David Szalay - All That Man Is

Balázs starts to walk again. He remembers now the way that Gábor had shouted at him when he emerged from the bathroom to find the man bleeding onto the carpet, had shouted after him as he left the room. It isn’t what Gábor would have wanted. And Emma…Just as he was leaving he had been aware of her emerging from the bathroom too, in one of the hotel’s towelling robes, and releasing a short scream…

Balázs wonders, for a moment, whether he should just flee the whole situation — just head home on his own, hurry to the airport now . He doesn’t have his passport on him, is one problem. Everything is at the house. No, he will walk a bit more while the adrenalin works its way out of his system. Then he will face whatever it is he has to face.

When, some time later, he finds the side street where they were parked, however, the Mercedes is not there.

—

He doesn’t know how to get home from the hotel, except on the underground, so he has to wait for the trains to start. Four o’clock finds him in Knightsbridge, pressing his nose to the windows of Harrods. Half an hour later he is wandering through Eaton Square. At five, watched by suspicious policemen, he passes in front of Buckingham Palace. It is fully light now, the sun is up, and he waits in Green Park for the station to open.

—

An hour later he finds Gábor in the smoke-filled living room of the flat, on the phone. He is obviously talking to Zoli.

While he talks he does not acknowledge Balázs’s presence, standing there waiting for him to finish, until he says to Zoli, in a quiet voice, ‘Yeah, he’s here. He just got back.’

A minute later he puts down his phone and says, ‘Zoli is fucking livid.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Balázs says.

‘Do you know who that is whose nose you broke?’

Balázs shakes his head.

‘What the fuck were you doing?’ Gábor shouts at him.

‘I’m sorry,’ Balázs says again, lowering his eyes.

‘I mean, are you out of your fucking mind?’

‘I thought…I thought he hurt her,’ Balázs says.

‘No, he did not hurt her. I told you she was okay.’

‘She’s okay? So what happened, why did she…?’

‘Do you have any idea,’ Gábor says, ignoring him, ‘what I have had to deal with?’

Balázs, after a long silence, is about to say sorry again, when Gábor goes on. He speaks in a ferocious semi-whisper, perhaps because Emma is trying to sleep in the other room. ‘First I’ve got to deal with the guy with the broken nose,’ Gábor says, ‘this guy on the floor. Give him towels to soak up the blood, find his teeth and give them to him — I mean, it was disgusting , man! Then he starts saying he’s going to call the police. I mean, he gets really fucking angry suddenly. So I have to try and calm him down, tell him he probably doesn’t want to call the police, that he probably doesn’t want to involve them. And he tells me to go fuck myself, he doesn’t give a shit, he’s going to call them, and we’re all going to get arrested. And I’m worried he is going to call them — that he isn’t thinking straight, he’s full of cocaine, he’s probably concussed or something. I mean, he might do something stupid, something he regrets later as well. So I tell him I’m going to call Zoli and talk to him, and he shouldn’t do anything till I’ve done that. And anyway he’s still dizzy and can’t even stand up, and doesn’t know where his phone is — his clothes and stuff’s all over the place. I mean, he’s still fucking naked at this point, and when he tries to stand up he just falls over again. So I call Zoli, yeah, and of course he’s asleep, because it’s the middle of the fucking night, and at first he doesn’t answer, but I keep trying and eventually he picks up, and obviously he knows there’s a problem otherwise I wouldn’t be calling him in the middle of the night, but then I’ve got to tell him what happened, I’ve got to tell him that you broke the guy’s fucking nose. And he says, “What did the guy do?” And I’ve got to tell him that the guy did nothing, basically, you just broke his nose. I mean, Zoli can hardly fucking believe it when I tell him that,’ Gabor says, suddenly flaring up himself, and taking a moment to light a cigarette. ‘And he immediately starts having a go at me for bringing you into this whole thing — I mean, like it was my fault what happened. And then he starts saying he’s going to break your legs and stuff. I mean, he says it like he really means it, and maybe he knows people who can do that, I don’t know. Anyway, I tell him the guy’s threatening to call the police. And he says I can’t let him do that. And I say, “What the fuck do you want me to do — kill him?” And Zoli says, “Let me talk to him.” So I tell the guy Zoli wants to talk to him, and give him the phone. And the guy looks fucking terrible — I mean, his face is swollen like a fucking balloon and all purple, and his nose is just a fucking grotesque mess. Anyway, he takes the phone and talks to Zoli, and he’s still really fucking angry — he’s shouting about how he’s going to call the police and how it might be embarrassing for him but we’re the ones who are going to go to jail and stuff. Fuck, it takes Zoli about half an hour to calm him down, and then he gives the phone back to me and says Zoli wants to talk to me again, and Zoli tells me he’s agreed with the guy that he won’t call the police if we give him his money back, and at that point I’m just fucking relieved to have this sorted out so he’s not going to call the police, so I tell Emma to get the money and she does, and I give it back to the guy. That felt really shit.’ Gábor stubs out his cigarette.

Balázs is still standing there, near the door.

Gábor says, ‘I tell him to get dressed and clean himself up, and I’ll be back in ten minutes. Then I take Emma back to the car, and leave her there and go back up to the room, where the guy’s got his clothes on and has washed most of the blood off his face. Anyway, he leaves and then I’ve got to try and clean the fucking room up. I mean, there’s blood everywhere.’ Gábor sighs, weary with telling the story now. ‘So I call Juli and we find some kind of carpet-cleaning machine in a cupboard somewhere, some kind of steam cleaner, and she shows me how to use it, and I’ve got to try and clean the carpet with it.’ Almost tearfully he shouts at Balázs, ‘I mean, this fucking unwieldy machine! I didn’t even know how to work it properly!’ He lights yet another cigarette. Still standing there, Balázs lights one too. ‘I mean, I fucking hated you while I was doing that,’ Gábor says. ‘I wanted to fucking kill you.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ Balázs says.

‘Where the fuck did you go?’

‘I dunno. Nowhere.’

Gábor looks at him for a few moments, as if he doesn’t understand. Then he says, ‘I can’t pay you, man. I mean, what I was going to pay you for this week. I mean, we had to give the guy his money back — which is much more than I was going to pay you, okay. I mean, we lost that money because of what you did, so…’

Though it had not occurred to him that this might happen, Balázs just shrugs.

‘I mean, Zoli wants you to pay us the difference,’ Gábor says, with some vehemence. ‘He wants you to pay us the fucking difference, and that’s like a million forints. I told him you can’t do that, you just don’t have the money, and he said maybe you’d prefer to have your legs broken. I mean, he is fucking angry, man. And so is Emma,’ Gábor says more moodily, looking away.

‘Is she?’ Balázs says quietly, surprised.

‘Well, yeah! She had to fuck that guy,’ Gábor says, spelling it out, ‘and she didn’t even get paid.’