by Pavel Mandys
“Shit, Bary . . . surely . . .”
“I’ve already told you that now I have to take care of myself. How did you put it? That we were no musketeers? Probably not. Jakub can’t help me anymore, but you can.”
I expect him to look down, but he peers into my eyes. I withstand his gaze because if I dodge it, I’ve lost.
“What do you want, Bary?” he finally asks, tiredly, staring down at the ground somewhere beside my legs.
“You know that already. Compensation. Satisfaction.”
“Compensation, satisfaction.” He grins, but his façade is already crumbling. I feel it from his every pore, every word.
“Exactly.”
He’s silent for a while, but then he slowly looks up at me. “How much?”
“How much?” I echo.
“Yeah, Bary, how much?”
I’m looking at him and almost imperceptibly nodding my head, as if just for myself. “I don’t think it’s about money anymore,” I say.
Surprised, he furrows his eyebrows. “No? Then what is it about?”
“You probably wouldn’t understand, Dan.”
“Don’t piss me off, Bary! You hear me? Don’t piss me off! What is it you want then, if not money?”
This time I am silent. I watch a man I do not know, whom I have never known. He’s standing in a soggy jacket, rain droplets trickling down his face and hands.
From the dusk behind him, three figures emerge.
“Hello, you son of a bitch,” says one of them through clenched teeth, and Dan turns sharply. He wants to back away, but there’s nowhere to go; behind him, only the low ledge of the castle wall.
I am slowly turning and leaving.
“Bary! Fuck, Bary!” I hear behind me.
Jakub’s brothers will also want to know the name of the shooter and his companions. Even through the droning patter of the rain, I hear the crackle of the stun gun.
Will I finally sleep without nightmares? God only knows. Maybe I’ve just replaced them with new ones.
But sometimes you simply have to see things through.
Amateurs
by Štěpán Kopřiva
Hostivař
It was true love. He knew it with absolute certainty. Not only did he suffer from all the physical symptoms—his heart beat wildly, his stomach tightened, and phenylethylamine sizzled in his brain like scorched oil. His psyche wasn’t spared either—the feeling of harmony and trust was so strong that it left Huk off-kilter. As a consequence, he felt permanently unbalanced, and he had to force himself to concentrate at all times; push himself to focus on every task, and constantly remind himself that he could not afford to make any mistakes. Particularly on a job like this one.
He got up earlier than usual. He put on shorts and a T-shirt; slid his feet into worn-out sneakers. By the door, he checked a barrel with leftover hydroponic water and grabbed a digital pH tester, toothbrush, and toothpaste from the table.
Suong was still asleep. She was lying on a mattress in a corner of the office—only a strand of her black hair and one bare foot poked out of the sleeping bag. By this time in the morning she was snoring quietly. Huk couldn’t even look her way without feeling electricity under his skin.
He opened the door quietly and slipped out into the warehouse. It measured 490 square meters and was empty except for a construction frame hanging from the ceiling to the concrete floor. In the frames were stretched sheets of foil: on the back, black; on the front, white; the trusty, reflective Orca Grow Film. Huk lifted the flap in the corner that served as an entrance and stepped into the greenhouse.
The heat slapped him in the face with a ringing twang.
* * *
During the past seven years, the Vietnamese have completely overtaken large-scale cannabis cultivation, Bartoš claimed. Not that the Czechs were pushed out completely—many of our citizens are still involved in growing cannabis on a small scale, in all sorts of indoor boxes, but all that is incomparable to the scale on which the Vietnamese mafia operates. They rent warehouses on the outskirts of Prague where they can grow not hundreds, but thousands of marijuana plants. That means earnings of twenty to thirty million korunas from one harvest. The Vietnamese mafia has the means to conduct this type of illegal business: infrastructure, international contacts, human and material resources. With time, the mafia has also acquired very solid know-how. For example, at the beginning, many large grow operations were uncovered due to their very high electricity consumption—whether they used it illegally or paid for it, the Czech utility company would always find out. The moment the Vietnamese realized that, they reassessed their methods. Today, they make no such mistakes, and the quality of their product has improved. The Vietnamese mafia originally used slave labor—if that poor soul imprisoned in the greenhouse had food delivered through an elevator shaft, that would have been a sporadic luxury. Okay, maybe not so sporadic, but the moment that the mafia discovered that a gardener’s specific knowledge could influence the quality of the product, they stopped the practice. Today, they only hired people who knew how to measure pH, use substrates and fertilizer, what to do when the plants lacked magnesium or phosphorus. To put it simply—they were experts. No amateurs allowed.
* * *
The warehouse had three exits: front, back, and through the loading ramp. Huk used the back one. In the small space between the warehouse and fence, the trampled grass pretended to capitulate, but was really lying in wait for the enemy’s attention to weaken so that it could attack with wheatgrass and cat’s tail. Right by the fence, a Babylonian tower of rotten wooden pallets was dramatically crumbling, and an electric motor was quietly rusting through. But most importantly, the electrical heart of the large greenhouse was parked there: two diesel Volvo Penta units, each with a capacity of 450 kilowatts. They were on for twelve-hour cycles; in addition to the metal halogen lighting of the warehouse, they also powered fans and vents. Huk urinated by the fence and walked to the outside water basin. He washed his hands, wet his toothbrush, and squeezed out a bit of striped toothpaste. He could have done all of that inside (there was a toilet and a shower next to the office), but he did not want to wake up Suong—he wanted to let her sleep as long as she could.
The Hostivař morning smelled like rain and hot exhaust fumes. Huk was standing by the fence, brushing his teeth, and through the wire fence he gazed out at the empty lots, metal enclosures, and cracked asphalt that stretched all the way to the train tracks. Hypsman’s industrial park, the rotting factory quarter dating back to the first republic, seemed to have disappeared into an architectural vacuum. Here and there the oblong façade of the Prague Glassworks stood out as part of the new development, or the wheat silo of a steam mill; metal scars on the highway glistened—the fragments of railroad trailers that now went nowhere. The steam mill hadn’t worked for ages, and the nuclear accelerator that used to be there was gone too. The mill had been turned into movie studios before the Protectorate; they made such seminal pieces of Czech cinematography as The Little Mermaid and an ad for the shoe brand Baťa. Today, they were shooting Street here.
* * *
Currently, the main technology used to uncover marijuana growhouses is thermography, Bartoš explained. Even if the boys get an independent energy source, sophisticated filters, and other fun stuff, the building will light up like a Christmas tree through the infrared camera aimed from a helicopter. The most sophisticated polystyrene insulation will not cover up heat. In this way, NPC uncovers around sixty Vietnamese-run greenhouses every year.
* * *
Before she left, she’d hugged Huk tightly and kissed him. And again—it was not only the physical contact, the touch, that crackled with static electricity. It was as if Huk’s nervous system was tuned to receive other frequencies. He perceived the apexes of her brain waves, her swinging polyhedron of emotions, her energy stimulated by caffeine, and perhaps something more—suppressed tension.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Suong disengaged,
and smiled. “Of course.”
He remembered when he’d first seen her. He thought such a pretty girl would not even look his way. But the moment he pushed through her superficial persona, he understood that Suong never believed in first impressions. She always carefully examined, weighed, and thought out everything—and once she decided, she acted directly and briskly. It was one of the many things he loved about her. When she exited the building, she turned one last time to look at him over her shoulder. She brushed back her hair and gave him a final glance. In that moment, Huk thought he could stand there forever; his legs apart, in the doorway to the prefabricated hall, the entrance to the illegal Vietnamese marijuana growhouse wide open; and he would simply keep looking at her.
He slammed the door and turned the key.
* * *
Suong heard the door banging behind him. She heard the double click of the lock but she did not turn anymore; she continued walking up the driveway, past the always-open gates that had become overgrown by a bush of hawthorn, out from the grounds toward the main street. She walked past the bus stop, where a retired-looking man in a Manchester hat was waiting; he looked her up and down but she was used to that and ignored it. At the corner, she turned. She did not go far, only to the white truck parked by the sidewalk.
She tried not to think about what she was doing—not necessarily because she felt guilty, but simply because it felt better. In fact, she was sure of this: despite the fact that it tasted like betrayal, it was no betrayal at all.
Suong banged on the side of the truck, knowing that Dan could see her in the rearview mirror. The door slid open and Emil’s thatched head peeked out onto the street, glancing both ways. “So? How does it look?”
“Good.” She was surprised by her feeling of disgust at herself. Fortunately, the feeling dissolved fast.
“He doesn’t suspect anything?”
“That one?” she said. “Dude—he eats from my hand. I have never met a bigger idiot. An exemplary piece.”
“Clever girl.” Emil smiled at her vacantly and shifted so that she could get into the truck.
She closed the door behind her.
* * *
Emil slammed the truck door and turned to his snitch, observing that, in spite of what was about to take place, Suong was remarkably calm. Emil hated the cliché about Asian self-control (this was not his first operation, so he had seen more than enough hysterically screaming Vietnamese), but he had to give it to Suong—she knew how to handle herself. And also, she knew how to bargain. Twelve percent from the take? Just thinking about it made his chewing gum turn bitter. But there was nothing he could change: it was her mark, and it was she who had slept with the gardener, the dirtiest job.
“Do you know how many plants there are?”
“A little under a thousand. Let’s say about nine hundred.” Her clear Czech, complete with a Prague accent, had always fascinated him: all those wide-open vowels and adjectives decorated with twisting eys. Suong was a model second-generation Czech Vietnamese. Her parents came to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic at the end of the 1980s, thanks to the agreement between socialist countries on educational apprenticeship visits, along with tens of thousands of other Vietnamese. That agreement was one of the main reasons why the Vietnamese community in the Czech Republic had such a strong historical background. Suong was born in Prague, grew up there, and went to school there. Her accent both irritated and attracted Emil. Just as Suong herself did.
“Nine hundred plants?” Emil multiplied fast. “After drying, that could make three, four million if we sell to Vizier.”
“So much? Dude!” Bombay was beside himself, as if this changed anything for him. Everybody knew that however much he earned, he’d be broke within a week. Emil allowed him on his team only because he’d been with them since the beginning. It was not clear, however, how long this arrangement would last. What once began as a hobby had morphed into a full-time professional job—and getting rid of Bombay would be a necessary farewell to their amateur past. Bombay’s psychotic history played a huge role in this decision. Even though all three of them had been users—Emil, Dan, and Bombay—only Bombay ended up with a psychological disorder. He had realized this when, riding a tram, he started hearing other random tram riders conspiring to kill him. Like any true math and physics grad, he approached the situation using disjunction elimination. He stole his father’s voice recorder, and taped the voices of his would-be assassins. Clearly, that was precisely the correct technological filter that needed to be inserted between reality and perception: when Bombay listened to the recording at home later and discovered nothing but trite banalities, he committed himself the next day to a psychiatric hospital. Since then, he’d been all right—more or less.
Right now he was sitting on the floor of the truck, smiling like a village idiot and emptying crumbs from an Ikea bag. Emil and Dan preferred mountaineering backpacks: not only could they fit more product in them, but their hands were free during the operation. This was quite an advantage at the moment when their only means of defense was thrashing around with a sawed-off mop handle.
Sure, a mop handle was not the most sophisticated mode of persuasion, but it was, unfortunately, necessary. Emil never really understood why the gardeners put up such stiff resistance when attacked. The product was not theirs, after all—it belonged to the Vietnamese mafia—and that was, in Emil’s opinion, another example of an organized system that deserved to be robbed.
“So?” Suong asked. “What’s the holdup? Let’s go!”
Dan, sitting in the driver’s seat, turned his head.
“Let’s go,” Emil confirmed.
The truck pulled away from the curb.
* * *
Robbery of the Vietnamese growhouses happens more often than you’d think, Bartoš smiled. Most of the time, the culprits are Czechs or Slovaks. Not surprisingly, the same historical development occurred in the Czech Republic as in the rest of Europe. Organized crime had been overtaken by a multinational conglomerate—mainly the Russians, Ukrainians, Nigerians, Vietnamese, and Kosovo-Albanians—and the Czech underworld had been downgraded to support services or had dissolved into smaller groups that are now trying to piggyback on the international syndicates. From this point of view, the Vietnamese are an ideal target because their community is the most closed off, and so they cannot always identify the culprits. In other words—it is a relatively easy way to get loaded, and while doing that, a Czech criminal may still consider himself important.
* * *
They backed the truck behind one corner of the hall so that it was not visible, but it was close enough for them to jump back in and speed away. Emil and Bombay pressed themselves against the doorframe, one on each side. Suong banged on the metal door.
“Sweetie?” she called out. “It’s me. I forgot something, let me in please.”
There was a short, absolute silence; Emil heard only the soft thump of his own pulse between his ears. Then the lock clicked twice and the door opened.
Bombay’s mop handle whizzed in the air.
The strength of the blow surprised them all. Most of all Suong, who had assumed that they would only nudge Huk to push him out of the way, but Emil was startled too. And judging by the astounded look on Bombay’s face, he was surprised by his own strength as well.
To note how stunned Huk was by the attack would be unnecessary. The wooden rod struck him right in the face. Due to Bombay’s height, the blow landed above his eyebrows, on the lower part of his forehead.
There was a sharp crack, Huk’s head jerked, the handle broke—and Huk flew back two meters.
Emil and Bombay had trained so they did not collide in the door. Bombay went in first and behind him, Emil slipped into the hall. Dan ran in third. Suong entered last.
Emil looked over the warehouse—the foil construction of the greenhouse, the walls, bags of substrate, plant pots, fertilizer, dirty garden tools—he had seen all this many times. Then he shifted his attention to the gardener
, who was sprawled on the floor. “What is this?” He pointed to the guy. “Suong? How come that—”
He didn’t finish, because the gardener kicked his feet out from under him.
* * *
It was more of a reflex than a planned counterattack.
Huk was lucky that the rod hit him on the forehead, the hardest part of the skull: if he was hit three centimeters lower, his nose would have been broken—the bone pushed through his face and into his brain.
Even if he got lucky, it didn’t necessarily mean that Huk was able to think or plan in any significant way. His entire sightline was overtaken by roaring pain; his skull pulsed like thunder; something hot was leaking from his eyes (perhaps tears, perhaps blood); his brain was paralyzed, and the figures around him turned into shadows behind a curtain of red mist. From afar, he heard that beanstalk of a man yell something at Suong, and intuitively he kicked out at him. By lucky happenstance, he managed to fell the giant.
With his blurry vision, he saw the tall man crash to the ground—but right away, another movement flashed past him. It was the same guy who had hit Huk before. He had now grabbed the fire extinguisher from the corner and was standing with spread legs above Huk, lifting the extinguisher above his head. Clearly, he was planning to finish what he hadn’t been able to accomplish the first time around. He was definitely ready to send Huk into the world of two-dimensional objects, and Huk was just helplessly lying at his feet. Paralyzing pain cut through every cell in his body, and he was not able to move at all.
Bombay swung the extinguisher.
And Suong hacked into his back with a nicely sharpened hoe.
Bombay squeaked. He let go of the extinguisher, which bounced off the concrete right by the gardener’s ear and flew off into a corner. Meanwhile, Bombay was startled, swiveling around and trying to reach the hoe which waggled between his shoulder blades.
