‘Chicken?’
‘Yeah.’ He is standing outside a fried chicken place. The street lights have just flickered on, greenish. There is a faint smell of putrefaction. ‘There’s this fried chicken place…’ he says.
‘Yeah, that’s fine,’ Gábor tells him. Then, ‘I mean — does it look okay?’
Balázs looks at the place. ‘Yeah, it looks okay.’
‘Yeah, fine,’ Gábor says. ‘And don’t be too long. We’ve got to leave at ten.’
Balázs slips his phone into the hip pocket of his jeans and steps into the pitiless light. There is a small queue. While he waits he studies the menu — some backlit plastic panels — and when it is his turn, orders without mishap. (His English is quite fluent; he learned it in Iraq — it was the only way they could communicate with the Polish soldiers they were stationed with, and of course with whatever Americans they happened to meet.) He has trouble, though, finding his way back to the flat and has to phone Gábor again for help. Then they sit in the living room, he and Gábor, on the low sofa, eating with their hands from the flimsy grease-stained boxes. The overhead light is on in its torn paper shade and the stagnant air is full of loitering smoke and the smell of their meal, in the hurried eating of which Balázs is so involved that he does not notice Emma’s presence until Zoli speaks.
Then he lifts his head.
His mouth is full and his fingers are shiny with the grease of the chicken pieces. She is standing in the doorway.
‘Wow,’ Zoli had said.
And now, as if speaking Balázs’s thoughts, he says it again.
‘Wow.’
—
Later, sitting in the pearly Merc, he finds an after-image of how she had looked, standing in the doorway, still singed into his vision as he stares out of the window at other things. The London night is as glossy as the page of a magazine. Nobody speaks now as the smoothly moving Merc takes them into the heart of the city, where the money is.
2
It is awkward, especially that first night. In the driver’s seat, Gábor seems morose — he spends a lot of time with his head lolling on the leather headrest, staring out through the windscreen at the plutocratic side street in which they are parked, or studying the Tibetan inscription tattooed on the inside of his left forearm. Unusually for him, he hardly says a word for hours at a time. The hotel is a few minutes’ walk away, on the avenue known as Park Lane — after which Balázs’s inexpensive cigarettes, he has now learned, are named.
When they arrived, Zoli made a phone call. A few minutes later they were joined by a young woman, also Hungarian, who was introduced as Juli and who, it seemed, worked at the hotel. Then she, Zoli and Emma set off, and Gábor told Balázs that the two of them would be waiting there, in the parked Merc, until Emma returned.
It is a pretty miserable night they spend there, mostly in a silence exacerbated by the tepid stillness of the weather.
There are instances of listless conversation, such as when Gábor asks Balázs whether this is his first time in London. Balázs says it is, and Gábor suggests that he might like to do some sightseeing. When Balázs, showing polite interest, asks what he should see, Gábor seems at a loss for a few moments, then mentions Madame Tussauds. ‘They have waxworks of famous people,’ he says. ‘You know.’ He tries to think of one, a famous person. ‘Messi,’ he says finally. ‘Whatever. Emma wants to see it. Anyway, it’s something for you to do, if you want.’
‘Okay, yeah,’ Balázs says, nodding thoughtfully.
They then lapse into a long silence, except for Gábor’s index finger tapping the upholstered steering wheel, a sound like slow dripping, slowly filling a dark sink of preoccupation from which Balázs’s next question, asked some time later, seems mysteriously to flow.
He asks Gábor how he knows Zoli.
‘Zoli?’ Gábor seems surprised that it is something Balázs would have any interest in. ‘Uh,’ he says, as if he has actually forgotten. ‘Friend of a friend. You know.’ There is another longish pause and then, perhaps finding that it is something he wants to talk about after all, Gábor goes on. ‘I met him last time I was here, in London. He suggested we set something up.’
—
She taps on the misted window just after five in the morning. It is light and quite cold. Not much is said as Gábor, waking, unlocks the door and she gets in. Nor while he fiddles with the satnav. Then he switches on the engine, sets the de-mister noisily to work on the windows, and they pull out into the empty street.
She looks tired, more than anything, still in her skimpy dress and heels — though now she has shed the shoes and drawn her legs up under her on the seat. The two men managed a few hours’ sleep while they waited; it is hard to say whether she has. Her brown-ringed eyes suggest not. Her residual alertness seems chemically assisted.
‘Everything was okay?’ Gábor says eventually, while they wait at a traffic light.
‘M-hm.’
‘Are you hungry?’ is his next question, a minute or so later.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Maybe.’
‘You should eat something,’ he advises.
‘Okay.’
They stop at a McDonald’s and Balázs is sent in. He is aware, in her presence, of his own obvious stink — he has been wearing the same T-shirt for twenty-four hours. She wants a Big Mac and large fries, and a Diet Coke.
‘Thanks,’ she says, when he gets back to the car and, turning in the passenger seat, passes her the brown bag.
It is the first word she has ever spoken to him.
To her, he says, ‘No problem,’ though she might not have heard, as at that moment Gábor starts the engine.
She pushes the plastic straw into the cup’s lid and starts to drink.
—
Zoli shows up in the middle of the afternoon, while they are all still asleep.
Gábor emerges vague and tousled in a singlet and boxer shorts to hand over Zoli’s share of the money, which he does in the recessed corner of the living room that has been turned into a derisory pine kitchenette. Zoli then hands out strongly chilled lagers and, as they open them, asks after Emma. She has not been seen since the morning — not by Balázs anyway — when she disappeared into the bedroom as soon as they got back to the flat.
Gábor had joined her soon after, leaving Balázs to press his face into the odorous sofa as he tried to escape the light that flooded in through the windows and ignore the sounds from the street, intermittent but easily audible from the first floor, and fall asleep. At about ten o’clock, still unable to sleep, he had masturbated under a weak shower to a torrent of images of Emma in a vaguely delineated hotel room, images of the sort that had filled his head all night. A shocking quantity of seed turned down the plughole. Some time after that, with a T-shirt tied over his eyes, he did finally fall asleep.
‘So everything went okay?’ Zoli says, and swigs.
‘Yeah, I think so,’ Gábor says, with a sort of sleepy snuffle. They are standing at the pine breakfast bar.
‘I know him, that guy,’ Zoli says. ‘He’s okay. He’s a nice guy. I put him in first because I knew he wouldn’t cause any hassle.’
Gábor just nods.
‘Some of the others I don’t know,’ Zoli says. And then, ‘I’m not expecting any hassle, though.’
‘No,’ Gábor says.
‘These aren’t people who want to talk to the police, to journalists, you know what I mean. They’ve got too much to lose. Some of them are famous, I think.’
‘Yeah?’ Gábor says. He doesn’t seem interested.
‘I think so,’ Zoli says, with a nod and a swig. ‘She still asleep?’ he asks.