by Andrew Ervin
He decided to deliver the weapons. But first he was going to make himself bigger.
Brutus would be safe until he got to Eve and Adam’s. The weapons were worth more to somebody than Brutus’s life, so whoever was expecting them might not fuck with him unless he deviated from the plan. But he certainly wasn’t going to take any chances by showing up in a strange city with his dick in his hand, just waiting to get picked up off the streets. It wasn’t like there would be a man in a chauffeur uniform on the train station platform holding up a printed AWOL NIGGER sign waiting to escort him to the drop site.
He pictured how it would go down. After Brutus makes the delivery, someone at Eve and Adam’s will jump on the phone, beep Sullivan, and give him the all-clear to send in the marines. Any way Brutus looked at it, he was fucked. That realization made him angrier than he had ever been in his life. Hatred burned the lining of his stomach. If he was going down, he would take Sullivan down with him. Brutus punched the seat across from him as hard as he could. Lefts and rights. Sweat poured off him, and he kept grunting and punching until the fabric burned his knuckles.
A steady trickle of wind entered through the rubber ring struggling to hold the window in place. The crystalline lattice of frost on the glass framed a view of nothing. He wiped the steam away with his elbow and brought his breathing back under control. The tiniest bit of light crept over the horizon. Cold, frozen ground. Dead, flat farmland occasionally interrupted by the odd silhouette of a house or a hunter’s wooden roost.
Brutus stood. Stiffness seized his shoulders. He cracked his neck and pumped his arms like he was rowing a boat, then put on his jacket and looped the handles of the bag around his wrist. He unlocked the compartment door and it slid open. A wave of stale smoke burned his eyes. Pairs of old men stood at the open windows sharing plastic jugs of wine. They argued above the noise of the tracks, but paused long enough to watch Brutus emerge. Each one pulled his bags closer or squeezed them tighter between his knees. Brutus gave them his best don’t-fuck-with-me glare, but the truth was that he would’ve much rather been out there trading lies with those guys than playing FedEx for Sullivan.
He found a closet-sized bathroom at the end of the car and took his time pissing, all the while holding the bag tight. He rinsed his hands with cold water and wiped them on his blue jeans. He couldn’t wait to get off that fucking train. The old men got quiet again as he passed, like he could understand what they were saying anyway. Back in his compartment, he watched the countryside morph into towns spaced closer and closer together and then into factories and the sprawling red-brick complexes of urban life.
“Budapesht”—that was how Magda said it.
He looked forward to taking care of business and then, just maybe, touring a bit of the city. The pictures he had seen of the city were so complex he couldn’t make sense of them. The Hungarians lived and worked in buildings constructed before Columbus first occupied America. They built commie high-rises on top of art-deco apartments on top of ornate Gothic churches. One conquering army after another. Stone Turkish baths on top of Roman colosseums on top of Celtic tribal sites dug into the ground where cavemen first discovered the hot springs seeping out of the Buda Hills. Of course all of it was now crowned by America’s contribution to the history of architecture, the Golden Arches. His stomach grumbled—it was a guilty pleasure, but a cheeseburger, or four, would’ve been right on time. He wanted to see a Roman amphitheater. The lions imported to Hungary—then called Lower Pannonia—really did survive on a steady diet of Christian meat. That wasn’t just bullshit.
He unfolded the map of the city. The train was going to drop him off on the Buda side of the river, at a place called Déli Pályaudvar, the southernmost of the city’s three major train stations. From there, he would need to get across the Danube to Pest. Eve and Adam’s was smack-dab in the middle of town, near Margit Bridge. It looked like a serious hike from the station.
Despite his efforts to relax and save his strength, every mile closer to Budapest got Brutus’s mind working faster. With no way of telling what was coming next, he attempted to focus his attention on the task of keeping his ass in one piece. Those jarheads could be waiting for him as the train rolled in. The M.P.s or the marines wouldn’t even need to be in on Sullivan’s scheme. If they were to pick him up off the streets, it would come down to Brutus’s word against his commanding officer’s, and that debate would never favor a PFC. In coming up with a game plan, his erring on the side of caution might make the difference between freedom—or what passed for freedom—and doing time in the army’s penile colony. Getting got. He would get off at the stop before Déli even though that was farther from where he needed to end up. The map said “Kelenföldi pu.”
Or … he could drop the bag somewhere else in Budapest, leave word for Sullivan where the weapons were at, and split. By the time Sullivan found the cache, Brutus could be back on one of these disgusting trains down to Serbia, or someplace where they would never think to look for him. From there, he could blow the whistle or even just wait it out a year or two until the smoke cleared and they had forgotten all about him. Did going AWOL have a statute of limitations? If he bailed and they didn’t catch him in, say, a year, shouldn’t he be able to go free? Fuck, CNN was down in Yugoslavia all the time. He could give those propaganda-spewing fools the scoop of a lifetime, except that they were too liable to turn him in. He could enlist Magda’s help or even have Joan beep that Congressional bitch who only showed up around the neighborhood every couple of years when she wanted votes. His sister would know what was up any day now, as soon as she got that letter. Getting over the border would be tough even if he had his passport, but given the general fucked-up nature of all things Yugoslavian, he felt confident he could manage it somehow. Nothing was ever easy. Walking around Serbia at night couldn’t be any more dangerous than growing up in West Philly. At least there was no crack in Belgrade, or probably less crack anyway, and given the choice, Brutus would prefer to take his chances with protomilitary gang lords wielding automatic weapons than with twelve-year-old Crip wannabes any day. He could even keep one of the rifles he was supposed to deliver, or sell them himself on the open market.
The outskirts of the city looked asleep. Closely compacted neighborhood blocks fit together at strange angles. Cages of chicken- and barbed wire ensnared each personal fiefdom of slapped-together brick, stucco, and plywood. Smoke escaped from roofs and blended with the slowly brightening sky. Brutus counted the stations on the map. Kelenföldi was next. He had a basic plan. He would hide the weapons somewhere and get the word to Sullivan about where to find them. He took several deep breaths and passed the old men again as the train arrived at a painfully slow, lazy stop. There were no announcements. He stepped down onto the platform and got swallowed by the pale yellow fluorescence that shone on the strip of bare concrete they considered a train station. AWOL—that was the reality of the situation. He didn’t even want to think about that shit.
8.
There wasn’t a marine or even a cop in sight, just an old drunk sitting on a bench with his head hanging. When Brutus approached, the bum vomited a steamy shower of blood into his own cupped hands and onto the ground between his legs. He tried to say something to Brutus but retched repeatedly instead and choked on his own words. Bile ran in a thin stream to the edge of the sidewalk and down to the stones lining the track bed. Brutus hurried past, watching his step.
Welcome to Budapest.
An oppressive, all-encompassing frustration nearly disentangled Brutus’s thoughts from his anger. Every effort to distance himself, for the time being, from the hatred inside brought a sticky, nauseating substance boiling up from his gut. Brutus had never seriously contemplated taking another man’s life, but here, freezing his ass off in goddamn Budapest, and walking through some homeless motherfucker’s puke, he knew that given the first opportunity, he would set Sullivan on fire and shit on his ashes. In the meantime, though, he needed to get it together. Walking around all p
issed off would only get himself got.
A flight of steps led down from the platform. Advertisement posters—Ivory Soap, Pick salami, Symphonia cigarettes, Unicum—covered the walls of the underground passageway, but they were awash in colorful graffiti and more than a few swastikas. While it was true that right-wing parties were getting reelected all over Eastern Europe, Brutus never dared to suspect that genuine fascism would rise again. Enough of that shit appeared unnoticed by the masses in the rhetoric of even the more moderate political parties at home and abroad.
He emerged in a cramped and ugly suburban neighborhood. No cars on the road yet. The train rattled away without him toward the city. He half hoped that Sullivan did have those marines waiting for him down the tracks at the next station. Suckers.
The smell of burning wood followed him. It hadn’t snowed yet—the storm that hit Taszár would likely follow a few hours behind him. On the corner, a street sign affixed to the side of a house read XI. THÁN KÁROLY UTCA. The map indicated that he could take the road he was on all the way across town to the Danube. His immediate priority was to get someplace where he might not attract as much attention as out here in the burbs. Eventually he arrived at a bigger street, where Budapest looked more like a city. While he obviously wasn’t in the fashionable part of town, the wide avenue—easily twice as big as Broad Street—looked majestic compared to Philadelphia. The building fronts followed the haphazard curvature of the roads and formed a solid cliff face. An empty yellow trolley ran right down the middle of the road between the traffic lanes.
A few tiny cars puttered past with engines that sounded like souped-up lawnmowers and moved just as fast. When the sun hinted at breaking through the low tarp of clouds, the statuary and ironwork came alive. The buildings had red, ceramic-tiled roofs and strangely painted exteriors. Some looked like stone fortresses straight out of the Middle Ages. Red, white, and green Hungarian flags decorated every lamppost down the street. The ground floors contained shops and dingy bars and video-poker dens, all with ribbons of the same colors in their windows. Near the top of one building, two sculptures of men, each five times the size of a real man, held up the roof on their backs. Brutus stopped in a doorway to check the map one more time. The walk would take longer than he had anticipated, so he hailed the first passing taxi. It slowed, but the driver looked at him and kept going. Just like back home. He walked a few more blocks. Parked cars covered the sidewalks, and he had to dance his way around them until he could get a taxi to stop. He climbed into the backseat, clutching the heavy bag in his lap. The driver was an older dude. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, and the smoke mingled with his breath and the car’s heater, which was mercifully bumped up.
“You speak English?” Brutus asked.
The driver turned all the way around in his seat. “No,” he said, with a smile.
Color brochures for strip clubs and massage parlors filled the seat pockets. Some kind of crazy violin music blared from the rattling speakers behind Brutus’s head. It sounded like rusty springs squeaking inside an old, dirty bed.
“I need a place for this.” He made motions like someone opening a locker and turning a key.
“Kulcsra?” The driver’s thick mustache looked like the head of a dusty broom.
“Yeah, a Coltrane. Take me there.”
The driver took the map and pointed to Déli Pályaudvar, the train station Brutus had just avoided. “Kulcsra,” he said.
“No, no. I ain’t going there. Where else?” The driver didn’t understand. “Another Coltrane.” Brutus made a circular motion with his finger around the map.
“Ah,” the driver said. He held Brutus’s wrist and used his finger to point at Nyugati, the western train station over in Pest. It was close to the big red circle, just a few blocks from Eve and Adam’s. Perfect. Cigarette ash landed on Margit Island, the tree-covered oasis in the middle of the Danube.
“O.K., there’s good.”
“Akkor jó.” The driver smiled.
Brutus had to laugh. “Yo!”
“Jó!”
In the speaker behind him, someone dropped a pregnant cat into a blender and hit frappé. The driver pealed off as fast as his little car could take them and started the meter, which reminded Brutus that he didn’t have any Hungarian money. He pulled a twenty out of his wallet. “This good?”
The driver’s eyes lit up. “Jó,” he said.
“Yo!” Brutus said.
The yellow streetlights couldn’t compete with the rising sun, which became a spotlight pointed at the whole city, and in it the old-world charm of the architecture gave way to a polluted modern metropolis. The filthy windows, cracked plaster, and bullet holes grew more apparent by the minute. Dirty mustard-colored paint must have been on sale when they built this part of town. The buildings looked ugly and gray, caked in car exhaust. There were tall buildings, but no skyscrapers. Nothing silver and shiny like in Philadelphia. But the details were incredible. The colors. People—artists—had spent real time making the buildings, but as the light increased, Budapest looked more and more like a city in an advanced state of decay. He tried to picture what Philly would look like in another two or three hundred years. He followed the taxi’s trajectory on the map.
The streets popped to life all at once, and an avalanche of cars, people, and crowded trolleys appeared from nowhere. The traffic sat bumper-to-bumper like on the Schuylkill at rush hour. Budapest wasn’t built for automobiles at all, much less for this many of them. After crawling for a few blocks, they got to one of the six or so bridges over the Danube.
Margit Bridge was four lanes wide, with another trolley line running right down the middle. The bridge was shaped like an elbow and halfway across, where the funny bone would be, a smaller road led down to Margit Island. To Brutus’s right, a small observation balcony extended over the water. Tourists were already taking photos, and he regretted leaving his camera behind at the base. He’d probably never see it again even if he did get back to Taszár. Or he would scroll through the pictures to find a shot of his own toothbrush jammed up Sparky’s ass. That was what the army was really about—the excuse to jam someone else’s toothbrush up your ass under the pretext of playing a joke. He wanted to get back there to bitchslap Sparky just once. That wasn’t much to ask.
Over on the Pest side, the parliament building came into view—spires and a dome and separate white marble wings that led in every direction. A man could get lost looking at a building like that. Structures so elaborate should never really exist outside a picture book, yet dozens of them lined the river; they were in motion, fluid, changing things. Many had huge neon signs on top. Several other bridges spanned the river to the south. More red, white, and green banners flapped on all of them. Behind him, back over in Buda, a huge statue of a woman up on an otherwise bald hill held up a huge leaf.
The cavern of buildings in Pest plunged him back into shadow, a man-made eclipse fashioned from century-old tenements; the first one on his left, overlooking a small rampart park, housed a McDonald’s painted a yellow so bright that it shimmered despite the lack of sunlight. Brutus spun in his seat to take in the sights. The taxi passed already-busy pizza joints and supermarkets, the Budapest Suites Hotel, and all kinds of places he couldn’t identify before the driver pulled over opposite a huge, glass-enclosed train station.
The Nyugati complex was incredible. Two cream-brick castles, one of them occupied by yet another McDonald’s, sandwiched a hundred-foot wrought-iron-and-glass wall that housed the train station. It looked like a set out of one of those English mysteries that the Mambo always watched on PBS. He handed over the twenty and managed to get a pile of coins from the driver for a locker. The old dude used hand signals to direct Brutus to the far end of the station and down a flight of steps—he made descending Yellow Pages motions with his fingers—then handed him a red, white, and green ribbon with a safety pin through it. A miniature Hungarian flag. “Tessék,” he said. The driver had one just like it on his collar.
“Thanks, bro.”
Brutus held on to the duffel bag and stepped into the melee of rush-hour pedestrian and automotive traffic. Everyone wore paper hats and many blew little plastic horns and buttwhistles like it was New Year’s. Kind of fucked up, but kind of cool. A citywide party. People were already getting drunk. A few of them stared at him. There still weren’t a lot of black people in Budapest.
He waited with the crowd at the crosswalk, his breath suspended in front of his face. He needed to find a heavier coat. In the meantime, though, he struggled to pin the flag to his chest like everyone else, until a rave chick in headphones leaned over and with a smile helped him fasten it. The techno beat surrounding her was louder than the whine of the cars inching past. The light changed; she didn’t look back, but it made him glad to know that the locals were cool enough. The day could work out just fine. A trolley, its windows thickened with fog, sat idly in the middle of the road waiting for the pedestrians to pass.
The station was far bigger than even Thirtieth Street, and the trains pulled right up to the sidewalk-level platforms. There were newspaper stands and florists and a crooked-looking money-changer kiosk along the side wall. The vendors had on hats and mittens and puffy, oversized jackets embroidered with the names of American sports teams he had never heard of. The Chicago Tigers? He needed some Hungarian money, but that could wait until he found a real bank. Human and mechanical activity rang through the station. The iron of the front wall held in place a curved glass ceiling that ran the length of the station, down to the far end where the trains went in and out. It was just as cold in there as outside. The smell of french-fry grease reminded him how hungry he was. He needed to grab a bite as soon as he stashed the fucking bag. People piled on and off a series of trains, and the loudspeakers repeated a bizarre jingle every few minutes. He couldn’t understand the garbled, prerecorded announcements and suspected that the Hungarians couldn’t either. A sign at the back of the station had a diagram of a locker. An arrow directed him to a set of broken escalators.