Peter Pišt'anek - Rivers of Babylon

“A hundred thousand is good money,” says Mozoň and sits down. But he thinks there’s no need to kill the stoker. He just has to be taken out of circulation for a few months. When he gets back, he will be so screwed up by everything that will have been done to him that he’ll choose to go back to his village. Mozoň has ways of doing that. There are some spacious cells in the basement of this safe house. They’ve never been used yet, but Mozoň believes it’s time they were. The inconvenient stoker will be an involuntary boarder in one of them. He’ll have ample time, living on bread and water, to reflect hard on the wisdom of leaving his village for the city. Mozoň thinks two to three months of solitary confinement will be enough for the stoker.

He gets up and motions to the lawyer. They go down to the cellar. Mozoň opens a door. Behind is darkness. Mozoň turns on the light and the lawyer can see a long corridor with a row of metal doors on each side. Each door has a small square hatch with a bolt.

“For keeping an eye on them,” Mozoň tells the lawyer. The lawyer nods in admiration. “We’ll chuck him in there,” says Mozoň. “Don’t worry; we’ll put him off wanting to act the uncrowned king of the hotel. Want to have a look inside?” The lawyer shakes his head. He’s shivering with cold. Mozoň turns off the light and closes the door. “A hundred thousand?” he asks the lawyer.

“A hundred thousand,” says the lawyer firmly, “plus his keep in gaol.” Mozoň nods.

“It’ll be harder abducting him,” says the lawyer, when they get back upstairs. “Rácz is never alone, not even for a second. There’s always someone hanging around him. He has his sidekick, the hotel driver and buyer. He also has a mistress, a girl who used to dance in the cabaret. A hooker.” The lawyer would suggest luring him out of the building under some pretext. “It’ll be difficult, but I think it can be done.” Mozoň and his subordinates can ambush him there. They can knock him out and take him away. That’s how the lawyer envisages it.

Mozoň clears his throat. His head is still spinning, but a spate of applied thinking and the prospect of all that money has neutralised the vodka. “It’s not that easy,” he opines. Mozoň knows from experience. A well-done abduction needs extensive preliminary preparation. Reconnoitring the terrain. Nothing can be left to accident. It would be best for Mozoň to come to the hotel for a few days incognito. He could take a look at everything. He’d pretend to be a guest from the West and try to attract Rácz’s attention. He’d make friends with him. It would all be easier that way. “See this?” Mozoň opens a steel cabinet, takes out a Bakelite box and opens it. It contains a needle with a transparent bulb at one end. “This is a powerful narcotic,” he tells the lawyer. “If I can jab him in the arm and squeeze the bulb, he’ll be out for an hour. That gives us time to transport him over here and lock him in a cell.” Mozoň pauses and looks at his listeners. The lawyer likes the idea. Tupý and Šolik stare at their chief in admiration.

“What’s more,” adds Mozoň, after putting the box back, “we could get ransom money out of the stoker, beside the hundred thousand. That would gives us extra to tide us over the bad times. The situation will change very soon,” Mozoň is sure. “Power will be restored to the working masses. Until then, we have to keep the faith,” he says resolutely. “Victory is near. We mustn’t let our guard down, comrades.”

Tupý and Šolik clap enthusiastically. They are looking forward to the money they’ll get out of the lawyer and the stoker. The lawyer is happy, too. What’s a hundred thousand compared to the fortune he’ll make out of the hotel when Rácz is out of his way?

“Time’s up!” Šolik suddenly says, after a look at his watch. It’s already three thirty-five. The secret policemen quickly change their clothes and pack their briefcases.

“Don’t you worry, doctor of law,” Mozoň tells the lawyer, as he locks up the safe house. “We won’t leave you in the lurch! We’ll help you.”

It’s slowly getting dark. The men amble to the bus stop.

* * *

Rácz’s face is inscrutable and expressionless. Not a muscle moves on his dark face, where a bluish shadow appears a few hours after shaving. He does everything with his eyes. They bulge with anger, or are sternly immovable, and sometimes proud and half-closed with contentment. Somebody gave him dark sunglasses: since then he’s never gone anywhere without them. His face seems cast in steel alloy. There are moments when he takes his glasses off and gives those around him a momentary look into his firm grey-blue eyes, only theatrically to hide them again behind the opaque black lenses. Few people can stand Rácz’s direct gaze. The wrinkles fanning around his eyes on an otherwise stone-smooth face give him an almost intellectual expression.

The coal dust has long been washed out of the pores of Rácz’s skin and the corns from his work boots have been massaged away by soft Italian moccasins, or crocodile or snake-skin cowboy boots. Rácz prefers to drape his angular body in Miami Vice-style loose-fitting jackets and trousers. Even his leather jackets — black, grey, brown, and burgundy — are a few sizes too big. He has prominent shoulders. His hair has grown longer and begun to curl. He had it cut, in the front and mostly on the sides, around his big ears. He has an Italian soccer player’s hairstyle. Sometimes he combs his hair back with gel in a sleek, shiny style. He has an earring with a tiny diamond in his left ear. Silvia chose it. She pierced his ear with special pincers; it didn’t hurt. In time Rácz found he liked it. It’s not too striking, but it discreetly suggests his financial status.

To a practised eye Rácz looks a bit less well-groomed since Silvia ran away. Fortunately, he’s hit on a few reliable combinations of clothes that he alternates and which can’t spoil his style. For example, he’d never wear his black double-breasted suit with high lace-up Adidas boots.

* * *

The dog is small, thin and mangy. Its big ears listen for sounds. Any suspicious noise terrifies it. The night is clear. The snow in the yard of the Hotel Ambassador reflects the moonlight, but the manager stands motionless in the dark, holding his breath. The dog approaches the bait: a huge bone from the stockpot. A pointed muzzle (the dog’s a spitz) sniffs it. The manager is even more motionless. Only his eyes shine in the dark. The dog greedily grabs the bone. In an instant it is writhing in the manager’s noose. It wheezes and splutters as the rope strangles its neck. The manager darts out of his hiding place with the rope wrapped round his wrist. The dog realises that the more it fights the rope, the tighter the noose gets. It watches the approaching manager out of the corner of its eye.

The manager squats down. He reaches for his catch with a hand in a thick glove. The spitz sinks its teeth into the manager’s fingers. That instant, the dog finds itself dangling. It is a few inches above the ground, helplessly paddling its legs. Only when it begins to lose consciousness and stops struggling, the manager lowers it. The dog begins to grovel. It recognizes a superior opponent. It had been only recently kicked out into the street. It still remembers how to deal with people. The manager offers it a bit of dried meat. The dog takes it; it’s starving. The manager waits for the dog to swallow the meat and then firmly jerks the rope. The dog gets to its feet and trustingly follows its new master.

Getting to the Hotel Ambassador without alerting the receptionist, who is reading his paper behind the counter, is difficult, but not impossible. He noiselessly crosses the dark lobby with the dog, hugging the walls and taking cover in dark corners. Only when he’s in his office in the administrative wing does the manager breathe a sigh of relief and relax. He’s welcomed by the happy barking and whining of a pack of dogs. There are all sorts: big and small, pedigree, mongrel, various colours and sizes. There is a mastiff with a gigantic wise head, and a terrier, whining and scratching the floor with its thin legs because of the cold. The manager releases his newest catch into the pack. The dogs get to know each other, they yap and bare their teeth. The manager watches them for a while. He realises that he has to begin carrying out his brilliant plan: soon the dry meat will run out and the dogs will starve to death. He spends a moment by the embers in the centre of the office, feeding the fire with a chair leg. The hotel has recently taken a delivery of new chairs. They burn very well. The flames come to life and light up the whole room: the sitting manager and fascinated dogs.