Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  “I can’t put it off any longer, is the thing. I know this isn’t the most tender thing I can say at the moment,” Charles said two days later as Neville spoke in hushed and halting German to one of the consulting physicians, “but he’s not exactly leaping out of bed to run his company, and this is not the optimal time for that kind of laziness.”

  “Sheer sloth,” John agreed.

  “I’m all for catching up on sleep, but something rather significant that’s been simmering for a while is now positively boiling over, and so you can do me a great favor. I’ve got a group that you in fact helped put together, and I need a warm body in a dinner chair next Monday, and frankly, Imre ain’t it. Can you manage not to have a stroke between now and Monday?”

  Neville shook the Swiss doctor’s hand and rejoined the two Americans. “Under the circumstances,” he said in his professional BBC voice, “the incapacity determination’s a relatively simple matter. I’ve arranged for the doc.”

  That night, the lines to get into A Házam offended the old hands. Velvet ropes unironically held potential guests at bay. Inside the front door, press and guidebook mentions of the club were framed and mounted under the Hungarian words for As Seen In. An artfully shabby poster prophesied the arrival of A Házam 2 and A Házam 3, to appear in other districts of Budapest, and Praházam, expected to sprout in Prague even sooner. This imminent pollination (the clubs would all sport the same autographed dictators’ photos, the same hooded spotlights, the same random furniture) was the flagship Hungarian investment of Charles’s old firm. Forever barring the club from their agenda, John and Charles instead sampled the pleasures of the Baal Room, recently opened by three young Irish entrepreneurs and decorated in an infernal theme. At the long bar shaped like a craggy shelf of molten rock, John and Gábor sat on red velvet stools while horned shirtless barmen in red tights brought them Unicum in fake human skulls and, new to the job, seemed nervously aware of the threat to bottles posed by their pointed, coiled-Styrofoam tails. Cages suspended from the cavernous ceiling housed men and women in carefully torn leather bikinis, dancing/writhing over plastic cauldrons containing red flickering spotlights, while massive bouncers with stylized pitchforks and primitively painted faces roamed the floor looking for trouble. On a large stage, under swiveling and flashing strobes, people danced to British pop music mixed with a looped recording of human screaming.

  Emboldened by a few sloshing skulls, John executed the opening maneuvers of the mistaken-movie-girl technique on the woman to his left, when, from the bar stool to his right, Charles spoke in confessional tones: “It was good to talk with you at the hospital that morning. It helped. Really. You know?” Oddly, he felt Charles meant it, but couldn’t think what talk he was referring to. A good talk in the hospital one morning?

  “Hey, whatever. No problem.”

  He turned back to his left, but the targeted mistaken movie star had disappeared. He had to admit it was not a heart-wrenching loss.

  The high-tempo music ended and was replaced by the long, ear-piercing shriek of a man in excruciating torment. Demonic laughter followed as the man sobbed chokingly. Then came the soft, romantic drums and opening synthesizer chords of John’s favorite song; it had taken the DJ nearly an hour to get to his request.

  VII.

  “THE THING IS, KÁROLY, YOU’RE SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD AND YOU

  don’t—”

  “Charles.”

  “—even seem to know what to do about it. What?”

  “Charles.”

  “Oh. Right …”

  Monday night, the promised South Sea islanders were late, and so from a vast distance, from faraway across the little round table set for five, from over the top of his own trembling black disc of Unicum, John watched Charles and Harvey massage their cocktails and converse past each other. He noticed this slight evidence of Charles’s nervousness: Charles’s smooth, interlocking surfaces were buckling and his distaste for Harvey emerged from under its protective cover (though Harvey, insulated in his own nervousness, did not notice). “They’ll be here. They’ll be here,” Harvey assured them, unprompted, and sought to bring dead air to life with electrical wit: “So, honestly now, tell me straight—you think he’s banging that Toldy woman?”

  “Well aren’t you a naughty sly boots.” Charles looked at his watch and snapped two cuffs back over its face. “If he was, he’s in no condition to do it now.”

  “Oh you never know, Károly—”

  “Charles. Charles. It’s English. It’s your native tongue.”

  “Yeah, but she keeps a pretty close watch over him in a private room, you were saying, yeah? It might have been one of those strokes that stirs the blood, if you know what I mean. Heard of things like that.”

  “Charles, can’t you shut this moron up?” Harvey and Charles looked up in surprise, and John realized with a flush of embarrassment that he hadn’t just thought it. The tone of Charles’s laughter, however, was expertly pitched; Harvey recognized at once John’s good joke, not to be taken seriously.

  The private dining room’s thick maroon curtains, surrounding the table on three sides, parted silently and a tuxedoed waiter held the dark velvet at bay for two South Sea islanders. The winter-pale man in front was the younger, only a few years older than Charles but prematurely gray in every way in his faux-antique accountant’s spectacles. Plastically handsome and weekly coiffed, he stepped aside, weakly coughed, and allowed his boss to enter the cramped luxury enclave first. Here was John’s promised surprise and a momentary bubble of stopped time in which to examine it: a three-dimensional simulation of a famous TV and newspaper face, a Down Under accent familiar from talk shows and news programs, the stern or slightly smug expression (two options only) that decorated a dozen business magazine covers each year. Harvey welcomed and introduced him with heavy respect. Before sitting or acknowledging the introductions, however, the vision turned to the waiter and ordered an obscurantist, antipodal cocktail as if he were the real man—the televised man—and so John could not really feel any credible doubt. The trademark cowboy hat, the clay of the prominent mole-island off the southeast coast of the nose, the eyebrows like primeval forests that TV makeup ladies must have had to toil long hours to glue into the semblance of smooth human features: The props were all familiar. Stranger, though, were the discrepancies: Just inside the curtained enclosure, the Australian had twitchy bad habits evidently suppressible only for the length of a news profile and no longer. Where the television face always locked onto its off-camera interviewers with executive intensity, 3-D Melchior never made direct eye contact, and so again John could almost convince himself that an impostor had joined them at this private table at the King of the Huns. Under the dim light, under the one solid wall’s ornately framed reproduction engravings of royal hunting parties, John felt a strange but physically perceptible relief to find here another larger-than-life man who wasn’t much, actually much less than the world had been led to believe.

  Hubert Melchior did not own the largest media empire in the world. There was a man in Atlanta and another Australian, and there were, presumably, powers in Hollywood and Frankfurt and the glassed-in aeries of Manhattan, whose names had not bubbled to the surface of world consciousness, all of whom had longer tentacles, more influence, more televisions and books and newspapers expressing their branded opinions. But with enough to go around, Hubert Melchior’s was one of those names that—even if one never followed business and finance—always seemed familiar. (“Is he the one who did that stunt, the thing with the flaming kangaroos?”)

  “These are the blokes scared you so bad, Kyle?” Melchior muttered as he sat down with a little grunt. His gray assistant laughed slightly and nodded on cue. The jibe was delivered in a weirdly humorless monotone, almost a mumble, not the boisterous corporate faux-cheer John expected. Melchior didn’t look at his assistant, had hardly looked enough at John or Charles to determine whether they were, in fact, sufficiently intimidating or not to have scared Kyle so
bad. He watched instead his own hands, which, palms down, glided over the wooden table in random, slow-moving patterns.

  “Scared me? No, no, gave me pause is all, Mr. Melchior,” said the younger man, with the semi-human intonations of browbeaten, hopeless executive assistants the world over, aging at twice the speed of their employers. He smiled at the three Americans, on Melchior’s behalf as well as his own, offering extra eye contact with the compliments of the corporation.

  Melchior was felinically fastidious. He scraped at a tiny, bulbous starfish of candle wax that had beached on the table. His left thumbnail scratched six or seven times in quick succession, then he brushed the wax crumbs away with speedy sweeps of his right pinkie. He alternated—scraping thumbnail, sweeping pinkie, scraping thumbnail, sweeping pinkie—long after anyone else could see any wax dripping at all, long after his eyes and attention were elsewhere, and still his hands polished of their own accord.

  “Mistah G’bore,” he murmured, unfolding his napkin and smoothing its individual creases with care. “Saw your face everywhere one week. Journo in the pocket here and there doesn’t hurt a young fellow. Know your way around that game nicely, I must say.”

  Charles laughed politely at the autistic speech emitted in the same voice of barely repressed boredom.

  “And with you and your chief there, this Mr. Horváth bloke, in the papers every time he turned around, poor Kyle’s nappies were always wet. He just kept saying, ‘Not the right time, not the right time, Mr. Melchior.’ Didn’t you there, Kyle boy? ‘Not the right time—’ ”

  “Mr. Horváth, though senior, has—I hope I’ve made it clear that Károly here is here as the fully entitled representative of—”

  “—‘not the right time, not the right time,’ just because of some nonsense about—” Melchior had heard Harvey’s interruption, but he hadn’t looked up from the invisible patterns he was drawing on the table with a stiff index finger, didn’t waste time scolding Harvey, simply kept talking, and no utterable noise on earth could have made him stop. “Couple of news articles and Kyle here is crying like a girl that it’s ‘inopportune’ for us to bid on Hungarian privatization deals. ‘Inopportune,’ after everything I’ve built.” Melchior’s toneless but candid admission that his multibillion-dollar media empire had been temporarily stymied by Charles and John, of all people, triggered in John a rush of pride. “King Jesus—had to listen to tripe about how we shouldn’t tamper with the privatization process, should let the Hungos deal with their own government first. Utter nonsense. And now there you sit, and you’re just a little boy, and no more Hungo than I am.” He gestured at but did not look up at Charles. “Look here. Truth be told, we were a little late to realize the media needs in this neck of the woods. But now no fooling. I’m in town for three days, and I got six papers, six publishers, two TV stations, and a cable start-up to talk to, so let’s not spend a lot of time courtin’ the sheep, right? Either she bleats for us or we move on.” Even this colorful Austral-corporate vulgarity emerged in the same vaguely bored, mildly sociopathic voice, and Melchior took a bite of his salad, found something distasteful in it, pushed it aside. “Your little house is nice and I want it, but I don’t have forever to do this. There are another dozen and a half I want if Hungo and Czecho and the Polacks are going to mean anything for Median. Let’s get on with it. Harvey here tells us we don’t need your chief for this talk. How’s that, then?”

  “He’s, unfortunately—” Harvey began.

  “Yeah. Sorry to hear it,” Melchior said.

  “I think a key point, a possible sticking point, which is what I see myself being able to help here with, what I’m on the lookout for, preventative, preventatively, to be discussed would be, Does it become the Median Press?” Harvey asked, brokering as fast as he could, before events brokered themselves.

  At last Melchior looked at someone: Charles, who had hardly said a word since the Australians’ landing. “It certainly becomes a proud new member of the Median family, and is given proper brand support as a result, much more support than you’re going to be able to muster with what’s left of your little private fund there, Mistah G’bore.” Vast personal knowledge implied, he returned to the work of realigning his unused silverware. “You any relation to those sisters, by the way? The actresses? So you tell me: Does the name of the house matter to anyone in this country?”

  It had happened so quickly, John hardly realized what was going on: As the last salad plate left the table on disembodied hands, John finally understood the Horváth Press was not only for sale but that the fates had already proceeded to the details of what it would be called when it was swallowed, still breathing, into the snaky belly of the Multinational Median Corporation, where it would quickly be broken down into its irreducible components.

  Charles slowly puffed out his cheeks and swayed his head from side to side. “Only very distantly,” he confessed. “Through my great-great-grandfather, I’ve been told, cousins of some sort. I’ve never met them, of course. It’s a relatively common name in Hungary.”

  “I think Károly’s in a, a, a kind of a spot, or like a spot,” Harvey offered. “We should be sensitive to the needs, that is, to the needs of both sides, or not sides but interests, the natural needs of those interests.”

  “Charles,” Charles corrected him sharply.

  “Right.” Harvey looked at him blankly. “What?”

  Charles ignored Melchior’s general question and offered instead a buffet of specifics. He began listing individual Horváth Holdings publications and prospective projects, descriptions of the firm’s published catalogs and backlist. He juggled titles, authors, and publications like a Las Vegas card trickster fanning a deck through the air. “Our Forint,” he was saying, “—and I pause here only as a possible example of some issues we might face—Our Forint is branded content with generations of tradition and consumer feeling behind—”

  “That’s your business sheet.” Melchior’s voice registered slight interest, but it was not a question, and he did not look away from the engraving over Charles’s shoulder, and John saw how the Australian simulated his look of keen intensity during TV interviews: over-the-shoulder focus points filmed from the side. “Our Forint, huh?” He reached out his hand and caught with an echoing slap the entire deck as it arched through the air. “No. Maybe for a while it stays under that name, but you know what we have. You’re no fool, Mistah G’bore. You picked that title for a reason, and I appreciate your openness to a deal. You know we’ve put enormous resources into the launch of Mmmmmoney. We want Mmmmmoney to be a worldwide publication, uniform globally, but with localized insert sections, seamlessly tailored to each market. Those inserts could, presumably, have localized names. Me and Kyle see no reason not to call the Hungo one Our Forint, if you can convince me you care.”

  “I think that’s probably a reasonable starting point.” Harvey looked back and forth between the table’s two interesting people.

  Melchior looked Charles in the eye and smiled, almost humanly. He had offered Charles the public impression of a concession, had addressed one small element of the whole, and expected his response to be extrapolated outward, and so the Australian pushed back his chair and stood; he did not need to stay for another course. He concentrated on sliding his spotted hands into plush gloves, even as his dishwasher’s dog–destined entrée was arriving at the table. His assistant stood in readiness, napkin in hand, but Melchior would leave alone; Kyle was to finish eating with the three Americans. Melchior smoothed the fleecy interior of his cowboy hat with a practiced action, alternating the palm and the back of the hand. “Based on what Harvey here’s told us, the amount of your bid, and the value of the Vienna outfit, Kyle here has an envelope with a number in it. It should be sufficient for you. It’s not a negotiating position. It’s final. I can’t go any higher than that number, so either your little item joins the Median family or it sits alone in Median country and we spend our first months here engaged in getting you out of our way. Kyle wi
ll wait one day at the Hilton for you to say you’re interested. Pleasure to meet you gentlemen.” No eye contact. No handshakes. And the cowboy hat and the mole and the abnormal, asocial drawl were swallowed by the maroon curtains.

  There was a certain ice-blue pleasure in Melchior’s company, John realized only as the velvet stopped billowing and settled into a vertical red sea. He didn’t seem to enjoy his work in the slightest, but he also seemed entirely free of artifice in its performance. He said “I want this” and “I’ll pay this amount for it” and “No, I won’t name it after your comatose boss” and that was that.

  “Lovely venison,” said Kyle with real feeling, a sadly eager glimmer on his face. Left for a few minutes to his own devices among people more or less his own age, he rushed to make the most of it. “Are there entertaining places to go around here after supper? Clubs or dancing and the like?”

  “Let’s see the envelope, Kyle.”

  “Right.”

  Charles held the sealed envelope to his temple. “Enjoy your venison, Kyle.” He placed the letter, unopened, in his pocket, and everyone spent the rest of the evening wondering when he would finally peek. Kyle, always sensitive to being dismissed, said not another word. He and Harvey graciously paid for the meal.

  On the street outside the restaurant, Charles pointed pointedly to two cabs, and Harvey tried to steal a confidential word with him as he could see that the encroaching forced separation was for a good strategic reason and that Charles obviously wanted him to execute certain intricate, advanced negotiatory maneuvers once he had Kyle alone. “Charles, Charles, listen,” he said, his arm sliding around Gábor’s shoulder, chummily walking him away from the others. Charles bent over to tie his shoe, arose facing the other direction, strode to the cab, pushed John in, and shook two hands. “Károly,” he corrected Harvey.