“I’ve got the pictures, see?” he sneered. “What about that coffee, now? Eh?”
“What pictures?” she asked coldly, and he could tell she was suddenly concerned.
“From your youthful years, darling little Brigita! Sweet as candy . . . cutting quite the figure with that baseball bat . . . If only I’d known this earlier, I’d have been so much smarter. But who’d have guessed! And a teacher, no less!”
“What do you want?”
“All I’m asking is for us to get together for coffee, Brigita darling. It’s worth our while, for both of us. The damage may still be fixable. What do you say? Maybe you were just having a little fun? You do so love a laugh . . .”
“When?”
“Tomorrow night at ten, out by the hangar.”
“Fine,” she answered dryly and hung up.
She should never have picked up. He was probably bluffing. There couldn’t be any pictures; nobody knew anything about it. Except for the Boss, who was dead, and Schweppes, who’d taken the pictures, and her. It was only for a brief time. She hadn’t had the sleaze to see it through, though the offers poured in from everywhere. One drunken night at the casino, after her shift, the Boss sidled over to her table. His eyes swam with an oily gaze, and at his side swung the rounded end of his stained wooden bat. In his other hand he held a leather leash, leading a German shepherd with a muzzle over its shiny black snout. The dog watched her, its head cocked to the side. The boss stood in front of her and dropped a big roll of bills onto the green felt tabletop. She wasn’t sure what he had in mind. He came up to her and, with his clammy breath, said:
“To make an ad for the business.” Then he winked, took her under the arm, and led her down to the basement of the casino where the massage salon was.
A stage set had been arranged. A red cloth backdrop hung on a frame and stretched across the floor for six, seven feet. Two small reflectors had been set up on the sides. On a nearby table there were collar-shaped bracelets, a bow tie, a few items of black lingerie, and a silk blindfold. The Boss pointed the bat at the lingerie and said, tersely:
“Do it.”
Brigita went behind a partition and started unbuttoning her clothes, hands trembling. She made no attempt to object, though she was seething. She chose three items and put them on: the collar-shaped bracelets, the bow tie, and the black, see-through panties. She stepped out and almost blithely asked: “What now?” looking the Boss right in the eye. He swung the wooden bat and tossed it to Brigita. She caught it deftly.
“Now have fun,” he said, arching his eyebrows. Then he dropped into an armchair and let the German shepherd off the leash. Holding the greasy bat in her hands she felt strange, but not bad. She stood, covered in gooseflesh, in the middle of the cold room.
“Need inspiration?” This was the first and last time she snorted cocaine. She and Schweppes. Then he came up behind her and tied the blindfold over her eyes. She danced in the dark, sensing the pungent odor of animal fur, and he snapped the pictures. All three of them stayed in the basement room until the next afternoon. Only once did she ask Schweppes about the pictures—they were already together by then—and he swore he’d destroyed them, her face couldn’t be seen on a single one; he told the Boss they hadn’t turned out well. She no longer gave a thought to that night. Brigita was able to put things like this behind her. Never a thought, until today. She considered calling the party leader, then realized she couldn’t. Nobody else must be involved in this. She hadn’t heard in years from the only person she could have called.
ÄÄÄ
For nights now he hadn’t been sleeping. He went out and rambled around the city, eyes glued to the pavement, while all those near to him, and at the office, went on acting as if nothing had happened. Whenever he looked up and saw, in the distance, black hair done up in a ponytail, blood flushed his face; he gasped for breath and clenched his fists. At the camp they’d called him Red. When they interrogated him before beatings, a red flush spread across his face, and their blows pummeled the patches of red. After coming back from the camp, he spent the next few years at a hotel on the Adriatic Coast. In his early forties he was granted a disability pension and declared unfit to work. Once he stood so close to the edge of the Krk Bridge, while cars whizzed by, that he felt the ease of the space between the concrete and the sea. He found staying on the solid bridge unbearably difficult, and was never able to explain the moment, except as his discovery of God. The vast amount of irrational evil he’d witnessed in his life required at least an equal measure of irrational good for a person to find a sense of balance. When he succeeded in this, he pulled himself together and, after a few years, became again what he had been, neither evil or good, neither a believer or a non-believer, a small, pragmatic man who, the more he was given the more he needed. And so it was that he began to see himself as a local powermonger who wasn’t entirely bereft of ideals, but, on the way to the top, ideals regularly find their place in the theoretical realm. In practice, votes are bought, hiring is rigged, secret accounts are opened, the official’s public profile is tweaked, the government is cheated at every turn. The mayor stumbled when he placed too much trust in his own preeminence and importance, just as he had trusted—in that space on the bridge between the pavement and the sea—
