by Andrew Ervin
Brutus didn’t bother to lock the door. There was nothing left to lose anymore. He pushed the computer aside, lifted Magda onto the edge of the table, and pulled up her skirt. She had on a pair of sexy see-through panties, like she had been waiting for him. Her perfume billowed off of her neck and chest—it was enough to make him want to spend the rest of his life writing love songs for her. She grabbed him closer, rubbing up against him and breathing in his ear until he couldn’t hear anything else. He knew someone was about to fly through the door any minute and wondered if Magda would yell rape just to save her own job. But he didn’t stop. Papers fell to the floor in piles. She kicked at the maps on the whiteboards, further blurring the Serbia-Bosnia border. When she stopped huffing and the blood no longer pounded in his head, Brutus noticed that a shortwave radio on a bookshelf had been playing the entire time. Magda recomposed herself, getting dressed and fixing her hair in the reflection of the laptop’s screen while Armed Forces Radio bleated the current number-one song, a bastardization of Billie’s “Strange Fruit,” to which someone had added a gaudy drum-and-bass rhythm.
Brutus zipped up, then sat in a cushy office chair at the head of the table and pulled Magda to him again.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I need to get back.”
He didn’t release her. A part of him was in love with Magda. When the time came, maybe he would invite her to visit him in Philly. But that was too far down the road to even contemplate. And imagine what Elvin would say when Brutus showed up around the block with a rich white woman on his arm. He could already hear the abuse he would get.
Before she could wiggle away, he handed her a small bundle of letters he needed mailed. Three of them contained the whole truth and were addressed to media outlets and a congresswoman in Philly, and a fourth was made out to Sullivan care of the base. The last one contained the anonymous photocopied enlargement of his penis. Brutus smacked Magda on the backside and let her go.
6.
The pigs rarely enforced lights-out so Brutus kept his desk lamp on. Sparky grumbled about it but was too much of a chickenshit to say anything; he was clearly Sullivan’s stooge, if not his outright bitch. Brutus watched the clock. He would need some rest, but there was no goddamn way he would be able to sleep. The phone was going to ring or the door would open just wide enough for some corrupt M.P. to shine a flashlight in his eyes. He stayed in bed reading.
Midnight came and went: it became the ides of March.
The clock hands crawled toward morning. Brutus no longer cared what happened so long as it happened soon. Now. Every so often he felt like he might have fallen asleep for a minute or two. The clock stared back at him.
At least he was a step ahead of Sullivan, and he took some small satisfaction from that. He had purchased a prepaid phone card from the P.X. and called ahead to the Vienna Hilton to book a room under his own name. He left a map of that city in his desk, where Sparky was certain to sniff it out. Sullivan’s people would look for him in Austria, which just might provide enough diversion to buy some extra time if he needed to haul ass out of the country to Slovakia, or even to Serbia. Getting over the border would be difficult without his passport, but not impossible. All G.I.s at Taszár were required to surrender their papers to their commanding officers upon arriving, which was just as good as having a leash around the neck that reached all the way to Hungary’s borders, but not a step further, like the dog in the cartoons.
Brutus hid thin bundles of twenty-, fifty-, and one-hundred-dollar bills in the lining of his jacket and wrapped two changes of clothes—one military, one civilian—in separate plastic bags. The civvies had those holes cut out of them, making them a little more conspicuous, but he didn’t care. It would be better than wearing the trademarked signs of the devil. Might as well wear chains like his homies back home enslaving themselves in collars of thick gold bling.
If returning to Taszár didn’t turn out to be an option, he might very well end up either in jail or with a dog tag around his toe. He didn’t spend the time contemplating which would be worse. If he had to, he could beep Elvin and some people back home and get them to call Channel 6 Action News. All the info they’d need was in the letters Magda mailed, so he just needed to stay alive and out of jail long enough to get some backup.
When the door finally opened, Brutus pretended to be asleep. A single set of footsteps approached his bunk. Sparky was also awake. Brutus steadied himself for a shot to the ribs, but it didn’t come. The bed sagged as a duffel bag landed on the blankets next to his feet. It was heavy. Black steel in the hour of chaos. He didn’t open his eyes when someone leaned in close to his face. He smelled breathy eucalyptus and cheap cologne. He held his eyes closed tight. A pair of lips leaned gently onto his ear, close enough to raise the hair on his arms and on the back of his neck. “Fucking nigger,” they said gently, as if to a child. Brutus didn’t recognize the voice. The footsteps receded again at a casual pace, and the door closed. Sparky stirred in his bed, maybe laughed.
Now Brutus could get a little sleep. He drifted in and out of consciousness, waiting a full hour after the footsteps disappeared down the hall. Before the first morning light could invade the room, he stood and pulled on a pair of jeans and a heavy gray sweatshirt from which he had decided against removing the stitched-on TEMPLE. It wasn’t a corporate logo, not in the usual sense. A strip of duct tape on the outside of the bag had a note written on it: EVE & ADAMS KATONA J. U. 1 BP.
BP meant Budapest. A courier job up to the city. He considered his options, but the reality of the situation was that he had no choice. No say in the matter whatsoever. His own government was blackmailing him, and there wasn’t a goddamned thing he could do except go along with it and try to keep his ass in one piece.
Brutus removed the tape, committed the address to memory, and placed it in yet another envelope to his sister. He dropped the envelope into the duffel bag along with his spare clothes, but resisted the desire to look inside. He also threw in his walkman and a vinyl booklet of CDs. From the weight, the bag contained either weapons or gold bars—and there was no way Sullivan would send a brother out into the world with a sack full of gold. But Brutus didn’t want to know for sure until he was gone. Didn’t want an excuse to back out—not that that was an option. He could still smell the aftertaste of the soldier’s cough drop. The feeling of the man’s lips on his ear reminded him of Magda’s heavy breathing. He regretted not grabbing the cocksucker by the throat when he had the chance and gouging the man’s eyes out with his thumbs, like they had taught him in basic training.
He stopped on his way out. “Take it easy, Sparky,” he said, and stole his roommate’s sidearm, replacing it with his own broken one. Sparky didn’t stir, but Brutus knew that he had heard him. Punk.
It was cold as fuck outside. A small private jet taxied on the runway inside the barbed-wire perimeter of the restricted zone. Brutus didn’t want to risk stealing a truck. The guards on duty didn’t stir from Heaven’s Gate, their tiny patrol bunker. A wisp of smoke trickled from a metal pipe sticking out of the roof. He hoofed it toward the train tracks just south of the base. He could get there before the sun came up, catch a train up to Budapest. Drop the bag. Get on another train. Back in no time. He just might live long enough to poke Magda some more. Getting off the base didn’t worry him as much as how he would get back in later.
He used the handles of the duffel bag as shoulder straps and wore it like a backpack. The contents shifted and jammed something hard into his spine but he didn’t stop to rearrange it. The cold rarely bothered him this bad.
There seemed to be no one else out on the streets except a couple of mangy-looking stray dogs, which he avoided. He stayed off the roads anyway and kept as far as possible from what looked like the downtown area of a small village. He put on his headphones to listen to the Roots. All the houses had metal fences around them. The Hungarians were a territorial people, no doubt because the Magyar tribes had been attacked and exiled from every homeland they ever ha
d, until they finally settled there. Most of the yards had tiny vineyards of just two or three rows of vines and fruit trees that were now bare for the winter. Ice stuck to the branches like that chalky Christmas snow in Wanamaker’s windows. Black Thought sang in Brutus’s ears:
A revolution’s what it’s smelling like, it ain’t gonna be televised
Governments is hellified, taking cake and selling pie
I ain’t got a crust or crumb, to get some I’d be well obliged
Murder is commodified, felon for the second time
Never was I into chasing trouble, I was followed by it
Facing trouble with no alibi, had to swallow pride
Vilified, victimized, penalized, criticized
Ran into some people that’s surprised I was still alive
He headed south, crossing over an empty highway and continuing along an endless dirt road. He couldn’t see a goddamn thing, but he had heard trains down there somewhere so he kept going. Despite the circumstances, it was a joy to be off the base. Brutus walked for an hour before he found the tracks, which he blindly followed east until reaching a tiny backwoods train station—a concrete shack of one open-air room, now yellowed with old paint and cigarette smoke. He might as well have been in Chehaw. The graffiti was extensive and poorly done. A long wooden bench lined the perimeter, interrupted only by the gated and padlocked ticket window and doors to the men’s and women’s rooms, which were denoted by metal cartoon cutouts of children peeing. Swinging double doors led to the platform out back. The place was completely deserted except for a solitary sleeping bum. He looked frozen to death.
The posted schedules looked nothing like SEPTA’s back home, but from what Brutus could gather the trains to Budapest ran every couple of hours all night long. If he waited long enough, maybe he could catch one to Vienna or Warsaw or Zagreb instead. Border security would be tightest this close to the base, though. He didn’t have any forints but assumed he could make do with hard currency until he found a bank. He kept an eye on the sleeping dude, not sure if he was really asleep after all. Sullivan would have spies everywhere. These people really were out to get him. Brutus sat at the end of the room, where he could see the doors both to the street and to the tracks. He resisted the urge to open up the bag. The station was unheated, and he waited for forty-five minutes before a train whistled in the distance. He hid near the platform as it pulled to a grinding halt. No one got off except a MÁV conductor in a blue uniform and red hat, who wobbled to the end of the five-car train and signaled up to the engineer with a flashlight. Brutus took off his headphones and emerged from the shadows of the station, startling him. “Budapest?” he asked.
“Ja, Budapesht,” the old dude said, correcting Brutus’s pronunciation. Hungarian civilians typically spoke some mishmash German to all foreigners, regardless of their actual nationality. His mustache drooped from the constant assault of breath that smelled like onions sautéed in kerosene.
“How much?” Brutus produced a few bills of smaller denominations. He handed the guy a twenty. “This good?” The conductor took it and wandered slowly back up to the hissing engine. Brutus climbed through the nearest door.
The train was empty except for a few old men chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Despite the vast number of free seats, they stood at the windows, spitting into the empty night. The entire train smelled like piss, stale beer, and more piss. Brutus went into an empty compartment. Four sepia-toned photos depicting the history of Hungarian railway innovation decorated the walls. Someone had scratched a swastika into the plastic covering of one. Another had the white remains of a sticker over the front of a trolley. Brutus slid the glass door shut, secured the lock, and closed the curtains. Then he removed his belt and ran it through the armrest of his red bench seat and through the handles of the bag.
The train lurched and then rolled eastward. Eventually, it would turn north.
The bag contained six assault rifles—Hungarian-made AMD-65s—each wrapped in a thick, chamois bag. So it was weapons after all. Upon closer inspection, they turned out to be semiautomatics that someone had converted by hand to fully auto. Totally illegal back in the States and likely in Hungary too.
Now he got it: he was going to meet some scraggly motherfucker with a goofy accent and an eyepatch at a table in the back of some dark bar. Hand over the bag, drink a whiskey, and, depending on how things pan out, either head back to Taszár or get out of the country by any means possible.
In addition to the rifles and his clothes, the bag also contained a map of Budapest with a red circle around a street corner next to the Danube and an Arden edition of Julius Caesar. No passport. Brutus removed his jacket and sat down to think things over. There were a few different ways the day could play out. In one scenario, Sullivan would wait until Brutus arrived at Eve and Adam’s and then wash his hands of him. In another, M.P.s would snatch his ass off the streets so no word of the operation got back to the base.
Brutus typically didn’t mind the M.P.s too much. He could handle them just like he could, and had, any pigs back home—yessuh, nossuh, anything you say, suh—or he could pop one and watch the rest scatter. But he certainly didn’t want to get tangled with any corrupt elements of the corps, not if it could be avoided. They were a mean bunch of motherfuckers. Sullivan’s kind of people. That was what now worried him. Once Brutus delivered the bag, Sullivan would have to send the marines after him. The same dudes who had been down to Taszár. That visit had been part of Sullivan’s plan all along. They had come to the base for the sole purpose of choosing their guinea pig. They needed someone expendable. Fuck. Brutus would never be allowed near the base again. He was too much of a liability. It would be that asshole sergeant and Doornail and those guys—whatever the fuck their stupid names were—hunting him down. No question. And without a passport, he was trapped.
His army career was officially over. Funny—that was exactly what he had wanted so badly the past few months, but not like this. Another of Sullivan’s jokes. You want out of the army, boy, you can have out. The marines would pick him up at Eve and Adam’s or on the train back to Taszár and that would be it. Throw him out the window like a cigarette butt.
Sullivan would betray him—maybe he already had—but Brutus couldn’t skip the drop. Any tiny hope of salvation depended on the timely delivery of the weapons. Anything else would be sure suicide.
There was nothing to see out the window but his reflection. He unholstered Sparky’s sidearm and saw at once that it wouldn’t fire. Anticipating the theft, Sparky had switched their weapons before Brutus did, the cocksucker. Now he would be without a piece, except for the ones meant for delivery. It had been a little while since he had fucked around with an AMD.
The cabin felt insufferably hot. The heater under his seat charred the backs of his legs to a juicy, tender medium-well, and someone had bolted the window shut. He was sweating like crazy but didn’t risk opening the door. No telling who else was on the train. He picked up Julius Caesar and flipped through it, the pages sticking to his fingers, until he found that someone had highlighted a passage in yellow:
There was a Brutus once that would have brooked
Th’eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king.
Fucking-a right. Brutus wouldn’t tolerate a king any more than he would tolerate the devil himself. An empire or a republic—that was still the issue, the reason he was in Hungary at all. It had been two or three years since he had last read it, but the thing he liked the most about Julius Caesar was that there was no definite good guy or bad guy. Brutus and Caesar, they were both good and bad at the same time. The reader was supposed to think Brutus was evil after he wetted his friend, but he turned out to be the cooler of the two.
When he felt himself drifting off, Brutus locked his arms in a sleeper hold around the duffel bag. The click-click clack click-click clack of the train invaded his thoughts and sounded like a metalsmith banging at an anvil. He dreamed of a large gray rat get
ting nailed to a tree. Brutus couldn’t see who was doing it, only a pair of gloved hands holding an iron railroad spike and a huge Soviet-looking mallet. Unlike the rat in that marine’s story, though, this one was still alive. It kicked and writhed wildly on the nail, screeching in verminous agony.
7.
Budapest approached and Brutus was neither awake nor asleep until the stench of cigarette smoke and piss seeped back into his consciousness and clothes. Sweat soaked his T-shirt and shorts. Julius Caesar lay prostrate on his stomach; he had read about half, up to where the emperor bit it. Among his dreams he remembered one about fucking Madga and another in which he stabbed Sullivan repeatedly in the back, like in the play. One of them woke him up aroused. His mind whirred immediately to life, recharged and ready to get through the day without taking a marine-sponsored dirt nap in some cold Budapest alley.
Short of discovering a Hungarian Underground Railroad, there existed only one viable possibility. He could play along, at least at first. Buy himself a little more time. Once Sullivan declared him AWOL, if he hadn’t already, there would be no way for Brutus to prove that he was set up and blackmailed. In the meantime, he could carve out some breathing space. He would make like Houdini, his childhood hero. As a kid, Brutus had read every book he could find about the escape artist, but only one of them got into specifics about how to get out of chains and locks and burlap bags. He had studied it zealously. From then on, every Christmas and family gathering included an appearance by the escape artist the Great Brutini. His uncles would seal him up in his Chewbacca sleeping bag, his head sticking out the top. They tied ropes around him, then dropped him on the living room rug. He escaped every challenge, even after they got smart and tied him up before he went in the bag. Brutus’s trick—O.K., Houdini’s—was to bulk his muscles up while they hog-tied him. Make himself bigger. When they were done making all the knots, he slackened his arms for a little extra wiggle room.