4. Write letter to J. J. Another tough one — later.
5. Fix pistol or find new
6. Kill whitey
He had about three grand in cash, which would go with him. The weapon wouldn’t be a problem. He could steal Sparky’s and leave him the piece-of-shit piece that didn’t shoot. Punk deserved it anyway.
Number six was a joke.
5.
When he got up the next morning, snow covered the ground and was blowing in every direction. He didn’t need to be on duty until the afternoon and he wasn’t hungry, so he skipped breakfast to run some errands. He could grab something later if he got desperate, but he hated to eat the hardened fecal matter that passed for meat at those fast-food places. Burger King was terrible enough back home; he didn’t even want to think about what went into the Hungarian equivalent of the Whopper. Maybe that’s what his rattraps were for. But sometimes there was no avoiding it. A man’s got to eat.
He pulled his jacket tighter, huffing it over to the office pool. When he was sure no one was looking, he whipped his dick out of his fatigues. Standing on tiptoe, he put it on the glass of the machine, set the enlarger to 150 percent and hit COPY. Zipping up, he folded the image and, laughing, stuffed it into another envelope. Back in his room, there was no safe place to hide anything, so he put the photocopy and the letter to Joan in Sparky’s closet between a few old boxes. There was a good chance his own stuff was being searched, maybe even by his own roommate. In Sparky’s possession, though, at least no one would find them in the next few days.
His next stop was Taszár’s small bookstore of government-approved texts, which operated under the auspices of a university in Budapest that served as the personal propaganda ministry of a well-known Hungarian billionaire war profiteer. They didn’t have a copy of Julius Caesar. He would have liked to bring Magda some poetry, but she had already read everything, and all they had for sale was that old Emily Dickinson shit. “Stop for death, my ass,” Brutus told the clerk, a lanky, bucktoothed Hungarian girl of fifteen or sixteen. She didn’t respond. The shop had nothing worth buying, so Brutus left without spending any money, a noble accomplishment. He didn’t like the idea of giving any more of his money to the army than he had to. Didn’t want to sell his soul to no Bravo Company store.
The base was unusually busy. Transports rolled out one after the other for either bridge-building duty in Novi Sad or to oversee still more landmine sweeping in Kosovo. All the trucks had SFOR stenciled on them in bright blue letters. A couple of them carried soldiers up to Budapest for R and R. The army reserved countless hotel suites along the Danube for years at a time. One of the hotels supposedly had thermal baths in the basement where all the women bathed together naked. That sounded like a damn good way to relax.
He was anxious to see Magda. It had been a few days. He wanted to question her about Sullivan, see if she had overheard anything. He went in through the back door and poked around, but couldn’t find her. A few officers looked at him funny, but he saluted and pretended he was supposed to be there. He wasn’t supposed to be anywhere in the whole goddamned country so the executive suite was just as good as anyplace else. Magda wasn’t around. The fifteenth was still a few days away, so he had some time before giving her the letter to mail home.
He returned the next day, let himself in again, and finally caught up with her. She looked great, her hair down at her shoulders instead of all tied up in knots and loops, like it usually was. She didn’t have any makeup on and it was the first time Brutus had ever gotten a look at her full, natural splendor. She had bright eyes that floated like lily pads when they looked at him. No perfume this time either, which he found strange.
The bosses must have been up her ass because she couldn’t get away.” Not a good time,” she said. “Let’s catch up later.” She didn’t want to be seen talking with him. She worked for a private civilian contractor, though, so it wasn’t like they could throw her in the stockade.
“That’s cool, but here,” he said, and handed Magda an envelope with her name on it. Inside was another envelope addressed to his sister. She slipped it into her pocket without opening it and kissed him on the lips.
“See you tomorrow?” she wanted to know.
“Yeah, tomorrow’s good.”
She kissed him again, a half second longer, and headed off in the direction of Sullivan’s office. Brutus returned to his room to prepare for afternoon rattrap duty, which meant cracking open a Dreher and rolling up a blunt.
Work was more tedious than difficult, and he had trouble concentrating. Still too much to do before the fifteenth. Afterwards, he took a shower and tried to empty his thoughts of his responsibilities and duties. He wrote a letter to the Mambo about nothing in particular. She could get the details from Joan. He told her that he loved her and would be home soon. Then he lay down to read from the Fanon book, and to get some rest. By the time sleep came, he had agreed to let events take him wherever they wanted to. He would follow whatever path presented itself. This was his life; he could feel it.
He awoke refreshed and ate a large, flavorless breakfast. It was the fourteenth. He didn’t need to be on duty until 16:00, so he went to check on Magda. As fate would have it — or luck, for that matter, which to Brutus looked like fate in a cheap wig and bad shoes — she was thrilled to see him. She was heavily made-up again, much to his disappointment, but that didn’t detract from her beauty. She kissed him hard, and he tasted the oily surface of her tongue in his mouth, got the first whiff of her perfume. She agreed to sneak off with him.
In the best-case scenario, he would only be off the base for a day. Two at the most. Magda never needed to know he was gone. He didn’t want to get her mixed up in whatever Sullivan was playing at.
The worst-case scenario was something Brutus tried to put out of his mind.
He followed Magda to a conference room just a few doors down from Sullivan’s office. She clearly knew her way around. A meeting had recently broken up probably, or the generals were taking a break from planning how to kill more people: their files and half-empty coffee cups were strewn everywhere. Overflowing manila folders covered the long conference table with briefings, some of which must have been highly classified. They could come back any second, and the possibility of getting busted either didn’t occur to Magda or it excited her even more. What would they do if they caught him? It didn’t matter anymore. White dry-erase boards covered two whole walls with crudely illustrated maps of the Balkans. The national boundaries had been drawn and redrawn in several places on both maps, each time with a different colored marker. On the table, a laptop remained on. The screensaver read I’D RATHER BE FUCKING YOUR MOTHER in scrolling text.
Brutus didn’t bother to lock the door. There was nothing left to lose anymore. He pushed the computer aside, lifted Magda onto the edge of the table, and pulled up her skirt. She had on a pair of sexy see-through panties, like she had been waiting for him. Her perfume billowed off of her neck and chest — it was enough to make him want to spend the rest of his life writing love songs for her. She grabbed him closer, rubbing up against him and breathing in his ear until he couldn’t hear anything else. He knew someone was about to fly through the door any minute and wondered if Magda would yell rape just to save her own job. But he didn’t stop. Papers fell to the floor in piles. She kicked at the maps on the whiteboards, further blurring the Serbia-Bosnia border. When she stopped huffing and the blood no longer pounded in his head, Brutus noticed that a shortwave radio on a bookshelf had been playing the entire time. Magda recomposed herself, getting dressed and fixing her hair in the reflection of the laptop’s screen while Armed Forces Radio bleated the current number-one song, a bastardization of Billie’s “Strange Fruit,” to which someone had added a gaudy drum-and-bass rhythm.