open to the sky, the visible square of which is a uniform gray.

“You see, we’d put a glass roof on it,” Márton says to the agent. “This would be the lobby.”

Márton takes a few paces across the damp concrete, largely stained green, that slopes down to a central drain. The building has been derelict for a long time. It was the subject of some kind of yearslong legal dispute, apparently.

“What do you think?” he asks Tibor, who has wandered off to where a piece of rusty metal hangs out of the crumbling wall.

The agent nods. “Sounds like a plan,” he says.

“We need to work out how many rooms we’d be able to fit in,” Márton tells him.

“Sure.”

“Ashley’s going to do some measurements.”

“Do you know what this was?” Tibor asks him. He means the rusty metal thing sticking out of the wall at about shoulder height⁠—a single horizontal bar a few meters long.

“No,” Márton says. 

“It was for carpets.” 

“Yeah?”

“You’d hang your carpet over it and then beat the dust out.”

“Okay,” Márton says.

“You’ll find one of these in most of the old courtyards of the city,” Tibor says, touching the rust-eaten bar.

The paunchy agent is probably about Márton’s own age, somewhere in his early fifties. He learned to sell property in Dublin. He lived there for years. That’s why his English sometimes has a weird Irish twist to it when he says things like “old courtyards.”

He and Márton speak mostly English with each other, only occasionally slipping into their own language.

They walk up the monumental stone stairs to the second floor, where Ashley gets to work with his laser measure, noting down  numbers on an old architectural plan.

While he does that, Márton and Tibor stand at a damaged balustrade, looking down onto the courtyard from a higher vantage.

“It’s hard to imagine that people lived here once,” Márton says. “The way it is now.”

“Mm,” Tibor agrees. He’s wearing a suit with an open-necked shirt and trainers, exhibiting a sort of informal formality that’s well suited to his role. He works for an international property agency, one that handles major assets like this derelict block of flats.

Márton, dressed less formally though more expensively, likes dealing with him. He’s one of those people you instinctively trust. He doesn’t seem to have any malice in him. One of his colleagues had shown Márton the property on the previous occasion he’d looked at it⁠—a more shifty and aggressive character.

They talk about what life must have been like when the building was first put up, in the late nineteenth century.

Servants, horse-drawn vehicles, uncomfortable clothes. 

That sort of stuff.

It would have housed members of a hardworking middle class that was only just coming into existence at that time, and who wanted to live in grand buildings like the nobility.

Now it’s all disintegrating plaster and exposed brickwork.

Rain gutters eaten away by rust.

The whole place has a wet, subterranean smell.

Ashley passes them, eyes down, intent on his laser measure.

“He seems like a very serious young man,” Tibor says in Hungarian. 

“Yeah,” Márton agrees. “He’s an excellent worker.”

“He works for you?”

Márton nods. “He has a degree in hotel management,” he says. 

“Yeah?” Tibor says. “Is that a thing?”

“Sure,” Márton tells him. 

“Okay.”

“He knows all about it.”

Ashley approaches them. “How we doing?” Márton asks him with a smile. 

“Yeah, fine,” Ashley says. “I think I’ve done everything on this floor.” 

“Okay.”

“So …”

“Onwards and upwards?” Márton suggests. They take the stairs to the next floor.

The plaster of the stairwell is a sort of murky, brownish, muddy color. What might once have been painted decorations are still dimly visible in places. It’s almost like some Roman thing, Márton thinks, looking at the decorations as they go up. Like the stuff he saw in Pompeii when he was there. Those painted garlands of flowers or whatever they were, showing faintly through centuries’ accumulation of grime.

Márton’s suite at the Ritz-Carlton is on the eighth floor and has a view of Erzsébet tér and the Ferris wheel. His window is level with the middle of the wheel. Sometimes, looking out, he can see the shapes of people in the boxes that hang from it, ascending on one side and descending on the other. Farther away, the bland dome of Saint Stephen’s Basilica catches the pale monochrome sunlight. While the Ferris wheel turns and then stops and then turns again, he deals with his emails and other messages.

The important ones are mostly about the hotel project. Márton discovered that the building was for sale last year, and this is the second time he has looked at it.

He opens a Coke Zero from the minibar and lies on the bed with Bloomberg on the TV. It’s nearly seven when Ashley calls.

The in-room phone lights up and softly trills. “Yes?” Márton says, answering it. He had been dozing on top of the duvet. The TV is still on. 

“It’s me,” Ashley says.

“You’ve done the numbers?” Márton asks him. 

“Yes.”

“Want to come to my suite to talk about them?”

“Okay.”

Then Márton has another idea. “Actually, are you hungry?”

“Kind of,” Ashley admits.

“Why don’t we get something to eat, then? We can talk while we do that.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll see you downstairs.”

“Okay,” Ashley says.

They meet in the lobby twenty minutes later and, at Márton’s suggestion, walk the short distance to Nobu. He orders some sushi and sashimi, and while they wait, they discuss how many rooms they think they’ll be able to fit into the space. That obviously depends on the size of the rooms, so that discussion leads into another, about what the average size should be, which is of course also a discussion about where the hotel would be placed in the market. Solidly four-star, is what Ashley thinks they should be aiming for⁠—which would imply a deal with a chain like Novotel or Radisson.