Tupý opens the gate. This time, Šolik is on duty in the hotel. Tupý is quite beside himself. What a visitor! He’s overcome by humility and servility. He doesn’t know to whom he should be more servile: his superior Ščepán, or his ultimate and final boss, Rácz.
Rácz gets out of the car and steps briskly toward the villa. He is well dressed. A brown leather jacket emphasizes his strong wide-shouldered figure; his black hair is carefully oiled, combed back and tied with a red elastic band. He wears dark glasses. He’s chewing gum. An earring shines in his ear.
“Take us to the basement!” Rácz orders through clenched lips and rolls ahead like a stocky, perfumed and impatient tidal wave. Tupý obeys. He takes a ring of keys off the hook and leads the visitor to the steps leading to the basement.
“Which is the lawyer’s cell?” Rácz asks.
“The very first one,” says Tupý.
“I want to talk to him,” Rácz decides.
“But, boss…” Ščepán has reservations.
“Well? What is it?” Rácz asks, his curiosity tinged with menace.
Ščepán nods to his underling. Tupý goes up to the cell and unlocks it.
Rácz enters. The lawyer is sitting on a wooden plank, dirty and unshaven. He looks ahead, lost in thought.
“Well, how goes it?” Rácz addresses him. The lawyer is startled.
“Have you come to kill me?” he asks stoically.
“Maybe,” Rácz says. “You’d deserve it.” Then he overcomes his distaste and sits down next to the lawyer.
“What are they doing there?” Urban asks Ščepán, who is peering into the cell through the hatch in the door.
“Nothing,” says Ščepán. “They’re talking. Now the boss is getting up. The lawyer’s on his knees begging him for something. The boss is giving him his hand and the lawyer is kissing it. Oh no!” Ščepán looks closer. “The boss is giving him his penknife,” Ščepán says with astonishment. “He’s giving him his knife.”
“No!” says Urban in disbelief; he pushes the secret policeman aside and looks for himself. Rácz and the lawyer are now sitting together at the table. The lawyer is holding Rácz’s penknife in his hand, cutting something. Urban looks closer. The lawyer is cutting off his left little finger. Pale as chalk, he saws it off with the knife. He wraps the severed finger in a dirty handkerchief and passes it to Rácz with a solemn expression on his face. Then he gets up and bangs the cell door.
“Hey!” he shouts. “Let us out!”
Rácz and the lawyer come out into the corridor. The lawyer is pale and sweating. His mutilated hand is bleeding. The prisoners in the neighbouring cells have discovered that Rácz has arrived, and everywhere swearing and cursing in Romany, Albanian, Croatian and broken Slovak break out. They all wish the stoker a slow death, illnesses, and accidents. But Rácz smiles.
“No food for two days!” he decides. “That’ll teach them.” Then he looks at his people. “We’re taking the lawyer along with us to the hotel,” he says. “There won’t be any more problems with him,” he adds. “From now on, he’s one of us. He admits that you can’t piss into the wind.” Rácz addresses this to everyone, but his metallic and penetrating gaze is focussed on the lawyer. “He’ll be cooperative. People have to be paid,” he adds after a while.
When they’re on the ground floor, someone digs out a first aid box. The lawyer doesn’t want treatment, but Rácz forces him. Ščepán and Tupý hold him down in a chair, while Urban clumsily and amateurishly disinfects the stump of the lawyer’s little finger. No one asks questions.
On the way down to the city, still in the car, the lawyer asks for the documents for the planned acquisition of the hotel. He browses through the documents for setting up a limited company and murmurs to himself. Finally he raises his eyes. “This is good work,” he compliments them.
“He did it,” Rácz points to Urban. Urban is driving, but smiles proudly.
The lawyer says, “If, God forbid, we have to go to auction, we can drag it out until they all drop out.”
Rácz makes an unhappy face. “That won’t work. We’d need to have cash and we don’t. I’ve invested in building land.”
The lawyer closes his eyes for a moment and then, covered in cold sweat, opens them. “That’s all right,” he says. “First of all, I need a bath and then a good meal.” He looks at Rácz. “You don’t look after your prisoners well, boss,” he says.
“If I did, then nobody would want to work for me and everybody would want to stay in prison,” says Rácz, making a joke of it. “But what did you mean about the auction?” he asks impatiently. The lawyer feels the thick bandage on his left hand. “It’s simple,” he says. “In an auction we go to any sum, just to get the Ambassador. Then we draft the purchase contract and at the same time apply for a delay in payment. A few days should be enough and nobody will find it strange at all. With the signed contract we go to Austria and get a loan from the first bank we find. I’m talking mortgages, you see?” The lawyer forces himself to smile. “We’ll mortgage the Hotel Ambassador,” he says. “As proof of ownership, we’ll show them the sales contract. Then we take the money and pay the price. The hotel will be ours. That is, it will belong to the bank to begin with, but we’ll soon pay it off. Anyway, in these unsettled times debts are the best and safest investment.”
Rácz eyes his subordinates proudly and yet respectfully, as if to say, “How about that? Don’t I have a good nose?”
“But that doesn’t mean an auction has to be held,” says Urban. “The hotel could be privatized by the sale of vouchers, in a major privatization.”
The lawyer nods. “In that case, we have to buy as many vouchers as possible in the first round. And later we try to buy as many vouchers as we can from small investors, at any price. It will always pay off. But it’d be best to have an auction. My ex-wife’s father works at the National Property Fund. He’s a corrupt swine. I’ll try and lobby him to transfer the hotel to minor privatization by auction.”
By now the car has reached the hotel. Rácz, the lawyer and Ščepán get out.
“Take it to the garage,” Rácz tells Urban, “and then join us in the restaurant.”
Rácz enters the Hotel. It will soon be his, he thinks. He will be a hotelier, the owner of a hotel. But that will only be the beginning. He laughs. He overcomes a sudden urge to clap his hands together and rubs them instead. He has a perfect grasp of what the lawyer meant. It’s a brilliant idea! If it works with the hotel, Rácz will try to use it elsewhere. He will be able to buy anything he wants without a penny in his pocket! Rácz has it all figured out. You only have to surround yourself with competent people. And you need to pay the competent people well.
Rácz feels a gargantuan hunger. As always when he’s in a good mood.
“Let’s go and eat!” he says. It’s his treat.
He enters the restaurant, faithfully followed by his people.
* * *
Freddy Piggybank radiates happiness. It seems that all the good gypsies around the Hotel Ambassador have disappeared somewhere. There’s no one to come and extort money from him for protection from bad gypsies. Freddy’s mood improved once he realised this. He looks better every day. His cheeks have filled out; the skin on his face and hands is taut and shiny. The traces of the torments he endured are definitely disappearing. All is fine at home, too: his stingy parents had a change of heart and have accepted him back into the family. But Freddy goes back as rarely as ever; usually he sleeps in his white trailer, which is once again supplied by power from the hotel. In the pleasant warmth and the soporific ammonia-hydrogen sulphide smell of his socks and work boots, Freddy Piggybank lies down on the narrow bed and, pleasantly exhausted, closes his eyes to sleep. He used to listen out and be woken from his slumbers by any suspicious noise, but now he sleeps undisturbed. There are no gypsies. The pavements in front of the Ambassador and the glazed mall between the hotel and the department store are clear. Freddy is happy, but at the same time also curious about the gypsies’ fate. His imagination thinks up the most outlandish possibilities: a contagious disease that killed them all off, a stroke that felled all their obese bodies, or mass poisoning. “Go and kick the bucket!” Freddy Piggybank wished them every time he calculated how much money his swarthy fellow-citizens had extorted from him. Maybe his God-fearing desire was fulfilled, he thought. Whatever had happened, a smile had returned to Freddy’s round face, and joy to his eyes, Life is really beautiful, after all!