And next morning at our briefing we were back in our byznys suits. Riding the tentacles and cranking up the mill and whispering and roaring with laughter and phoning and faxing and shooting up and forging plots and raking it in and winning and losing. Drinking Firewater. Sleeping with pseudodrooginas. Chasing cars. And paying off cops and gangsters, who every now and then we needed, and who we didn’t have anything to give but cash.
Sometimes it took a house, a hotel, a rubber stamp or two, a smile. One signature cost twenty, another the right sentence at the right time. Some places on the eternal wheel of the world there were death, solitude, and insanity together with love and compassion and the solidarity of the human tribe. Here it was dark and there it was light, and we lived mostly in between. I trained my eyes to see the dividing line. I stabbed myself in the heart and it healed itself up, ripped off my fingers and next morning they were back. Cut the nerve and they wiggled. Wanted to die, but just made money. And that night, as we sat under the light, laughing and stroking each other, death gave me a light prick of his sickle, grazing my eyelid with the tip, just a touch to say: Hey, you fuck, I know you’re out there. Sometimes it seemed like nothing really existed, other times it was full. I couldn’t get to sleep that night.
The Galactic Bar was for ungluing our heads, the Dóm for eroticism, and Černá’s for both and more. We dealt in trade. And we flew into fits and shook with spasms, because it was unbelievable what we could do. Then Sharky came up with towing BMWs, my job was to sell the things, and even when I had the addresses in my pocket and knew just how to get there, it took some wild dancing … joints cracking and heart charging up as I obtained information … dealing with guys who’d spent their whole lives polishing their one Oktavia or Zhigula, and who, via commercial enterprise or inheritance or magic or sleazy rackets or divine grace or murder in the Congo or hard honest family work or sheer chance, had struck it a little rich, what do I know about all the ways there were in the years when time broke into a run … and I listened to their astonished speech, old and new … interweaving … because, astonished at all the gold to be had in that suddenly sprinting time, these guys walked straight from their grubby factory workbenches and concrete engineer’s feed troughs into the newly reestablished millionaires’ clubs … instead of the old standby, soccer, now they broke up their lives with golf … took things at a slower pace … and adopted the new terminology of social mobility … instead of bats and biddies it was madam or mrs. or my dear lady … instead of hobbyhorses, maracas, fuck bunnies, wham-bam, or poontang they vied for cuties, cupcakes, receptionists, assistants, and secretaries … and their wives began to exercise a little here and there, because suddenly it occurred to them they actually had something to live for still … sunbathing in the Canaries, say … lovers, for instance … and as their husbands got rich, there was plastic surgery all over the place … and brand-new handsome vitamin people … and the men settled into their new old legally acquired smuggled BMWs, happy, as if suddenly … I’m afraid to write it … never blaspheme unnecessarily, Bohler had admonished us … they’d spotted their sister in the rearview mirror outlined in the flames from their eyes … they dressed in suits and hired photographers and cruised around in tax-free duty-free cars … and being used to their smelly old bolshevik jalopies, occasionally they’d lose control and knock off some old or young beggar’s head … because there’s always somebody standing in the rain by a milepost and somebody driving by … and it’s fairly rare to run into a saint who’ll whip a gleaming sword from his briefcase and hew his jalopy in two as a gift … and that’s the way it was, is, and always will be … and I cruelly fleeced my parvenu clients and donated the leftovers to Bohler for the scamps and goons and refugees so I wouldn’t please the Devil too much … so I could get through the eye of the needle before that camel.
Perhaps I’ve neglected to convey sufficiently and exhaustively in both common parlance and my golden mother tongue Czech what a truly big-hearted fellow Bohler was. Now that he had cash and a flat, even if it did belong to the pack, he was constantly sucking up to his Katholik, church-and-pew Bog by caring for stray sheep, usually shaggy with wool the color of coke from the filthiest bolshevik boiler room around. He sprinkled his little altar with tears while we cranked out the cash, a portion of which he squandered not only on the scamps but on all the other characters he dragged in from South Station whenever the urge seized him. Delousing stray Romanians, returned to the way station of Bohemia from every corner of fucking white man’s Europe, rubbing Dalmatian ointments into Albanian hookers’ legs, swollen from pounding the pavement, and running baths filled with Fiora perfumes for underage Gypsy girls from the worst urban holes of the Wild East … he sobbed his eyes out to David about how whenever there was some odd job, arranging fabrics in the warehouse, say, or packing gadgets into crates, or the painless removal of spiderwebs from the hallways of our buildings, the kinda dumbfuck peasant work we usually paid some lush from the nearest dive to do … he could go down to the station and pick through the rejects from all the countries … where the delicate flesh of baked pigeons gently and readily … passes through the razor-thin lips of emaciated faces … and continues down in the shape of mouthfuls … those desirable states whose officials were absolutely right to decide that no way’re they givin asylum to that shady-lookin greaseball … because either they’ve got demogracy at home or they goddamn well avec deus ex machina better fight for it, by nonviolent means of course.
Bohler had an infallible nose for the biggest badasses … we had to throw the craziest fucks out on a regular basis … a destitute Romanian concentration camp escapee turned out to be a Portuguese pickpocket … a Bulgarian divinity student that Bohler nabbed in the station dive turned out to be an Indian witch and violated his altar … torture-scarred Armenians, after eating, taking a bath, changing clothes, and buying tickets to the nearest town in Germany (all on the pack’s tab), turned without warning from members of the first Christian nation on earth into savage Azeris tired of murdering in the woods … but then again not too tired … Croatians fleeing the most awful horrors imaginable, after a fit of Bohler’s generosity, underwent a bizarre transformation into Serbs … Serb dissidents turned into Bosnian Muslims … asking the way to the Black Stone of Mecca and salaaming endlessly … apage Satanas, Bohler shrieked in his sleep, and Lady Laos kept a sawed-off shotgun under the bed … I do’ know if i’s fo’ him, me, o’ them, she said with an apologetic smile … all of Bohler’s good deeds were followed by swift and just punishment … and one day he brought in a gorgeous Slovak … as it happened Sharky was out in eastern Slovakia looking into an intriguing plan Kosice had to become a Hanseatic city of free byznys … we’d just sat down with the Water after some difficult negotiations in which we’d managed to extend the patent on Doctor Hradil’s Miracle Elixir to include its sale as a guaranteed anti-hair-loss product … also caused weaker links to lose their skin, unfortunately … with a little fast work, we nailed down a monopoly in Bohemia … and that in turn meant more moola and chuckles and loot, Micka was the only one even keeping track anymore … as the theologist nudged the beautiful girl into the room, Lady Laos turned visibly pale, which for a tea rose is pretty unusual … this is Helenka from the University of Trnava, Bohler blushed, she’s applied for Czech citizenship … says she wants to study anthropology, human evolution … Bohler said into the silence. Hey, hi, I majored in anthro too, course they gave me the boot, cause I was the best, I said amiably. Yeah, cool, when they shut down the border she’ll be crossin the Iron Curtain, back an forth, back an forth … Micka daydreamed, already drunk. She was beautiful. She was mysterious … she was brought in. I fell for her right away. She was quick to grasp what it was all about and wanted in on the action, tearing right into Praguese. I listened to her tongue, and when she and Lady Laos went at it I got it in full stereo. Even Micka had to smile.