by Andrew Ervin
The smell downstairs, like on the train but worse, singed his sinuses. His boots stuck to the floor. The blue-gray lockers covered the back wall of a dim passageway that led back in the direction of the street. There were also beer stalls and a video-poker den, and a red sign pointing to a metro station and a big red MARX TÉR sign, a holdover from communist days. He looked around. No one had followed him or was paying any attention, so he placed a hundred-forint coin in a locker. It opened easily. He removed the map and some money from the bag then slid it in, closed the locker, and pulled out a key with an orange plastic knob. He tugged on the door a few times and found it secure. Then he placed coins in six other lockers, taking the keys. He put them in an inside pocket of his jacket, keeping the real one separate. He could send Sullivan on a treasure hunt if he wanted to. Each key would buy him a little more time.
Meanwhile, he was ready to pick up a bag of doughnuts and some coffee, then scout out Eve and Adam’s. Given the hour, it might not be open, especially if it was a titty bar. If it was open, though, he wanted to pop in, get the lay of the land, walk out. One two three. After that he would get a better look at that view from the bridge, maybe scope out the island.
Brutus retraced his steps to the foot of the escalator, then felt a hard shove from behind. He lost his balance and landed on his stomach with a thud. One of the keys in his pocket dug into his ribs, breaking the skin. He tried to ID his assailants, but the toe of a muddy army boot hit his face at full force and everything grew dark. He heard his nose pop open like a bottle of champagne. Warm blood sprayed everywhere, and the pain seared through him as if from a cop’s nightstick. More kicks came just as hard to his ribs and kidneys and legs. There must have been four or five of them going at him all at once. A white, celestial pain stabbed at his eyes and took over his entire head, blinding him. Before he felt his consciousness recede, it occurred to Brutus that Sullivan had been one step ahead of him all along.
9.
Somebody helped Brutus to his feet, which supported his weight better than could be expected. He must have been unconscious for a while. Everything hurt. Every goddamn thing. It hurt to breathe, to exist. Whoever did this to him was gone. At least one rib was broken, maybe more. The pain ran all the way around his side and up to his shoulder. A well-dressed old man with gray hair was asking questions Brutus couldn’t understand. His head weighed five hundred pounds, every one of them painful. One eye was entirely blind.
“You are an American?” the old man asked.
It said so on Brutus’s jacket. U.S. Army. He tried to respond but his motor coordination wouldn’t kick-start.
“You were attacked by skinheads,” the old man said. He sounded like a bad Dracula impression. His necktie was slashed in half, and it dangled over his chest in ribbons of colorful silk. “I will get for you a doctor.”
“No doctor,” Brutus told him. The less interaction with the authorities the better. He just wanted to catch his breath. “I need to go. Thanks for your help.” There was blood all over his clothes. His CD player and watch were gone, but the money was still lined in his jacket. Maybe it had absorbed some of the blows like body armor. Most importantly, all the locker keys were still in his pocket.
Brutus left the old man standing in a small puddle of blood and who-knows-what-else. Instead of going back upstairs, he stayed underground for another moment, until his senses returned. He followed the dank passageway to the direction of the main ring road—the körút—ringing the train station where the taxi had dropped him off. There would be fewer people down there than up in the train station. It hurt like hell to walk, but apart from a cracked rib and a chipped tooth, nothing else felt broken. A welt over his eye made seeing extremely difficult. He had to find a bathroom somewhere and examine the extent of the damage. Goddamn skinheads? So it wasn’t Sullivan’s goons?
He came to a brightly lit underpass beneath the körút, where he had to wade through a crowd of old women, drunk revelers, and the free-range insane, all of whom were orbiting around an Asian hurdy-gurdy player who balanced on a one-legged stool and performed a rendition of what sounded like “Helter Skelter.” Brutus looked for what little solace the collective anonymity of Budapest afforded a transient black man who had been visibly pounded to within an inch of his life. Escalators headed even deeper underground to another subway stop. A band of South Americans in brightly colored blankets played guitars and pan flutes and danced in a circle. Two cops followed a hairy, gangrenous homeless man wearing a Burger King crown. They looked at Brutus funny, but he ignored them and they left him alone. An N.W.A. song came to mind. The pain outweighed his need to eat something, but he still had to get some Hungarian money.
A TourInform office, which was a small, glass-enclosed shop squashed between a newsstand and the Non Stop Büfé, listed the international exchange rates on an electronic sign. He joined the line behind a series of American teenyboppers anxious to transmute their dollars into assorted tchotchkes to bring home for Mommy and Daddy. The smoke and stink of so many people caused Brutus to sneeze into his sleeve; the pain ripped through his lungs like a gunshot. The snot was camouflaged by the other stains. His mood soured even further when some asshole Utah choirboy in front of him turned all the way around and said, “God bless you.” Brutus had heard about these kids. Mormons or Scientologists or some shit like that, godboys gathered like tsetse flies over the corpse of communism in the former Soviet states and now sallying around the metro stations or in front of McDonald’s sporting their WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? badges and tabernacle haircuts—that shaved-in-back, moussed-on-top, Berlin-circa-1938 look. Sometimes they carried microphones. And of course they were American, every last motherfucking one of them. A few of them were even stationed at Taszár. The kid’s front teeth jutted so far out of his slack-jawed face that Brutus could have opened a bottle of Dreher on them.
“Fuck you,” Brutus said. He was in no mood and would have liked nothing more than to punch the asshole in the nose just to see what it would look like. “Maybe the devil should bless me instead. What do you think of that?”
“Ex-excuse me?” The other gangly rednecks in line turned around and recited their prayers while digging through their WWJD folders for the pertinent literature to hand out to devil worshippers. They used cheat sheets to find the appropriate Bible passages, but because they didn’t have exact reading material for practicing Satanists, they struggled to improvise something while Brutus suppressed his desire to piledrive someone onto the dirty floor. Amid the commotion he pushed his way to the front of the line and handed over a stack of bills. The woman behind the counter thumbed them out one at a time while another of the kids made the mistake of tapping Brutus on the shoulder. “Can we talk? According to Romans 8:37—”
“Son, leave me the fuck alone.”
The drone of the hurdy-gurdy sounded like five lapdogs fighting in a tin box. The moneychanger moved on to the first of her infrared anti-counterfeit scans and someone tapped Brutus on the shoulder again. He turned around this time and with both hands grabbed the nearest godboy by his starched white collar. He barreled him through the swinging glass doors and body-slammed him full force onto the ground of the underpass. Then he walked back up to the teller, ignored the fright in her eyes, and immediately collected his forints. Nobody said shit to him after that.
Hurting all over, but finally with some paper in his pocket, he needed to find a place to crash for the night. A well-cologned man brushed past him and whispered under his breath, “Change money?” but Brutus didn’t acknowledge him. The hum of activity receded as he climbed a long ramp up to street level, as if the station’s noise had existed for him alone and stopped entirely once he was gone.
The taxi had passed a hotel—that would be his first stop. The sidewalk squirmed with people, most of whom wore red-and-green paper hats. The ribbon the cabbie had given him was gone. It hit him: it was Independence Day, the anniversary of one of Hungary’s aborted revolutions. The army traditionally didn’t ackno
wledge the holidays of their so-called “host nations,” much less celebrate them, but Magda had told him about it. No nation on Earth boasted as many Independence Days as Hungary, and today was one of them. The Ides of March.
He opened the map again. Eve and Adam’s was about three long city blocks down the körút, right before the bridge. Even amid the mayhem of public celebration, he had zero chance of keeping out of sight. He was too conspicuous. People stared at him openly and without shame. His face had to be a mess and there was blood splattered all over his jacket. The cold felt good and kept him more clearheaded than he expected.
Upon closer inspection, Budapest wasn’t all that different from Philly. The buildings were older and the cars smaller, but the shop windows looked pretty much the same. There were bookstores and pizza places with chicks in skintight skirts just like in Old City. Budapest was equally dirty, that was for sure. Graffiti everywhere, the car-exhaust stink, fast-food bags blowing around like crippled birds. The only real difference was that everyone was white. It was like being at the opera. And the weather disoriented him. If the sun still existed, it was hiding behind a canopy of pollution and the densest clouds Brutus had ever seen. It looked like it could start pissing down rain or snow or sleet any second. If you didn’t like the weather, just wait five minutes. But that was true every place he’d ever been.
He stopped in front of a record store to check out his reflection in the window but couldn’t make himself out. The lump on his forehead still welded his eye closed and touching it even gingerly sent a spark down his neck. He didn’t want to deal with any Hungarian jibber-jabber, so instead of picking up some food at the little grocery store he continued to the hotel, where a monkey-suited bellhop stood out front trying to light a cigarette in the wind. He refused to even look at Brutus, who went inside to book a room and establish a base camp for the day’s business.
The lobby smelled vaguely sweet, like a bakery, and the place was a whole lot more luxurious than the outside made it appear. A door on the other side of the lobby led to some kind of beauty parlor. The ugly bitch behind the desk looked at him like he had shit stuck between his front teeth.
“Can I get a room?”
She smiled and sneered simultaneously, and spoke with a vaguely British accent. “How many nights?”
“Just one … no, make it two.”
“May I have your passport, please?”
“I don’t have my passport. I was just robbed.”
“I’m sorry. In that case it’s quite impossible to—”
“Listen, lady. I’m an American soldier and I can pay in cash. Up front if you want. But I need a room.”
He unfolded his new wad of Hungarian money and that shut her up. The bill came to over three hundred American a night. Maybe more. It was steep but fuck it. He was desperate. She was no doubt skimming a piece off the top for herself. That was the way it worked in this part of the world. He couldn’t even blame her, really.
“Fill this out.” She slid a sign-in form and pen across the counter. “Do you need some help with your bags?”
“I don’t have any … any bags.”
She placed an electronic key card in front of him. “You are in room 422. Enjoy your stay.”
Enjoy this.
As good as it would’ve felt to go upstairs and throw some water on his face, maybe rest his eyes for a second, he decided against it. He was liable to sleep for fourteen hours. It was better to take care of business first. His stomach grumbled despite the pain; his next stop would be for some chow. And a change of clothes was in order. He had some extras in the duffel bag but he didn’t want to go back for them just yet. He put the hotel key card in his inside pocket and went back out to the street. So many keys.
He had gotten sweaty in the lobby and this time the cold air outside bit right through him. He didn’t like the idea of breaking out that “I’m an American” garbage, but with all the bullshit he had to put up with every day from his own fucking country he might as well reap some of the benefits once in a while. Fast food—that other thing he hated about America but sometimes there was no getting around it. He sure as fuck wasn’t going to some Hungarian restaurant to have a Gypsy come to his table with a violin to badger him for money, and then get ripped off on the bill because he didn’t know the language or the exchange rate. A block before the river, he got to the bright yellow McDonald’s he had passed in the taxi. The manager came around from the back and watched Brutus while the girl took his order. She didn’t speak English, but he got the message across. He asked for a cup of coffee and three cheeseburgers. When his food arrived, Brutus sat down to eat and every single person in the place watched him like he was an exotic specimen on display at the Please Hassle Museum. A middle-aged man walked by and didn’t even attempt to conceal his fascination and Brutus finally lost it. “Fucking problem?” he yelled, spitting bits of cheeseburger at him. “This some fucking zoo?” The man averted his eyes and disappeared. A couple teenagers somewhere behind Brutus made jungle noises. The coffee was still hot enough to scald his tongue, but he gulped it down and went to the men’s room to see what kind of shape he was in.
The damage wasn’t as bad as he had thought. The real pain, he knew, would soak into his muscles and bones overnight. His mouth ached like a motherfucker and two teeth were definitely chipped. To his surprise, none were missing or even loose. He washed the dried blood off his mouth and from around his eyes, then took a long piss. The laughter and commotion stopped when he came out.
Back on the sidewalk, those fuckers inside watched him through the restaurant’s windows. Following the map, he turned off the körút and crossed a small park, which was really just a block-sized patch of grass next to the river with a few drained fountains and some benches thrown around. The base of Margit Bridge loomed overhead. The sculptures in the middle of the fountains were wrapped in plastic and looked like some kind of modern art project. Kids sat around drinking wine straight from the bottle. They stopped to watch him pass. Someone was throwing up behind a row of plastic garbage cans.
The wind coming off the Danube sawed straight through his coat and sweatshirt, both of which remained wet with blood and sweat. Margit Island looked as green and peaceful as advertised. At the other end of the park, the black and yellow Guinness sign at Eve and Adam’s beckoned him.
An immense wooden bar ran down the right-hand side of the narrow room, and across it a row of vinyl booths overlooked the river and island through a series of tall windows. A dartboard hanging in the back like a saintly icon was being desecrated by four thick-handed boozers who never missed the bull’s-eye. Several well-dressed businessmen stood at the bar speaking a combination of English and Dutch. A gaggle of whores in fake fur coats accompanied them, smiling way too much and drinking unusually small glasses of beer. Someone had crossed the word TIPS off the wooden box next to the cash register and replaced it with SINN FÉIN. Brutus hadn’t even known they were still in business. Some of the ladies looked at Brutus, but they knew better than to bother him. The bartender whispered something to one of the hookers, and she strolled past Brutus toward the door. He turned with a wince to watch her pass and found himself staring down the business end of her moneymaker. Instead of anything he might call pants, she had on a pair of shorts the same color, texture, and which served the same general function as the skin one pulls off the outside of bologna. They left the rest of her ass free to slap together like two flesh cymbals crashing along to the climax of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. The door closed behind her with a jingle.
Brutus sat at the bar and put his head down until the bartender ambled slowly over. He was a stout, red-mustachioed man whose age— thirty? fifty?—could probably be determined by counting the red veins in his eyes.
“I’m afraid we don’ allow sleepin’ at the bar, not unless ye have a few drinks in ye first, heh. What can I bring ye?”
“Shot and a beer. Whiskey.”
“Coming right up. Jameson?”
“Anythi
ng.”
“Good man. My name’s Jimmy. Lemme know if I can be of service. From the looks of things I’d say someone tidied you up pretty good, heh?”
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
“I don’t doubt that. Lemme get ye those drinks, heh?”
Jimmy poured a Guinness and left the pint in front of Brutus to settle, then slipped through a door at the end of the bar. The ubiquitous remake of “Strange Fruit” came on the jukebox, reminding Brutus of the last time he had seen Magda. Was that just yesterday? Day before? It occurred to him that Jimmy might be his contact and, if so, he was likely on the horn with Sullivan right then. The Irish accent sounded phony. He reappeared and brought Brutus another beer. “Here y’are, on the house. Here’s hoping yer luck’ll change, heh?”
Brutus didn’t respond. He buried his head in his sleeves again and only nodded off for a second but the resulting disorientation was staggering. The pain settled in and cozied up next to the humiliation of that public beating. The embarrassment hardened like scar tissue; it disrupted the clarity of thought he was going to need. The fresh pint and another double whiskey waited beside him on the bar as if the booze fairy had stopped by. He discovered some new contours while running his tongue over the ridge of his teeth. His neck cracked with an audible snap but all things being equal, he was in decent shape. If he had gained nothing else from basic training at least the army taught him not only to suppress pain but to work with it, to temper it inside him like a burning ember. The cracked ribs and the sore jaw reminded him that he was alive, that he was a U.S. soldier, however disenfranchised. He had work to do; he had to stay alive, get the devil off his trail. He drank the whiskey in one go and took a long pull from his beer. The cold liquid made his chipped teeth ache.