Gypsy Hearts

by Robert Eversz

  Zdeněk’s desk lay against the far wall. I ferreted through the drawers for anything remotely resembling a series of numbers that might spring the lock. Zdeněk wasn’t stupid enough to leave his combination lying about, and I soon abandoned the search. My life crumbled. The first grand caper I’d attempted was a failure. Monika would leave me. I hadn’t any money remaining except counterfeit bills. The next morning I’d scrape hands and knees crawling to beg Dickie to forget what I’d said about the family; afterward I’d call Father, whimpering what a bad boy I’d been. Then, the handcuffed humiliation of a plane ride on wired money, back into the custody of my parents like an extradited criminal.

  The muted chime of bells caught my attention. I became overwhelmingly conscious of the passage of time. The bell sounded once, twice. I glanced at my watch. Half past the hour. Not only had I accomplished nothing, I was late. It seemed as though ten minutes had passed since I’d left Monika. I laid two tin boxes on the desk and slid my thumbnail between the key-ring coils, methodically working loose the keys to front and inside doors. Even as I laid each in a bed of wax and pressed, I despaired of success. Nothing had worked according to plan and a sudden fit of reason convinced me that something else would go awry between mold and key. I dug out a teaspoon-sized plug of wax from a remaining tin, stuffed it into the hole in the jamb at the base plate, and shut the door. A stroke of genius! Anyone rattling the knob from the outside would conclude it was locked. I lifted on the knob and pushed with my shoulder. The door sprang open. The victory was small but lifted my spirits immeasurably. I repeated the procedure—cracked open the front door and plugged the base plate from the inside—before slipping quietly into the night.

  Only when a good hundred yards distant did I begin to run, whipped on by paranoid fantasies of Zdeněk clamping Monika’s wrists while demanding the management call the police, which alternated with more realistic fears that his hand wiggled between her willing thighs. My gasping breath drew a startled look from the doorman when I arrived at the Hotel Paříž. The elderly English couple had been replaced by a young American quartet, but the Germans remained, talking boisterously over a small arsenal of alcoholic drinks. I reclaimed my original table, signaled the waiter, and ordered a double Scotch on the rocks. While I waited for my drink, I snuck over to the restaurant, where I ducked the white-frocked maître d’ and snagged Monika’s eye. Zdeněk’s hands were nowhere near the hem of her dress. She laughed at one of his remarks, pretending, while she fondled the flute of a champagne glass, to find him amusing. A brilliant actress!

  “Zdeněk invited me to visit a hotel he invested in,” Monika taunted when I laid the keys in her palm outside the door to the women’s room. “What would you say if I let him sleep with me tonight?”

  I shocked myself with the viciousness of my reply. “I’ll kill him. I’ll break his legs, smash his skull, cut out his tongue and eyes.”

  Monika backed down the hall, the bright-as-emeralds look in her eyes luring me to an unmarked door that gave with a turn of the knob to a closet of some kind; a wedge of light bisected a shelf of linens until the door shut us in darkness. I felt Monika’s hands and mouth everywhere at once.

  “And is there very much money?” she whispered.

  “More than I can carry,” I answered, more or less truthfully.

  “I think you should let him fuck me. So he doesn’t suspect.”

  She pulled me to the floor. Various body parts were thrust upon me in the darkness, identifiable by taste and texture, though she moved with such frantic passion I was rarely certain of the relation of these parts to the whole. My most critical buttons gave way, and I was enveloped as though swallowed whole. I haven’t much memory of events after that. Never before had I been subject to such passion. I remember grasping something like linen and stuffing it into her mouth to silence her cries, then the sound of a door opening and shutting when she left me wasted on the floor.

  A peculiar tranquillity settled over my thoughts as I stared up into the darkness. That evening I had utterly failed at my immediate objective and twice fulfilled my greatest aspiration. I knew what I had to do next. My resources were limited. Even if the molds were perfect, the obvious solution would not have changed. I didn’t know where to acquire Semtex, and if I found a few ounces on my doorstep I’d be more likely to blow myself up than Zdeněk’s safe. Had I been able to purchase a stethoscope I wouldn’t have known what a tumbler falling into place sounded like, and I didn’t know any safecrackers I could hire by the hour. Had I attempted to formulate a plan around any of these possibilities, the plan would have failed. I had expected events that evening to follow my plan, but like the film scripts I attempted to write, my plan was incomplete and unrealistic, no deeper than the one-line concept to which I reduced all ideas.

  I straightened my wits with my pants and slipped from the linen closet, pretending to be oblivious to the astonished stare of a waiter who witnessed my exit. He would not soon forget having seen me, but the odds of anyone asking him the type of question that would elicit memory were so remote that I quickly discounted the possibility. I paid my bill and wandered up a garish Václavské náměstí still crowded with foreign teenagers and Czech whores. A drink might serve the dual purpose of quenching my thirst and setting up an alibi for the evening, should events conspire to require one of me. Repré Club, located in the basement of Obecní Dům, always attracted a post-midnight expatriate crowd, and as I found its dilapidated Art Nouveau trimmings more to my liking than the cavernous Ubiquity, I decided to try my luck there, descending a burnished wooden staircase into the smoke-filled din of what local traditionalists liked to refer to as the nightly rape of one of Prague’s most significant cultural landmarks.

  A few hundred of the 10,000 Americans living in Prague at the time regularly frequented clubs like Lávka and Repré; after a few months of nightly carousings it was easy to spot the regulars among the tourists and the occasional Czech. I smiled and nodded to familiar faces as I pressed through the crush of bodies, making certain they recognized and noted my presence. At the bar, I downed one beer in a long draught and nursed a second. A scribbler of dime detective novels elbowed next to me to talk about his latest potboiler. I politely nudged the conversation to topics of sex, stating unambiguously that I was to meet a beautiful Romanian at Staroměstské náměstí at 2 A.M.; the poor girl hadn’t a place to stay for the night so I was letting her sleep in my apartment until the following morning, when she was to catch a train back to her native Bucharest. I cornered a young playwright from Boston with the same story as he stumbled out of the men’s room. For the next two hours, I worked my way through the club, disciplining my imagination to repeat the story in unvarying detail to everyone I met, though I couldn’t decide whether or not I’d slept with the Romanian girl and thus told conflicting sexual histories of our relationship, from the chaste liaison I’d described to the pulp writer to a more ribald version in which we had abandoned our trousers and inhibitions in a men’s room toilet stall at the Hotel Paříž. I doubted the inconsistency would lead to any real difficulties; men are notorious for lying about their sexual exploits and if pressed to explain I could plead either braggadocio or modesty, depending on which answer better served me.

  Staroměstské náměstí was deserted by 4 A.M. The few night owls drank their way to sunrise, and the worm hunters remained warm in their beds. A swift yank on the knob and a strategically applied shoulder popped open the door to Zdeněk’s change booth. I thought about Monika while I waited in the back room, keeping track of time in the darkness with periodic clicks of the flashlight onto my wristwatch. My new plan was so simple it required little preparation or thought; the principal requirement was to keep my wits when the action began. I couldn’t decide whether Monika’s behavior signaled a significant and permanent change in our relationship or an aberrance of passion. I had kept my many failures of plan a secret. Was it not possible that my seeming mastery of the situation had moved her to admiration and passion?
Of course she couldn’t overnight forget the emotional loss of Sven; if she could easily move from one man to the next I could just as easily be displaced. This explained how she could treat me with complete disdain a few minutes after passion had exhausted itself. Her affections would become more constant as her undeniable and instinctual attraction to me gradually wiped Sven from her heart. I imagined us sunning on a beach in the South of France, drinks at sunset on the veranda of our ocean-view penthouse, turning heads as we sweep into a casino at Monte Carlo, dressed cuff to cravat by Armani. …

  The rattle of a turning lock woke me sometime later. No windows, no light, no way to tell if morning had arrived. I jumped to my feet and fumbled the flashlight, which clanged and clattered to the tiles as loud as a streetcar. I froze, listening. Had he heard? I dropped on hands and knees and felt for the satchel. The room was pitch black. I lost track of left and right, up and down. My hands stumbled over canvas flap and zipper. A blade of blue-white light sliced beneath the door. The scuff of a foot turning, a door thumping shut, a dry cigarette cough: the normal sounds of someone coming to work in the morning. I unzipped the satchel, groped my props, and picked the flashlight from the tiles. Four hours to prepare myself for Zdeněk’s arrival and still he had caught me by surprise. I clenched the knife and flashlight between my legs and fumbled with the ends of the scarf. When the key entered the lock my heart thumped as loudly as fists on a door. I couldn’t get the loose ends wrapped into a full knot and hadn’t time to try again. I gripped the flashlight in my left hand and knife in my right and watched the door swing open, suddenly horrified that it would swing into me. I backed into the corner, holding my knife like a spear carrier in a third-rate opera afraid of tripping up the tenor.

  The overhead fluorescents clicked on bright as klieg lights. The room went white. My eyes sparked and burned. Bits and pieces struck my eye—a wall, the door, a rose sport coat. I stumbled forward and kicked shut the door, blinking furiously. I pressed the knifepoint into Zdeněk’s back and, my voice thick with what I imagined sounded like a Ukrainian accent, I said, “Don’t move or I keel you,” but the accent took a pratfall in my mouth and I had to bite my tongue to keep from adding, señor.

  “Cože?” Zdeněk said, half turning.

  “Don’t turn around! Hands, reach for sky!”

  Zdeněk obeyed. My scarf slipped off my nose when I spoke, and only by nipping it with my teeth did I keep it on my face. I elbowed the light switch and spotlit the safe with my flashlight.

  Zdeněk responded in a language rich in consonants, Czech or one of the other Slavic tongues. I let the scarf slip to my neck. The bastard was trying to trick out my nationality. Brutality doesn’t come naturally to me. I reminded myself that I had no conscience. I wrapped my arm around his throat and stuck my knife until I heard him yelp. I told him to kneel. He kneeled. I spotlit the combination dial and told him if he didn’t open it I’d kill him. His hands trembled on the dial. I could smell his sweat and the lingering scent of a familiar perfume. I risked removing the knife from his throat to pull the scarf over my face. Most women can be personally identified by a heady mixture of natural and commercial scents. I could smell Monika from across a crowded room. She’d gotten close enough to rub her scent onto Zdeněk. The safe popped open. He sat back on his heels. I kicked the satchel and told him to fill it. When I caught him examining the label I dug the knife tip into the back of his neck. He jerked forward and plunged both hands into the safe. If he pulled a gun I couldn’t hesitate to kill him. His hands emerged holding nothing but deutsche marks, dollars, pounds sterling, a fat rainbow of notes arcing from safe to satchel. He emptied the safe in less than thirty seconds. I told him to push the satchel toward the door. He did, and waited for his next instruction, hands on knees.

  I hadn’t thought how to end the scene. I somehow imagined vanishing, with Zdeněk none the wiser that I’d gone. But I couldn’t very well just leave him kneeling like that, able to jump up and shout for help the moment I left his office. Stabbing or knocking him over the head seemed brutal. He looked too vulnerable kneeling before me, head lowered, waiting. I didn’t want to kill him. I wanted to be merciful. But still, he reeked of Monika’s perfume. What if he’d actually taken her to his hotel? I raised the flashlight over my head and brought the butt end full force onto his skull. He fell onto his side. His eyes looked up at me glazed and vacant. I was sure he and Monika had been up to something. I hit him a second time, harder, in the face.

  20

  By the looks of his light-socket hair and swollen eyes, Andrew had been sleeping when I had rung and rung again the buzzer to his apartment. His T-shirt, bearing the bleach-faded likeness of Kurt Cobain, bunched haphazardly into jeans buttoned once at the top; at the bottom one dirty white-socked foot scratched another with a gaping hole in the toe. I was happy to see him, not just because I needed to establish an alibi but because I was always happy to see Andrew.

  I said, “Did I wake you I’m sorry I just wanted to apologize for what I said the other day I was under a lot of stress and you know I didn’t mean it if you hadn’t run away I could have explained but I want you to know that it really bothered me and I’m sorry.”

  He rubbed his eyes as though seeing an unwelcome apparition, and asked, “What time is it?”

  “About eight,” I lied.

  Andrew said, “Look, you don’t get it, so I’ll spell it out for you. I’m not your friend, I don’t want to talk to you, and I sure as hell don’t want to see you at eight o’clock in the morning.”

  “But I’ve changed!” I protested.

  Andrew slammed the door in my face. I left the building elated. That he had asked me the time was a great stroke of luck. In this, he was a far better friend than he realized and I could have hoped. He would soon enough forgive and forget my unfortunate remark about his cripple. I looped back to my apartment through side streets and alleys, confident that in the heft of my satchel I carried the resources to begin leading the life I’d imagined with Monika. I’d suggest a trip to Cannes. At one of those famous little-known bistros we’d bump into Michael Eisner. He’d mistake me for someone he’d met and ask about my newest project. I’d pitch it on the spot and after a half hour of negotiations we’d shake hands on the deal. Monika was always alluring in these fantasies; a black haired, green-eyed elegance, the kind of woman to give a man both confidence and prestige.

  A different Monika stared back at me from the couch of my smoked-out apartment. She sat huddled on the floor, wrapped in a blanket. Lank and tangled hair spread like an oil spill down the sides of her face. An ashtray within flicking range overflowed with cigarette butts. Black streaks lined her cheeks where the mascara had run, and her lipstick had smeared well beyond the ridged confines of her lips. I mistook her for drunk and, imagining the tawdry scene which preceded her dishabille, remarked, “Zdeněk gave you a good fucking, did he?”

  The wail that pitched from Monika could have come from a mortally wounded child. She shrieked with pain. My initial reaction was not compassionate; I wanted to bolt out the door or slap her. I dropped the satchel and stared. I felt as if one person repeatedly slugged me in the stomach while a second ran an ice cube up and down my spine. She hid her ruined face in the folds of the blanket. I couldn’t fathom how my remark had pierced her; earlier, she had confessed an intent to commit the act I had accused her of and seemed excited by the complications sure to ensue. Her wails quieted to sobs. I crept closer, ready to flee if she should burst out again. Her sobbing neither gained nor lost momentum but fluctuated with the regularity of a looped recording. I allowed my hand tentatively to wander to her shoulder, then, as her sobbing abated, gently wisped away the hair falling over her forehead.

  She spoke rapidly, words ellipsed by grief and muffled by the blanket, which she cupped to her face like handfuls of earth. I couldn’t make complete sense of her, catching only phrases. Something about fear of abandonment and loss of family. I’d scoffed at the cliché of a melting heart too many ti
mes to mention, but mine was reduced to the consistency of chocolate in a boy’s pocket on a summer day. She had never before shown me vulnerability. When she said she couldn’t stand being abandoned and followed that plea with my name, a seven-headed hydra of virtues stirred in my depths. I said many things of the type that most men regret later having said, such as I’d loved her from the moment I’d first seen her, I’d never leave her, if we were ever separated I’d scorch the earth until I found her. Her hand slipped out of the blanket and grasped mine. Immediately, I got an erection. Shocking, that my finer sentiments could be so directly linked to a sexual impulse. I had always imagined such feelings to be chaste. When I opened my arms she turned her face toward mine and offered her lips. My tongue on a scouting expedition met the solid gate of her teeth. It was the cloistered kiss of a nun, cool and closed-mouth.

  “The job went just like clockwork. You should see the fat bundles of money!” I exclaimed with a theatrical enthusiasm, thinking it might rekindle her passion. Twice in twelve hours should have been enough, but Monika’s effect on me was priapismic. She curled into my chest. I shifted my body to retrieve the bag but was held in place by the resistance of deadweight. I let her slip into the crook of my arm. Her eyes were closed, and in the soft rhythms of her breath I could hear a faint mewing, like that of a cat chasing mice in her sleep.

  Early that afternoon I awakened just enough to carry Monika from floor to bed, where I fell into a dream which would be laughable in its trite iconography had it not been completely terrifying. In the dream, I swam endless circles in a brimstone lake, supervised by Luciferian creatures resembling Inspector Zima and that Hungarian cop, Bortnyk, who prodded me with pitchforks whenever I attempted to land. Most dreams unfold from premise to denouement in seconds, but it seemed I swam forever the same desperate circles.