Andrew Ervin - Extraordinary Renditions

The train lurched and then rolled eastward. Eventually, it would turn north.

The bag contained six assault rifles — Hungarian-made AMD-65s — each wrapped in a thick, chamois bag. So it was weapons after all. Upon closer inspection, they turned out to be semiautomatics that someone had converted by hand to fully auto. Totally illegal back in the States and likely in Hungary too.

Now he got it: he was going to meet some scraggly motherfucker with a goofy accent and an eyepatch at a table in the back of some dark bar. Hand over the bag, drink a whiskey, and, depending on how things pan out, either head back to Taszár or get out of the country by any means possible.

In addition to the rifles and his clothes, the bag also contained a map of Budapest with a red circle around a street corner next to the Danube and an Arden edition of Julius Caesar. No passport. Brutus removed his jacket and sat down to think things over. There were a few different ways the day could play out. In one scenario, Sullivan would wait until Brutus arrived at Eve and Adam’s and then wash his hands of him. In another, M.P.s would snatch his ass off the streets so no word of the operation got back to the base.

Brutus typically didn’t mind the M.P.s too much. He could handle them just like he could, and had, any pigs back home — yessuh, nossuh, anything you say, suh — or he could pop one and watch the rest scatter. But he certainly didn’t want to get tangled with any corrupt elements of the corps, not if it could be avoided. They were a mean bunch of motherfuckers. Sullivan’s kind of people. That was what now worried him. Once Brutus delivered the bag, Sullivan would have to send the marines after him. The same dudes who had been down to Taszár. That visit had been part of Sullivan’s plan all along. They had come to the base for the sole purpose of choosing their guinea pig. They needed someone expendable. Fuck. Brutus would never be allowed near the base again. He was too much of a liability. It would be that asshole sergeant and Doornail and those guys — whatever the fuck their stupid names were — hunting him down. No question. And without a passport, he was trapped.

His army career was officially over. Funny — that was exactly what he had wanted so badly the past few months, but not like this. Another of Sullivan’s jokes. You want out of the army, boy, you can have out. The marines would pick him up at Eve and Adam’s or on the train back to Taszár and that would be it. Throw him out the window like a cigarette butt.

Sullivan would betray him — maybe he already had — but Brutus couldn’t skip the drop. Any tiny hope of salvation depended on the timely delivery of the weapons. Anything else would be sure suicide.

There was nothing to see out the window but his reflection. He unholstered Sparky’s sidearm and saw at once that it wouldn’t fire. Anticipating the theft, Sparky had switched their weapons before Brutus did, the cocksucker. Now he would be without a piece, except for the ones meant for delivery. It had been a little while since he had fucked around with an AMD.

The cabin felt insufferably hot. The heater under his seat charred the backs of his legs to a juicy, tender medium-well, and someone had bolted the window shut. He was sweating like crazy but didn’t risk opening the door. No telling who else was on the train. He picked up Julius Caesar and flipped through it, the pages sticking to his fingers, until he found that someone had highlighted a passage in yellow:

There was a Brutus once that would have brooked

Th’eternal devil to keep his state in Rome

As easily as a king.

Fucking-a right. Brutus wouldn’t tolerate a king any more than he would tolerate the devil himself. An empire or a republic — that was still the issue, the reason he was in Hungary at all. It had been two or three years since he had last read it, but the thing he liked the most about Julius Caesar was that there was no definite good guy or bad guy. Brutus and Caesar, they were both good and bad at the same time. The reader was supposed to think Brutus was evil after he wetted his friend, but he turned out to be the cooler of the two.

When he felt himself drifting off, Brutus locked his arms in a sleeper hold around the duffel bag. The click-click clack click-click clack of the train invaded his thoughts and sounded like a metalsmith banging at an anvil. He dreamed of a large gray rat getting nailed to a tree. Brutus couldn’t see who was doing it, only a pair of gloved hands holding an iron railroad spike and a huge Soviet-looking mallet. Unlike the rat in that marine’s story, though, this one was still alive. It kicked and writhed wildly on the nail, screeching in verminous agony.

7.

Budapest approached and Brutus was neither awake nor asleep until the stench of cigarette smoke and piss seeped back into his consciousness and clothes. Sweat soaked his T-shirt and shorts. Julius Caesar lay prostrate on his stomach; he had read about half, up to where the emperor bit it. Among his dreams he remembered one about fucking Madga and another in which he stabbed Sullivan repeatedly in the back, like in the play. One of them woke him up aroused. His mind whirred immediately to life, recharged and ready to get through the day without taking a marine-sponsored dirt nap in some cold Budapest alley.

Short of discovering a Hungarian Underground Railroad, there existed only one viable possibility. He could play along, at least at first. Buy himself a little more time. Once Sullivan declared him AWOL, if he hadn’t already, there would be no way for Brutus to prove that he was set up and blackmailed. In the meantime, he could carve out some breathing space. He would make like Houdini, his childhood hero. As a kid, Brutus had read every book he could find about the escape artist, but only one of them got into specifics about how to get out of chains and locks and burlap bags. He had studied it zealously. From then on, every Christmas and family gathering included an appearance by the escape artist the Great Brutini. His uncles would seal him up in his Chewbacca sleeping bag, his head sticking out the top. They tied ropes around him, then dropped him on the living room rug. He escaped every challenge, even after they got smart and tied him up before he went in the bag. Brutus’s trick — O.K., Houdini’s — was to bulk his muscles up while they hog-tied him. Make himself bigger. When they were done making all the knots, he slackened his arms for a little extra wiggle room.

He decided to deliver the weapons. But first he was going to make himself bigger.

Brutus would be safe until he got to Eve and Adam’s. The weapons were worth more to somebody than Brutus’s life, so whoever was expecting them might not fuck with him unless he deviated from the plan. But he certainly wasn’t going to take any chances by showing up in a strange city with his dick in his hand, just waiting to get picked up off the streets. It wasn’t like there would be a man in a chauffeur uniform on the train station platform holding up a printed AWOL NIGGER sign waiting to escort him to the drop site.

He pictured how it would go down. After Brutus makes the delivery, someone at Eve and Adam’s will jump on the phone, beep Sullivan, and give him the all-clear to send in the marines. Any way Brutus looked at it, he was fucked. That realization made him angrier than he had ever been in his life. Hatred burned the lining of his stomach. If he was going down, he would take Sullivan down with him. Brutus punched the seat across from him as hard as he could. Lefts and rights. Sweat poured off him, and he kept grunting and punching until the fabric burned his knuckles.

A steady trickle of wind entered through the rubber ring struggling to hold the window in place. The crystalline lattice of frost on the glass framed a view of nothing. He wiped the steam away with his elbow and brought his breathing back under control. The tiniest bit of light crept over the horizon. Cold, frozen ground. Dead, flat farmland occasionally interrupted by the odd silhouette of a house or a hunter’s wooden roost.