“But dear Andrew, I’m never joking.”
He stared at me, uncertain if I joked still further or told the truth. I grinned ever wider until he realized that perhaps the opposite was true; I never told the straight truth. Shocked by that momentary glimpse into my character, or so I imagined, he backed toward the door and looked at me strangely, fingers trembling on the doorknob, awaiting, I feared, the moment he could politely flee.
“Have you ever been to a Catholic mass?” he asked.
The question startled me. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“There’s a Gregorian choir at St. Jacobs. Want to come along?”
I suspect Andrew thought he might see me, if not saved in the arms of the Church, then within spitting distance of its feet. We walked the crumbling baroque neighborhood briskly. A reenactment of Aztec sacrifice rites could not have interested me more. Andrew claimed his interest was aesthetic to my anthropological and was all for slinking into the back row, but I wouldn’t allow it. I dragged him as near to the altar as the crowd would allow. The priestly minions filed in soon after we settled and performed a series of incomprehensible gestures involving cloth, candles, and biblical texts. The service was conducted in Czech and Latin. I understood little. The rituals soon passed from the quaint to the tedious. I glanced about the church. The interior swarmed with saints, prophets, apostles, and angels swooping and trumpeting like so many acrobats in a holy circus. My gaze drifted to the cherub-infested ceiling and down a ghastly figure of St. Agnes, carved as a wooden giantess to stare with saintly severity upon the worshipers and crush them if they transgressed.
Like a host forgotten at his own party, a small figure of Christ stood alone at the end of the pew, attracting my eye simultaneous to the first chanted note from the choir. The sacred heart burned eternal in his chest. His crucified palms spread open to embrace the faithful. I looked directly into the wooden eyes and remembered a youthful time when I believed his myth. His arms seemed wide enough even for my sins. A memory of innocence struck me: a boy too young to have doubt or carnal knowledge crying at the dramatized death of a movie Christ. The memory weakened me. I wished a return to that effortless purity of being. My brain emptied. The choir’s voice filled my chest like a balloon. I surged into the vaulted spaces, soaring with the chant, the charade of personality sloughed off in the desire for spiritual union with the God of the cave.
A young Slavic blonde in the next pew, attracted to the spiritual glow in my countenance, glanced over and met my gaze. She smiled with sensual frankness, then blushed and turned away. An absurd fantasy shot up at me like an arrow, of stealing down the steps leading to the crypt and jumping her bones amid the stone coffins of her Bohemian ancestors. The shriveled remnants of conscience pumped and gasped and choked out a dribble of shame. I plummeted to earth with the dust of heaven on the seat of my pants and hoots of angels in my ears. I felt a sudden kinship with Lucifer, the rebel angel tossed out of heaven. A God-chosen chump to play the loyal opposition. Condemned to eternal villainy for the greater good of God. Terrifier of innocents, straw demon for the righteous, bogeyman to keep the faithful shivering in their sinless beds. Like Lucifer, I would have preferred to sit at the right hand of God, rather than catch that same hand across my chops.
The shame passed to disbelief. That I could believe in a clutter of dead statues brought on a chuckle, and the longer I considered how I had been fooled by an attack of sanctilepsy the louder I laughed, until my roaring echoed through the vault to contend with the priest’s litany. Stares swiveled to fix me with vehement disapproval. Andrew’s elbow dug into my ribs, always the most ticklish spot in my anatomy. I howled with laughter. Soon, a brown-robed monk with a bowl cut hustled to the pew and competed with Andrew to be the one to pitch me out onto the street.
This was not a fantasy. This actually happened. Do I disappoint you? Did you expect a different sort of villain, a brutal man of action who, though you might not agree with his motives, nonetheless is admirable in his directness? Or perhaps a faux villain, someone who initially appears to be evil, but—as his motives and character come into focus, an unhappy childhood here, a good deed sprinkled amid the bad there—you realize is not such a bad fellow after all? These are not me. I am not a hero with a tragic flaw. That I should be so heroic, to be brought low by a single flaw! I began low and shall end no higher.
Perhaps my judgment was not sound—I now consider many of my attitudes and decisions at that time loosely hinged at best—but I thought my best chance for salvation lay in my towering goddess of the vomit-flecked pumps. When I arrived at Lávka that night, my nerves were strung taut between the dread and hope of meeting her. The back patio held a scattering of tourists in the fading light. I chose a table with a view of the castle and waited for a girl selling roses by the bloom to pass through the club. One or two often did, plying an extortionist’s trade among the couples. I needed to buy at least a dozen. If I bought a dozen and my goddess did not appear, I could place the roses in the lap of another woman and smiling mysteriously leave without a word. If such a woman were single, I might reap some benefit the next time we met.
“Out looking for new victims?” a voice whispered in my ear.
I twisted to match the voice with Bortnyk’s face. He had a beer in hand, and not likely his first. That he knew my habits irked me. Quite possibly he had been at Lávka the previous night as well, watching my argument with Andrew and subsequent disgrace. Paranoia. He had not then known my habits or what I looked like. He pulled a chair from beneath the table and reversed it before sitting, propping his elbows on the chair back as he drank. Unexpectedly, he smiled.
“Not happy to see me?”
“I’m overwhelmed with joy. Police harassment is near the top of my list of entertainments.”
“I’m not a policeman tonight,” he corrected. “I’m off duty and out of my jurisdiction. Tonight, I’m just a man.”
The glint in his voice did not bode well for my personal safety. Never before had I been looked at with a frankness so warmly expressive of death. In his tar-black eyes gray flecks of light lay submerged like bones. I began plotting escape routes. If I got up and walked out, he would catch me in some dark alley and turn me into a police statistic. I’d need to be clever. Defuse his anger first. Argue that I was as much a victim in this as anybody. Confuse him with a little pretended humanity.
“Look, I’m sorry about all this.”
“Fuck you and fuck your apology.”
“She took off her ring. I didn’t know she was engaged.”
“I don’t care what you knew.”
I smiled. Shook my head. Threw my hands into the air.
“I’m at a loss here, Detective. What do you want me to do?”
“Die,” he answered.
“Eventually, I will. But not soon enough to please you, I hope.”
I told the truth when I said I had no idea Margit was engaged. The injustice of my situation galled me. Not that I was above sampling another man’s fiancée. I resented being guilty of a crime I had no previous knowledge of committing.
“How did you find out?” I asked.
“Margit told me.”
“I thought women tried to keep their affairs secret.”
“It’s the last knife they throw as they walk out the door.”
“She left you?”
Bortnyk drained his beer and signaled a passing waitress for another. It was certain that the longer this went on, the more he would drink, and the more he drank, the more likely he would start swinging at any imagined provocation.
“Do you know what a stinger is?” he asked.
“A cocktail?”
He lurched forward and clamped my wrist to the table. “I’ll give you a hint. It locks onto the heat of the target’s engines.”
“A missile, then.”
“The target rolls, the missile follows. The target accelerates, dives, the missile follows. No matter what the target does, the missile follow
s until it makes contact with the source of the heat. Then it explodes.”
“Impressive.”
“I operate the same way,” he said.
I shouldn’t have laughed. I didn’t want to antagonize him any further. Like that afternoon at mass, I couldn’t stop. I gripped the edge of the table, helplessly waiting for the fit to blow over. Bortnyk watched, anger lines flexing the length of his jaw. When the tears stopped flowing and I could breathe once again without tittering, he said, in a voice he might use to order at a restaurant, “I want to break your bones. Arms and legs and face.”
“I’m not worth it.”
“You’re a thief.”
I backed my chair away from the table and stood. “I’m not a great guy. I’ll admit that. But I didn’t steal the wallet from your fiancée’s purse.”
“You stole my fiancée,” he said.
“Please. I didn’t steal your fiancée. I merely borrowed her.”
I turned and walked quickly from the table. The sparse crowd did not offer enough cover for immediate escape. I clipped rapidly down the steps leading to the bathrooms. There were two exits from the bottom of the stairwell: one back the way I came and the other surfacing near the entrance. I wondered how well Bortnyk knew the club. If he was any good as a detective, he would have a clear blueprint in his head. I resisted the temptation to sprint up the steps to the front. Bortnyk would know the club had only one exit.
A toothless, grinning attendant took a two-crown admission fee at the bathroom door. My lungs rattled and wheezed in the fetid air, a sign since childhood that my nerves were close to snapping. I unzipped and stepped up to the urinal. The old bastard collected two crowns from every full bladder in the club, and the urinal still smelled like a urinal. Not like in America, where the toilets smell like perfumed oases. What if Bortnyk followed me into the bathroom? My back was to the door. He could sneak behind and smash my face into the porcelain. The thought pinched my bladder. I zipped up and approached the mirror. Three months in Central Europe had bleached the last traces of Southern California from my skin. The indispensable benefit of a suntan is that it masks the paling effects of fear. Ten deep breaths to calm the nerves and clear the brain. Then it was up the steps again to the back patio.
Bortnyk had disappeared, our table claimed by a group of tourists. I backed into a corner, shielded by a pack of young men sniffing for women near the bar. I waited. Bortnyk raced up the steps from the bathroom and sliced through the crowd toward the table. I slipped inside, strode briskly past the front bar and out the club. Well into Staré Město, the old town of Prague, I finally paused at a dark corner, unzipped, and listened for pursuing footsteps above the liquid splatter on cobblestones.
Instead, I heard the clatter of a woman’s heels, amplified by the arched promenade across the street, where a squat Gypsy called to a young man waiting for traffic to clear. Startled, he darted between cars, a smirk clenched in his teeth. The Gypsy returned to her archway predictably bored. I recognized the attempted transaction and the street. The better-looking hookers worked for hard currency in hotel bars or wandered Václavské náměstí, a broad avenue popular with tourists. Customers didn’t need hard currency on Perlova Street. The hookers priced themselves for local clientele, workers and clerks who couldn’t pay the hundred-plus deutsche marks charged by the hookers walking Václavské náměstí. Perlova was not the street to find the busty young blonde of healthy vulgar fantasy. Any hooker who could command more than a fleeting glance under a streetlamp would not work here. Perlova was the street of the fat, the lame, the diseased, the freaks. I had heard rumors that the mayor of Prague was a frequent visitor. Perhaps I might lodge a complaint about Zima and Bortnyk. I pushed out of the shadows and, peering into the dark under the arched promenade, spotted a face so startling I stopped in the middle of the street, convinced my eyes had contrived an apparition. What astonished me about the face was its location, no higher than waist level, though the woman did not appear to be sitting or kneeling. The same height a child’s face might be. But what would a child be doing on Perlova at night? A horrifying thought. Was she that dollop of freshness to slack the jaded’s thirst? And if so, how much?
Child, woman, or other, a streetwise awareness twisted the creature’s head when I stopped and stared. A gleam of white flashed in the darkness, hip-high. The sight astonished. It was smiling at me! The creature called out in a stained voice and breached the dark so I might see it better. White plastic go-go boots, pink hose, red coat parted to reveal sagging voluptuousness beneath a black miniskirt and tight white pullover. A contiguous slash of hair the size of a mustache hovered above its eyes. Its lips were obscenely red and full. The lips of a carnal goddess. A stunningly incongruous genetic gesture. I was driven to ecstasy. Another monster! My soul mate! A midget Gypsy whore!
I approached, trembling. Another smile, quick as a knife flash. She spoke to me in German, batting her eyes in grotesque coquetry. I told her I was an American. I appreciated monstrousness and was willing to pay for it. She understood no more than two words of my monologue: “American” and “pay.”
“Fifty dollars,” she said.
I pulled a hundred-dollar bill from my sport coat and watched the greed in her eyes. She wouldn’t examine the bill too closely. Not that I worried. I’d passed such bills before to black-market money changers, always with a camera around my neck and a map of Prague jutting visibly out of my pocket. About half the time the bastards tried to cheat me with worthless notes, discontinued bills from the communist era or Polish zlotys, but not even the shrewdest questioned the legitimacy of my hundred-dollar bills. “Mad money,” I called it. I avoided banks as a precaution. An expert with a loupe and strong light might notice the hundred was a color Xerox seamlessly printed onto a bleached dollar bill. I’d bought a hundred of these bills from a friend, at ten cents on the dollar. It pleased me to fool the black-market money changers.
The creature tugged on my arm when I showed her the bill, whispering the other word in her English vocabulary: “Room.” A room was too private for what I had in mind, contemplating the obvious anatomical advantage of waist-high lips. I dangled the hundred above her head and countered the pull of her arm with a step in the opposite direction. She resisted, protesting with the same word, “Room.” I tugged my arm free and stepped onto the street. The bill fluttered in a cool breeze. She wheedled, cajoled, begged. I didn’t understand a word. When I turned and crossed to the opposite curb, her uncertainty was compromised by greed. I was almost touched, the way she clutched my arm.
I led her to a dark wedge where two buildings unevenly joined, and with a simple gesture demonstrated the service I wanted performed. A line of trash cans screened her from the street but left me visible from the waist up. She took the hundred and went to work. It wasn’t the most artful handling I’d ever experienced. She insisted, with rude pulls here and there, on hurrying the act to its contracted conclusion. I didn’t oblige. A hundred dollars, even in counterfeit, entitled me to some drawing out of pleasure, and if she wasn’t interested in providing it, I could.
The physical sensation she provided was of minimal interest. My sexuality always has been primarily cerebral. It was the idea of the event that excited me. That I was capable of such a perverse idea and had the lack of decency to act upon it lent new perspective to my personal degradation. The novelty of experience justified almost any act to me then. I was engaged in a game of dare with my conscience. What rules could I break, what unspeakable acts could I commit without incurring the wrath of conscience? I sought liberation. If I was capable of paying a midget Gypsy whore to fellate me in the shadows of a public street, few acts could constrain me to decency. I could satiate any whim or desire, without fear of conscience’s reprisal. I could be the freest man on earth.
Deep into my reverie, I noticed a billboard had been newly riveted to the side of the nearest peeling baroque town house. I blinked at an iconic hamburger and golden obelisk of fries as though confronted by h
allucination. The first sign of a free market economy had arrived to the street of whores: Prague was soon to have a McDonald’s franchise. I began to laugh. The midget whore pulled away, startled by the sound. The confused twisting of her absurd eyebrow, that solid slash of hair across her brow, seemed funnier than the McDonald’s billboard, or maybe it was the unexpected juxtaposition of the two. I laughed harder. The whore backed away, terrified.
“Don’t stop, really, it’s okay, this is what I like,” I said, laughing.
“Ďáble!” she shouted, angry and afraid.
She turned and ran, short legs churning furiously, to the safety of her arched promenade. A man built like a sprung suitcase stepped out of the shadows and shouted at me. Her pimp. He’d grown so stout the buttons on his shirt stretched to popping. I laughed at him too. He advanced into the middle of the street, shaking his fist. I fell back into the shadows and laughed at everything.
5
On the street corner outside my apartment building, a beggar with hands joined like flippers to his shoulders routinely exhibited his appendages for coin. Prague was a city of the deformed and disfigured. The route to Charles Bridge featured a half-dozen beggars who waved stumps or signs proclaiming disability. Plastic surgeons were in short supply, and the routine orthopedic care taken for granted in the West did not yet exist. Those struck blind stayed blind. Those not deformed were infected with one virus or another caught in the packed warrens of the metro, where an ill-timed breath doomed. I sat hunched at the far wall between cars and sang to myself a litany of the infected, of the flu-ridden, cold-caught, polio-victimized, valgus-deformed, arthritisafflicted, cataract-blind, pockmarked, clubfooted, and hare-lipped, of that crippled gob of flesh, post-communist humanity. I sprang free when the compartment doors slid open, glad of my Southern California fit body, pleased that my deformities were as invisible as wormish meat inside the immaculate shell of an almond.
Gypsy Hearts Page 4