Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  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 time to see if the scurrying mouse looked guilty or not; impossible to see 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 slithered 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 Mercedeses, 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 see which photos they were so enjoying together, and when he had entered Editor’s office, 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 Gábor.

  (7) THE MIDDLE-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, slivery 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.”

  “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 the two boas around your naked body as best you can, adjust your wig, and you see me throug
h 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 forest 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. I 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.”

  “I just mean—”

  “Really. I have to paint.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Hey. Hey. Really.”

  He dressed. She kissed him on the threshold of the open door, handed him his backpack with Mark’s journals in it. She had the thick plaid blanket wrapped around her torso, her bare arms and shoulders blanched silver-white by the humped moon that washed the courtyard and the doorway. She had also put on a fake-feather headdress, the key element of a Bulgarian-made “American Red Indian Chief” costume she had found in a scavenging trip to a peculiarly Hungarian toy store. It was hard to take anything too seriously with a bald, seminude American Red Indian Chief girl. Still, he wanted to say something, she could see that, and so she stroked his cheek and smiled, then turned her back, stepped into the apartment, let her blanket fall and her trailing headdress brush its lowest fake feathers against the rounding of her naked hips, and closed the door behind her.

  (8) JOHN SUBMITTED TO EDITOR his first installment of the series

  “Hungarians You Need to Know but Should Not Try to (Blatantly) Bribe.” To cover his tracks, he began with someone unrelated to Charles Gábor’s business: the elderly guard who worked the front door of the U.S. embassy, the man responsible for waving a handheld metal detector over a Danube of visa seekers, businessmen, visiting government officials. John’s profile of Old Péter ran in the company of an extreme close-up of the guard (PHOTO: N. MANKIEWILICZKI-POBUDZIEJ), stressing the deep canyons in his face, the softness of his squashed-lip, squinting smile, the furry wattles that flapped from his chin and fell into the open collar of his Romanian polo shirt. The caption: WELCOME TO THE EMBASSY OF THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

  Their simultaneously translated interview (Old Péter knew only employee names, titles, and floor numbers in English) took place after hours at the embassy (vibrating with the constant and constantly disappointed promise of an approaching Emily) while an obese, whiskered Hungarian woman scrubbed the lobby steps on her hands and knees. John learned from Old Péter that three of the marines he had met in July (including “the giant Negro boy”) had traded in embassy blues for desert khaki and were now somewhere in the Persian Gulf, preparing to fight the Arab Hitler. “Hussein Saddam boom!” slurped Old Péter. “U.S. marines!” He sprayed the room with machine-gun sound effects. The cleaning lady paid him no attention, only churned her rags again into the bucket of steam at her side and sloshed the floor with both hands.

  Two days later, John submitted the series’ second installment: “Psst, Buddy, You Wanna Buy a Paprika Factory?” The prodigiously complimentary column profiled a subdirector in charge of midsize enterprise denationalization for the State Privatization Agency. John described the bureaucrat as “a key architect of a new world” but also “a defender of Hungary’s entrepreneurial past.” John hailed the man’s answers to repeated questions about the importance of restoring Hungarian commerce into Hungarian hands as hallmarks of “twenty-first-century brilliance” and “one of the many reasons this man’s name is constantly bubbling to the top of conversations about candidates for ministry portfolios.”

  “And exactly which conversations are those?” Charles asked John the evening of the piece’s publication.

  “Well, this one right now, for example.”

  John listened proudly as Charles read the entire piece over the phone to Imre, laughed from time to time, and answered the old man’s questions in liquid Hungarian. “We’re closing in, Imre,” he said in English. “Closing in.”

  “It seems a scandal,” John had mentioned in the course of the interview, “that foreigners look upon the privatization process as a discount sale and not, as it of course should be, the restoration of justice and logic to an economy battered by injustice and illogic. Why should an American or a Frenchman or a, a, a South Sea islander buy a Hungarian business when there are Hungarians eager and qualified to run them? Why is a foreigner—a carpetbagger—any better than keeping it in the state’s hands?”

  The bureaucrat’s answer, though balanced, grappling with the complexities he felt the young reporter’s question had missed, nevertheless won him yet more praise: an understanding that his job is more than simply that of an estate auctioneer but is closer to that of a wise overseer of an enormous garden, entrusting the appropriate natives with the tools and knowledge to make this country blossom again.

  “You think he meant Gábor has won the bid?” Harvey asked the next morning.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t want to push. But he was clear that there was a desire, at the very highest levels of the government, to keep the nation’s historic legacy in the proper hands—at least in the initial stage of unloading the heavily symbolic stuff to the private sector. After that, let the market do what it will, but the government certainly isn’t missing the public relations issues at stake.”

  Now Harvey read the article over the phone to an unknown auditor, answered questions curtly, then replied, in a tone that implied special access (which John appreciated), “Because the reporter’s right here in the room with me, that’s how.”

  “So who’s got the best bid for the Horváth Press?” John couldn’t resist asking the shy man behind the metal desk at the tail end of the interview. The quiet economist, only twenty-nine, stared at him.

  “Mr. Price,” he answered. “You are aware, I hope, that I cannot tell you of this. You are a journalist, no? This bidding process is completely ominous. You ask ominous information.” And John remembered for years the unpleasant sensation in his stomach that he had pushed too far, until he realized the man had only meant to say anonymous.

  (9) FRIDAY THE THIRTIETH, the last hours of November, some American kid vomiting against the base of an apartment block across the street, and from the large window of the new Thai restaurant next to the bar, a wedge of yellow light fell on the dark road. Charles pulled open the bar’s heavy wooden door, under the dull orange nautical lanterns. “Now some entertainment, please,” one of them said (“Ten minutes maximum here if it sucks”). John, Charles, and Harvey (a tenacious social barnacle since John had introduced him to Charles, who later declared him “possibly a gold mine, possibly full of shit”) all descended into the old bar, shaped like a frigate. Everything about the place whispered to these experienced customers that only a few more weeks remained before the end, before the old haunt tipped irreparably and became fully Westernized, unacceptable to any self-respecting expat.