Nine (10 page)

Afterward, in his dreams, he often killed the man and fucked the woman. While he was awake too, and taking his sweet time, and always in the room with the white pile carpet and the autumn park on the wall.

Jacek pulled up a chair opposite him, smiling.

“How did you know where I'd be?”

“Where else could you have been?”

“Before three I have to make a call.”

“There's a post office on the other side of the square.”

“The same one?”

“I guess.”

“I haven't been here in a while.”

 

It wasn't one yet. Empty trams moving along Stalingradzka. Between the bare bushes you could see the pony enclosure. They stood there, dark brown, almost black, heads lowered, sideways to the sun; their long manes reached to the ground. There was no one at the zoo except a few kids playing hookey. Looking for the elephants, because elephants are easiest to find. But the elephants were inside.

So for a second Bolek watched the ponies: two sun-soaked patches. A white Passat tried to pass on the right, so he stepped on the gas and cut the guy off. Then lost interest in him. Went back to thinking about how it would be good to have a son one day and take him to the zoo, sit him on a pony, take his picture. Bolek had lots of photographs in his album, but they were mostly of adults, all buddies and people he knew aside from the pictures of himself from thirty years ago in a ridiculous plywood baby carriage reminiscent of a Citroën 2CV. Or naked on a blanket in a tiny white hat with a turned-up brim.

A 176 bus came out of Leńskiego while he still had a green light. He honked, stepped on the gas, slipped in front of it, on the count of sixteen entered the traffic circle with a squeal of tires, then into the continuation of Stalingradzka, leaving behind him the dismal police barracks at Golędzinow and that last solitary red-brick building where people kept stubbornly living.
For the next five kilometers nothing, depots, hangars, the vastnesses of the FSO auto plant locked in high steel, factory scape to the horizon, with overhead cables and the straight vein of tram tracks along which chassis are brought three times a day and three times taken away.

Now he was doing a hundred in the left lane, gazing at all he had managed to avoid. The lot next to the test track glittered with a thousand colored roofs in the sun like a Pop Art version of ocean waves. He sneered at an Opel he passed; he was doing a hundred and twenty now, and his Beamer was barely purring. He sneered at all the people—at the moment only a few here and there—waiting for him to go by so they could cross the road and, raising their pass, enter the main gate, or the one by the body shops.

Kids kicking a soccer ball around on a cold court, their bodies helplessly white against the asphalt. In a few minutes they'd get dressed and go to their next lesson in the trade, because their fathers were getting older and more tired.

He passed the school building. In the distance, the Torurńka overpass. A few seconds, and he was in the cement shade, parking outside the iron gate of a church. He locked the car, straightened his belt over his gut, and ran across the divided highway.

Three Ikarus buses at the terminus, their drivers waiting for replacements. Bolek went into a brown shack where a few men stood with Królewskie beers thinking about a cigarette, because inside it was no smoking and outside it was cold. A small-boned guy drinking wore black gloves with ripped seams and a red Windbreaker with a Porsche logo. His two-day stubble stopped just below his eyes.

“What's the matter, Iron Man—cold?” asked Bolek.

“No, it's just that the water was off this morning and I didn't wash.”

“Couldn't you have done it somewhere on the way?”

“In the bus?”

“Fair enough,” said Bolek, and waited for the man to finish his drink. This the man did quickly, then nodded toward the bar.

“Stand me one, Boluś?”

“Later, Iron Man, I'll buy you as many as you like.”

“What's the job?”

“No job. I just want you to go with me to a place and be there.”

“What do I do there?”

“Nothing. Keep your eyes open.”

“Oh,” said Iron Man. He looked left, right, said, “Let's go then.”

Bolek shook his head, tapped his Rolex. “In a minute. I don't want to wait there.”

Iron Man took hold of Bolek's wrist.

“Nice. Gold. Does it keep good time?”

“You're still in the business?”

“You have to do something. But it gets worse and worse. Pieces of crap at two hundred a pop. And anyone who wears anything better doesn't ride the bus.”

“Do you ever think about giving it up?”

“Then what? Go work at the plant? I'd come back from the late shift, fall asleep, and they'd steal my watch . . . That's not for me.”

“There are options.”

“I got set in my ways. Maybe things will change. People can't go on being so poor.”

“Would you like to be rich?”

Iron Man spread his elbows on the counter and looked up at Bolek. “No, Boluś. That's not for me. I'm too delicate.”

“You never did like fighting. I had to watch out for you. Remember?”

“On the other hand I was fast. You had to fight because they always caught you.”

“One or the other, Iron Man. Those were the days, eh?”

In the end Bolek stood Iron Man that second one. He gave him a five and didn't blink when Iron Man brought back a mulled beer but no change. They stood and reminisced about the terminus buses and trams hidden behind lilac bushes, in green evenings, about the yellow streetlamps so low you could break them without effort.

“And that beer shack,” Iron Man went on. “On pay day they'd just lie there like in some war film, but I was too young then.”

“Right,” Bolek said, glancing at his watch so he wouldn't get sentimental.

 

Meanwhile, across the highway a priest was standing at the side door of a church, looking at the black Beamer, surprised that someone had parked right outside the place of worship. People only drove by. The big rigs from Russia going to Gdańsk went past ten steps from the entrance. Overhead, at the height of the cement cross, wound the ribbon of the overpass, from which cars trickled from the other side of the river, from Żoliborz, or sped straight on toward Bródno, leaving in the air a hanging carpet of exhaust and a constant vibration that forever blocked the church from the sky like a quivering sheet of metal. The rumble
eased a little only at night, but the walls could never entirely shake off the tremors of the day, because before dawn new vehicles came around the looping ramps, calling like tugboats in the fog. More, the brick mass of the power station would sometimes blow steam, and then the air would fill with a cracking roar as from a time before there were people or any creature that had the power of hearing. Not a living soul in the neighborhood. Nothing but work, haste, coal, the bells of trams, and the endless procession of shifts, and at night red rosettes on the soaring chimneys—to warn the planes, but they looked like electric crowns of thorns.

So the priest stood and considered the Beamer, which was almost touching the gate with its hood. The two men were now picking their way across. Bolek beeped with his remote, and Iron Man slowed to take a look at the majestic rear of the black machine.

“Are you here to see me, gentlemen?” called the priest, but his voice was swallowed up in the growl of diesel engines starting at the light. He tried to speak louder but then saw their faces, so he came down the steps to say something else, but Iron Man bared his teeth in a smile:

“There's still time, father.”

“Please don't block the gate. There's no parking here.”

Bolek, the door half open, looked at the priest as if seeing him only now, and shouted:

“Hey, Iron Man, see the attendant.” Then to the man in the cassock: “So how's business?”

The priest opened his mouth. Two trailer trucks thundered across the overpass. The two men got in the car and merged with the traffic. Slipping into the left-hand lane, they
disappeared behind the curtain of red that stopped the cavalcade behind them.

 

Three minutes later they left the car between two Ukrainian buses and walked slowly across the square. An attendant stood in their way and said it would be two zlotys. Bolek nodded to Iron Man, and Iron Man took the change from his pocket. They stopped at terrazzo stairs between plastic pillars.

“We go up,” said Bolek. “You stay in the hallway and make sure no one's coming.”

“Who might come?”

“If they show, you'll know. But they're not supposed to.”

“What if they do?”

“Knock and come in, or give me a shout, I don't know. To buy me time.”

“And then?”

“Then beat it.”

“OK,” said Iron Man, and drew on an unlit cigarette.

Inside, the smell of stale smoke, dust, toilets. A large, dark room with pictures of Switzerland on the walls, fake palm trees, red tablecloths. No windows, three chandeliers with weak bulbs, and a fan. At the far end, beneath the Matterhorn, a few people sat and ate. No one looked up, so Iron Man stuck his hands into his pockets and said, “Nice place.” Bolek went to the bar and spoke with a platinum blonde who sometimes nodded, sometimes shook her head. When Bolek left her, she turned up the radio: the Fireflies. She half-closed her eyes.

They went upstairs. The hallway was long, doors on either side. At the end Bolek gestured with a finger. Iron Man leaned against the wall and finally lit his cigarette. Bolek knocked on a brown door with a painted 15.

 

The woman stood at the window. She was big. He closed the door behind him and slid the bolt shut. She was eating from a small Styrofoam tray.

“What's the smell?” asked Bolek.

“Fish and chips,” she answered.

“You're eating fish?”

“I'm Catholic.”

He came closer and looked at the tray: only bones and the last French fry on a plastic fork. She stuck it under his nose. He opened his mouth and took it.

“I'd never have thought.”

“That I'm a Catholic?”

“No, I mean in general, where you're from . . .”

“Where I'm from, a lot has changed.”

“I know, but.”

“You're a fool, and all you think about is food.”

“Irina . . .”

She wore a dark dress with silver thread, and her perfume was even darker, coming from her cleavage, into which a gold chain fell. Her high heels made little holes in the carpet. Bolek looked at the holes and thought about her heavy flesh. She took a hand mirror from the bedside table, a crimson lipstick, and touched up her lips.

“You have it?” he asked.

She turned her back to him, spread her legs, reached under her dress, and handed him a packet wrapped in plastic. It was warm. He placed it against his cheek, took a deep breath, chuckled.

“You wear perfume there too.”

“Poles are perverts.”

He put the parcel in his pocket. “I'm not checking it. If it's not right, I'll be back.”

“You'll be back anyway,” she said.

He went up to her and put his hands on her breasts. She didn't move, just grew heavier. She slipped her thigh between his legs and pushed.

“You'd better go if you want to come here again.”

 

In the parking lot two men were standing next to the Beamer. One on one side, one on the other. Peering in. When they saw Bolek and Iron Man, they stepped back and watched them get in. The men wore blue-and-red tracksuits. When the black car left, they went up to a rusty Lada and started unloading checkered bags. They dragged them to the hotel.

On the short straight stretch, Bolek got up to eighty. At the intersection he braked, and Iron Man pitched forward.

“Put your seat belt on, asshole!” Bolek snapped. He glanced left at the unbroken line of cars and in the rearview mirror at the empty alleyway where dust was still rising into the air. His foot twitched on the gas pedal, and the tachometer needle jerked like the tail of a restless cat. When the traffic eased up, they moved—but straight ahead, onto the dull grass strip between the two sides of the highway. The Beamer bounced over the curb and came to a stop angled left, sniffing for a gap in the traffic, but it was half-past two now and the trucks kept coming like a moving wall of words: Sovtransavto, Kruger, Kleeber, Mariola Cat Eyes, Faith Hope Charity, Olech, Your Baltic Your Herring—the last empty, because they were returning north. Iron Man put his seat belt on and asked what they were doing.

“Look and see if they're coming.”

“They're coming and coming—there's no gap.”

“Not the cars, idiot, the guys! From outside the hotel.”

“I can't see; they're all blocking my view,” complained Iron Man.

The traffic thinned, Bolek let up on the clutch, the Beamer jerked forward, stopped, shook as if overcome by lust and needing to rub against something.

“Damn cop!” roared Bolek, and punched the steering wheel. Iron Man tried to slide down in his seat, but the belt held him in place and all he could do was nervously squint left and right. No blue cop car in sight.

“Damn cop,” repeated Bolek, a stream of yellow mud and last year's grass sprayed from under the Beamer's rear wheels, and a baby Fiat behind them turned on its wipers and smeared gray across its windshield. Bolek put the car in reverse, first, reverse, second. The Beamer inched forward as in a dream, and from the right Bolek could see a new wave of vehicles. Finally a bump over the curb, and they were off to the left, urged on by a bleating of horns.

Three kilometers later, by the cement works, Iron Man's neck grew stiff. He turned and asked:

“Where are we going, Bolek? We were supposed to go to the city.”

“Change of plans. We're visiting the old neighborhood.”

“Why the hell for, Boluś?”