“So what do you live on?”
Mozoň’s expression becomes confidential. Contradictory feelings do battle within him: on one hand, deeply inculcated service secrecy and confidentiality, on the other, the desire to show his old college mate that Mozoň, too, is somebody to reckon with.
“So what do you do? Private detective?” the lawyer keeps asking.
Mozoň shrugs. “Something like that. Come with me, and I’ll show you something,” he suggests.
“Is it far?” the lawyer asks.
“Let’s take a taxi,” Mozoň decides, stumbling into the lawyer’s bureau.
The lawyer agrees. Even though he’s had a lot to drink, a persistent instinct at the back of his cranium tells him that his old mate from law school could be useful to him.
“Shall we?” Mozoň asks, getting up with effort and moving towards the door.
“Let’s go, then,” says the lawyer. He takes the office keys off the desk and puts the bottle in his coat pocket.
A silent taxi driver drives them to the villa overlooking the city. The men start to sing. They cheerfully clap each other on the back. They imagine themselves always to have been the best of friends. Mozoň needs a friend, someone he could like and who’d like him in return. Comradeship is sacred.
“Women are cunts,” he says to the lawyer sotto voce, as if afraid that the moment they get out of the car the taxi driver will go and tell his wife.
The lawyer nods. He’s divorced; he’s been through the mill. He pays crazy amounts of child support for three children. But the lawyer won’t let himself be fleeced. His salary is small and they can’t deduct much from it. What he makes, he makes on the side. His ex-wife, blast her, knows about that but can’t do a thing about it. She’d love to have the shirt off his back.
The bottle travels from the lawyer to Mozoň and back. When it’s empty, they throw it out of the taxi window onto the pavement. They soon reach their destination. The villa can be seen towering behind a sandstone wall. Mozoň pays the driver and keeps every penny of the change.
Standing to attention, with drawn faces, Šolik and Tupý endure a dressing-down from a drunken Mozoň. Mozoň had known he had the stupidest subordinates, but had no idea that they were that stupid. Their stupidity cries to high heaven. They couldn’t sort out one bloody currency dealer. Go on like this and they’d soon be on the street scavenging from rubbish bins.
Mozoň relishes his anger. He’d like to impress his friend with his power. The lawyer is embarrassed at witnessing a scene he’d rather not see. But the two humiliated cops clearly don’t mind. They peek at the lawyer with curiosity. They’ve never had a visitor before. They let Mozoň’s pep-talk come in one ear and go out the other.
“They’re the ones firing guns in the hotel!” Mozoň informs the lawyer. “These fools! As if they didn’t know that if they were caught they couldn’t have got out of it so easily. We’re outside the law, you prats!” he reproaches Šolik and Tupý, “Outside the law!”
“He punched me in the fathe,” Tupý says in self-defence. “Then he thtarted running. I tried to thtop him. To thtop him escaping.”
Šolik hurriedly backs him up. “He wouldn’t listen, chief. He wouldn’t show us the contents of his pockets. He said that he worked in the hotel as a stoker. He reacted to a body search with violence.”
The lawyer joins in, “Listen, men!” The lawyer has no idea what they’re on about. And he’s not interested. But he’d like to know what they’d charge to get back to the hotel and take the stoker out of circulation somehow. It doesn’t have to be today or tomorrow. The lawyer just needs to know he can be certain about one thing: the stoker’s days are numbered. Can that be arranged?
The three secret policemen, the humiliated and the humiliater, smile; their eyes soften as if they’d remembered a snatch of a long forgotten tune. Mozoň clears his throat. “Anything can be arranged,” he says. But the lawyer should explain why he’s interested in liquidating a petty currency dealer.
“A petty currency dealer?” The lawyer is beside himself. He explains briefly to the cops how dangerous a character Rácz is. He has the entire hotel and surroundings in his hand. Everybody is scared of him. The currency dealers do exactly as he says, he’s their uncrowned king. The hotel lawyer has a lot of fine plans for the Hotel Ambassador. But he needs a free hand to realise them. The hotel employees would be sure to elect him manager, instead of the old one, who is completely incompetent, but everyone’s afraid of the stoker. He’s a blackmailer: he can close down the heating in the hotel at any time, and then people freeze. He’s got tons of money. The lawyer is worried that, as things are, the employees would elect Rácz manager out of fear. The lawyer is offering his new friends a hundred thousand crowns to liquidate the stoker.
“A hundred thousand is good money,” says Mozoň and sits down. But he thinks there’s no need to kill the stoker. He just has to be taken out of circulation for a few months. When he gets back, he will be so screwed up by everything that will have been done to him that he’ll choose to go back to his village. Mozoň has ways of doing that. There are some spacious cells in the basement of this safe house. They’ve never been used yet, but Mozoň believes it’s time they were. The inconvenient stoker will be an involuntary boarder in one of them. He’ll have ample time, living on bread and water, to reflect hard on the wisdom of leaving his village for the city. Mozoň thinks two to three months of solitary confinement will be enough for the stoker.
He gets up and motions to the lawyer. They go down to the cellar. Mozoň opens a door. Behind is darkness. Mozoň turns on the light and the lawyer can see a long corridor with a row of metal doors on each side. Each door has a small square hatch with a bolt.
“For keeping an eye on them,” Mozoň tells the lawyer. The lawyer nods in admiration. “We’ll chuck him in there,” says Mozoň. “Don’t worry; we’ll put him off wanting to act the uncrowned king of the hotel. Want to have a look inside?” The lawyer shakes his head. He’s shivering with cold. Mozoň turns off the light and closes the door. “A hundred thousand?” he asks the lawyer.
“A hundred thousand,” says the lawyer firmly, “plus his keep in gaol.” Mozoň nods.
“It’ll be harder abducting him,” says the lawyer, when they get back upstairs. “Rácz is never alone, not even for a second. There’s always someone hanging around him. He has his sidekick, the hotel driver and buyer. He also has a mistress, a girl who used to dance in the cabaret. A hooker.” The lawyer would suggest luring him out of the building under some pretext. “It’ll be difficult, but I think it can be done.” Mozoň and his subordinates can ambush him there. They can knock him out and take him away. That’s how the lawyer envisages it.
Mozoň clears his throat. His head is still spinning, but a spate of applied thinking and the prospect of all that money has neutralised the vodka. “It’s not that easy,” he opines. Mozoň knows from experience. A well-done abduction needs extensive preliminary preparation. Reconnoitring the terrain. Nothing can be left to accident. It would be best for Mozoň to come to the hotel for a few days incognito. He could take a look at everything. He’d pretend to be a guest from the West and try to attract Rácz’s attention. He’d make friends with him. It would all be easier that way. “See this?” Mozoň opens a steel cabinet, takes out a Bakelite box and opens it. It contains a needle with a transparent bulb at one end. “This is a powerful narcotic,” he tells the lawyer. “If I can jab him in the arm and squeeze the bulb, he’ll be out for an hour. That gives us time to transport him over here and lock him in a cell.” Mozoň pauses and looks at his listeners. The lawyer likes the idea. Tupý and Šolik stare at their chief in admiration.