Gypsy Hearts

by Robert Eversz

  The first door I knocked on at the second floor summoned neither answer nor sound from within. I moved quickly to the next, which yielded to an offended matron in pink nightgown, who scolded me in the Queen’s tongue for waking her and slammed the door at my back. I ran to the opposite end of the string of numbers, and hammered at the far door. A man with a belly the size and color of a slab of beef answered with a sleepy Ja? I wished him Gute Nacht and pounded the door across the hallway. It opened to a Mediterranean who, when I told him I was looking for my wife and a Japanese man, stared at me as though I was either drunk, stupid, or insane. I moved one room toward the center. The language of the gentleman who flung open that door was incredibly rude, no matter what its Romantic origins. Doors opened up and down the hallway, and persons in various states of national undress peered and stumbled into the light. Soon I was being cursed in half the languages of Europe.

  I judged the distance and obstacles to the bank of elevators down the hall as too daunting and sprinted up the nearer stairs. The arrival of hotel management, considering the clamour I’d caused, was a realistic fear. My legs and lungs began to cramp by the fourth flight of stairs, slowing my progress to a staggering climb. When I knocked at the correct door, I would not play my role with restraint. My wronged husband would not be a civilized man of good breeding but a raging primitive. By the eighth floor, I must have looked as maniacal as I felt. My heart threatened to pound from its cage of ribs, and sweat half blinded me. I tracked the room numbers to 822, paused to focus my concentration, and knocked so gently on the door I might have been caressing it.

  That the Japanese was still crisply dressed moderated my anger. He stood openly in the doorway, blinking in confusion as I ranted about the perfidy of wives who cuckold their husbands. That word, which so appropriately if approximately rhymes with vulgar slang for coitus, seemed to alarm him. He stepped back and attempted to slam the door in my face. I wedged my foot at the base and threw my shoulder into it. The Japanese was a slight man, no more than 140 pounds, and I knocked him well back into the room. Monika stood at the side of the bed, glowing with excitement, the cocktail dress peeled down to her waist. The sight of her unsheathed breasts enraged me, not just with jealousy; she had revealed her most identifiable mark, the snake tattoo adorning her left breast. I called her a dirty whore and meant it, which excited her all the more.

  The Japanese nattered at me in his incomprehensible tongue from the moment I breached the threshold. When I felt his hand on my sleeve I ripped my arm away, turned and threw an overhead right which not only missed its target, but was used by the Japanese to his advantage in flipping me to the floor. I rolled in time to evade a karate chop aimed at my head. Monika laughed and poured herself back into her dress. Her laughter infuriated me. I jumped to my feet and charged, but the Japanese inconveniently moved aside, thrust out a hip and, employing some martial-arts mumbo jumbo, turned me onto my head. I spun free and scrambled back to vertical. The Japanese stood lightly balanced on the balls of his feet, waiting for me to reveal the depth of my stupidity by charging again.

  “Go get him, killer,” Monika laughed, zipping herself up the back.

  I picked up an ashtray and threw it at him, and after that did damage to his hand in deflecting it, I threw a lamp, which struck him on the back. He fell stunned against the wall. I lifted the desk chair above my head; the backrest swinging down clipped his shoulder and made him howl. He ran to the bathroom and slammed the door, crying, “Thief! Help! Thief!”

  How could I possibly act out a scene with someone not just on a different page, but with an entirely different script? “Not thief!” I shouted, pounding on the door. “Husband! Jealous husband!”

  The urge for sexual gratification did not occur to us in the elevator descending to the lobby or in the taxi we hailed on the street outside. The incident left us dry and bitter. Her attempted act of infidelity and derision at my being thrown were unforgivable. She crouched in the far corner of the taxi, sullenly smoking. I huddled in the opposite corner, seething. The stupidity of showing her breasts to the Japanese was maddening. Had I arrived just five minutes later, the question of their consummation would have been unanswerable. She would assure me she hadn’t and I would be almost certain she had. Not once did she look my way. Her anger enraged me. She had no right to attack me with so hostile a silence.

  “Sorry I came before you could, dear,” I remarked. “Do you want me to give you a hand job?”

  Her two-word reply assured me she didn’t.

  “Showing him your tattoo was idiotic,” I charged.

  “That was his interest. Tattoos. It’s some Japanese thing.”

  “Why didn’t you just give him your name and address?”

  “The whole stupid scene wouldn’t have happened with Sven. He’d throw that little man through the wall.”

  “Sven is dead,” I said.

  Monika did not hesitate. She did not think or plan. She sprang at me claw and fang. Her hands seemed everywhere at once. She slapped, slugged, kicked, and bit. My ears rang with murderous shrieks. The taxi careened from curb to curb. I fastened one hand to her side and struggled to catch the second. Her teeth found the soft spot below my jugular vein. Headlights raked the cab and horns bellowed. The rip of metal on metal signaled a violent shift in direction, and I soared through the cab as though launched in zero gravity, Monika at my throat. The pebbly texture of the vinyl which covered the back of the driver’s seat came to my attention as I ascended above it, then the black vortex of hair on the back of the driver’s head sucked me in to indeterminate moments of stunned calm. I don’t think I lost consciousness as much as the will to move. The steady bleat of a horn roused me, if slowly, like an alarm sounding in an adjacent room. I peeled myself off the back of the driver’s seat and pushed Monika upright. Her mouth was smeared in blood, and I feared she had been badly injured, until she smiled, dazed but oddly happy, and I realized the blood was my own.

  A mustached man in a windbreaker jabbered at me when I stumbled onto the street. At that late hour, traffic was thin. Only one other car had stopped, the one we had struck. Traffic slowed, detoured around the wreckage, and sped on. I assumed the man was the driver of the other car, which had fared much better than the Romanian Dacia in which we had ridden. The taxi driver remained slumped over the wheel. Monika staggered out the opposite door and began to laugh as though she had just disembarked from an amusement park ride. I opened the driver’s door and shook his shoulder. He didn’t move or groan. I hadn’t bothered to look at him when I had jumped into the cab and shouted our destination. I pulled him back from the wheel. The horn ceased bleating. The only visible damage to his face was a small cut above his left eyebrow. Blood dripping from my neck stained his shirt. I removed my hands. His head lolled to the side like a ball of cotton candy on a broken cardboard tube. The other motorist nudged around my shoulder to look. The impact of the collision and the force of our bodies striking him from behind had snapped his neck. The dead face looked so wronged I tried to apologize. Monika grabbed my arm and pulled. I turned and ran and did not stop until the fire in my lungs burned the features of that face from memory.

  The wound, as I examined it in the bathroom mirror of our suite, was oval in shape and dark purple in color, like the mark of a leech. Over the shoulder of my mirror image, I watched Monika sit on the closed lid of the toilet and carefully feel with thumb and forefinger her bruised lips. We hadn’t said a word as we had run through the streets of the old quarter and across Szabadság Bridge. I had waited in the lobby with a Hungarian newspaper hiding my bloody shirt while Monika, mouth washed from a rusty spigot, had claimed the room key. Even in the safety of the hotel room, we couldn’t bear to look at each other directly. Her fingers probed her twin arch of teeth for loose fittings. The accident had left her miraculously unhurt, and I think she so minutely examined herself not from vanity but hoping to find in some small cut or scrape a pain to lessen her guilt.

  “If you’re missin
g any teeth, I think you’ll find them in here,” I joked, grinning wryly and pointing at my neck.

  She jerked her fingers from her mouth and stared at the tiles. I pressed a warm cloth against my neck to clean the tooth marks, then a cold cloth to ease the swelling. I pitied her. Holding the cloth to my neck, I searched the bedroom and found an opened pack of cigarettes on the floor by the lamp. Monika craned her neck around the door to watch me. That was the most touching part. She followed me around by foot or glance, afraid of being left alone for more than a moment. I crouched at her feet, speared the center of her lips with a cigarette, and lit it.

  “It was an accident,” I said.

  She swept the hair from her eyes and nodded. The wound on my neck made me wince when I stretched to kiss her brow. I returned to the bedroom and called room service for a bottle of wine. When it arrived, I washed down four aspirins with the first glass. Monika sat on the floor and smoked. Smoking was a return to life. The more she consumed, the healthier she seemed. I pressed a glass of wine into her hand. She took a distracted sip, then gulped it down whole, her gaze fixed on the opposite wall.

  “I killed him,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  “He killed himself,” I answered.

  Monika smoked, drank, thought a moment, and carefully replied, “No. I killed him.”

  “He killed himself by driving a shitty car.”

  “He killed himself by picking us up,” she countered.

  “It was an accident.”

  “I killed him. I should have killed you instead.”

  I let that one go for a minute, then returned, walked around it, sniffed at it, and, unable to resist, picked it up. “Why should you have killed me?”

  “The poor fool was just trying to make a dollar. Two people get into his cab one night, have an argument that has nothing to do with him, and then he dies.”

  “But why me?”

  “Because you’re foolish enough to love me.”

  I stared at the ceiling and thought profound thoughts about chance and destiny. Closing my eyes, I summoned, detail by detail, the first critical moments of our meeting. Clear as a strip of film projected in a dark theater, I watched Monika shout obscenities as I lay prostrate at her feet. That our relationship had begun with such a wretched scene, and by determination I had willed our love into being, exulted me. “Amazing to think how the simple act of our meeting each other—remember that night at Club Lávka?—could result in a chain of events that would end the life of this perfectly anonymous being. How else can you explain it, except by fate?”

  “What night at Club Lávka?” she asked.

  “You won’t remember this because I never told you,” I began, certain the moment had arrived when we would begin to mythologize the initial circumstances of our meeting and mating, like all lovers who feel their love was destined from the start. “We didn’t meet that afternoon over coffee, but two nights before, at Club Lávka. It was just after midnight. You were seated at a table by the river. I had gotten into some silly argument with a friend, and to say I was a little drunk is an understatement. I was ripped. Then somebody elbowed me in the stomach, and I hurried to the railing, because I had to, you know, because I felt sick, but I didn’t get there in time and threw up at your feet.”

  I was laughing by the time I completed the last sentence, expecting to hear her exclaim That was you? I imagined ourselves older and wiser, years hence, still laughing over the incident.

  “But I wasn’t at Lávka that night,” Monika complained.

  “Of course you were,” I insisted. “At a table by the river. You were incredibly angry, but I fell in love with you at first sight.”

  Monika retrieved her purse from the sitting room and searched it for something she failed to find. She looked up, annoyed. “I wasn’t even in Prague two nights before we met.”

  “One night before then,” I tried.

  “Sven and I arrived from Budapest that morning. We checked into our hotel and went straight to the café.” She tossed her purse aside. “I wanted to show you the train tickets, but I guess I put them someplace else or lost them.”

  “It’s been a long night. You’re just confused,” I suggested.

  “I’m not confused!” she shouted. “I hate Lávka. I never go there.”

  I stared at her, astounded. “How could you possibly forget a man throwing up at your feet?”

  “Exactly,” she replied.

  28

  When dealing with an intellect as naturally devious as Monika’s, reasonable suspicion was difficult to separate from paranoia, and the effort of keeping the two apart nearly unhinged me. As the escalating volume of her snores marked the passing hours, I increasingly disbelieved the veracity of her supposed amnesia. My remark about Sven’s demise goaded her into an attempt to hurt and disorient me. She remembered well enough that first night at Lávka but would not admit it. After gulping three-quarters of the bottle of wine, she slept through the night peacefully enough. Little wonder I felt like a wreck when the door began to rattle at the hinges, and I bolted up to find myself alone in bed.

  Henrík! I thought. That silver-haired sultan of smut! By the insistent strength of his fist on the door I was certain he had returned to abduct Monika into a life of hard-core hell. I sprang from the bed and struggled into my trousers, imagining the running motion of his feet as I lifted him by the seat of his pants and dropped him out the window. The banging shook the entire suite. I hurried to the walk-in closet that separated sitting and bed rooms, still fumbling with zipper, button, and clasp. Through a crack between hinge and doorjamb, I watched a sliver of Monika unlock and swing open the front door. No sense in rushing out half undressed. I plucked a polo shirt off the shelf and found the sleeves with my arms. When he thought himself alone with Monika, I’d leap from the closet, grab him by the scruff of the neck, and hurl him into the nearest blunt object. I slipped the polo shirt overhead but neglected to unbutton the top, and when my forehead got stuck in the opening I experienced a comical moment that cut to horror as I pushed my head through the womb of cloth to the figure of István Bortnyk standing just inside the entry hall.

  His voice at that distance was barely audible. I ransacked memory for any mention to Zima or Havran about recent or impending trips to Budapest. Bortnyk had once vowed to hunt me to the grave, and though I considered his threat ridiculous at the time, I cursed myself for the hubris of committing crimes in his territory. I should have pulled Monika out of the country on the day I arrived. He palmed something that looked as though it might be a small picture. I imagined he sought my identification. He had traced Monika through her name on the hotel registration. She looked at the object in his palm and nodded. Had she just betrayed me? I could tell nothing from her reaction. I glanced wildly about the closet for a shelf large enough to conceal me and considered crawling under the bed. Bortnyk would just drag me out by the collar like a dog. Better to fight. The closet was unbearably small. I fought the urge to bolt out the door, shove him aside, and run. The air stifled. I took successive deep breaths that turned to gasps. If I ran, I could knock him cold and escape before he warmed to consciousness. My breathing sounded ragged and sharp, like grinding metal. Impossible that he didn’t hear it; Monika’s nod had informed him of my presence and my rasping lungs pinpointed my exact location in the suite. I searched the closet for something to bludgeon him into submission, but found nothing more deadly than a heavy sweater.

  I retreated to the bedroom, jerked the lamp cord from the wall, and gripped the base by the light socket. Monika nearly took a panicked blow to the crown of her head when she walked through the closet to retrieve her purse. I took her by the arm and mouthed a one-word question. Monika looked through me, not just without recognition but as though I had ceased to exist. I might have already struck her on the head by the dazed look on her face. She turned to unhook my fingers—those inanimate things snagging her blouse—and walked away.

  Though the clatter of footsteps marked thei
r progress out the door, I waited several minutes in silence, suspecting a trap. Lamp cocked above my shoulder, I crept cautiously into the sitting room, feeling like a character in a bad suspense film about to be fooled by scrambling cat or windblown shutters. Such cinematic canards lull the character into a false sense of security while on the periphery the killer lurks, but a thorough search assured me I was alone in the suite. I chain-latched the door and raced from room to room, jerking out suitcases and clothes.

  Remaining in Budapest would invite my own beheading, or whatever the style of execution in that barbaric country. I would pack my belongings, draft a note to Monika instructing her to meet me in Warsaw, and flee to the train station. That Bortnyk had not searched the suite proved he did not yet know we were partners. But where would we meet in Warsaw? I’d never been to any Central or Eastern European cities other than Prague and Budapest. And if I thought of a foolproof meeting place, could I be certain she would join me? My breath raced so quickly I could not catch it. I darted to my wallet on the nightstand for a snapshot of my finances, and discovered I hadn’t enough money to take a taxi to the train station. Monika had pilfered me while I slept. My heart beat so violently I feared I would vomit the thing. After several blank moments, I found myself on hands and knees, lungs barking for air.

  A towel soaked in cold water and molded over my face restored a less hysterical pace of breath and a return of my senses. Monika was a good enough actress to convince Bortnyk of the falseness of any accusation and keep my identity secret, if she wished. To abandon her would not be just foolhardy, as she would in turn abandon me, but would be an act of cowardice branding me unworthy even to my own conscience. I breathed slowly in and slowly out. If she failed to return by late afternoon, I would notify the Danish ambassador and seek the counsel of a local lawyer, careful to screen my identity from both. Bortnyk could not possibly know anything. She would certainly return. He could not have tracked Monika so quickly without a name and passport number, which implied he wanted her for something other than last night’s debacle. But his mere arrival on the scene commanded my departure.