Extraordinary Renditions (9 page)

And he fell for it.

Doornail placed the whiskey and cheeseburgers on the center conference table and the soldiers swarmed on them. The bottle got passed around despite the hour, and people talked about where they were from and what they thought of Europe so far. The marine baited them, trying to get them loosened up enough to talk shit about Sullivan. “I hear he’s a punk,” he said, but no one went for it. Brutus wanted to be back in his room. He didn’t touch the food, but he helped himself to the whiskey when it came his way. He hated the implicit assumption that he could be made to feel at home by this marine’s shit talk and fake jive. Semper fi? Semper idem, motherfucker. He could hear the staff sergeant and the white soldiers’ laughter through the walls.

Then it was his turn to speak. “I’m from Philadelphia.”

“Yo, Philly.”

“No. Nobody in Philly calls it ‘Philly’ except people who aren’t from there. It’s ‘Philadelphia.’” That wasn’t entirely true, but he liked the idea of messing with him. “And as far as being in Hungary, well I ain’t really seen shit yet.”

Some of the others nodded in assent.

“You’ll get your chance,” Doornail said. “How ’bout you?” he asked another man. “Where you from, soldier?”

The conversation went on like that, and they hung on every word. Doornail took tiny sips from the whiskey and pretended to get tipsy. Once they went around the whole group, he riled them with stories about the titty bars in Budapest and the hot-blooded Hungarian girls.
“Goddamn!
Springtime in Budapest is a glorious sight! Play your cards right, toe the line, and I bet your man Sullivan’ll hook you up with a pass to come visit.”

The other soldiers bought the fake camaraderie like a five-dollar blowjob. One of them asked Doornail how he got the name.

“Back in O-Town … I mean, Oakland,” he said, looking at Brutus. “I got it when I was a teenager, and it just stuck.” He practiced his little laugh. “When I was sixteen I moved into my own crib. Sure, O-Town had a bad rep, but I never felt endangered in any way until then. I get there and I can tell right away that some of the folks in the hood were waiting to fuck with me.”

The word “fuck” sounded funny coming from him, like when an American solider spent too much time with the few remaining Brits and started saying shit like “bloody” and “wanker.”

“It’s a predatory thing in Oakland, and I was the new kid. Like you men here.”

Brutus paid a little more attention. He watched Doornail’s eyes as he spoke, but he couldn’t get any read.

“Day I move in, I pick up this dead rat out back. Big sucker. And I nail it to my front door,
bam bam bam.
I wanted to send a message to the neighborhood. You know, don’t fuck with me. Sure enough, I get up next morning and the rat’s gone. Somebody came up and stole it right off my door. Now this is a tough neighborhood! But you know what? No one messed with me after that. People didn’t shy away. I mean, they couldn’t let me be a badass by crucifying a rat on my door, but they didn’t mess with me neither.”

When the staff sergeant knocked on the door, everyone stood to shake Doornail’s hand. “Next time, I’ll see you men up in the city,” he told them, and exited like a rock star.

Brutus picked up the Fanon book and then put it back down in frustration. The unorthodox visit from the marines was little more than another thinly veiled threat, a demonstration of Sullivan’s far-reaching influence, of the width and breadth of his might. Army life consisted of continuing battles of the will and the establishment of petty superiorities over one’s fellow man. He witnessed the ill-natured competitiveness most often in the mess hall and on the shooting ranges. Sullivan was the reigning champion of the big-dick contests, none of which had been mentioned at the recruiter’s office on Broad Street, under the gaze of that Quaker-ass William Penn.

The constant threat of terrorist attacks on American targets at home and abroad required Brutus to carry his firearm at all times, and his needed a good cleaning. The army was training the goddamn Iraqi police there on the base. That was what they called it. “Training” them in the fine art of torture, to be sure. Private jets landed every couple of days on an airstrip built specifically for the base’s restricted zone.

Doornail’s story stayed with him longer than he would have preferred. The image of the dead rat lingered on the periphery of Brutus’s thoughts,
slightly out of focus but vivid enough to unsettle everything around it. There was a lesson in it—something foreboding, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He was taking apart his weapon when someone banged on his door. He didn’t answer it, but the knock came again. “Private First Class Gibson? You’re to report to Sullivan’s office immediately.”

Probably just a couple knuckleheads busting his balls.

“Hold up.” He clanged the pieces of his pistol together loud enough that they wouldn’t think he was jerking off.

A pair of Latino soldiers stood in the doorway, sending an elongated, fun-house shadow into his room. An open window backlit their helmets like two metallic haloes—a carefully cultivated effect. Brutus made a show of keeping his hands out in the open. He had grown suspicious of cops long before his arrival in Europe.

“You Gibson?”

“Yeah.”

One of the soldiers shifted his weight, sending a blinding light directly into Brutus’s eyes and rendering himself invisible. “Sullivan wants to see you.”

“Right now?” He looked back at the row of metal that had recently been a pistol. Regulations forbade him from leaving without it. He could go to jail for having an unsecured weapon in a barracks room.

“No, when your gold-plated invitation arrives,” the other guy said.

The authorities there were just as witty in Budapest as they were in Philly.

“Hold up.”

Brutus considered putting the pistol back together first but decided to forget it. He grabbed his wallet from his desk and followed the M.P.s out, pulling the door locked behind him. A dozen minor infractions of protocol committed over the past few days came to mind, none of which warranted a personal summons from Sullivan.

Brutus refused to be the first to speak. He allowed the cops to feel that they had adequately established their authority. Unfortunately, they weren’t just fronting—he really
was
more or less at their mercy. There were all kinds of stories about out-of-uniform soldiers dragging men from their rooms, taking them behind the latrines, and treating them like Rodney King for a day. Brutus wasn’t about to make the first move.

Sullivan’s office was over in the executive suite of newer buildings on the western edge of the camp. Brutus’s sometime-girlfriend, a civilian named Magda, occasionally worked there as an interpreter. She spent most of her time in the restricted area, and wouldn’t talk about what went on there. He couldn’t even bring up the topic. The cops directed him into the back of a Humvee, which slid on the ice around the turns. Other soldiers watched without surprise as the three of them passed. Brutus read their eyes: he had had this coming for a long time.

Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan sat smiling behind his desk. Brutus had never even spoken to him, other than “yes” and “sir.” This ought to be good, he thought. He saluted and stood at attention. “Private First Class Jonathan Gibson reporting as ordered, sir.”

Up close, Sullivan appeared cross-eyed; he had the lazy eye of a sniper who had spent too many hours staring down the scope of a rifle either out in the field or from the roof of an embassy someplace. His bright green eyes glowed in violent contrast to the taut, ruddy complexion of his skin. A framed blueprint of a small military bridge occupied the entire wall behind him. Sullivan had overseen its reconstruction over a river in Serbia and was awarded a commendation from the highest echelons of SFOR. Young for a man of his rank, he had a reputation as a cunning, brutal officer. He was the biggest ballbreaker on the continent. It was said that his assignment to Hungary was a form of punishment, or possibly even exile. A soldier in his command had once died under allegedly crooked circumstances. Brutus had to stay sharp. Smile and nod.

“At ease,” Sullivan said. “Relax, Brutus.” His voice was calming in an authoritative way, kind of like how they portrayed Satan’s in old movies. Brutus remained standing. Sullivan saw the surprise on his face. “You don’t mind if I call you Brutus, do you?”

“No, sir.”

Sullivan dismissed the soldiers. He had a large manila envelope on the desk. The words PFC GIBSON JONATHAN and PHILADELPHIA, PENNA. were typed on a white label.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“No, sir.” A million possibilities ran through his mind. They probably knew about Magda. Relations with the civilian population had been forbidden since another G.I. got convicted of rape in Japan some months earlier and set off a diplomatic shitstorm. Word had it that parents in Okinawa, probably in Hungary too, were trying to cash in on the American occupation by sending their daughters out to fuck soldiers and then yell rape. Uncle Sam was known to throw a lot of money around to keep the stories out of the papers. At Taszár, the authorities didn’t care if a G.I. poked another Hungarian honey, not until they needed an excuse to climb up his ass.

Sullivan slid the envelope across the desk. Brutus became aware not only of his own nervousness but also how much Sullivan relished that nervousness. He bathed in it, took strength from it. He was probably stroking a hard-on under his desk. He looked like a snake about to lunge at a rat. A thought ran through Brutus’s mind: a snake without poison is still a snake. He couldn’t remember where he’d heard that. Maybe from his buddy Elvin. He opened the envelope, which was empty except for a single eight-by-ten photo.

“Look at the photograph, Private.”

It was black-and-white and extremely grainy, with a spooky, timeless quality. It could have been taken twenty minutes or twenty years earlier: a hard-core shot of two men, one black and one white, engaging in anal
sex. From the angle and quality of the print, he couldn’t make out either of their faces. The black man was getting fucked up the ass, and Brutus knew what was going to happen next.

“What’s the matter, Brutus? That is you, isn’t it? That nigger faggot, I mean.” All the softness left his voice. A thin smile crept across his face.

“No, sir.”

“Do you always catch, Brutus? Don’t you get the urge to pitch once in a while?” Sullivan stopped smiling. “Listen to me. This is you in the photograph. Do you understand?”

“Sir, I—”

“Do. You. Under. Stand?”

Brutus looked deep into Sullivan’s face and saw nothing at all he could work with. His mind raced. A snake without poison is still a snake. It wasn’t him in the photo, of course, but that would be his word against Sullivan’s. How many men had Sullivan pulled this on? How many different people had been in that picture? Did he have another version with the roles reversed in the unlikely case that he wanted to blackmail a white dude? A Latino? Sullivan was setting him up. Blackmail—the word rolled over and over through his mind. He entertained the idea that the white guy in the photo was Sullivan.

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

Brutus
did
understand. For the first time in his army career, he knew exactly what was happening to him. He was being set up, made into an example at Taszár and at every post Sullivan would have for the remainder of his career.

“You see that it’s you in the photograph?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It pleases me to know you’re as smart as our best testing demonstrates. So you understand that you have officially entered into a world of shit? So to speak.”

“Very much so, sir.”

“And, Private, that I alone can get you out of it?”

“I pretty much guessed that too, sir. And if I’m not mistaken you’re going to make me some kind of deal.” Brutus sidestepped the usual formalities, testing his limits. He wished he had his pistol with him, but didn’t know what he would do with it. Better this way.

“You’re perceptive, Private. But this is not the time to discuss such matters. For now, let’s just say that you are going to help me with something. When you’re finished, you get to keep this photograph as a souvenir. Fuck with me, and this is going on the front page of
Stars and Stripes.
You get where I’m coming from?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You won’t end up in some cushy, American prison. Oh no. It would please me very much to visit you in the filthiest cell this whole stinking country has to offer, and I will blow you sweet kisses while you’re bent over in front of some skinhead mother killers far meaner than the featherweight in this picture. Dismissed, Private.”

Brutus saluted and turned to leave.

“Oh, one more thing before you go, Private. With a name like Brutus, I assume you’ve read
Julius Caesar?”

“Yes, sir. Several times, sir.” He even had “Et tu Brute” tattooed on his left bicep.

“Well. A nigger who reads Shakespeare is like the one monkey out of a thousand that gets lucky at a typewriter and writes a sonnet. That makes you one lucky monkey, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So when I tell you to beware the ides of March, you know you better fucking listen, right?”

“Yes, sir.” Brutus couldn’t stand the sound of his own voice: yessuh, yessuh, yessuh. “But it wasn’t Brutus, sir.”

The lieutenant colonel looked up from the paperwork on his desk. “Excuse me?”

“It wasn’t Brutus, sir, who had to beware the ides of March. It was Caesar.”

Sullivan scowled. “Dismissed, Private.”

“This is
not,”
Sullivan had announced in his introductory lecture, “a free country.”

The day Brutus had arrived at Taszár, he received an orientation package of army propaganda. More than national defense or fighting wars or peacekeeping missions or any of that,
paperwork
justified the existence of the U.S. military. He was handed three three-ring binders stacked one on top of the other. That was only the beginning. He pitched most of the material into the garbage, but kept a few pamphlets because of their comic value. One described the dangers of Hungarian women, known to be a predatory race of acid-tongued nymphets interested only in obtaining an American passport. There was nothing a Hungarian girl—especially “a girl from the countryside,” it was stressed—wouldn’t do to sink her claws into a G.I. The handout told horror stories of girls getting pregnant and demanding child support from the U.S. government, of angry fathers seeking retribution (“The honor of one’s family is extremely important among the peasantry of Eastern Europe”), and of mafioso thugs using their girlfriends as bait to extort money out of the unwitting soldier. “Socially Transmitted Diseases (STDs) run rampant in emerging democracies.”