Prague (50 page)

The three of them walked, that cold October evening, through Deak Square, where the pit that would become the underground parking for the Kempinski Hotel had reached its lowest point and the glass hotel was primed to spring upward from this deep crouch. Tmre led them down the boulevard to the front door of a gentlemen's club called Leviticus. John politely announced he was heading home to an early bed. He let the business partners disappear under the canopy shaped like the entrance to a desert hut: fake skins (canvas) stitched together and stretched over (artificially) straining wooden (painted metal) staves. He turned onto the boulevard and counted his blessings, laughed aloud at the sycophantic antics Charles still had to perform—having to follow the old man into a strip joint, for God's sake, archetypal haunt of the world's loneliest men and women. Mark would have had a field day with that.

John identified constellations on his way to the Blue Jazz, looked obliquely to bring them into focus. Just as Imre, when seen obliquely, he decided, had no grandeur at all, was. to be honest, a ridiculous, ridiculous man; Charles had condemned himself' to a career of indulging the whims and appetites of a very nonserious old fool. Charles, viewed obliquely, was not much more impressive.

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(5) (A RECURRING DREAM image in later years, long after he congratulated himself that he had forgotten even to think of her. forgotten even her name: Emily Oliver nude but for a feather boa, floating against a green sky, lofted by plush, luxurious, silver wings and cradling an American football against her body with one arm, her other extended in a running back's locked-elbow blocking position.)

This perennial, gaudy oneiric bloom sprouted from seeds planted Hallow-een of 1990. when, floating over other guests' heads on a slightly raised platform, Emily really did wear football shoulder pads under a green Philadelphia Eagles jersey, and her tight white pants, although convincingly gridironic, were in fact a pair of her favorite casual slacks. John considered approaching her, using Mark's vanishing act and his own (failed) efforts to track him down as an excuse for their first conversation in months. But the opportunity kept skittering away. Now she was talking to a man whom John did not know but could identify—from his haircut and bulk—as an embassy marine, despite his sparse Tarzanian wardrobe of a fake leopard-skin bikini bottom, loincloth, and shoulder strap. Far across the rented hotel ballroom, unnoticed in the crowd and shadows and his costume. John watched them talk under a banner with greetings written in Iwo languages: English (IIAPPY IIALLOWEEN) and Hungarian (WELCOME TO THE AMERICAN-STYIJ- COSTUMED CELEBRATION OF THE EVE OE THE FEAST OF ALT.

SAINTS). The jungular marine held Emily's football helmet (the painted silver wings on its temples would later sprout into three plush, luxurious dimensions), and he spun it lightly between his two middle fingers; he touched it gently with fingertips that, John thought from his post across the room, proposed something sinister in their dexterous manipulation of the headgear.

The skeletal octet of Franz Liszt conservatory students, unclear which of the elderly songs in their tattered American Popular Times book were actually familiar to Americans, counted off a Hungarian-language rendition of 'After-Breakfast Girl" played with a Latin beat, and the crowd shuffled, and five gigantic, puffy playing cards with pink human faces and skinny limbs in red or black tights and sleeves—an improbable royal flush—danced in a sort of conga line, two steps forward and one step back, one more step back and two steps forward. Finally, the last royal rectangle waddled out of his way and he could see her again. Tarzan had swung off. Her back was to him. Emily floated farther away now, her bright white number 7 proud under the familiar ponytail, and then there slithered a white-gloved hand and black-sleeved arm around her waist, and the hand's twin circled the front of her neck, insinuating itself under her

AKiHUK I'HILllfS

chin, tipped her head back, and then there were lips against her ear, or perhaps a nose against her cheek—John couldn't be sure, because from where he stood there was only a back covered by a cowled cape and a mask of a famous trade-marked cartoon mouse, with his signature enormous ears but a smile altered by Ihe costumer: wide open and menacing, with four razor-sharp fangs.

"The journalist! I owe you a big thanks." A sudden intrusion hobbling in from the middle distance: an eye-patched, kerchiefed pirate, a live parrot on a shoulder, Harvey the investor atop a very convincing peg leg, which must have been severely restricting the circulation in the calf he'd tied out of view. John's article on Cap'n Harv had won its subject significant attention, apparently; he'd attracted some investment queries, the story had been picked up in his hometown newspaper and radio back in the States, he'd found himself in the center of some interesting deals and people, he was feeling pretty pleased with the nice coverage, et cetera, et cetera. Even when John could shift his jealous focus onto this unsteady, clunking man, he had difficulty assessing if Harvey wasn't pulling his leg, or even obliquely threatening him; John had, after all, written a profile so aglow with uranium-poisonous irony that it should have sent any normal man's heart ticking up like a Geiger counter. It was inconceivable that it resulted in business investment and respect. To the extent he had expected ever to hear from him again, it would have been in the dcliciously unequal combat of the "Letters to the Editor" page, where John could savor some ill-conceived, ungrammatical, unprovable claim to decency, which would of course only present to John the delightful gift of writing another column ("Our reporter responds . . .") in which to try out new barbs on this fish's slick silver lips. Or, John half expected for a lew weeks that Harvey, failing even the courage to risk a public duel in print, would squeeze out some oily legal correspondence, amusingly suitable for framing. But no, here instead there was nothing but rosy-cheeked Halloween glee and future gain coming off this grinning, chattering pirate, and now Harvey had, if John understood correctly, a tip if John was interested; (here had been inquiries—Harvey had made/received some inquiries—and the question of the Horvath Press's privatization was a little more hotly contested than it appeared in the, shall he say, interestingly slanted local coverage to date, and would John be curious to hear about a syndicate— not a syndicate, that's the wrong word—but a sizable interest, a concern, as it were, that may be in a position to throw some thumbtacks on Gabor and the old man's road, or, on the other hand, in the alternative, as lawyers like to say (and here a wink, unnoticed, since his winking eye rested behind a patch), they may

be in a position to perhaps bring the end of the rainbow a little closer and make it a happy little leprechaun day for everybody close enough to the deal to drop their hand in the pot o' gold, and perhaps, if John and Gabor would like, this concern, let's call them South Sea islanders (perhaps a pirate joke of some sort), South Sea islanders (repeated with a self-congratulatory laugh), I think I am alone in the unique position to convince them to turn in their thumbtacks for rainbows, if you see my point...

Far away, over Harvey's shoulder—over the parrot's shoulder, too—this was more than just a friendly whisper. John could, of course, not hear what was whispered, or see the mouse-obscured face, but he recognized, even at this distance, the substance of intimacy. He could see that much in Emily's smile. Should Harvey arrange for a summit meeting of sorts?

He looked down at the pirate and back up to the far-off stage and now Emily stood in front of Robin Hood, helping adjust the laces of his jerkin, tying them off for him at his chest. The hero of Sherwood, a gawky middle-aged man well over six feet tall, wore too-large tortoiseshell glasses and had gray and thinning hair, no thicker than a baby's, under his cap of Lincoln green. His long bow scraped at his calves, and had begun to cause runs in his bunching green tights. Noticeably unhappy, he fingered his quiver nervously and repeatedly scratched at his temple under the bow of his glasses, Emily stopped him; she took his hands away from their bad habits and smiled at him. Something she said made him shed one layer of worry and enjoy himself slightly more.

In an effort to protect Charles's bid (and his own share in it), John told the buccaneer to hold off his South Sea islanders a little longer, not even knowing precisely what he meant by that. John spoke at some length, trusting in the power of speaking with, and in, confidence. "I think it will be worth everyone's while if you can keep your South Sea islanders content a few more weeks and then bring them to meet the appropriate people under circumstances that by then can be. ahh, amenable. There won't be any shortage of ... opportunity when these mousy governmental details are put to one side. The government can still slow things down to a Communist-era crawl if it gets a whiff of hungry foreigners like you or your islanders. Let Imre talk the government off the property, then who can say what is or isn't or may or may not be possible." John promised everything and nothing, and the pirate nodded significantly.

The mouse passed him and he didn't see the rodent until it was almost too late, and his previously half-formed plan—tear the mouse head away and confront the rat beneath—was already too delayed to put into operation. He hadn't

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time to see if the scurrying mouse looked guilty or not; impossible to sec which way its beady little eyes were looking. As the mouse wore boots, he found it difficult even to gauge its height, and as its cowled cape and ringed, sparsely furred tail slilhered off into the crowd, John's imagination choked into action: Nearly anyone could have been Emily's secret verminous lover. He struggled to guess who was sweating and festering under the black mask of the mouse: Was Bryon back in town? Where was Charles tonight? Is there some other marine in there, and does she take them both at once, Tarzan and the rodent? Some unknown, some visiting athletic alumnus of Nebraska who had debauched the girl years earlier and had now come to Budapest to spread his viral affections even here? Or, unlike the marines, was she licensed to fraternize with Hungarian nationals, engage in illicit congress with some Magyar Romeo-Zsolt who cooed sexy Hungarian gibberish from under those circular ears?

And so he abandoned Harvey in midsentence and stalked out of the ballroom, out of the hotel and onto the dark street, where a caped. vampiric mouse had just turned left at the end of the taxi rank. The smoking cabbies leaned against their Merccdeses, made little zigging circles with the orange tips of their cigs, and muttered, "Taxi, taxi, taxi, taxi, taxi, taxi," until John had made the same left turn, but his prey had already vanished. He broke into a jog and made the first turn he could, but there were neither doorways nor exits from the dead end he had penetrated. John stood stupidly in an alley, next to overflowing trash barrels surrounded at their bases by garbage, under a few flickering yellow lights, while scrambling and squeaking at his feet, very real, very hungry (but nonvampiric) rats were startled from their evening routine by a man in full-dress marine uniform, a rattling plastic saber at his side.

(6) "CHIEF,
 
AM
 
I
 
INTERRUPTING?"

"No worries, mate. What's on your barbie?"

John halfheartedly pitched his idea: a series of profiles to run throughout the rest of November—introductions, one at a time, of the Hungarian government officials Westerners would most likely meet in the course of their work, beginning with, probably, someone from the State Privatization Agency or something like that.

And through the horizontal slats of Editor's unfurled Venetian blinds, on the other side of his soundproof glass, Nicky and Karen leaned over Karen's desk and flipped through one of Nicky's portfolios. John couldn't sec which photos they were so enjoying together, and when he had entered Editor's office,

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Nicky had delighted in his unsatisfied curiosity. Now striped a half-dozen times by those Venetian slats, the women laughed and pointed, looked thoughtful, and tapped their fingers on favorite shots. From time to time Nicky looked up through the glass to confirm and savor John's surveillance. She discreetly pursed her lips into a kiss for him, then threw her arm around the other woman's shoulder and theatrically pointed out for her a particular aspect of composition, which John of course could not see, even though he walked to Editor's window and. with his high-school-basketball-broken, permanently half-healed, crooked finger bent down a Venetian slat with a metallic snap just as intrigued Editor assented to his half-baked, crooked proposal, the brainchild of Charles Ciabor.

(7) THE HIDDLE-OF-THE-NIGHT sensation of awakening in a room where the heat doesn't work well: the drafts that whip themselves into existence in the middle of the room like desert jinn; the 2 A.M. sounds and smells of rapidly approaching winter; the metallic snap of the floor against bare feet; the tickling, cold aromas of drying oil paint and photo fixative and of diesel fuel rising from the street through a cracked window, and the faint whiff of familiar perfume embedded in the rasp of a woolen blanket that warmed him enough to make his legs sweat, though his exposed chest and arms prickled with silvery, silvery cold; and the moment when, checking his watch on the scavenged bedside table, he caught the second hand unawares and it sat immobile for a long breath, until it finally knew it was being watched and jerked into a nonchalant rhythm, playing it innocent.

"Are you asleep?" he asked,

"No."

"The frost on your window is beautiful."

"Hm. It looks like snowy branches."

"I suppose so."

"As seen through a windshield."

"I guess so, yeah."

"Over that little curved quarter-pie wedge that windshield wipers make."

"That's true. Do those have a name?"

"And the heat doesn't work in the car."

"Just like here."

"No. different. In the car, it's because of an electrical malfunction. Sabotage."

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"Sabotage?"

"Yes. We're driving along this dark road when our heat stops working, then the headlights start to flicker, then they shut off entirely. Then the car just dies and it's very quiet outside. You ask if we're out of gas." " Are we out of gas, Nicky?' "

" 'Why, no, I don't think so, John, the needle is on three-quarters full.' But the car just sits dead on the road and it makes that sick wheezy sound when I turn the key and then it won't even do that. We're miles from anywhere. Sabotaged. And we're dressed in nothing but feather boas and stiletto heels." "We are? Both of us?"

"Yes. Now you have to get out and go for help." "In nothing but a boa?"

"And stiletto heels; don't whine. And very long eyelashes. And a jet-black wig."

" 'But, Nicky, I'll freeze if I go out in the snow dressed like that.' " " 'We'll both freeze if we don't get help, damnit, and no one is going to just walk by this isolated road.' But you have a point, so I sacrifice my boa for you. So now you have both boas on. You get out of the car and look back longingly as your stiletto heels squeak into the fresh snow. You wrap Ihe two boas around your naked body as best you can, adjust your wig, and you see me through your long eyelashes and my breath is misting up the windows already, so it's already difficult to make me out, but you know I am counting on you entirely, a woman wearing nothing but stiletto heels, shivering inside a car on a deserted and snowy foresl road in the midst of the coldest night on record. I'm relying on you for my life. In a tiny convertible from the 1960s heyday of Italian design. Black. Sssssabotaged." "Nicky?" "Yes?"

'Are you sending me home?" "You catch on fast, little man."

"I see you put Mark's picture back up. It's a little daunting to do it when I'm looking at a blowup of us doing it."

"You seem to be doing it just fine. If he ever comes back, he can have it and I'll keep the Polaroid. Hey, I want to meet your old piano friend someday." "Did I tell you about her?"

"Of course you did. Or someone did, Mark, maybe, whatever. It doesn't matter. 1 want to meet her, okay?"

"Do you ever think about where we're headed. Nick? You know? I sometimes feel like. I don't know, like, maybe we could be—"

"Stop right there. Now I'm really sending you home."