“No. Only these. Maybe the other guy took Ivanov’s gun.”
“What is in the end part?” Marlon asked, eyeing a separate compartment on the end of the bag, big enough to hold a couple of paperback books. Something was definitely making it bulge. Csongor unzipped it, reached in, and, to his own shock, pulled out a pistol. This one was smaller than the one Ivanov had been carrying, with woodgrained grips. He recognized it: this was the basic sidearm that Soviet and Russian military had always carried. He simply could not believe that one of them was in his hand.
“OMG,” Marlon said.
In Hungary, Csongor had had very little access to guns. But on a trip to a hacker conference in Vegas two years ago, he had spent a couple of evenings at firing ranges that catered to foreign visitors, and he had learned a few basics. He figured out how to eject the clip from this weapon, then maneuvered it into a shaft of sun coming in through the crack in the roof and pulled back the slide just enough to verify that no rounds were in the chamber. Then he found the safety and flicked it back and forth a couple of times just to get a feel for when it was on and when it was off. When he was certain that the weapon contained no cartridges and that it was inert, he set it on the van’s seat next to him, then reached back into the bag pocket to see what other treasures might be contained in there. He came up with a spare clip for the pistol, fully stuffed with cartridges. Then he pulled out a pair of heavy black cylinders with steel rings affixed to their tops.
He looked up and locked eyes with Marlon. Neither of them had ever seen anything like this before, outside of a video game, but Csongor was pretty certain, and Marlon’s expression confirmed, that these were grenades.
“Make some noise if you are alive,” said Yuxia. Traffic had become complex, and she was doing a lot of lane changing.
“Now we have a pistol and a couple of hand grenades,” Csongor announced.
Marlon had taken one of the grenades and was examining it. The sides of the canister were perforated with large holes, revealing some internal structure. “These are not real grenades,” he announced. “Look. No shrapnel. Holes instead.”
“Stun grenades?” Csongor guessed.
“Or smoke or tear gas.” Marlon and Csongor could communicate very clearly as long as they hewed to vocabulary from video games.
Yuxia intervened. “Csongor’s supposed to be telling us who he is,” she reminded Marlon. “Grenade can be explained later.”
“I’ll tell you who I am,” Csongor promised. “But first please tell me what just happened. What do you know about that tall black guy?”
Marlon was glaring at him. Csongor realized that he had insulted Marlon, or more likely just spooked him, by implying that he, Marlon, might know something about who the guy was. He looked into Marlon’s eyes. “It might be important,” Csongor pleaded.
“He lived upstairs with dudes from the far west,” Marlon said. “We only saw him a couple of times.”
“Did you know that these dudes from the far west had AK-47s?”
“What do you take me for, man?”
“Okay, sorry.”
Csongor leaned back in his seat, hoping that this would ease the throbbing in his head. There was a significant silence: their way of reminding him that he had yet to explain himself. “Okay,” he said. “Do you guys know anything about Hungary?”
Neither of them did. But neither would come out and admit it, perhaps worried about being impolite. Marlon, somewhat surprisingly, made a reference to the 1956 Olympic water polo team. But that was where his knowledge of Hungary began and ended.
Whenever Csongor found himself in an airport, he would go to the newsstand and browse the endless racks of glossy English-and German-language magazines, bemused by the phenomenon of cultures that were large enough to support monthly publications in which people would dither in print over the minutest details of makeup, high-performance motorcycles, and model railways. Hungarians learned those languages so that they could feign membership in that world when it suited them. But their isolation and tininess were nothing compared to what it would have been if Hungary had been part of China. Here, if Hungarians survived at all, they would be trotted out once a year to perform folk dances, simply to prove to the rest of the world that they hadn’t yet been exterminated. Csongor had never heard of Yuxia’s ethnic minority, the Hakka, and yet he didn’t have to look them up on Wikipedia to guess that there were probably ten times as many of them as there were Hungarians.
So where to begin?
“It is a long story. I could start with the Battle of Stalingrad,” he said, “and go on from there. But.” He stopped, sighed, and considered it.
“First, I am an asshole who made a lot of wrong decisions.”
Hungary was an embedded system. It was idle to dream of what it would be like, and of all the brave and noble decisions Hungarians would have made, had it been a thousand times larger and surrounded by a saltwater moat. He paused to rest.
Yuxia checked him in the rearview.
Marlon fixed him with a somewhat incredulous look as if to say,
Csongor couldn’t help chuckling at this. Somewhat to his astonishment, Marlon’s face cracked open with a smile. Cool, tough, world-wise, but unquestionably a smile. He turned back toward the window to hide it.
“And because of certain fucked-up remnants of the past, which we are now getting rid of,” Csongor continued, “things were actually simple and easy for me as long as I kept making the wrong decisions. However”— he checked his watch, and found that its crystal was shattered and its hands had stopped—“something like half an hour ago, I made the correct decision and did the right thing. Look where I am now.”
Another nervous mirror-glance from Yuxia. Csongor realized he’d better explain that remark. “In a car with nice people,” he said.
That was better, but he was still planting his big feet in the wrong places. To Csongor, Marlon would always be the guy who risked his life to enter a collapsing building and lead a stranger to safety. But Marlon, he sensed, didn’t want to be thought of that way. He had the cool insouciance of the skate rats performing their death-defying leaps in the Erszebet Ter, the hackers showing off their latest exploits at DefCon in Vegas.
“Or at least one nice person,” Csongor corrected himself.
Marlon turned around and gave him that smile again, then reached back with his right hand. Some kind of complex basketball-player handshake ensued. Csongor was pretty sure he muffed his end of it; Central European hockey players didn’t go in for such things. But he no longer had that awful feeling that he used to get when he was trying to skate backward, and so he let it rest there.
MR. JONES SAID nothing further in English until an hour into the journey, when he looked at Zula and said, “I give up.”
By that time they had completed a couple of circuits of the ring road that lined the island’s shore. Contrary to the first instruction given, they had not gone to the airport. Zula had been confused by this until she had understood that her companion—if that was the right word—didn’t speak a word of Chinese, and that he assumed (correctly as it turned out) that the taxi driver spoke no English; so he had just shouted the one English word that every taxi driver in the world had to know. This had been just to get him moving. Once that driver had nudged and honked his way clear of the chaos surrounding the exploded building, Mr. Jones had produced a phone, dialed a number, and spoken in Arabic. Zula had known that it was Arabic because she had heard a fair bit of that language while living in a refugee camp in the Sudan. After a brief exchange of news, which Zula could tell had been extremely surprising to the person on the other end of the line—for Mr. Jones had soon grown weary of insisting that every word was true —he had handed the phone up to the taxi driver, who had listened to some instructions, nodded vigorously, and said something that must have meant “yes” or “I will do it.”
Mr. Jones had then exchanged a few more terse Arabic sentences with his interlocutor and hung up. And the taxi driver had begun to drive laps around the ring road.
Zula had been resting her free elbow on the frame of the taxi’s window, turning her hand out, from time to time, to press her fingertips against the tinted glass. There was something about the manufactured environment of
