Gypsy Hearts

by Robert Eversz

  “Then the retainer will represent your interests, solely?” he inquired, delicately.

  “Correct,” I answered and, reaching for my wallet, asked the amount.

  “Two thousand,” he stated.

  I slipped two thousand-crown notes from my wallet and laid them on the desk. Havran smiled at the notes like a shortchanged cashier.

  “Dollars,” he said.

  I raised my eyebrows, frowned, cleared my throat, but no matter how discreetly I showed my surprise neither his expression nor the quoted amount changed. I lifted the thousand-crown notes from the desk like corpses and crumpled them into the pocket of my sport coat.

  “Just so I understand your price structure, how much would the retainer have been had it included my cousin?”

  “I don’t believe in hypotheticals, Mr. Miller. Just the facts! And the fact is the retainer will be for you only.”

  “But you didn’t know beforehand that the retainer wouldn’t include my cousin, so the fact is, you prepared two bills.”

  “I can see now you are a clever fellow. If you look at the facts that way, then indeed, the fact is I estimated the cost of a retainer covering both you and your cousin at twice the amount of you alone.”

  The gross from Zdeněk’s safe was just over $4,000. No doubt Inspector Zima was among the group of my concerned friends. The greedy bastards knew the exact amount and were attempting to steal it whole. I felt an intense resentment that all my hard work was going to the benefit of thieves. I said, “For that amount, I trust my vacation will not be a permanent one.”

  “A temporary measure, we hope,” Havran clucked, rising from behind his desk to escort me to the door. “No Euro-pessimism for us, no sir! I sincerely hope you will soon return to walk our historic streets.” He tapped twice on my shoulder as he opened the door. “But even if you choose to take a permanent vacation, you must not neglect your Czech friends. This is of utmost importance. They have means to reach you wherever you choose to live, and the last thing any of us wants is a forced return from your vacation.”

  “I’ll bring the retainer tomorrow,” I promised.

  “You are as wise as you are clever,” he pronounced, heartily pumping my hand in farewell. “How I envy you, Mr. Miller. How I envy you!”

  The late-afternoon sun slanted across copper-green cupolas and red tile roofs when I stepped onto Paržíšká Street. I did not walk with purposeful direction; instead, I wandered aimless through baroque shadows cast at cubist angles across the cobblestones, ruminating on the profound impact Monika had made on my life as I considered every twenty yards or so the contrast of architechtures in my path—a Romanesque rotunda here against a Renaissance sgraffito facade there—and marveled at the play of light where a gable or spire struck against the sky. Wandering the city served as my chief recreational activity most afternoons and rarely failed to lift my spirits, though that afternoon the thought that I was to leave it oppressed terribly. After some time I arrived at Na Příkopě, a broad pedestrian avenue built on the site of a moat which once defended Prague from foreign invaders, and now served as one of the city’s principal attractions to the descendants of those same invaders. I found an empty bench and sat, my face turned sunward, to watch the human panoply: tourists waddling behind umbrella-toting guides; construction workers in blue uniforms as frayed and dusty as their skin; nouveau riche Czechs in ill-fitting German suits and white socks and State bureaucrats in ill-fitting Polish suits and white socks; country Gypsies begging with children clung to flowered dresses; scrawny metal heads from East Germany and robust metal workers from West Germany; goateed Americans in backpacks and baseball caps and too-loud voices; and everywhere the young Czech girls, high-cheekboned and curious-eyed, tantalizingly lanky and short-skirted and so intensely sexual it hurt to watch them, knowing that in a few short years by the regional curse of reverse alchemy they would turn short and squat and grim as their mothers and grandmothers. I observed with a sense of having missed something vital during my few months in the city, like a man who doesn’t realize until the relationship has terminated that he’s been in love all along.

  Someone calling out my name in public has always startled me like a sudden unmasking, and hearing my name shouted as I approached my apartment building, I scuttled through the door and quickly locked it behind, terrified that it might be Zima or one of his ex-STB henchmen; it wasn’t until I turned to glance through the glass that I caught sight of Andrew’s frantic wave and grin. I opened the door with a sheepish excuse that I hadn’t heard him calling out my name. He laughed—a bright musical sound in his throat, like ringing glass—and jibed, “And you were so angry at me for not hearing your shouts at Jo’s Bar.”

  I summoned the courage to look him directly in the eyes, expecting irony but greeted instead by a cheery twinkle. Surprisingly, he seemed genuinely glad to see me, and suggested a walk through Josefov, the site of the former Jewish ghetto of Prague which bordered my apartment building. I readily agreed. We said nothing for the first few minutes—I was simply too happy to be in his company to risk an off-putting first remark—and it wasn’t until we began to circumscribe the walls of the old Jewish cemetery that he observed, “You look troubled. Is there anything wrong?”

  After I’d seen nothing but the back of his hand the past few weeks, his sudden concern nearly moved me to tears. I said, “So much is wrong I don’t know where to start.”

  “I think I know. The police paid me a visit this morning.”

  I feigned surprise. “Inspector Zima? Rumpled and chain-smoking?”

  “That’s him. He asked if I’d seen you a few mornings ago.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “The truth, of course. That you woke me up early, about eight.”

  “I expected nothing less of you, but thanks all the same.”

  “Did you know a tourist visa is good for only three months?” he asked, seemingly apropos of nothing.

  “Sure, but nobody bothers to check.”

  “Zima did. I’ve been here three and a half months.”

  I stopped him with an arm to his elbow and a look of genuine remorse. “He’s not going to—no—how awful!”

  “I simply can’t allow myself to be kicked out of the country now.”

  “I know a good lawyer,” I suggested.

  “I knew you’d want to help,” he said with a light smile. “Ferida and I are getting along really well. She’s the girl who—”

  His mouth stiffened and his face flushed dark red.

  I tugged him along and said, “Please forget I ever said that horrible thing.”

  “Part my fault. I shouldn’t have pushed you,” he admitted, very generously, I thought. “You understand, she’s a refugee, she can’t just pick up and go anywhere to follow me. And the work I’m doing here is really important. I can’t afford to stop.”

  “You make me feel guilty, Andrew. I’m not doing anything here, not anything of value like you.”

  “You’ve engaged this lawyer yourself?” he asked, with an inappropriate intensity.

  “Sure. He’s not cheap, but he knows the system here.”

  “Then I don’t feel quite so bad.”

  “I told you it’s nothing to worry about.”

  “You misunderstand. It’s not the risk of deportation that worries me. Not anymore. Knowing you have a good lawyer means I don’t feel so bad about changing my story.”

  “Changing your story how?”

  “I told him you’d stopped by not at eight but at nine.”

  “You lied?”

  “That’s why I came by to talk to you. To warn you. I figured either you or I was going to be deported, so why should it be me? I’m sure the charge isn’t anything very serious.”

  “Grand theft and assault is very serious.”

  “You didn’t do it, did you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well then. Nothing to worry about.”

  “But you’re my only alibi!”


  “All you have to do is catch a train to the West this evening. You said yourself you weren’t doing anything important here.” This, Andrew said with a friendly squeeze of my shoulder and a merry gleam to his voice, as though he had not betrayed but merely caught me in a logic trap of my own making. That Andrew had the effrontery to lie about the false time line I’d constructed flabbergasted as much as galled. What was the use of lying about anything if someone else’s lie could undo it all? I sputtered a protest that quickly disintegrated to indignant fricatives. Andrew cut me off with a hearty handshake and an encouragement to write when I’d reached safety. “So I can stop worrying about this terrible mess you’ve gotten yourself into,” he said. Then he was off, striding briskly toward Staroměstské náměstí—frequently checking over his shoulder to be certain I didn’t follow—and a claimed meeting with his beloved Ferida.

  There are moments in everyone’s existence, I suppose, that define personal impotence in the face of a universe not just indifferent but seemingly hostile to human will. Moments when events have so conspired against the successful exercise of will that to try at all seems absurd. No matter how I tried to rationalize it, that I was the victim of an indifferent universe or vindictive God or just personally incompetent, I couldn’t suppress the horror felt when I entered my apartment and noticed the sudden absence on the floor where Monika’s suitcase had been.

  Once the first shock passed, brutal as a wall falling, I rushed from corner to corner, upending the couch, flinging open the closet door, charging into the bathroom in hopes of finding that she hadn’t left me, but had merely moved the suitcase to another location inside the apartment. When I failed to find it I threw the contents of cabinets to the floor in frustration, searching places a suitcase of that size could not have reasonably been. In the kitchen, I found the note she had left behind, folded beneath an overflowing ashtray:

  Nix,

  You were right. I am being followed. You know where to find me.

  Monika

  The cryptic last line maddened me. What did she mean? I had no idea where to find her. We had never discussed how to reconnect should events force our separation. The content of the note seemed designed to assure me of her good intentions when it was evident she had run off with the silver-maned rogue I’d seen accompanying her in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel. I was reasonably certain she hadn’t seen me. Monika was always clever when forced to it. She knew I was wary of her being followed, and so invented that as an excuse to flee. I would not admit to the irony of her having left me because she feared she was being followed by someone who, it turned out, was me.

  I paced the apartment, certain at that very moment she stood in the toilet stall of an exclusive hotel or restaurant, skirt hiked and my competitor at her back. No Czech or resident alien would risk taking a cab from Václavské náměstí, the drivers loitering there known for being no better than licensed thieves. He was a tourist, then. I knew almost nothing about Monika’s sexual tastes except their unpredictability. He could have been a casual pickup, someone from her past, a mark from whom she planned to con a little traveling money. I knew she hadn’t any money. She couldn’t survive long without funds. The rogue looked as though he had style if not wealth. But why bother with a con when she had shown such indifference to the proceeds from Zdeněk’s safe?

  The answer nipped at the edges of consciousness like a small, nervous dog. I kicked it away repeatedly, but each time the idea returned with sharper teeth and shriller insistence. I pulled the wallet from my pocket and placed it on the kitchen table. I told myself I wronged her with my suspicions, and, from the very beginning of our relationship, she hadn’t remained two steps ahead of me. I flipped open my wallet. The claim token to the locked case full of cash I had left at the train station was missing, an absence as large in my wallet as Monika had suddenly become in my life.

  24

  Lethargy numbed my desire to will any muscle to move, though the involuntary ones continued to pump and flex in the minutiae of an increasingly pointless existence. I don’t know how long I sat at the kitchen table, staring at my wallet. Hours, it seemed. A loud knocking once roused my chin from my chest. Sometime later, when it repeated itself with greater insistence, I stood and ambled to the front door, where I peeped a scarlet-faced Uncle John hammering with a beefy fist and shouting things I’d prefer not to repeat. I settled into the chair by the end table in the living room and stared at the dustless square where I had kept the phone, waiting for Monika to call between bouts of consciousness that she couldn’t because I had thrown the phone out the window. When I tired of staring at the spot where the telephone had rung, I returned to the kitchen and stared at the fold in my wallet where the claim token had been, like a castled king barricaded behind rook and pawns, shuttling ineffectually between squares.

  I could think of nowhere to go without Monika. Despite her coldness and betrayals, I could not imagine life without her. To flee to some strange city would lose her and the money she presumably had removed from baggage claim at the train station. Without those funds, I couldn’t pay Havran and prevent my arrest. Clearly, I couldn’t leave Prague without some assurance of finding her and the money. She wrote that I knew where to find her. As dawn splashed red the walls of my apartment, I again searched cabinets, drawers, and cracks in walls for some hidden message, and found nothing but lipstick-stained glasses and cigarette butts.

  She wouldn’t have left evidence in so obvious a place, I reasoned. She feared the police would search my flat; any clues left behind would lead them straight to her. Her cryptic message had been a clever strategy to confuse them but encourage me. She would leave word somewhere obscure yet obvious, a location only I would know to search. But where? The message desk at the Merkur? That was her method of contacting Sven, not me. The Gellért in Budapest? Her memories of our encounter there would not be fond. The men’s room at the Hotel Paříž? Certainly memorable, but inappropriate. Where could she be certain I’d look? I retrieved my wallet from the kitchen table and realized with fantastic elation not only the perfect dead-letter drop but the only permissible explanation for the missing claim token.

  * * *

  The same matron in floral print smock attended baggage claim at Hlavní Nádraží. Rather than wrestle with her limited grasp of English, I snared a fluent passerby who explained, following my instructions, that my claim token had been stolen with my wallet. The argument that followed, in which the matron insisted that I couldn’t remove any baggage without a claim token, and I calmly repeated the tag number and a description of the case, ended when she admitted that the bag had been removed sometime earlier, she could not remember when or to whom. I palmed a hundred crowns and slipped it under the service bell. She had been bribed so infrequently the amount shocked her, ashen face blazing as her nubbed nails scrabbled at the bill and swept it into an apron pocket.

  “A young woman, very black hair,” my translator repeated. “And an older man. Her father? Not Czech. The woman had the claim ticket.”

  In dashing off her note to me, Monika had misused adverbs; although I didn’t know where to find her, I did discover how. At the Ambassador Hotel, I slipped the desk clerk five hundred crowns and a story about a meeting I’d missed with a gray-haired man whose name I had regrettably forgotten but who had been a guest of that hotel. The size of the tip encouraged a prodigious display of memory from the clerk, aided by a registration card which included the guest’s name—Henrík Havas—Hungarian passport number, and street address in Budapest. In my more optimistic moments, I reasoned that Monika had such confidence in my abilities that she had fled knowing I would find her. In my less sanguine moments, I recognized that she had either caught me following her, and fled with a competitor as a punishing ruse, or I had been replaced by a man she would present as “her uncle” when next we met. Either scenario included a new character whose motivations conflicted with mine.

  My arrival at the Keleti train station in Budapest was greeted by a scu
lpture of a man howling, eyes wide and hair electrically aglow, depicted in neon tubes and steel beams bent with the grace of a line drawing. The sculpture was an advertisement for an electronics company, hung just inside the mouth of the arch where all trains arrive and depart, and though it did nothing for the image of that company, it prepared visitors for the horrors awaiting in the city of Magyars. Swarms of neophytic capitalists descended upon the train as it pulled into the station and assaulted the disembarking passengers—mostly American tourists and Germans from Berlin—with offers of rooms to rent and cabs to hire. Such scenes were standard in Central European train stations at the time, renting services to foreigners one of the few methods of securing hard currency in the former Iron Curtain countries. I brushed away those who thrust maps and photographs at me to speak with the swarthy gentlemen who called “Taxi?” in soft voices as I passed. I was keen to find an English-speaking driver who wouldn’t rip me off, and after rejecting the first two candidates I selected a short and squat man in his fifties who drove a dark-blue unmarked Russian Lada: perfect, I thought, for surveillance.

  From the rear seat, I reveled in the wide avenues and fast traffic of Budapest. With the weekend approaching, I could not be expected to have Havran’s retainer until the following week, giving me five to six days to locate Monika and the money, perhaps more if he wasn’t quick to alert Zima that I’d tramped without paying the bill. The address listed in Henrík Havas’s passport led the driver to a not unimpressive villa in the Buda Hills, just above the Castle Palace. In Los Angeles, a villa of that type in a similar location—say, a tree-lined street in the Hollywood Hills—would have fetched a million. I instructed the driver to park half a block down and across the street and ambled over to closer inspect the premises. Not that I suspected Henrík Havas of being rich; in Budapest a villa like that could have meant anything. Half were owned by the State, and most of the rest by those whose primary currency was good political connections. The villa needed a fresh coat of paint and the services of a competent gardener, but Henrík’s name was the only one on the front gate. I returned to the Lada and the task of waiting. Whenever a car drove past, my driver squirmed nervously behind the wheel. The few passersby assiduously avoided eye contact. Occasionally, my glance would cross the driver’s in the rearview mirror. He seemed on the verge of speaking, but when I smiled with bland confidence he kept silent. Little doubt he suspected I worked for the CIA.