The surface gouges and twisted frame gave evidence of the primitive tools and violence Monika had used to spring the combination lock. “Haliburton. It was the best,” I said. The lid flopped open and a miscegenetic crowd of lire, escudos, drachmas, and pesetas scattered to the floor. A split-second estimate counted less than thirty bills total; not a single mark, pound, or franc. Monika coolly maneuvered a pair of tweezers between her eyebrows and plucked an errant hair. Thirty thousand lire, four thousand drachmas, two thousand escudos, and three thousand pesetas. I dug the previous day’s Herald Tribune from my bag and calculated the exchange rates.
“Seventy-one dollars,” I said.
Monika shrugged and drew a thin black line along the top ridge of her eyelid. I swept the plates of half-eaten eggs, the pitcher, and cups of orange juice and coffee with her mirrored compact case to the floor. She froze, either from fear or because she couldn’t complete her eyelash line without the benefit of guiding mirror.
“Where is the rest of the money?” I asked, very calmly, very much in control.
“You’re sitting in most of it. I’m wearing the rest.”
I examined the pop fabric and cut of her blouse, the tacky bead bauble dangling from her wrist, and asked, “Was there a sale at Versace?”
She looked at me very seriously and said, “Versace never has sales.”
I kicked the plates away from my feet, stood, and jerked open the curtain to the window overlooking the Danube. “I can’t believe you’re so stupid to have a Hungarian producer on the string and still pay for your own suite.” I said. “What is this costing us, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Five hundred marks a day.” She retrieved her compact from the rubble of an upended bread basket and returned to painting her eyes. “They made a fuss about payment when I checked in, because I don’t carry credit cards, so I paid for the week. The old hag at the front desk just about kissed my feet. They even sent up a complimentary bottle of champagne.”
“French?”
“Hungarian.”
“I’m impressed.”
If Monika caught the sarcasm in my voice she chose to ignore it. She dabbed eye shadow onto a feathery brush and lightly swept the tips across a closed eyelid. I sat at the table again, reached out, and clipped shut her compact case.
“Stealing the money was bad enough, but to steal and then spend my half is unforgivable.”
A lesser woman would have felt the vestiges of a rationalized guilt, or at the very least exasperation at the rudeness with which I had shut the case, but the stare Monika subjected me to was the guileless product of a superior conscience asking me to rise above the conventions of petty morality. “What fun would it be to steal your money but not spend it?” she asked. “If I still had the money, I’d have to give it back to you. And that would mean I didn’t really steal it, wouldn’t it?”
While I located the implied ends and unwound the implications of that, Monika took her lipstick, rouge, and eye liner to the bathroom mirror, where she began to concentrate on the volume and line of her eyebrows. The threat of an international arrest warrant might shake her where my righteous indignation had left the pencil tip between her fingers without so much as a tremor. I had never witnessed a woman enhance her beauty with so sharp and practiced an eye, but I had never met a woman as consciously beautiful as Monika. Beauty, like art, seemed equal parts natural talent and willful determination. If I revealed Zima’s suspicions and Havran’s threats, she might just as easily decide our partnership had become unacceptably dangerous.
She caught my eye in the mirror with a shrewdly seductive look and asked, “Did you like the way I greeted you at the door last night? Didn’t it excite you?”
The memory of sex struck me like a shock wave, an incandescent blast of desire that swept all sense before it. I gritted my teeth and stared at the floor tiles, angry that my vulnerability could be so readily exposed.
“And our night in the Hotel Paříž? Do you remember?” she taunted. “What we did in the men’s bathroom and the closet? Did you enjoy that?” She brushed past me in the doorway and picked her purse from the foot of the bed.
I followed her into the sitting room, feeling on the edge of understanding something I might not wish to know. “What are you getting at?”
“It all comes tied together. You can’t have one without the other,” she said, and blew me two air kisses as she walked out the door.
After months of labyrinthine Prague, I reveled in the modern sensibility of Pest’s avenues, broad and straight to accommodate the demands of traffic and open to the sky. I deliberately walked the streets with the busiest midmorning traffic, cars weaving in and out of lanes to jostle for position at the next stoplight. The smell of exhaust in bright sunshine overwhelmed me with an unexpected homesickness for the gridlocked streets of Los Angeles. The streets of Prague were as quiet as a museum exhibit, but Budapest was loud, dirty, vulgar. Street-corner statues depicted the legacy of conflict with the Ottoman Empire, brutal warrior kings wielding shield and ax, fallen Turks at their feet. Even the statues of the Hungarian saints, István and Lazlo, gripped swords in massive fists and scowled down from their pedestals. The inhabitants seemed sprung to life from the statues: alienated, aggressive, borderline violent. The men were short and stocky and favored mustaches the size of a push broom. The women had lustrous black hair and dusty skin, and not one of them looked back at me when I stared in erotic admiration unless it was her profession to do so. The stores sold goods yet undreamt of in Prague, and on every street I noted a restaurant that looked like I wouldn’t be risking my life by eating from its menu. Budapest was a modern city, not on the scale of New York or Los Angeles, but I could feel commerce in the rhythms of street traffic and bustling crowds, and, with commerce, money to be skimmed.
I played the tourist through the morning and into the early afternoon, loafing in the gilt and marble splendor of the Café Astoria over a Viennese-style cappuccino and strolling down Vací utca, the shopping promenade where, among flocks of tourists, the black-market money changers and prostitutes plied their trades. Whenever I passed a money-exchange outlet or bank I stepped inside to observe procedures. Our financial situation had not yet become desperate, as I still retained my dwindled stash of counterfeit bills and a portion of the U.S. dollars from Zdeněk’s safe, but considering Monika’s alacritous spending habits those sums wouldn’t last out the week. I had checked with the front desk at the Gellért and discovered she indeed had paid out the week, though I still suspected Henrík had paid and she lied to protect both money and the illusion of virtue. That afternoon, however, I was content to wander without firm direction until the consular section of the U.S. Embassy opened, where I hoped to replace my passport, which had been mysteriously picked from my pocket that very morning.
“I know the exact moment the bastards got it,” I told a sympathetic Hungarian woman at the window for U.S. citizens. “Three men were coming out of a door at the same time I was going in, and we got all tangled up. They were gone by the time I knew what happened. Even if I was a little faster on the uptake and managed to catch one of them, my passport would have changed hands about three times by then—you know how they work.”
The woman clucked sympathetically and handed me the forms for passport replacement. I needed to provide the consulate with proof of U.S. citizenship—with convenient foresight I had photocopied the inside cover and first page of my passport that morning before it had been stolen—a passport fee of $65, and three photographs, which could be acquired from a photography studio a few blocks from the embassy. It took the photographer three tries and a stern lecture on the proper use of a camera to get it right, but the end result came out rather handsomely, I thought, and by the consulate’s closing time I had filled out all the required forms, submitted my passport fee and photographs, and been assured that two days hence I could retrieve my new passport.
I found Monika in high heels and bathing suit when I returned to the suite
early that evening, reading script pages to Henrík, who listened to her impassioned German with an air of directorial authority. He actually smoked from a silver cigarette holder, if you can imagine. A half-empty bottle of champagne—not Hungarian but Taittinger—and two full glasses bubbled at his elbow. The dramatization so absorbed Monika that she didn’t notice my arrival, and though Henrík was perfectly aware he pretended to focus solely on her performance. The swimming suit confirmed my worst suspicions, but his choice of tactics encouraged me. Only a loser would attempt a trick like that.
I startled Monika with applause at the overwrought conclusion of her speech. Her cheeks blushed with equal tints of embarrassment and pride—a common enough reaction in amateur thespians unused to exposing themselves in public. I addressed myself to Henrík. “Ophelia from Hamlet, just before she drowns herself, right? I like the swimming suit—it’s important to make Shakespeare relevant to today’s audiences.”
He embraced her with a congratulatory kiss just off-center to her lips and spoke rapidly in German. Though I didn’t understand a word, I knew enough about directors to smell the fumes of fulsome praise. Likely, he had never heard of Ophelia and thought Shakespeare an exotic African. She listened with an intensity that portended worship. The intimacy of their dialogue offended me. German had been selected as the language of choice to screen me out. I wandered over to the window and stared at the twilight, contemplating various forms of objectionable behavior. She slipped a robe onto her shoulders—a modesty which seemed directed more at my eyes than his—and continued her Teutonic prattle. The problem with Europe was its people spoke too damn many languages.
“Monika say you work at Hollywood,” Henrík said, turning at last to offer a limply reluctant hand.
“I’ve been involved in a few projects,” I admitted, aiming for a tone of modest understatement that would imply a far greater importance.
“I no like much Hollywood movies,” he sniffed.
His jacket, scarf, the cigarette holder and attitude—I suddenly understood that Henrík must have thought himself French.
“Of course you don’t,” I said. “Because as long as there are Hollywood movies around for people to watch, your shitty little films won’t draw an audience.”
Henrík glanced at Monika, puzzled. “Excuse, my English not so good,” he said. She spoke to him in German. He nodded, as though understanding something different than I had intended, and replied in the same tongue.
“Henrík says he too thinks that Hollywood is destroying the film cultures of Europe and must be stopped,” she translated. “He’s surprised to hear you admit something like this.”
I glared at her, piqued at the mistranslation of my remarks. “I’m surprised to hear Hungary has a film culture. I thought it disappeared with Bela Lugosi and the Gabor sisters.”
“Great actors,” Henrík agreed.
Monika merely nodded, as though to confirm that had been the gist of my comments. He grabbed my shoulder and grinned. I had become a hit with him, despite my worst intentions. Like most older citizens of the former Iron Curtain countries, his teeth were rotten.
“He says he’s always happy to meet another filmmaker,” Monika translated, as I attempted to dodge the stench that, at those close quarters, was unavoidable with so fricative a language as German. “Film people understand that great art requires great sacrifice. He hopes you will remember this in the weeks ahead and not let jealousy interfere with my success.”
“How could I be jealous of a hack Hungarian schlockmeister with the breath of a dead canine?” I said, smiling and patting him on the back with a friendliness as ferocious as his.
His smile turned to rictus. No doubt he understood at least part of my insult. Monika hurriedly translated some innocuous remark, and the two exchanged question and explanation before she turned to me and said, “He says he also looks forward to seeing your work, if there is anything to see.”
We stood together beaming with disguised malice before he lamented the passing of time with a trite gesture of watch and, amid a flurry of script pages and tender kisses to the back of Monika’s hand, fled the room.
“You don’t actually kiss him on the mouth, do you?” I asked, when the door shut behind him.
She rushed to a cigarette, lit it, and chased the smoke with a sip of champagne. “I’m not fucking him, if that’s what you mean,” she said.
“That must make him very unhappy.”
“Are you jealous?” she asked.
I laughed at the notion.
“Not of Henrík,” she explained. “Jealous of me. Because I’m actually doing something, and all you do is talk about it.”
“I’m hardly jealous because you got your big break in Hungarian films.”
“You know that little notebook you carry around? I looked in it.”
I mentally thumbed through the contents for incriminating evidence but could remember having written nothing there except phone numbers, shopping lists, and a few one-line script ideas. I raised my eyebrows, as if to say, So?
“It’s almost empty. You’re not writing anything.”
“That isn’t how I work,” I answered.
“You don’t work. You just talk.”
“Talking is work. That’s how I form my ideas.”
“Stop lying. You have no development deal.”
Our dialogue had suddenly grown ugly without my knowing precisely how. I had meant to ascertain the truth of her relations with Henrík, and she had turned it into a surprise attack on my character. I had to defend myself, if not for her benefit, for mine. I said, “No, really, it only looks like I’m not working. I wait until the material has jelled in my mind and then I lock myself in a room for two months.”
“You’re conning yourself with everybody else. There is no Paramount Pictures, no Tom Cruise.”
“Sure there is.”
“You’re a fake.”
“I’m not.”
“A fraud.”
Film was the most important lie of my life, more important than any truth I’d ever known. I had based my being on it. I said, “I do know someone at Paramount.”
“You’re lying to yourself. That’s the sick part. You don’t know the difference.”
“I could get a script read, and Paramount does pictures with Tom Cruise all the time, so really it’s not so unrealistic, my idea of making a film there.”
“You’re fucked up, Nix.”
“No.”
“You’re a liar, a cheat, a thief, a complete and total fake.”
I knelt on the floor, covered my head with my arms, said, “No, I’m not.” Monika towered above, watching me like she would an earthworm flooded from its hole, a small pink thing lying prostrate on the pavement. One conscious press of heel and I’d go squish.
“Poor, bad Nix.” She sighed.
I nearly burst into tears when, instead of smashing me, she knelt and wrapped an arm around my shoulder. I hid my face in her neck. She smelled of sweat and perfume, a musky odor that swelled my throat. I wanted to explain how, with my ambition and energy, I had achieved nothing but a reputation for dubious word and deed.
“I’m a fraud too,” she admitted. “Nobody knows anything true about me.”
“But you have talent,” I protested.
“How would you know? I read in German.”
“I noticed it at the Hotel Paříž. When you walked into the lobby. It’s what movie stars have. People can’t take their eyes off you.”
“If I have a talent, it’s pretending to be somebody I’m not. Just like you. That’s what my bad little Nix should do. He should become an actor.”
I never should have claimed to be a screenwriter, even one who produces. Lack of substance had hollowed out my claim. That I should even want to write a screenplay was absurd; screenwriting was the most abused and least respected profession in Hollywood. Monika was wrong. I wasn’t a total fraud. My problem wasn’t a lack of qualifications but a misreading of my talents. “Mayb
e I should limit myself to producing,” I said. “Producers tell other people what to do. I’m good at that.”
“Producers have money,” Monika pointed out.
“So do I,” I said. “My family is filthy rich. My share is in the millions.”
She pushed me away, thinking that I joked at best or told a calculating lie at worst, but perceiving in my expression a truthfulness which frankly would have been invisible to anyone else, she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Before you start scheming how to steal it from me, you should know that I can’t touch the money for another four years, and then only if I pay the proper filial obeisance to dear old dad.”
“Speak English,” she demanded.
“Kiss my father’s ass,” I explained.
She stroked my hair and coaxed my face to nest again in her neck. “Then kiss his ass, darling, and kiss it good.”
I nuzzled her neck and slipped my hands between terry cloth and skin. Her robe parted to a delicate necklace of collarbone and twin pendants set like pearls in the cups of her bathing suit.
“What if, for example, you got a steady job, said you’d found a nice girl, and were ready to settle down?”
Confessing to Monika things I wouldn’t even confess to myself twined intimacy with unexpected eroticism. I hadn’t anticipated the erotic ramifications of emotional intimacy. The urgency of my desire compelled boldness. I needed to imprint myself upon her, and to prove by her admission of body an equal acceptance of spirit. I lifted her breasts free of cloth and stroked the tips to a ruby-red corona.
“Would that make a difference? I mean, in when you got the money?”
“I could be canonized as a saint, and still I wouldn’t be allowed to touch the principal until my thirtieth birthday,” I said, and gently pushed her supine. She neither resisted nor encouraged. With the tip of my tongue I traced the line of shoulder to neck, from throat to the crease of skin between breast and ribs.
Gypsy Hearts Page 24