Pete Hamill - Brooklyn Noir

“Why don’t you just fucking go back, man?” Paul Schneider, my companion in hell, asked as he assigned me yet another story about Donald Trump’s sex life. “So you hate it here, so leave.”

“Can’t.”

“Yes, you can. You buy a ticket. You get on a plane. Have a crappy meal, drink too much wine, and wake up in Budapest or Bucharest or wherever the fuck you’d rather be. People do it all the time. I’d lend you the money if I had any.” Paul was expecting a baby, or at least his wife was, and he was working double shifts so they could afford to move out of their 400-square-foot apartment.

“I’d steal it if you had any. But I can’t go back.”

The newsroom was quiet. We were both smoking. We’d stuffed a screwdriver in the smoke detectors and bribed Bart, the security guy. Smoking was the only thing that made this bullshit job even close to bearable.

“Why?”

I sighed, pretending to be annoyed at his persistence. “After the Berlin Wall fell, organized crime became the new growth industry in Eastern Europe. I made some trouble. Wrote some stories that made a few gangsters decide I deserved a whole new face.”

“So what? Aren’t journalists supposed to be fearless?”

“Very funny.”

“And what else?”

“Nothing else.” I reached for the cigarettes, Paul withdrew them.

“What else?” He held the packet up between two fingers just out of my reach, a practiced move. My lousy pay didn’t even come close to covering all my vices. Paul was used to me bumming off him.

“Fuck you.”

“Ah, a woman.” Paul handed the packet to me after taking one for himself, desperate for a story, anything that would distract him from the numbing hours that stretched before us. “Do tell.”

“Ana,” I sighed. “Her name was Ana.”

“And she broke your heart.”

“If you want to put it like that.” I struck a match, it snapped in two. I struck another one and the same thing happened. My hands were shaking. Ana could do that to me still, after all these years. Paul took the box from me and deftly lit the match. I started talking to smother my embarrassment. “She decided one day that she didn’t want to see me anymore I used to pick her up after work — she worked nights — and so I’d sit in this bar in Budapest and wait for her to finish and then walk her home.” I shook my head. “And one night she’d reassigned the job. That was it. No explanation, no nothing. I had no idea what I’d done wrong. Still don’t. She wouldn’t speak to me.”

“So no closure.”

“No.”

“Bummer,” Paul said.

“Yeah.” Maybe all those yuppies who paid 150 bucks an hour for a shrink were onto something. I hadn’t talked to anybody about Ana, I guess I’d been enjoying my own private hell a little too much. But now I felt as if a small burden had lifted. “All the time I was in Hungary it was as if I had an evil cloud hanging over me. Because before Ana, there was Mike McIlvaney.”

“He broke up with you too?” Paul stubbed his cigarette out on his shoe and flicked the butt into the bag we used to remove evidence of our illegal habits from the office.

“In a manner of speaking.”

They called it the Highway of Death for a very good reason. A two-lane stretch of asphalt between Vienna and Budapest where bunches of flowers, crosses, and stuffed animals bore witness to its incapacity to deal with the enormous daily volume of traffic.

The problem was this: Food and wine were cheap in Budapest and the Viennese were fond of getting into their late-model German automobiles and making a bargain-shop-ping day of it. Racing the other way for a taste of the West were their less fortunate Eastern European cousins, shaking behind the wheels of their unreliable, two-stroke Trabbants. Most American lawnmowers have more power than the Trabbant, and there were no passing lanes on the Highway of Death. The Austrian drivers, spoiled by superior technology and frustrated at having to sit behind an aerodynamically challenged global-warming machine, took frequent, stupid risks. Trabbie drivers, too, pushed their impotent cars past what they were capable of.

Mike had a Fiat. He, like me, was freelancing, building a name for himself. He had dark hair, a rangy build, and although his parents were American, he’d been raised in Brisbane and had an Australian accent. We’d become friends.

It was a quiet week when we made our decision. The Hungarians had just elected a democratic government and the transition had been fairly smooth. There were rumblings of trouble between Romanians and ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania, and between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Pristina, but not enough for us to warrant a trip to either place just yet.

“Man cannot live by beer alone, mate,” Mike said one night, slightly drunk in a Pest bar. Food in Budapest was good but mostly limited to what the Hungarians could grow — peppers, cherries, tomatoes, meat, bread. “I feel like avocados. Can’t remember the last time I had an avocado. Let’s go to Vienna.”

The next day we set off.

Trouble met us on the way home. Dark had fallen and we’d just crossed the Austrian border when the Fiat choked a couple a times and died. Mike pulled over, popped the hood, took off his seatbelt, and reached into the glove compartment for a flashlight to check it out.

There’s not a day that I don’t think about what happened next. It was timing that Satan would have been proud of. The nano-second after Mike unbuckled, a Mercedes hit us from behind. It was a heavy car, going fast. I later found out the driver was drunk. The Fiat shunted forward and the impact popped Mike through the windshield, just like that. If he’d had his seat belt on, like me, he’d still be alive.

“Christ,” Paul said, sucking deep on a new cigarette when I’d finished.

“Yeah,” I said. “Watching someone die, it messes with your head. Between Mike and Ana, I guess I went to pieces.”

He studied me, eyes narrowed through smoke. “I guess you did.”

This woman had dark hair cut in a bob, dyed ruby red, and glowing olive skin. She was wearing tan pants tucked into knee-length boots and reading a library book in Cyrillic. Someone who’d got on the wrong train asked her for directions and she replied, smiling, in a softly accented voice. I sat across from her from Atlantic Avenue. I caught her eye at Avenue J and smiled. She looked away. I’d been considered good-looking once, but personal grooming wasn’t high on my agenda anymore. It was months since I’d had a haircut and I’d become a haphazard shaver.

She got off at Brighton Beach, walked north, and turned left on Coney Island Avenue, clutching her suede coat closely to her even though the evening was mild. She went into a restaurant, ordered two chicken kebabs and a can of Sprite. Food seemed like a good idea for me too, so I had some, although I didn’t notice what I ate. She sat silently at her table and didn’t look my way, not once. Then she went to the bathroom, where I guess she must’ve made a phone call or something, because a few minutes later, a guy joined her. She said something to him and he glanced my way and frowned. I could see his pecs flexing under his thin white shirt.

I avoid trouble these days. I called for the check.

“So why don’t you start freelancing some articles or something?” Paul asked over our customary breakfast beer at the end of our shift. “You know, get back in the saddle.”

“There’s nothing to write about.”

“That’s defeatist crap.”

“All right, I can’t be bothered.” That wasn’t quite true. Once, just after I got back and was desperate for cash to make the deposit on my new rental apartment, I had dashed off a travel article about the grand old cafés of Budapest. It didn’t require any research, it bored me to write it, but the airline magazine paid promptly and the money was sweet.