Extraordinary Renditions (14 page)

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.

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.

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.