Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

* * *

Ever since Rácz interrogated the two Junjan gangsters he’d captured, some of his good mood vanished forever. What he found out from them would dismay any responsible administrator with long-term plans for his city, region or country. Yet these were not underworld leaders, but just run-of-the-mill enforcers. They made it clear to him that he had no chance in the business, as the Junjan mafia was strong, the strongest in Europe, and the smartest thing Rácz could do would be to apologize to them and immediately release them. They in turn would put in a good word for him to Gôdöğonñ Sürgünn, the Junjan businessman and de facto head of the whole family. Because what Rácz has to do is to visit Gôdöğonñ Sürgünn and acknowledge his dominance. The mighty Gôdöğonñ Sürgünn would mercifully take into account the position that Rácz used to enjoy and would let him keep a sufficient number of smaller privileges. Similarly, his payments to the common treasury would not be that steep, since Rácz’s businesses make so much profit that, even after giving up a third, he’d still have a lot left over.

Rácz would not listen to any more of this. Some immigrant wants to steal from him everything he’s built up with these two hands and this head? Where the fuck do these people come from, if they think they can shove Rácz aside like a beginner? You can’t do this to him. Big mistake! Big mistake! Rácz sorted out the gypsies, the Albanians, and in between Rivers of Babylon and The Wooden Village , he sorted out the Russians, Chechens, and Ukrainians too, and not a word was written about it, and now they think he can’t get rid of these new ones?

Rácz had heard enough now. Without anger, but without a word of explanation, he personally shot both Junjans with his new nine-millimetre pistol with a silencer as thick as a sausage. They hadn’t expected that at all. They felt very sure of themselves under Gôdöğonñ Sürgünn’s protection. Only as Rácz started slowly screwing on the silencer, did they realise in horror that even Gôdöğonñ Sürgünn couldn’t help them here.

Unfortunately, Rácz couldn’t order their corpses to be taken away and burned in the boiler-room as he used to in the old days. He had the boiler-room converted two years ago to gas, so the Junjans ended up that night in a meat grinder of a rendering plant that, of course, also belonged to Rácz and was the first stage in producing delicious Bobby and Mick food for our four-legged friends.

“That’s where they’ll all end up,” Rácz bragged to his men. “In dog biscuits.”

It didn’t help him to restore his equilibrium. Quite the contrary: one Junjan wet himself before he died, so the hypersensitive Rácz had to get his favourite carpet cleaned. The second one sprayed blood and brains over his brand-new Doctor of Social Sciences diploma that he’d just bought from a private Luxemburg university for a horrendous sum.

The very next day he had Mozoň summoned. Nobody knows what transpired between the two of them; before the conversation he threw everyone out of the office and told his security team, Mozoň’s immediate subordinates, not to listen outside the door.

After half an hour Mozoň left the office with a torn ear and a bloody nose. Rácz came out after him.

He’d come to an agreement with Mozoň, Rácz told his men. The job of security service Sekuritatia director is hard and demanding, especially in these hard and demanding times. Mozoň (alias Silent) has been demoted to hotel detective. From now on, the acting director of Sekuritatia is Rácz. A war that won’t be easy or short has to be prepared for.

* * *

If only there was just the Khan in this world and not his underlings, too!

Junjan Slovak proverb

And this is how it proceeded: first Rácz ordered an attack on and beating of Krčmárik, a member of parliament who had previously stopped Rácz privatising the Tatra Foothills Freezing Plant. Meanwhile Rácz found out that the Krčmárik he’d beaten up was only a minion of the Minister of Food, who was a minion of Gôdöğonñ Sürgünn — officially a Junjan businessman dealing in fur and tinned fish, unofficially one of the godfathers of the Junjan mafia located in Europe.

Gôdöğonñ Sürgünn was tense and out for revenge. He was fighting for dominance in Central Europe against the Budapest Junjan godfather Cmüngürül Gabdźâ and the Viennese Üngurtt Tököroll, and was having little success, so he had no stomach for protracted wrangling. Worse, he’d lost two men, vanished without trace. Rácz was stopping him taking over the city, so he decided to deal with him summarily. Unfortunately, he underestimated him. Both Sürgünn’s hit men, whose task was to murder the mighty business tycoon, ended in the Danube with their feet concreted in tasteful plastic bowls.

Shortly after that, a bomb went off in the office of Sürgünn’s firm Junja Fish & Food . It happened at night, so the explosion just wrecked the building and blew out the windows in all the nearby buildings.

A retaliatory bomb exploded in Rácz’s Hotel Ambassador, this time in the evening, so the few people present in the lobby lost their lives. Among them was poor Mozoň, who was sitting in the lobby, made up as a negro, watching through a hole in his newspaper what was going on around him, as his poorly-paid position of hotel detective required.

The member of the parliament, Krčmárik, was scared shitless, as they say, and fled to Austria, where he meant to hide. But Üngurtt Tököroll, informed of all Slovak parliamentarians’ and government crooks’ movements, got him even before he reached Vienna. When he found that this member of parliament, ex-communist, now rabid nationalist, was only a useless, uninformed puppet, he was dismayed and disappointed, so he tortured him a bit and sent him back to Bratislava, via the Danube.

The Minister of Food recognized the bloated drowned man fished out near Gabčíkovo as his man: he judged this to be Rácz’s work. Without consulting Gôdöğonñ Sürgünn, he ordered Rácz to be shot. The sniper fired around noon from the rooftop of the Manderla Building. The moment the gun went off, Rácz bent his head down to a lighter one of his bodyguards helpfully proffered to light his cigar. The unlucky bodyguard lost his life: the bullet aimed at Rácz found its way into his brain. Rácz’s other bodyguards ran to where Rácz noticed a split-second reflection of a sniper’s telescopic sight. They found only an empty cartridge case and no trace of the sniper on top of the Manderla Building. He had fled somewhere over the roofs, or hidden in the building.

Ordinary people long to have heroes of their own, so they turned the funeral for Rácz’s bodyguard, a sadistic psychopath whose education was five years of elementary school, into a spontaneous demonstration against the wiles of government privatisers. Rácz backed up this demonstration with suitably chosen media activities. He, too, was a government privatiser, but that was under the previous government. That government was less rapacious than the present one, therefore it was better. Which means it was good. Rácz’s dead bodyguard, who used to beat his own mother, almost became a symbol of democracy.

A day later, somebody used a shotgun to kill Sürgünn’s son, a well-known Bratislava playboy, just as he was getting out of his Porsche 911. Rácz was a bit puzzled, since he wasn’t behind it. But who was?

Then came Saturday and Sunday, and everybody went off to some lake or other. On Monday things started again. Bombs exploded and wrecked a number of cars parked in front of the Masex trust that had been privatised by the Minister of Food’s wife. Gôdöğonñ Sürgünn, heart-broken by his son’s death, had felt the need to punish the Minister of Food for acting out of hand. By now Gôdöğonñ Sürgünn had begun to cruise the city in a bespoke armoured car ordered from the USA.