Andrew Ervin - Extraordinary Renditions

“No, sir.”

Sullivan dismissed the soldiers. He had a large manila envelope on the desk. The words PFC GIBSON JONATHAN and PHILADELPHIA, PENNA. were typed on a white label.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“No, sir.” A million possibilities ran through his mind. They probably knew about Magda. Relations with the civilian population had been forbidden since another G.I. got convicted of rape in Japan some months earlier and set off a diplomatic shitstorm. Word had it that parents in Okinawa, probably in Hungary too, were trying to cash in on the American occupation by sending their daughters out to fuck soldiers and then yell rape. Uncle Sam was known to throw a lot of money around to keep the stories out of the papers. At Taszár, the authorities didn’t care if a G.I. poked another Hungarian honey, not until they needed an excuse to climb up his ass.

Sullivan slid the envelope across the desk. Brutus became aware not only of his own nervousness but also how much Sullivan relished that nervousness. He bathed in it, took strength from it. He was probably stroking a hard-on under his desk. He looked like a snake about to lunge at a rat. A thought ran through Brutus’s mind: a snake without poison is still a snake. He couldn’t remember where he’d heard that. Maybe from his buddy Elvin. He opened the envelope, which was empty except for a single eight-by-ten photo.

“Look at the photograph, Private.”

It was black-and-white and extremely grainy, with a spooky, timeless quality. It could have been taken twenty minutes or twenty years earlier: a hard-core shot of two men, one black and one white, engaging in anal sex. From the angle and quality of the print, he couldn’t make out either of their faces. The black man was getting fucked up the ass, and Brutus knew what was going to happen next.

“What’s the matter, Brutus? That is you, isn’t it? That nigger faggot, I mean.” All the softness left his voice. A thin smile crept across his face.

“No, sir.”

“Do you always catch, Brutus? Don’t you get the urge to pitch once in a while?” Sullivan stopped smiling. “Listen to me. This is you in the photograph. Do you understand?”

“Sir, I—”

“Do. You. Under. Stand?”

Brutus looked deep into Sullivan’s face and saw nothing at all he could work with. His mind raced. A snake without poison is still a snake. It wasn’t him in the photo, of course, but that would be his word against Sullivan’s. How many men had Sullivan pulled this on? How many different people had been in that picture? Did he have another version with the roles reversed in the unlikely case that he wanted to blackmail a white dude? A Latino? Sullivan was setting him up. Blackmail — the word rolled over and over through his mind. He entertained the idea that the white guy in the photo was Sullivan.

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

Brutus did understand. For the first time in his army career, he knew exactly what was happening to him. He was being set up, made into an example at Taszár and at every post Sullivan would have for the remainder of his career.

“You see that it’s you in the photograph?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It pleases me to know you’re as smart as our best testing demonstrates. So you understand that you have officially entered into a world of shit? So to speak.”

“Very much so, sir.”

“And, Private, that I alone can get you out of it?”

“I pretty much guessed that too, sir. And if I’m not mistaken you’re going to make me some kind of deal.” Brutus sidestepped the usual formalities, testing his limits. He wished he had his pistol with him, but didn’t know what he would do with it. Better this way.

“You’re perceptive, Private. But this is not the time to discuss such matters. For now, let’s just say that you are going to help me with something. When you’re finished, you get to keep this photograph as a souvenir. Fuck with me, and this is going on the front page of Stars and Stripes. You get where I’m coming from?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You won’t end up in some cushy, American prison. Oh no. It would please me very much to visit you in the filthiest cell this whole stinking country has to offer, and I will blow you sweet kisses while you’re bent over in front of some skinhead mother killers far meaner than the featherweight in this picture. Dismissed, Private.”

Brutus saluted and turned to leave.

“Oh, one more thing before you go, Private. With a name like Brutus, I assume you’ve read Julius Caesar?”

“Yes, sir. Several times, sir.” He even had “Et tu Brute” tattooed on his left bicep.

“Well. A nigger who reads Shakespeare is like the one monkey out of a thousand that gets lucky at a typewriter and writes a sonnet. That makes you one lucky monkey, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So when I tell you to beware the ides of March, you know you better fucking listen, right?”

“Yes, sir.” Brutus couldn’t stand the sound of his own voice: yessuh, yessuh, yessuh. “But it wasn’t Brutus, sir.”

The lieutenant colonel looked up from the paperwork on his desk. “Excuse me?”

“It wasn’t Brutus, sir, who had to beware the ides of March. It was Caesar.”

Sullivan scowled. “Dismissed, Private.”

3.

“This is not,” Sullivan had announced in his introductory lecture, “a free country.”

The day Brutus had arrived at Taszár, he received an orientation package of army propaganda. More than national defense or fighting wars or peacekeeping missions or any of that, paperwork justified the existence of the U.S. military. He was handed three three-ring binders stacked one on top of the other. That was only the beginning. He pitched most of the material into the garbage, but kept a few pamphlets because of their comic value. One described the dangers of Hungarian women, known to be a predatory race of acid-tongued nymphets interested only in obtaining an American passport. There was nothing a Hungarian girl — especially “a girl from the countryside,” it was stressed — wouldn’t do to sink her claws into a G.I. The handout told horror stories of girls getting pregnant and demanding child support from the U.S. government, of angry fathers seeking retribution (“The honor of one’s family is extremely important among the peasantry of Eastern Europe”), and of mafioso thugs using their girlfriends as bait to extort money out of the unwitting soldier. “Socially Transmitted Diseases (STDs) run rampant in emerging democracies.”

The battery of physical and psychological examinations, and the innumerable injections, lasted for weeks.

Back before the construction of Camp Bondsteel over in Kosovo, the American brass decided that Taszár Air Base could be another Guantánamo. Originally built for the Red Army in the 1950s, it was conveniently located within striking distance of the Yugoslavian border. The Russians abandoned the base in 1990 and a few years later, Uncle Sam moved in. To the Hungarian government, opening Taszár to the United States gave them a jackbooted foot in the door to NATO. The Budapest media, like the American, was effectively state run and did little to feed the nation’s appetite for political scandal, even in the face of another occupation by another imperial power.

Taszár served for a short time as the operational headquarters for the theoretically multinational force charged with “keeping the peace” in the Balkans. Once things cooled down over there, though, the American government refused to decommission the base. Instead, they repurposed it for use in their War on Terror. It wasn’t like they could illegally intern civilians on American soil — they had tried that with the Japanese during World War II — so instead, they used bases like Taszár. The so-called black sites. The few Brits and Dutchmen Brutus saw around existed purely for symbolic purposes. For obvious historical reasons, there were very few Russian, or even German, soldiers on Hungarian soil.