Rácz finishes pissing and reminiscing. It’s gone. It was a long time ago. He shakes his member and zips up his trousers. “Let’s go,” he tells Ďula. “Let’s go down to the bar. It’s cold here.” Donáth was a nobody. Not like Rácz. Rácz lives life to the full. He doesn’t ask for much, but he’s fussy. He’s successful. He’s capable.
He sits down in the cabaret bar and everybody comes to see him. The small-time currency dealers want to unload their foreign currency. They buy at eighteen and sell at twenty crowns. Sometimes it’s two hundred deutschmarks, sometimes five hundred. Westerners change at most two hundred. In any case they’re not in the market to buy a wind surfer or a huge camping tent. The small timers let Rácz make two hundred crowns on a hundred deutschmarks. Rácz buys everything and piles it up. Then he sells at twenty-one. That’s enough for him. Daily he turns over ten, maybe fifteen thousand deutschmarks. That’s enough to live on. Add the money for turning the heating off and on. Rácz can’t complain. The Albanians give him hostile looks, because he’s infringing their monopoly. Rácz doesn’t worry about them. They greet each other with a perfunctory nod. This implies: “I am aware of you.” They more or less respect each other. Rácz unconsciously learns from them how to behave, dress, and walk like a black-market currency dealer — a preoccupied, fast mincing gait, with the toes of the shoes pointing outwards, the torso inclined forward a bit, and the head to one side. The Albanians try to make him out. They can’t help seeing that he behaves as if he owns the entire hotel. They see the cabaret dancers blatantly toadying to him and foreign guests frantically buying him rounds. Ďula keeps watch like a bodyguard. They finally come to terms. They’ve decided that it’s better to have Rácz on their side. Business takes off. The labour is distributed. The Albanians do deals outside the hotel; they’re all mobile, they drive rickety used cars: old Mercedes, Fords, Opels and various battered cars with Austrian, German, and Dutch licence plates. Rácz doesn’t go anywhere. He doesn’t leave the hotel. He holds all the strings. At first he wants nothing to do with stolen goods, but when he does his sums at night in his suite and sees how much it would bring in, he agrees. For jobs outside the hotel he uses Ďula. He has the use of the hotel Renault minibus. He can do anything. They managed to move a wagon-load of stolen cement. It went in a day. Private builders almost fought to get at it. Rácz made three hundred thousand crowns and he never saw a bag of cement. He didn’t have to lift a finger. He just did the deal and took the cash. Even Ďula got a share. He was so shattered that he kissed Rácz’s hand. Rácz accepts with dignity, his lips clenched, as if this was natural. Then he adds a few thousand on top. It’s good to have a faithful and reliable servant. Out of sheer joy, Ďula downs two litres of cold water without stopping and, with a schnitzel in his teeth, he crawls under all the tables in the cabaret. Then he painfully vomits for a long time in the toilet. But this doesn’t spoil his joy.
Urban shows up as well. “Well, how is it going? Did you get your camera? Sit down, why stand?”
“Thanks, I’ll stand,” Urban mutters. He has the camera.
“And what are you going to do with it?” asks Rácz.
“All kinds of things,” says Urban. “Make money on weddings, christenings, graduations. Do you realise how much money people are willing to spend to see their own boring mugs?”
Rácz shrugs. No, Rácz has never been interested in that sort of nonsense. Still, he’d like to know how much Urban spent on that toy. Why won’t Urban sit down?
Urban sits down with an expression of pain on his face.
“I haven’t seen you for a long time,” says Rácz. “Must be a week, at least. How much did you fork out on that new toy?”
“A lot,” says Urban. Here, Urban could easily sell it for fifty thousand. But in Germany you could buy it for a month’s salary. Even less.
“And how much did you pay for it?” asks Rácz.
“Enough,” Urban says evasively.
“Just asking.” Rácz backs off; he’s not really that interested. It’s Urban’s business. As long as it was worth it.
Urban has some Austrian schillings.
“How many?” asks Rácz.
“A thousand.” “I’ll give you twenty-eight hundred,” Rácz offers. Urban agrees. “See how times change,” Rácz laughs, counting the cash. “A month ago you’d have been buying from me. That’s life. One day up, next day down,” Rácz philosophizes. A sentimental mood comes over him. He grows sad. He summons the waiter and to cheer himself up orders Ďula a litre of cold water and a huge fried schnitzel.
Closing time is four in the morning. Rácz and Silvia take the lift upstairs to the stoker’s suite. Sometimes, when Rácz is too busy, he asks Ďula in and, while taking his shoes off, tells him what to do the next day. Ďula has plenty of spare time. He’s single and also lives in the hotel. He would even sleep with Rácz for that kind of money. Sometimes Rácz is tired and falls asleep the moment he hits the bed. Then Silvia undresses him and covers him up. This is not out of love; if Rácz got cold, he might catch pneumonia and die, and Silvia’s source of income would dry up. Now things have gone so far that the whole economy around the Hotel Ambassador would crash. The foreign exchange rate would drop sharply, or rise vertiginously, the price of gold would change, and so on. That is why Silvia covers the exhausted Rácz. The experienced prostitute realises that when so much power is concentrated in a single person’s hands, he becomes irreplaceable. And she doesn’t want to screw in hotel rooms and parked cars any more. She’s used to a comfortable and peaceful life now. She wallows in bed in the morning. Rácz has been up for a long time and Silvia can hear his imperious voice in the corridors when she opens her eyes. She has breakfast in bed. Sometimes she watches a video, and sometimes satellite TV. She prefers MTV, a pop music station. Rácz is allergic to MTV. If he happens to come into the suite when MTV is on, he angrily turns it off. He switches over to Eurosport. He can stand motionless, watching a rough wrestling match for hours. He knows all the fighters by name. His favourite is Hulk Hogan. Rácz sometimes grabs Ďula and tries out wrestling holds on him. Ďula often remains on the floor without moving, his eyes glazed over. Silvia has to revive him with a spray from the soda water bottle.
“Oh, you really let me have it this time, boss!” Ďula shouts with servile cheerfulness, feeling the back of his neck and getting off the floor. “You could easily go and join those guys on TV! You could have beaten them all! Ha, ha, ha! You’re so strong!”
Rácz is proud of his strength. A life of luxury hasn’t yet managed to soften his muscles steeled by years of hard work. Rácz could floor the lot of them! He demonstrates it: with one punch he knocks the stuffing out of the door and then punches through it. Silvia and Ďula applaud.
When Rácz and Ďula leave, Silvia reads magazines. Sometimes she gets bored and goes shopping. She even takes Edita along, so that she has someone to envy the money Rácz gives her. Sometimes she buys her a trifle and secretly enjoys it when Edita gets resentful. “You could have gone down to the boiler-room instead of me when we were freezing cold,” Silvia teases her. She knows that this isn’t true; the square-cut stoker had noticed her long before he got the idea of shutting the valves and began his dazzling career. When they get home from shopping, Edita stops sulking. Her nostrils flare in anticipation. Silvia lies down on the couch in the living room of the suite and lets Edita take her boots, fur coat, sweater, panties, everything off. Naked as a tapeworm and with a domineering look in her cold eyes, she lets herself be caressed and excited. Edita also undresses. She puts her lips, swollen with excitement, over Silvia’s moist and open crotch.