Extraordinary Renditions (13 page)

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:

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 getting 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.

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.

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.

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 pissed 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.