Andrew Ervin - Extraordinary Renditions

Brutus stood. Stiffness seized his shoulders. He cracked his neck and pumped his arms like he was rowing a boat, then put on his jacket and looped the handles of the bag around his wrist. He unlocked the compartment door and it slid open. A wave of stale smoke burned his eyes. Pairs of old men stood at the open windows sharing plastic jugs of wine. They argued above the noise of the tracks, but paused long enough to watch Brutus emerge. Each one pulled his bags closer or squeezed them tighter between his knees. Brutus gave them his best don’t-fuck-with-me glare, but the truth was that he would’ve much rather been out there trading lies with those guys than playing FedEx for Sullivan.

He found a closet-sized bathroom at the end of the car and took his time pissing, all the while holding the bag tight. He rinsed his hands with cold water and wiped them on his blue jeans. He couldn’t wait to get off that fucking train. The old men got quiet again as he passed, like he could understand what they were saying anyway. Back in his compartment, he watched the countryside morph into towns spaced closer and closer together and then into factories and the sprawling red-brick complexes of urban life.

“Budapesht”—that was how Magda said it.

He looked forward to taking care of business and then, just maybe, touring a bit of the city. The pictures he had seen of the city were so complex he couldn’t make sense of them. The Hungarians lived and worked in buildings constructed before Columbus first occupied America. They built commie high-rises on top of art-deco apartments on top of ornate Gothic churches. One conquering army after another. Stone Turkish baths on top of Roman colosseums on top of Celtic tribal sites dug into the ground where cavemen first discovered the hot springs seeping out of the Buda Hills. Of course all of it was now crowned by America’s contribution to the history of architecture, the Golden Arches. His stomach grumbled — it was a guilty pleasure, but a cheeseburger, or four, would’ve been right on time. He wanted to see a Roman amphitheater. The lions imported to Hungary — then called Lower Pannonia — really did survive on a steady diet of Christian meat. That wasn’t just bullshit.

He unfolded the map of the city. The train was going to drop him off on the Buda side of the river, at a place called Déli Pályaudvar, the southernmost of the city’s three major train stations. From there, he would need to get across the Danube to Pest. Eve and Adam’s was smack-dab in the middle of town, near Margit Bridge. It looked like a serious hike from the station.

Despite his efforts to relax and save his strength, every mile closer to Budapest got Brutus’s mind working faster. With no way of telling what was coming next, he attempted to focus his attention on the task of keeping his ass in one piece. Those jarheads could be waiting for him as the train rolled in. The M.P.s or the marines wouldn’t even need to be in on Sullivan’s scheme. If they were to pick him up off the streets, it would come down to Brutus’s word against his commanding officer’s, and that debate would never favor a PFC. In coming up with a game plan, his erring on the side of caution might make the difference between freedom — or what passed for freedom — and doing time in the army’s penile colony. Getting got. He would get off at the stop before Déli even though that was farther from where he needed to end up. The map said “Kelenföldi pu.”

Or … he could drop the bag somewhere else in Budapest, leave word for Sullivan where the weapons were at, and split. By the time Sullivan found the cache, Brutus could be back on one of these disgusting trains down to Serbia, or someplace where they would never think to look for him. From there, he could blow the whistle or even just wait it out a year or two until the smoke cleared and they had forgotten all about him. Did going AWOL have a statute of limitations? If he bailed and they didn’t catch him in, say, a year, shouldn’t he be able to go free? Fuck, CNN was down in Yugoslavia all the time. He could give those propaganda-spewing fools the scoop of a lifetime, except that they were too liable to turn him in. He could enlist Magda’s help or even have Joan beep that Congressional bitch who only showed up around the neighborhood every couple of years when she wanted votes. His sister would know what was up any day now, as soon as she got that letter. Getting over the border would be tough even if he had his passport, but given the general fucked-up nature of all things Yugoslavian, he felt confident he could manage it somehow. Nothing was ever easy. Walking around Serbia at night couldn’t be any more dangerous than growing up in West Philly. At least there was no crack in Belgrade, or probably less crack anyway, and given the choice, Brutus would prefer to take his chances with protomilitary gang lords wielding automatic weapons than with twelve-year-old Crip wannabes any day. He could even keep one of the rifles he was supposed to deliver, or sell them himself on the open market.

The outskirts of the city looked asleep. Closely compacted neighborhood blocks fit together at strange angles. Cages of chicken- and barbed wire ensnared each personal fiefdom of slapped-together brick, stucco, and plywood. Smoke escaped from roofs and blended with the slowly brightening sky. Brutus counted the stations on the map. Kelenföldi was next. He had a basic plan. He would hide the weapons somewhere and get the word to Sullivan about where to find them. He took several deep breaths and passed the old men again as the train arrived at a painfully slow, lazy stop. There were no announcements. He stepped down onto the platform and got swallowed by the pale yellow fluorescence that shone on the strip of bare concrete they considered a train station. AWOL — that was the reality of the situation. He didn’t even want to think about that shit.

8.

There wasn’t a marine or even a cop in sight, just an old drunk sitting on a bench with his head hanging. When Brutus approached, the bum vomited a steamy shower of blood into his own cupped hands and onto the ground between his legs. He tried to say something to Brutus but retched repeatedly instead and choked on his own words. Bile ran in a thin stream to the edge of the sidewalk and down to the stones lining the track bed. Brutus hurried past, watching his step.

Welcome to Budapest.

An oppressive, all-encompassing frustration nearly disentangled Brutus’s thoughts from his anger. Every effort to distance himself, for the time being, from the hatred inside brought a sticky, nauseating substance boiling up from his gut. Brutus had never seriously contemplated taking another man’s life, but here, freezing his ass off in goddamn Budapest, and walking through some homeless motherfucker’s puke, he knew that given the first opportunity, he would set Sullivan on fire and shit on his ashes. In the meantime, though, he needed to get it together. Walking around all pissed off would only get himself got.

A flight of steps led down from the platform. Advertisement posters — Ivory Soap, Pick salami, Symphonia cigarettes, Unicum — covered the walls of the underground passageway, but they were awash in colorful graffiti and more than a few swastikas. While it was true that right-wing parties were getting reelected all over Eastern Europe, Brutus never dared to suspect that genuine fascism would rise again. Enough of that shit appeared unnoticed by the masses in the rhetoric of even the more moderate political parties at home and abroad.

He emerged in a cramped and ugly suburban neighborhood. No cars on the road yet. The train rattled away without him toward the city. He half hoped that Sullivan did have those marines waiting for him down the tracks at the next station. Suckers.