“Yo!” Brutus said.
The yellow streetlights couldn’t compete with the rising sun, which became a spotlight pointed at the whole city, and in it the old-world charm of the architecture gave way to a polluted modern metropolis. The filthy windows, cracked plaster, and bullet holes grew more apparent by the minute. Dirty mustard-colored paint must have been on sale when they built this part of town. The buildings looked ugly and gray, caked in car exhaust. There were tall buildings, but no skyscrapers. Nothing silver and shiny like in Philadelphia. But the details were incredible. The colors. People — artists — had spent real time making the buildings, but as the light increased, Budapest looked more and more like a city in an advanced state of decay. He tried to picture what Philly would look like in another two or three hundred years. He followed the taxi’s trajectory on the map.
The streets popped to life all at once, and an avalanche of cars, people, and crowded trolleys appeared from nowhere. The traffic sat bumper-to-bumper like on the Schuylkill at rush hour. Budapest wasn’t built for automobiles at all, much less for this many of them. After crawling for a few blocks, they got to one of the six or so bridges over the Danube.
Margit Bridge was four lanes wide, with another trolley line running right down the middle. The bridge was shaped like an elbow and halfway across, where the funny bone would be, a smaller road led down to Margit Island. To Brutus’s right, a small observation balcony extended over the water. Tourists were already taking photos, and he regretted leaving his camera behind at the base. He’d probably never see it again even if he did get back to Taszár. Or he would scroll through the pictures to find a shot of his own toothbrush jammed up Sparky’s ass. That was what the army was really about — the excuse to jam someone else’s toothbrush up your ass under the pretext of playing a joke. He wanted to get back there to bitchslap Sparky just once. That wasn’t much to ask.
Over on the Pest side, the parliament building came into view — spires and a dome and separate white marble wings that led in every direction. A man could get lost looking at a building like that. Structures so elaborate should never really exist outside a picture book, yet dozens of them lined the river; they were in motion, fluid, changing things. Many had huge neon signs on top. Several other bridges spanned the river to the south. More red, white, and green banners flapped on all of them. Behind him, back over in Buda, a huge statue of a woman up on an otherwise bald hill held up a huge leaf.
The cavern of buildings in Pest plunged him back into shadow, a man-made eclipse fashioned from century-old tenements; the first one on his left, overlooking a small rampart park, housed a McDonald’s painted a yellow so bright that it shimmered despite the lack of sunlight. Brutus spun in his seat to take in the sights. The taxi passed already-busy pizza joints and supermarkets, the Budapest Suites Hotel, and all kinds of places he couldn’t identify before the driver pulled over opposite a huge, glass-enclosed train station.
The Nyugati complex was incredible. Two cream-brick castles, one of them occupied by yet another McDonald’s, sandwiched a hundred-foot wrought-iron-and-glass wall that housed the train station. It looked like a set out of one of those English mysteries that the Mambo always watched on PBS. He handed over the twenty and managed to get a pile of coins from the driver for a locker. The old dude used hand signals to direct Brutus to the far end of the station and down a flight of steps — he made descending Yellow Pages motions with his fingers — then handed him a red, white, and green ribbon with a safety pin through it. A miniature Hungarian flag. “Tessék,” he said. The driver had one just like it on his collar.
“Thanks, bro.”
Brutus held on to the duffel bag and stepped into the melee of rush-hour pedestrian and automotive traffic. Everyone wore paper hats and many blew little plastic horns and buttwhistles like it was New Year’s. Kind of fucked up, but kind of cool. A citywide party. People were already getting drunk. A few of them stared at him. There still weren’t a lot of black people in Budapest.
He waited with the crowd at the crosswalk, his breath suspended in front of his face. He needed to find a heavier coat. In the meantime, though, he struggled to pin the flag to his chest like everyone else, until a rave chick in headphones leaned over and with a smile helped him fasten it. The techno beat surrounding her was louder than the whine of the cars inching past. The light changed; she didn’t look back, but it made him glad to know that the locals were cool enough. The day could work out just fine. A trolley, its windows thickened with fog, sat idly in the middle of the road waiting for the pedestrians to pass.
The station was far bigger than even Thirtieth Street, and the trains pulled right up to the sidewalk-level platforms. There were newspaper stands and florists and a crooked-looking money-changer kiosk along the side wall. The vendors had on hats and mittens and puffy, oversized jackets embroidered with the names of American sports teams he had never heard of. The Chicago Tigers? He needed some Hungarian money, but that could wait until he found a real bank. Human and mechanical activity rang through the station. The iron of the front wall held in place a curved glass ceiling that ran the length of the station, down to the far end where the trains went in and out. It was just as cold in there as outside. The smell of french-fry grease reminded him how hungry he was. He needed to grab a bite as soon as he stashed the fucking bag. People piled on and off a series of trains, and the loudspeakers repeated a bizarre jingle every few minutes. He couldn’t understand the garbled, prerecorded announcements and suspected that the Hungarians couldn’t either. A sign at the back of the station had a diagram of a locker. An arrow directed him to a set of broken escalators.
The smell downstairs, like on the train but worse, singed his sinuses. His boots stuck to the floor. The blue-gray lockers covered the back wall of a dim passageway that led back in the direction of the street. There were also beer stalls and a video-poker den, and a red sign pointing to a metro station and a big red MARX TÉR sign, a holdover from communist days. He looked around. No one had followed him or was paying any attention, so he placed a hundred-forint coin in a locker. It opened easily. He removed the map and some money from the bag then slid it in, closed the locker, and pulled out a key with an orange plastic knob. He tugged on the door a few times and found it secure. Then he placed coins in six other lockers, taking the keys. He put them in an inside pocket of his jacket, keeping the real one separate. He could send Sullivan on a treasure hunt if he wanted to. Each key would buy him a little more time.
Meanwhile, he was ready to pick up a bag of doughnuts and some coffee, then scout out Eve and Adam’s. Given the hour, it might not be open, especially if it was a titty bar. If it was open, though, he wanted to pop in, get the lay of the land, walk out. One two three. After that he would get a better look at that view from the bridge, maybe scope out the island.
Brutus retraced his steps to the foot of the escalator, then felt a hard shove from behind. He lost his balance and landed on his stomach with a thud. One of the keys in his pocket dug into his ribs, breaking the skin. He tried to ID his assailants, but the toe of a muddy army boot hit his face at full force and everything grew dark. He heard his nose pop open like a bottle of champagne. Warm blood sprayed everywhere, and the pain seared through him as if from a cop’s nightstick. More kicks came just as hard to his ribs and kidneys and legs. There must have been four or five of them going at him all at once. A white, celestial pain stabbed at his eyes and took over his entire head, blinding him. Before he felt his consciousness recede, it occurred to Brutus that Sullivan had been one step ahead of him all along.