Authors: Kevin Egan
“How much is Pinter paying you?” he said.
“Enough to come here and not go back,” said Grotzky.
“A fair trade for your lies.”
“I turned over what I found.”
“You held on to what you stole.”
They reached the sixteenth floor. The corridor was clean, bright, and quiet, completely devoid of any discernible smell. The apartment itself was as sleek and as well-appointed as the lobby and the corridor.
“Here,” said Grotzky, “look.”
The windows of the living room faced the river. The sky had turned a darker gray since they'd left the promenade, the sun had flattened as it touched the horizon. Andreas took in the view, the flat-screen television hanging on the wall, the granite coffee table, the plush, chocolate brown upholstery of the sofa and chairs, the wine goblets sparkling in a glass cabinet. He thought of Matyas in their own apartment, slouched in a chair propped up by a brick, slugging tap water from a plastic bottle.
Grotzky sat on the couch and opened a briefcase on the coffee table. Inside were many papersâenvelopes with Hungarian stamps, yellow sheets with blue writing, snippets of news articles. From this, Grotzky removed a photocopy of a four-page letter.
“I found it in my car. You remember, my old Yugo.”
Andreas remembered the backseat with its scraps of aluminum foil and dried chicken bones. He held the letter in his hands. His mother's handwriting, beautiful and evocative.
“You were already gone,” said Grotzky.
“She could have mailed it to me.”
“It was already too late.”
We know that now, thought Andreas, don't we.
“What did they pay you, those soldiers?” he said.
“It's not what they paid. It's what they promised.” Grotzky lifted a hand to his neck and squeezed. “You were too young. You don't remember. But in those days, Luca spent every night in the tavern near the forest. He was frustrated to be sitting on a fortune but unable to sell it because he trusted no one. I told him to turn it over to the government. They would reward him, I said, for this contribution to the rich history of our people. But he didn't trust the government, either. And so he drank every night, and when he drank he talked. They would have found him anyway.”
“He would not have gone with them,” said Andreas. “He was too smart.”
“Too smart, but also too dumb,” said Grotzky. “When he was a boy, sitting in the flea market in Budapest, he would watch the soldiers pass the tables. They called him Roman Boy and made fun of the coins and chariot nails he tried to sell. He wanted them to see what the Roman Boy found, and he paid for it.”
Grotzky excused himself and disappeared down the hallway. A few moments later, Andreas could hear the halting stream of an old man peeing. He went into the kitchen and slid open the drawers until he found the neatly folded dish towels. He held one beneath the faucet, carefully letting it soak up every molecule of water it could hold.
Later, before leaving the apartment, he inverted his reversible jacket, changing it from blue to red. He unfolded the ballcap from his pocket and pulled the brim low on his face.
In the lobby, the concierge still shouted into the phone. On the sidewalk, the doorman twisted a red balloon into the shape of a monkey while the toddler slept in the stroller. The sky was dark now, and on the subway ride back to Queens and the apartment he shared with his brother, he read the letter more than twenty years too late.
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Ursula's plans had changed, so instead of being alone in his apartment Gary had a living room full of nurses. They were easy on the eyes, but right now Gary didn't want easy. He wanted to hear that McQueen found the missing piece. But McQueen hadn't called, and so Gary sat in the living room and tried to smile as the nurses laughed and talked over each other and told stories about people he didn't know.
He wasn't in a good mood and hadn't been all day. Even before the bullet clipped his spine, he'd been prone to the occasional darkness. It afflicted him without warning, the way other people suffered from migraine headaches or asthma attacks. He would wake up and his lifeâthe same life that satisfied him the night beforeâwas somehow wrong. He'd feel generally irritated, as though the least little thing could set him off emotionally. Low-energy days, he called them, and he would consciously try to avoid the people he cared about because he needed to preserve his reputation as the sunny Gary Martin, everyone's friend, everyone's Teddy bear.
The phone in his pocket buzzed. McQueen, he saw when he scooped it out. Finally. He weaved the battle chair through the crowded living room, waving the phone at Ursula to signal he had a call rather than a surge of antisociability. In the bedroom, he spun a quick one-eighty so that he faced the door in case anyone followed him in.
“Yeah, Mike,” he said. He hated answering the phone in a hopeful or desperate way, though on a low-energy day he couldn't summon much beyond deadpan.
“Where the hell are you?” said McQueen. “A goddam chicken coop?”
The noise from the living room seemed even louder in the bedroom. Gary closed the door.
“Ursula has some friends over. Better?”
“Yeah,” said McQueen. “That subbasement is big as the goddam Roman catacombs. Lots of the rooms are empty, but there's still a shitload of places to look. I started with a room full of steno notes.”
“And?”
“Nothing there, Gary.”
“Okay,” said Gary. He forced himself to cough because he suddenly felt he might cry, as he did on other low-energy days.
“You all right, Gary?”
“Fine,” he said, coughing again.
“Getting a cold?”
“Nah. Seltzer. Went down wrong. Tickling my throat.”
“I'm going to keep looking,” said McQueen. “The subbasement will take me a while, but you let me know if you have any other ideas.”
He senses something, thought Gary.
“I will when I get a chance,” he said. “You know when these nurses get together.”
“You're a better man than I am,” said McQueen.
“Maybe,” said Gary. He ended the call and bent his neck back hard against the headrest. Those fake coughs hadn't fooled McQueen. He knew he was talking to someone on the verge of tears, and the amazing thing was that Mike didn't toss one of his stupid-ass wisecracks. He may not earn the Nobel Prize for compassion, but he still sounded like he cared. He sounded like a friend.
And so a sob now ripped itself free in Gary's gut like a bubble of air belched from the muck at the bottom of a pond. Gary let it come. He felt he could sit here all night and blubber like a teenage girl, but there was just that single sob and it was over. He pulled his heavy head forward and wiped a tear from beneath his eye. He blinked, looked around the bedroom. Outside, the nurses howled over a story about an ER doctor. Gary wished he could pull himself onto the bed and let himself drift in and out of sleep till the morning. But the bed was covered with jackets and shoulder bags, so he rolled to the dresser and opened the bottom drawer.
He never unlocked the chest with Ursula in the apartment, but if he couldn't drift himself out of his low-energy state he needed something. He pulled out the book, locked the chest, closed the drawer, and then spun the chair so that his back faced the door. This is good, he thought. He would read the book from cover to cover, then go back into the living room and endure the rest of Ursula's party.
“Hi.”
One of the nurses stood on the other side of the bed and pawed through the jackets. Gary closed the book over his thumb.
“Hi.” He needed a moment to remember her name. “Jen.”
“Just looking for something. Sorry. What are you reading?”
Gary lifted the book to show the cover.
“Great book,” said Jen. “I read it to my kids practically every night. They didn't get the half of it, but they liked it.”
“Same here. I used to read it to my niece and nephew. I still do, when I see them. But it's not like it was before. They always sat on my lap.”
“I'm sorry,” said Jen.
“Yeah, well, it's not all that. They're three years bigger, too.”
“Time does march on,” said Jen. “You know, the amazing thing about that book, about all his books, is how deep he gets with just a few words and simple sketches. He's so philosophical.”
“I know,” said Gary.
“And, like, I never read it the same way twice. Sometimes, it's just a stupid cheese wheel looking for the hunk that was cut out of it. And sometimes, it's a real person with real dreams and desires.”
“I hear you,” said Gary. “Sometimes I watch
Casablanca
and I believe Ilsa truly loves Rick. Other times, I think she's lying her face off just to use him.”
“Well, I don't know about
Casablanca
, but I know this book. And if you ask me, it's all about you and Urse.”
“Yeah,” Gary riffled the pages front to back. “I think so, too.”
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
At first Andreas thought Matyas was dead. His brother was crumpled in his chair, his head pressed on the armrest, an arm dangling to the floor. His foot had kicked the water bottle, which lay on its side with its contents now a dark circle in the brown carpet. For a moment, Andreas felt a sense of relief, then pity at the sight of his brother's composed features resembling the face he'd had as a boy, then sorrow at the realization that the boy was gone forever.
But then Matyas twitched, and Andreas saw he wasn't dead but sleeping painfully, his body curved around the exact spot where the first tumor grew inside him. There were many tumors now, not just the primary as the doctor explained. It was like a jailbreak.
Andreas lifted the bottle off the floor and placed it on the table beside the chair. He cared nothing about the carpet, nothing about the landlord or the security deposit. Soon enough, none of those trifles would matter.
He gently patted his brother's cheek.
“Matyas,” he said. “Matyas, I'm back.”
Matyas opened his eyes, which darted around as if taking stock of his awkward position. Then he pushed himself up and blinked. The lamplight in the room was bright, the window dark.
“Andreas,” he rasped.
“Yes.”
“What time is it?”
“Late,” said Andreas. “Are you thirsty?”
Matyas nodded, and Andreas took the bottle into the kitchen to refill it from the faucet. When he returned, Matyas was sitting fully upright, feet on the floor, face no longer boyish.
“Did you talk to Pinter?” he said. He accepted the bottle and took a slug.
“I went to his office, but could not see him,” said Andreas.
“Luis?”
“I will call him later,” said Andreas. “Are you hungry?”
“Very.”
Andreas went into the small, cluttered kitchen. He set oil to heat in a frying pan, sliced three potatoes, then dropped the slices into the sizzling oil. He beat four eggs, then poured them in. Fifteen minutes later, he set up a snack table in front of Matyas and served him a wedge of potato and egg. Matyas ate silently, and Andreas remembered how much they had talked together as boys and how unfortunate it was that they spoke so little to each other now. In normal circumstances, Andreas expected he would regret these silences. But these were not normal circumstances.
Matyas finished eating, and Andreas cleared away the plate and the snack table. When he returned, Matyas's head already had lolled sideways, his body already beginning to twist around the spot in his side.
“Come,” he said, lifting Matyas under his arms. “Up with you.”
He walked Matyas into the bedroom, tucked him into bed, and turned off the light. He was washing the frying pan when his cell phone rang. Though it no longer mattered, he took the call out into the hallway.
“That Croatian witness,” said Luis. “I have his name.”
After the call ended, Andreas went back into the apartment. He stood in the hallway outside the bedroom door and read the letter again as he watched his brother sleep.
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Ivan remembered being on butt duty the morning Luis tapped him on the shoulder. Luis, a paralegal for attorney Robert Pinter, had walked him through the tedious process of filing his immigration papers, had phoned when his permanent residence status had been approved, and had delivered the letter of recommendation from Pinter that got him his job in the courthouse. Ivan often saw Luis filing papers in the county clerk's office or answering calendar calls in the motion courtroom. They might nod, exchange banal pleasantries, or, as they had on one occasion, chat over coffee in the lobby. A tap on the shoulder was something different.
There were a couple of guys in the park, Luis explained. They needed to talk to him about something important. He called them
paisanos
, which Ivan understood to mean anything from relatives to neighbors to countrymen.
Ivan wanted to finish butt duty, but Luis said the
paisanos
would not wait and led Ivan across Centre Street. The sky was bright, the air crisp, and the shadows sharp. The two men looked like brothers, one slight and the other brawny. Luis performed the introductions, added that they all three hailed from Polgardi, then lifted his hands as if to say
I'm done
.
The talk was small at first. This person, that shop, the quarry that dominated the town. Ivan ran their names through his head. Matyas and Andreas. Surname Szabo, which was common enough in Hungary. Their faces slowly began to look familiar, but he couldn't have known them. They were so much older, and he had been gone from Polgardi for so many years. What would they have cared about a young boy like him? And then he remembered.
“Was Karolina Szabo your mother?” he said.
The younger brother, Andreas, began to speak, but Matyas punched him in the arm.