Then he began to pull away from us, sending out signals on his own and keeping in motion the octopus whose tentacles wound their way into government offices and out among byznysmen and goon squads, whom we also had need of now and then … he began to steer us, which suited us just fine … since all us savvy Praguers with the heroic past of the Sewer were actually a little squeamish of the warts on the tentacles … and then Sharky came in as foreign minister and we expanded.
I saw She-Dog again and David violated our little entente, tripped up on the water mill, lost all fear of anything, it all merged, and he lost his mind.
At the outset, though, good spirits prevailed. We were the Knights of the Secret and we were waiting. We and our assistants worked like robots. It even struck me once that if there was anything human about this transformation, it was something out of Frankenstein.
Sometime at the dawning, in freedom, we decided to make money, to engage somehow in the changed world around us. What I liked most were the coins, the eyes of a wide-ranging organism, their gaze as cool as the distant stars, the cold wind blows over them too … we soon realized money wasn’t the metal we used to buy our beer or red wine and the Northerners their rum, but that money was debts, stamped and unstamped papers, money grows from money, multiplying by division like cells … money is words, friendships, low blows, promises, money reacts magically when the right doorknobs are polished, stacking up with each smile in the right place at the right time … currency is attracted through courtesy to this bank and hostility to that one, and the one with the most money on his hump isn’t the mad dog, or the exotic tattooed dragon from the murderer’s dream, but the clever eel.
Micka wanted cash, I was killing off the rest of my power and feeling the motion and searching for my sister, and David was taking shape, starting to live, he’d been born into freedom. We were cranking up the machine, and though we suspected it might destroy us, death during those tense moments of conveying the treasure out of the cave was just another sparkling secret you could set your own rhythm to. In that single everlasting instant of frenzied time, death is there as your invisible girlfriend; and we also relied on instinct.
If the Monster, with all its tanks and troops and police, hadn’t cut us down back in prehistoric times, what did we have to fear now? Prison … if anything leaked out, if all those cleverly scattered connections were unable to cover it up … would be like a leper colony for kids, once you’d seen the spooks’ ugly mugs from below … prison now: yeah right. Either the laws didn’t exist, or they did but no one was paying enough attention to catch us in a loophole, those paragraphs didn’t apply … I’m still talking about years 1, 2, 3, etc. after the explosion of time … didn’t apply to us because we were fast.
So instead we concluded a little entente among ourselves, because we feared for our souls.
We said no, David told Bohler, no rackets, no Ukrainians, no Yugos, no Russians. Eyetals maybe, Greeks maybe, no Albanians, no Poles, nobody from Prague, no tough gangs, fuck em. You’re racists, Bohler mumbled upward, imploringly, in the direction of his Bog, he’s been bought off, I thought to myself. You’re racists, Bohler the helper pleaded one more time. No we aren’t, but you’re a moron, said David. From time to time Bohler tried to cut his shady business friends in on our ride, but David, now the boss, kept a firm grip on him. Whenever we began to give Bohler a hard time about his great compassion for dubious types, he countered by dropping a few words to the effect that our buildings, a dependable source of revenue, had in fact been obtained through his prayers. After some consideration, I had to admit there was something to this.
The member of parliament who along with his little clique forced through the legislative exemption on the termination of leases owned five buildings himself. Never even got a chance to throw the poor tenants out. His tough luck Micka used to work in a boiler room with his archenemy, now a police officer. And I knew the MP’s stepdaughter, she used to sleep with one of my droogs from the active era. That did the trick. We drank a toast the day she brought us the photocopies of the MP’s real estate contracts with the dates retouched, but we had no clue David would work so fast that three of the buildings fell right in our laps. I stood up for Bohler, so he got the rentals. I still felt like I owed him a lot. As helper, he could only dream of sharing. But he didn’t give a damn, he was interested in more important things.
It was also his idea to gobble up the space in front of the buildings. By now David knew how to stand politely if Mošna the civil servant glanced at his watch, but he didn’t. It didn’t even occur to him. He just looked at the piece of paper David held up to his face. It was a copy of a collective death sentence dated 1952, and the name of the judge was legible. For Mošna it served as sort of an orthographic mirror. The Devil knows whether those unavenged old convicts still dangled in his dreams … in his other hand David held another sheet of paper, and he could’ve said something like: Now sign this, cunt … but he was a polite boy and all he felt for cunts was a mix of grateful respect and tenderness … but I couldn’t think of any other word, he said. So he only said the first part. And Mošna the civil servant signed.
Ludvig the civil servant was sent down to us from heaven itself. Boys, you’ve got it made, you don’t know what it’s like passin the buck all day long, you boys’re livin! Got a little drum kit back home myself, haven’t picked up the sticks in years, though. In his mind we lived wild, exciting lives, for him the adolescent demi-vierges slouching around the basement clubs, the jaded huntresses lining the bars in the places we took him, were all bohemian sexpots. He was our man in the government. When Bohler handed him the aspirin that Micka passed off as LSD, I wanted to rub off the name at least, but David wouldn’t allow it. Sometimes I’d get furious about how easy it was, I’d go totally berserk, but I knew we were just trying to see how far we could push it, testing the spring, we wanted to fly.
Ludvig held the ceiling up with his eyes, panting loudly. Trying not to lose contact with real life. As the conversation rewound from art back to byznys, he miraculously revived. I’ll get you eighty of our best architects to build that palace, terrific boys, every one, Artists that aren’t in it just for the cash! Those architects of yours’ll rob you blind, man! Micka had him spellbound. But we were all “terrific boys.” He never actually did take home any of our female friends, so maybe he was gay. Either it was enough for us to see how desirable he was, groping one of them off in the corner, or he genuinely wasn’t interested.
Pisses me off, said Micka, I’d like to hear what kina setup he’s got at home. Maybe he’s scared to go to a hotel an at home he’s got a wife, I said. More likely he can’t get it up, the theologian said. Micka gave the nod and another terrific boy joined us at our table. Give this architect a break, Ludvig, or I’ll rip your ass to shreds faster than you can say Frank Gehry! Micka yammered. Ludvig pulled out a break and tossed it across the table, for once in his life he had plenty of them for everyone, and amid the general drunkenness it even seemed normal for the artist to be dragging around his diploma, it had gold lettering, we all saw it. Micka was getting better every day, and our man in the government melted, the contract was in the bag, all that was left was to seal it shut.