The outskirts of the city looked asleep. Closely compacted neighborhood blocks fit together at strange angles. Cages of chicken- and barbed wire ensnared each personal fiefdom of slapped-together brick, stucco, and plywood. Smoke escaped from roofs and blended with the slowly brightening sky. Brutus counted the stations on the map. Kelenföldi was next. He had a basic plan. He would hide the weapons somewhere and get the word to Sullivan about where to find them. He took several deep breaths and passed the old men again as the train arrived at a painfully slow, lazy stop. There were no announcements. He stepped down onto the platform and got swallowed by the pale yellow fluorescence that shone on the strip of bare concrete they considered a train station. AWOL — that was the reality of the situation. He didn’t even want to think about that shit.
8.
There wasn’t a marine or even a cop in sight, just an old drunk sitting on a bench with his head hanging. When Brutus approached, the bum vomited a steamy shower of blood into his own cupped hands and onto the ground between his legs. He tried to say something to Brutus but retched repeatedly instead and choked on his own words. Bile ran in a thin stream to the edge of the sidewalk and down to the stones lining the track bed. Brutus hurried past, watching his step.
Welcome to Budapest.
An oppressive, all-encompassing frustration nearly disentangled Brutus’s thoughts from his anger. Every effort to distance himself, for the time being, from the hatred inside brought a sticky, nauseating substance boiling up from his gut. Brutus had never seriously contemplated taking another man’s life, but here, freezing his ass off in goddamn Budapest, and walking through some homeless motherfucker’s puke, he knew that given the first opportunity, he would set Sullivan on fire and shit on his ashes. In the meantime, though, he needed to get it together. Walking around all pissed off would only get himself got.
A flight of steps led down from the platform. Advertisement posters — Ivory Soap, Pick salami, Symphonia cigarettes, Unicum — covered the walls of the underground passageway, but they were awash in colorful graffiti and more than a few swastikas. While it was true that right-wing parties were getting reelected all over Eastern Europe, Brutus never dared to suspect that genuine fascism would rise again. Enough of that shit appeared unnoticed by the masses in the rhetoric of even the more moderate political parties at home and abroad.
He emerged in a cramped and ugly suburban neighborhood. No cars on the road yet. The train rattled away without him toward the city. He half hoped that Sullivan did have those marines waiting for him down the tracks at the next station. Suckers.
The smell of burning wood followed him. It hadn’t snowed yet — the storm that hit Taszár would likely follow a few hours behind him. On the corner, a street sign affixed to the side of a house read XI. THÁN KÁROLY UTCA. The map indicated that he could take the road he was on all the way across town to the Danube. His immediate priority was to get someplace where he might not attract as much attention as out here in the burbs. Eventually he arrived at a bigger street, where Budapest looked more like a city. While he obviously wasn’t in the fashionable part of town, the wide avenue — easily twice as big as Broad Street — looked majestic compared to Philadelphia. The building fronts followed the haphazard curvature of the roads and formed a solid cliff face. An empty yellow trolley ran right down the middle of the road between the traffic lanes.
A few tiny cars puttered past with engines that sounded like souped-up lawnmowers and moved just as fast. When the sun hinted at breaking through the low tarp of clouds, the statuary and ironwork came alive. The buildings had red, ceramic-tiled roofs and strangely painted exteriors. Some looked like stone fortresses straight out of the Middle Ages. Red, white, and green Hungarian flags decorated every lamppost down the street. The ground floors contained shops and dingy bars and video-poker dens, all with ribbons of the same colors in their windows. Near the top of one building, two sculptures of men, each five times the size of a real man, held up the roof on their backs. Brutus stopped in a doorway to check the map one more time. The walk would take longer than he had anticipated, so he hailed the first passing taxi. It slowed, but the driver looked at him and kept going. Just like back home. He walked a few more blocks. Parked cars covered the sidewalks, and he had to dance his way around them until he could get a taxi to stop. He climbed into the backseat, clutching the heavy bag in his lap. The driver was an older dude. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, and the smoke mingled with his breath and the car’s heater, which was mercifully bumped up.
“You speak English?” Brutus asked.
The driver turned all the way around in his seat. “No,” he said, with a smile.
Color brochures for strip clubs and massage parlors filled the seat pockets. Some kind of crazy violin music blared from the rattling speakers behind Brutus’s head. It sounded like rusty springs squeaking inside an old, dirty bed.
“I need a place for this.” He made motions like someone opening a locker and turning a key.
“Kulcsra?” The driver’s thick mustache looked like the head of a dusty broom.
“Yeah, a Coltrane. Take me there.”
The driver took the map and pointed to Déli Pályaudvar, the train station Brutus had just avoided. “Kulcsra,” he said.
“No, no. I ain’t going there. Where else?” The driver didn’t understand. “Another Coltrane.” Brutus made a circular motion with his finger around the map.
“Ah,” the driver said. He held Brutus’s wrist and used his finger to point at Nyugati, the western train station over in Pest. It was close to the big red circle, just a few blocks from Eve and Adam’s. Perfect. Cigarette ash landed on Margit Island, the tree-covered oasis in the middle of the Danube.
“O.K., there’s good.”
“Akkor jó.” The driver smiled.
Brutus had to laugh. “Yo!”
“Jó!”
In the speaker behind him, someone dropped a pregnant cat into a blender and hit frappé. The driver pealed off as fast as his little car could take them and started the meter, which reminded Brutus that he didn’t have any Hungarian money. He pulled a twenty out of his wallet. “This good?”
The driver’s eyes lit up. “Jó,” he said.