by David Szalay
Gábor doesn’t seem to understand the question. ‘What?’
‘Chicken,’ Balázs says emphatically. ‘Is it okay?’
‘Chicken?’
‘Yeah.’ He is standing outside a fried chicken place. The street lights have just flickered on, greenish. There is a faint smell of putrefaction. ‘There’s this fried chicken place …’ he says.
‘Yeah, that’s fine,’ Gábor tells him. Then, ‘I mean – does it look okay?’
Balázs looks at the place. ‘Yeah, it looks okay.’
‘Yeah, fine,’ Gábor says. ‘And don’t be too long. We’ve got to leave at ten.’
Balázs slips his phone into the hip pocket of his jeans and steps into the pitiless light. There is a small queue. While he waits he studies the menu – some backlit plastic panels – and when it is his turn, orders without mishap. (His English is quite fluent; he learned it in Iraq – it was the only way they could communicate with the Polish soldiers they were stationed with, and of course with whatever Americans they happened to meet.) He has trouble, though, finding his way back to the flat and has to phone Gábor again for help. Then they sit in the living room, he and Gábor, on the low sofa, eating with their hands from the flimsy grease-stained boxes. The overhead light is on in its torn paper shade and the stagnant air is full of loitering smoke and the smell of their meal, in the hurried eating of which Balázs is so involved that he does not notice Emma’s presence until Zoli speaks.
Then he lifts his head.
His mouth is full and his fingers are shiny with the grease of the chicken pieces. She is standing in the doorway.
‘Wow,’ Zoli had said.
And now, as if speaking Balázs’s thoughts, he says it again.
‘Wow.’
Later, sitting in the pearly Merc, he finds an after-image of how she had looked, standing in the doorway, still singed into his vision as he stares out of the window at other things. The London night is as glossy as the page of a magazine. Nobody speaks now as the smoothly moving Merc takes them into the heart of the city, where the money is.
2
It is awkward, especially that first night. In the driver’s seat, Gábor seems morose – he spends a lot of time with his head lolling on the leather headrest, staring out through the windscreen at the plutocratic side street in which they are parked, or studying the Tibetan inscription tattooed on the inside of his left forearm. Unusually for him, he hardly says a word for hours at a time. The hotel is a few minutes’ walk away, on the avenue known as Park Lane – after which Balázs’s inexpensive cigarettes, he has now learned, are named.
When they arrived, Zoli made a phone call. A few minutes later they were joined by a young woman, also Hungarian, who was introduced as Juli and who, it seemed, worked at the hotel. Then she, Zoli and Emma set off, and Gábor told Balázs that the two of them would be waiting there, in the parked Merc, until Emma returned.
It is a pretty miserable night they spend there, mostly in a silence exacerbated by the tepid stillness of the weather.
There are instances of listless conversation, such as when Gábor asks Balázs whether this is his first time in London. Balázs says it is, and Gábor suggests that he might like to do some sightseeing. When Balázs, showing polite interest, asks what he should see, Gábor seems at a loss for a few moments, then mentions Madame Tussauds. ‘They have waxworks of famous people,’ he says. ‘You know.’ He tries to think of one, a famous person. ‘Messi,’ he says finally. ‘Whatever. Emma wants to see it. Anyway, it’s something for you to do, if you want.’
‘Okay, yeah,’ Balázs says, nodding thoughtfully.
They then lapse into a long silence, except for Gábor’s index finger tapping the upholstered steering wheel, a sound like slow dripping, slowly filling a dark sink of preoccupation from which Balázs’s next question, asked some time later, seems mysteriously to flow.
He asks Gábor how he knows Zoli.
‘Zoli?’ Gábor seems surprised that it is something Balázs would have any interest in. ‘Uh,’ he says, as if he has actually forgotten. ‘Friend of a friend. You know.’ There is another longish pause and then, perhaps finding that it is something he wants to talk about after all, Gábor goes on. ‘I met him last time I was here, in London. He suggested we set something up.’
*
She taps on the misted window just after five in the morning. It is light and quite cold. Not much is said as Gábor, waking, unlocks the door and she gets in. Nor while he fiddles with the satnav. Then he switches on the engine, sets the de-mister noisily to work on the windows, and they pull out into the empty street.
She looks tired, more than anything, still in her skimpy dress and heels – though now she has shed the shoes and drawn her legs up under her on the seat. The two men managed a few hours’ sleep while they waited; it is hard to say whether she has. Her brown-ringed eyes suggest not. Her residual alertness seems chemically assisted.
‘Everything was okay?’ Gábor says eventually, while they wait at a traffic light.
‘M-hm.’
‘Are you hungry?’ is his next question, a minute or so later.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Maybe.’
‘You should eat something,’ he advises.
‘Okay.’
They stop at a McDonald’s and Balázs is sent in. He is aware, in her presence, of his own obvious stink – he has been wearing the same T-shirt for twenty-four hours. She wants a Big Mac and large fries, and a Diet Coke.
‘Thanks,’ she says, when he gets back to the car and, turning in the passenger seat, passes her the brown bag.
It is the first word she has ever spoken to him.
To her, he says, ‘No problem,’ though she might not have heard, as at that moment Gábor starts the engine.
She pushes the plastic straw into the cup’s lid and starts to drink.
Zoli shows up in the middle of the afternoon, while they are all still asleep.
Gábor emerges vague and tousled in a singlet and boxer shorts to hand over Zoli’s share of the money, which he does in the recessed corner of the living room that has been turned into a derisory pine kitchenette. Zoli then hands out strongly chilled lagers and, as they open them, asks after Emma. She has not been seen since the morning – not by Balázs anyway – when she disappeared into the bedroom as soon as they got back to the flat.
Gábor had joined her soon after, leaving Balázs to press his face into the odorous sofa as he tried to escape the light that flooded in through the windows and ignore the sounds from the street, intermittent but easily audible from the first floor, and fall asleep. At about ten o’clock, still unable to sleep, he had masturbated under a weak shower to a torrent of images of Emma in a vaguely delineated hotel room, images of the sort that had filled his head all night. A shocking quantity of seed turned down the plughole. Some time after that, with a T-shirt tied over his eyes, he did finally fall asleep.
‘So everything went okay?’ Zoli says, and swigs.
‘Yeah, I think so,’ Gábor says, with a sort of sleepy snuffle. They are standing at the pine breakfast bar.
‘I know him, that guy,’ Zoli says. ‘He’s okay. He’s a nice guy. I put him in first because I knew he wouldn’t cause any hassle.’
Gábor just nods.
‘Some of the others I don’t know,’ Zoli says. And then, ‘I’m not expecting any hassle, though.’
‘No,’ Gábor says.
‘These aren’t people who want to talk to the police, to journalists, you know what I mean. They’ve got too much to lose. Some of them are famous, I think.’
‘Yeah?’ Gábor says. He doesn’t seem interested.
‘I think so,’ Zoli says, with a nod and a swig. ‘She still asleep?’ he asks.
‘Yeah,’ Gábor says.
Zoli doesn’t stay long, and after he leaves Gábor goes back to bed. If he had had a bed, Balázs might have done the same. Instead he goes out into the blinding day and gets another box of chicken piece
s from the same place as the night before. Then he lies on the sofa with the window open, smoking and trying to read a book – Harry Potter és a Titkok Kamrája. He is working his way slowly through the series.
He finds it difficult to focus on the story.
Then he finds it difficult to focus on the words.
When he wakes up she is standing in the doorway, in a dressing gown. He has no idea what time it is. It is still daylight.
‘Hi,’ she says in a neutral voice.
‘Hi.’ He sits up. ‘What, uh, what time is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Gábor wants to go shopping.’
Balázs is not sure what to say.
She tilts her head as if looking at something upside down – Harry Potter és a Titkok Kamrája. ‘Is that any good?’ she asks.
‘Uh.’ He picks it up and looks at the front, as if the answer might be there. ‘It’s alright,’ he says. He tries to think of something else to say about it.
She stays there for a few moments more, in the mote-filled afternoon light.
Then she yawns, and leaves.
*
Later, when they are sitting in the parked Merc, Gábor tells him about the shopping trip – two and a half hours in the scrum of Oxford Street, followed by a meal in the red velvet interior of an Angus Steakhouse. They have been talking more than they did the first night, the two men. It is drizzling. Maybe that helps, the way the surrounding hubbub softens the silence. The fact is, they do not know each other well. Even in the context of the gym they are not particularly friendly.
At about midnight, Balázs leaves the Merc and walks through the drizzle to the nearby KFC to get their ‘lunch’ – two ‘Fully Loaded’ meals.
Taking his seat again, he finds Gábor in a pensive mood. ‘Sometimes I worry about my attitude to women,’ Gábor says. Water trickles down the window against which his head is silhouetted. ‘D’you worry about that?’
Balázs has just bitten into his chicken fillet burger and cannot immediately answer. When he has swallowed what is in his mouth, he says, ‘What d’you mean?’
‘Just my attitude to women,’ Gábor says miserably. ‘Maybe it isn’t healthy.’ He turns to Balázs, still wet in the passenger seat, and says, ‘What do you think?’
Balázs just stares at him.
‘What would you do in my position?’ Gábor asks.
‘What would I do?’
‘Yeah, if you were in my position.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘If you and Emma were … whatever,’ Gábor says impatiently. ‘Would you let her do this?’
‘Would I let her?’
‘Yeah.’
Balázs is having trouble imagining, with any emotional specificity, the situation Gábor wants him to – a situation in which he and Emma were … whatever. Sex, is all he is able to imagine, and that of an impossibly lubricious kind. ‘Don’ know,’ he says. And then, trying to be more helpful, ‘Maybe.’
‘You would?’
‘Well …’ Balázs attempts to think about it honestly. ‘Maybe not,’ he says. ‘It depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On what … You know … What sort of relationship …?’
‘That’s it,’ Gábor says. ‘That’s my point. That’s what I’m talking about.’ He turns his attention, finally, to the food in his lap.
‘You’re worried this won’t be, uh … this won’t be positive for your relationship?’ Balázs asks.
‘Yeah,’ Gábor says simply, and pushes a sheaf of French fries into his mouth.
‘Well … D’you talk to her about it?’
Gábor shakes his head, and speaks with his mouth full. ‘Not really, to be honest. I mean, I try sometimes. She doesn’t want to. Whatever.’
They eat.
‘It’s her birthday next week.’ Gábor sounds slightly wistful now.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. I’m taking her to a kind of wellness spa place.’
‘Yeah?’ Balázs says again.
‘In Slovakia. They’ve got this luxury hotel up in the mountains. We’ve been there before. Kempinski hotel. You know those hotels?’
Balázs frowns, as if trying to remember, then shakes his head.
‘Fucking nice,’ Gábor tells him. ‘There’s this lake, surrounded by mountain peaks – she loves that shit. They’ve got every kind of treatment,’ he says. ‘Literally. You know. Mud baths, whatever.’
*
The days pass, and every day is the same, from Zoli’s visit in the mid-afternoon, through the long night, to the stop at McDonald’s in the smeary sun and the spasm in the mildewed shower, which smoothes the way to sleep.
Still, his sleep is poor. He feels stretched thin with fatigue, feels as insubstantial sometimes as the sails of smoke that sag in the windless air of the warm living room. Sometimes he feels transparent, at other times insufferably solid, but all the time there is the small furtive thrill of inhabiting the same space as her. Of using, for instance, the same bathroom. The small, water-stained bathroom is full of her stuff. He examines it with intense interest.
If her proximity thrills him, however, it tortures him as well in the long pallid hours of each afternoon, as he lies on the sofa knowing that she is there, on the other side of the flimsy wall, at which he stares as if trying to see through it, while the fantasies unspool in his smooth skull.
As for her, he marvels at how fresh she seems. If on Monday, which was the fourth day, she looked a little haggard and hungover when she appeared at four o’clock in the afternoon in her old towelling dressing gown, it was nothing she was not able to magic away with twenty minutes in front of the bathroom mirror.
Monday was the night they had the problem, the night of the incident. It was still early, not even eleven, when Gábor got the text. ‘Shit,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s from Emma.’
‘What’s it say?’ Balázs asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Isn’t that the signal?’
‘Maybe it’s a mistake,’ Gábor said.
‘Isn’t it the signal?’ Balázs asked again.
‘Yeah,’ Gábor sighed. ‘Okay,’ he said heavily, ‘let’s go.’ He was scared, Balázs thought. That’s why he was taking the hammer – he had a hammer with him, he kept it under the driver’s seat. Now it was up his sleeve.
They started to walk towards the hotel. Gábor was shaking his head, his face full of sorrowful intensity and fear. As they walked, he phoned Juli, who was working nights all week. She said she would meet them at the staff entrance.
She was waiting there, smoking nervously, when they arrived.
They followed her along a passageway with a green plastic floor, to the service stairs. ‘It’s the fourth floor,’ she told them, handing Gábor the key card. Gábor nodded, and he and Balázs started solemnly up the stairs.
Scuffed walls, a neon tube over each landing.
‘You ready?’ Gábor asked.
Balázs shrugged.
Gábor said, ‘This is where you earn your money.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’ll make sure she’s okay, you deal with him. I mean, if there’s any trouble.’
‘Okay.’
‘And the minimum of necessary force, yeah? I know I don’t need to tell you that. We don’t want … You know what I mean.’
He was worrying about the police, obviously. It was something that was on Balázs’s mind too. ‘Why don’t you leave the hammer here?’ he said, stopping.
‘What?’
‘Leave the hammer here. You can get it later.’
‘Why?’
Balázs wondered how to put it. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if …’ He started again. ‘Let’s say the police get involved, and you’ve got a hammer … A weapon. D’you see what I’m saying? We won’t need it anyway.’
Gábor was doubtful. ‘We won’t need it?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’ A
fter a further hesitation, Gábor said, ‘Okay.’ He put the hammer down quietly and they passed through a fire door into the heavy, monied hush of the hallway on the other side. It was unlike anywhere Balázs had ever been, the sort of place he had only seen in American films – that was how it felt, like he was in an American film.
They were standing outside 425, the lacquered woodwork of the door. Listening, they heard nothing. Then Gábor swiped the sensor, the lock whirred and disengaged, and they went in.
‘What’s this?’ Gábor said. He sounded surprised, almost disappointed.
There were three people in the room, which was large and well lit – Emma and two Indian men, all sitting down, and all seemingly waiting patiently, in polite silence.
‘Okay, listen,’ one of the Indians said immediately, standing. ‘We want to talk to you.’ He was much the older of the two of them and had been sitting on an upholstered chair between the tall, draped windows.
Gábor ignored him and said to Emma, in Hungarian, ‘What’s going on?’
She shrugged. ‘There are two of them.’
‘I can see that. What’s been happening?’
‘Nothing.’
The older man was wearing a tweed jacket and seemed to be waiting for Gábor to finish speaking to Emma.
Gábor turned to him and said, in English, ‘Only one of you can be here.’
‘Yes, this is what we want to talk to you about,’ the man said.
‘Only one of you,’ Gábor told him again.
‘I understand, I understand …’
‘Okay, you understand. So one of you go. Please.’
The Indians – the older with his nice jacket and manners, his elegant cologne; the younger, scrawny in a Lacoste polo shirt, and still in his seat – were profoundly unintimidating. There was a fairly obvious sense that Balázs, standing with his arms folded near the door, displacing a lot of air, would be able to deal with them simultaneously if necessary. The older man’s exaggerated politeness, with its weird edge of suppressed hysteria, may just have been an acknowledgement of that.
