Your attention, gentlemen, Micka announced at one of our briefings. Diisseldorf, that means Bank of Japan, they got their hounds at the border right this second, waitin to see how the breakup goes. As long as we’re not swimmin in blood, the hounds’ll come runnin. An a little bird tells me Suzuki’s makin a deal with Volkswagen to buy Škoda, I.G. Farben, an bloody old Krupp! Cash on the barrel! They’ll have computer samurais here on every corner before we know it.
And David combined and Micka negotiated, and they plugged in the well-traveled Sharky, who we made our foreign minister … we’re still in years 1, 2, 3, etc. … and Micka pulled the levers calibrated for cross-border transfers … mainly at the ministry, but also in various companies and outfits, and David did his combining, and they sent me out to play my part … this time it was pretty enjoyable, since I was riding with Bohler’s Laotian lady, alias Madame Hoi-Tsu … the gadgets, complete with cheap spare parts from Thailand, compliments of Golden Joe, were taking several of the slower countries by storm all at once, and the Laosters peeled us off a percentage, and every so often we would quietly and without needless ado unload a few less important buildings on the outskirts of town … that actually didn’t exist … since the treacherous MP we’d shot down was working for us now … we’d persuaded him of the benefits of some fast work in the silent company of a few certain land registers stored in a particular office … and the Miraculous Doctor Hradil’s Elixir was taking by storm one East European market after another, because the farther east it went, the more poor souls there were who either wasted away into lifeless vagabonds or adjusted into entirely healthy individuals … here and there we also received reports that in certain mutated regions the Elixir worked as an aphrodisiac … out toward the Urals, Doctor Hradil’s Miracle Elixir was winning more and more enthusiastic devotees every day … both right and wrong patients, in exact accordance with Darwin’s theory … and with the good old Russian roulette principle … and the label designed by our art director, picturing the deviously smiling M.D. Hradil with a rented white lab coat and a borrowed stethoscope, fending off the Grim Reaper, was the hit of the new, post-bolshevik world, and the days when Vasil sat in the cellar licking labels and pasting them on were long gone … now the Elixir was produced out of a few old factories in the new Bohemia’s capital … and we were still the Mongolian Indian fabric magnates, and the construction of the government palace on our government plot of land was going at such a snailish pace that it actually didn’t exist, which meant it didn’t block our view … and another scheme or scam … would pop up every now and then … and there was no shortage of them … because this was and still is the Klondike … of the Wild East.
And we went like whipped dogs hitched to a sled that we just had to get there, because the second you stop, your time is gone and you end up freezing to death in hostile territory.
We cracked the whip on each other just as hard as we did on ourselves, that’s the way it is in the human byznys tribe. And whenever we felt our bodies pining, like an unexpectedly cold morning breeze, the M.D. would find us a remedy … his sons were wholly absorbed in the search for their sisters, and no one understood that better than me … but time was flying like a demon from its lair … out of that crack in the concrete … as if time were hungry, as if time were feeding on the flesh of the people who lived in it … its enemies, it struck me … I told Doctor Hradil about it one day, but he said: only paranoids have enemies … and the metal flowed … and Prague was changing … and the ones that couldn’t find their way had to crawl … slower and slower, till they perished in time … and the ones that had harnessed time broke the others’ backs, shot them down, as long as there was something in it for them, but if it didn’t seem worth their trouble they knocked around the cheap eateries in the town below the Castle, keeping to themselves, till they perished too … and that’s the way it’s been from the very beginning … there’s something baroque about it … and the way the people who live in the Castle perish isn’t a whole lot more elegant … and the M.D. just cracked a little smile over his autopsy table and, eyes glittering, plunged into his research … the avid anthropologist … and then one of his sons got killed for carelessly erasing an evil swastika down in that accursed subway … the hitlers were starting to swarm.
At first our little group wasn’t too concerned, just the wrong rumble in the wrong place at the wrong time, but soon we were to hear more about them.
The Laotians, who’d taken a liking to the Doctor’s pack, even teaching the littlest ones some of their words, gathered under the lab windows the night of the young boy’s final journey. It may’ve seemed a little strange to them to see the deceased rolling off the old conveyor belt onto the bier in sacks. The M.D. had dissected him in order to be certain … of the strength of the blows … the direction of the wrath … so he’d be better able to protect his other children.
The Laotians also got their butts kicked every now and then, and every now and then they kicked ass right back, but until they saw those sacks filled with the little white boy who’d spoken their language, it didn’t really hit them … they’d stared down death’s bony sneer for a pretty long time in that cutthroat land of theirs.
But now, for the very first time, they got a nice sharp look at their new free land, and except for the ones Bohler had persuaded to be baptized and rewarded with rosaries they all began to howl … and the ones that had been baptized knelt down with clasped hands and began twisting their necks and tossing their heads … damn, what’s with them? I hissed to Bohler … well, he said tentatively, I donno for sure, but if y’ask me I’d say they’re turnin the other cheek, guess I went overboard, they musta misconstrued it.
Just then Bohler’s Laotian lady came up to us with a terrified look on her face: Horry, horry! What’s up? I inquired. Lao’ians ou’ to ki’. So what do you want me to do? I said. Call the cops? No, no, she said, they ki’ cop too! Bohler and I traded looks, then took in the scene with panicked eyes. The Laotian pack was calmly howling away below the lab windows, but the ones who’d been baptized started popping up out of the crowd here and there … samurai swords glittering in their hands, boofalo spears hoisted high … one guy right in front of us, the one that used to hunt sharks, tore off his clothes, snatched a boofalo spear away from one of his softly howling neighbors, and dumped his clothes on his head … uh-oh, said Bohler, I was tellin em just today, “If you have two coats, trade one for a blade an go fight, if your strength tells you to,” I mighta been a little off on that one … another Laotian, armed with a sword, dragged an old woman out of the howling, wailing crowd, slammed her into the wall, then slapped an elderly man in the face … the rest of the armed anabaptists clustered around the shark hunter … what else did you say in your sermon today? I asked the blanching Bohler, maliciously, I admit. “Cast off your father an mother an rid yourself of your family when you take to the warpath against obvious iniquity,” shit, they didn’t get that those’re just quick metaphors, Bohler added. But then we heard the wail of sirens and Micka’s raspy voice. A dark line was forming in the street, again I saw the plexiglas. The shark hunter let out a savage roar, quickly joined by his blood relatives. Luckily Micka and David got in on the act, recognizing the footsoldiers’ leader. It was Micka’s pseudodroog from the Sewer days, owed the Organization for all sorts of things, I’d performed the corruption on him myself. Arms raised to the heavens, Bohler reined in the Laosters with a frightening string of international swear words as David handed flowers to the cops in the first few rows and the Doctor shouted down at them from the window of his lab: He was my son, not yours, you sickening pigs! His teenage daughters draped themselves over the boofalo spears while the little ones ran back and forth translating. I noticed the Doctor’s sons had knocked out a few windows with their slingshots; that probably explained why the tenants had called the cops. The scene quickly settled down. Bohler led his Christians away. We held a procession for the son.