9.
Somebody helped Brutus to his feet, which supported his weight better than could be expected. He must have been unconscious for a while. Everything hurt. Every goddamn thing. It hurt to breathe, to exist. Whoever did this to him was gone. At least one rib was broken, maybe more. The pain ran all the way around his side and up to his shoulder. A well-dressed old man with gray hair was asking questions Brutus couldn’t understand. His head weighed five hundred pounds, every one of them painful. One eye was entirely blind.
“You are an American?” the old man asked.
It said so on Brutus’s jacket. U.S. Army. He tried to respond but his motor coordination wouldn’t kick-start.
“You were attacked by skinheads,” the old man said. He sounded like a bad Dracula impression. His necktie was slashed in half, and it dangled over his chest in ribbons of colorful silk. “I will get for you a doctor.”
“No doctor,” Brutus told him. The less interaction with the authorities the better. He just wanted to catch his breath. “I need to go. Thanks for your help.” There was blood all over his clothes. His CD player and watch were gone, but the money was still lined in his jacket. Maybe it had absorbed some of the blows like body armor. Most importantly, all the locker keys were still in his pocket.
Brutus left the old man standing in a small puddle of blood and who-knows-what-else. Instead of going back upstairs, he stayed underground for another moment, until his senses returned. He followed the dank passageway to the direction of the main ring road — the körút — ringing the train station where the taxi had dropped him off. There would be fewer people down there than up in the train station. It hurt like hell to walk, but apart from a cracked rib and a chipped tooth, nothing else felt broken. A welt over his eye made seeing extremely difficult. He had to find a bathroom somewhere and examine the extent of the damage. Goddamn skinheads? So it wasn’t Sullivan’s goons?
He came to a brightly lit underpass beneath the körút, where he had to wade through a crowd of old women, drunk revelers, and the free-range insane, all of whom were orbiting around an Asian hurdy-gurdy player who balanced on a one-legged stool and performed a rendition of what sounded like “Helter Skelter.” Brutus looked for what little solace the collective anonymity of Budapest afforded a transient black man who had been visibly pounded to within an inch of his life. Escalators headed even deeper underground to another subway stop. A band of South Americans in brightly colored blankets played guitars and pan flutes and danced in a circle. Two cops followed a hairy, gangrenous homeless man wearing a Burger King crown. They looked at Brutus funny, but he ignored them and they left him alone. An N.W.A. song came to mind. The pain outweighed his need to eat something, but he still had to get some Hungarian money.
A TourInform office, which was a small, glass-enclosed shop squashed between a newsstand and the Non Stop Büfé, listed the international exchange rates on an electronic sign. He joined the line behind a series of American teenyboppers anxious to transmute their dollars into assorted tchotchkes to bring home for Mommy and Daddy. The smoke and stink of so many people caused Brutus to sneeze into his sleeve; the pain ripped through his lungs like a gunshot. The snot was camouflaged by the other stains. His mood soured even further when some asshole Utah choirboy in front of him turned all the way around and said, “God bless you.” Brutus had heard about these kids. Mormons or Scientologists or some shit like that, godboys gathered like tsetse flies over the corpse of communism in the former Soviet states and now sallying around the metro stations or in front of McDonald’s sporting their WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? badges and tabernacle haircuts — that shaved-in-back, moussed-on-top, Berlin-circa-1938 look. Sometimes they carried microphones. And of course they were American, every last motherfucking one of them. A few of them were even stationed at Taszár. The kid’s front teeth jutted so far out of his slack-jawed face that Brutus could have opened a bottle of Dreher on them.
“Fuck you,” Brutus said. He was in no mood and would have liked nothing more than to punch the asshole in the nose just to see what it would look like. “Maybe the devil should bless me instead. What do you think of that?”
“Ex-excuse me?” The other gangly rednecks in line turned around and recited their prayers while digging through their WWJD folders for the pertinent literature to hand out to devil worshippers. They used cheat sheets to find the appropriate Bible passages, but because they didn’t have exact reading material for practicing Satanists, they struggled to improvise something while Brutus suppressed his desire to piledrive someone onto the dirty floor. Amid the commotion he pushed his way to the front of the line and handed over a stack of bills. The woman behind the counter thumbed them out one at a time while another of the kids made the mistake of tapping Brutus on the shoulder. “Can we talk? According to Romans 8:37—”
“Son, leave me the fuck alone.”
The drone of the hurdy-gurdy sounded like five lapdogs fighting in a tin box. The moneychanger moved on to the first of her infrared anti-counterfeit scans and someone tapped Brutus on the shoulder again. He turned around this time and with both hands grabbed the nearest godboy by his starched white collar. He barreled him through the swinging glass doors and body-slammed him full force onto the ground of the underpass. Then he walked back up to the teller, ignored the fright in her eyes, and immediately collected his forints. Nobody said shit to him after that.
Hurting all over, but finally with some paper in his pocket, he needed to find a place to crash for the night. A well-cologned man brushed past him and whispered under his breath, “Change money?” but Brutus didn’t acknowledge him. The hum of activity receded as he climbed a long ramp up to street level, as if the station’s noise had existed for him alone and stopped entirely once he was gone.
The taxi had passed a hotel — that would be his first stop. The sidewalk squirmed with people, most of whom wore red-and-green paper hats. The ribbon the cabbie had given him was gone. It hit him: it was Independence Day, the anniversary of one of Hungary’s aborted revolutions. The army traditionally didn’t acknowledge the holidays of their so-called “host nations,” much less celebrate them, but Magda had told him about it. No nation on Earth boasted as many Independence Days as Hungary, and today was one of them. The Ides of March.
He opened the map again. Eve and Adam’s was about three long city blocks down the körút, right before the bridge. Even amid the mayhem of public celebration, he had zero chance of keeping out of sight. He was too conspicuous. People stared at him openly and without shame. His face had to be a mess and there was blood splattered all over his jacket. The cold felt good and kept him more clearheaded than he expected.
Upon closer inspection, Budapest wasn’t all that different from Philly. The buildings were older and the cars smaller, but the shop windows looked pretty much the same. There were bookstores and pizza places with chicks in skintight skirts just like in Old City. Budapest was equally dirty, that was for sure. Graffiti everywhere, the car-exhaust stink, fast-food bags blowing around like crippled birds. The only real difference was that everyone was white. It was like being at the opera. And the weather disoriented him. If the sun still existed, it was hiding behind a canopy of pollution and the densest clouds Brutus had ever seen. It looked like it could start pissing down rain or snow or sleet any second. If you didn’t like the weather, just wait five minutes. But that was true every place he’d ever been.
He stopped in front of a record store to check out his reflection in the window but couldn’t make himself out. The lump on his forehead still welded his eye closed and touching it even gingerly sent a spark down his neck. He didn’t want to deal with any Hungarian jibber-jabber, so instead of picking up some food at the little grocery store he continued to the hotel, where a monkey-suited bellhop stood out front trying to light a cigarette in the wind. He refused to even look at Brutus, who went inside to book a room and establish a base camp for the day’s business.