Andrew Ervin - Extraordinary Renditions

When the door finally opened, Brutus pretended to be asleep. A single set of footsteps approached his bunk. Sparky was also awake. Brutus steadied himself for a shot to the ribs, but it didn’t come. The bed sagged as a duffel bag landed on the blankets next to his feet. It was heavy. Black steel in the hour of chaos. He didn’t open his eyes when someone leaned in close to his face. He smelled breathy eucalyptus and cheap cologne. He held his eyes closed tight. A pair of lips leaned gently onto his ear, close enough to raise the hair on his arms and on the back of his neck. “Fucking nigger,” they said gently, as if to a child. Brutus didn’t recognize the voice. The footsteps receded again at a casual pace, and the door closed. Sparky stirred in his bed, maybe laughed.

Now Brutus could get a little sleep. He drifted in and out of consciousness, waiting a full hour after the footsteps disappeared down the hall. Before the first morning light could invade the room, he stood and pulled on a pair of jeans and a heavy gray sweatshirt from which he had decided against removing the stitched-on TEMPLE. It wasn’t a corporate logo, not in the usual sense. A strip of duct tape on the outside of the bag had a note written on it: EVE & ADAMS KATONA J. U. 1 BP.

BP meant Budapest. A courier job up to the city. He considered his options, but the reality of the situation was that he had no choice. No say in the matter whatsoever. His own government was blackmailing him, and there wasn’t a goddamned thing he could do except go along with it and try to keep his ass in one piece.

Brutus removed the tape, committed the address to memory, and placed it in yet another envelope to his sister. He dropped the envelope into the duffel bag along with his spare clothes, but resisted the desire to look inside. He also threw in his walkman and a vinyl booklet of CDs. From the weight, the bag contained either weapons or gold bars — and there was no way Sullivan would send a brother out into the world with a sack full of gold. But Brutus didn’t want to know for sure until he was gone. Didn’t want an excuse to back out — not that that was an option. He could still smell the aftertaste of the soldier’s cough drop. The feeling of the man’s lips on his ear reminded him of Magda’s heavy breathing. He regretted not grabbing the cocksucker by the throat when he had the chance and gouging the man’s eyes out with his thumbs, like they had taught him in basic training.

He stopped on his way out. “Take it easy, Sparky,” he said, and stole his roommate’s sidearm, replacing it with his own broken one. Sparky didn’t stir, but Brutus knew that he had heard him. Punk.

It was cold as fuck outside. A small private jet taxied on the runway inside the barbed-wire perimeter of the restricted zone. Brutus didn’t want to risk stealing a truck. The guards on duty didn’t stir from Heaven’s Gate, their tiny patrol bunker. A wisp of smoke trickled from a metal pipe sticking out of the roof. He hoofed it toward the train tracks just south of the base. He could get there before the sun came up, catch a train up to Budapest. Drop the bag. Get on another train. Back in no time. He just might live long enough to poke Magda some more. Getting off the base didn’t worry him as much as how he would get back in later.

He used the handles of the duffel bag as shoulder straps and wore it like a backpack. The contents shifted and jammed something hard into his spine but he didn’t stop to rearrange it. The cold rarely bothered him this bad.

There seemed to be no one else out on the streets except a couple of mangy-looking stray dogs, which he avoided. He stayed off the roads anyway and kept as far as possible from what looked like the downtown area of a small village. He put on his headphones to listen to the Roots. All the houses had metal fences around them. The Hungarians were a territorial people, no doubt because the Magyar tribes had been attacked and exiled from every homeland they ever had, until they finally settled there. Most of the yards had tiny vineyards of just two or three rows of vines and fruit trees that were now bare for the winter. Ice stuck to the branches like that chalky Christmas snow in Wanamaker’s windows. Black Thought sang in Brutus’s ears:

A revolution’s what it’s smelling like, it ain’t gonna be televised

Governments is hellified, taking cake and selling pie

I ain’t got a crust or crumb, to get some I’d be well obliged

Murder is commodified, felon for the second time

Never was I into chasing trouble, I was followed by it

Facing trouble with no alibi, had to swallow pride

Vilified, victimized, penalized, criticized

Ran into some people that’s surprised I was still alive

He headed south, crossing over an empty highway and continuing along an endless dirt road. He couldn’t see a goddamn thing, but he had heard trains down there somewhere so he kept going. Despite the circumstances, it was a joy to be off the base. Brutus walked for an hour before he found the tracks, which he blindly followed east until reaching a tiny backwoods train station — a concrete shack of one open-air room, now yellowed with old paint and cigarette smoke. He might as well have been in Chehaw. The graffiti was extensive and poorly done. A long wooden bench lined the perimeter, interrupted only by the gated and padlocked ticket window and doors to the men’s and women’s rooms, which were denoted by metal cartoon cutouts of children peeing. Swinging double doors led to the platform out back. The place was completely deserted except for a solitary sleeping bum. He looked frozen to death.

The posted schedules looked nothing like SEPTA’s back home, but from what Brutus could gather the trains to Budapest ran every couple of hours all night long. If he waited long enough, maybe he could catch one to Vienna or Warsaw or Zagreb instead. Border security would be tightest this close to the base, though. He didn’t have any forints but assumed he could make do with hard currency until he found a bank. He kept an eye on the sleeping dude, not sure if he was really asleep after all. Sullivan would have spies everywhere. These people really were out to get him. Brutus sat at the end of the room, where he could see the doors both to the street and to the tracks. He resisted the urge to open up the bag. The station was unheated, and he waited for forty-five minutes before a train whistled in the distance. He hid near the platform as it pulled to a grinding halt. No one got off except a MÁV conductor in a blue uniform and red hat, who wobbled to the end of the five-car train and signaled up to the engineer with a flashlight. Brutus took off his headphones and emerged from the shadows of the station, startling him. “Budapest?” he asked.

“Ja, Budapesht,” the old dude said, correcting Brutus’s pronunciation. Hungarian civilians typically spoke some mishmash German to all foreigners, regardless of their actual nationality. His mustache drooped from the constant assault of breath that smelled like onions sautéed in kerosene.

“How much?” Brutus produced a few bills of smaller denominations. He handed the guy a twenty. “This good?” The conductor took it and wandered slowly back up to the hissing engine. Brutus climbed through the nearest door.

The train was empty except for a few old men chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Despite the vast number of free seats, they stood at the windows, spitting into the empty night. The entire train smelled like piss, stale beer, and more piss. Brutus went into an empty compartment. Four sepia-toned photos depicting the history of Hungarian railway innovation decorated the walls. Someone had scratched a swastika into the plastic covering of one. Another had the white remains of a sticker over the front of a trolley. Brutus slid the glass door shut, secured the lock, and closed the curtains. Then he removed his belt and ran it through the armrest of his red bench seat and through the handles of the bag.