I had been ordering the shots in fours just to be safe. The place was by no means crowded, as it was just after ten A.M., a good hour before most Poles ventured in for their first fix of the day. But the bartender could get to talking, or decide he had to visit the facilities for an extended period of time and forget to refill my glasses as often as I’d like. It was important to have reinforcements at hand.
Polish zakaskas are perfect if you didn’t want to bother with the rigors of a cocktail menu. That’s because there is only one cocktail on the menu: a cold shot of Żołądkowa Gorzka. Perfect Grizzly efficiency: You will drink this, and you will get drunk. After endless months of tiki joints and dark oak saloons and steak houses and cocktail lounges and dives and airport bars, it was strangely nice to be deprived of choice. Żołądkowa Gorzka, which means “bitter vodka for the stomach,” was a rather new brand that followed traditional Polish methods of blending herbs and dried fruit. Despite the name, it was more sweet than bitter. There was some wormwood, gentian root, and galangal tossed in as well. Not that I cared about the taste. The spirit did the fifty-meter-dash across my tongue on its way to my bloodstream. It was amber in color, which could fool people into thinking you were shooting some good old-fashioned Kentucky bourbon in the middle of Warsaw. I liked it more with every shot.
The menu in a zakaska is just as simple. Aside from the ubiquitous herring (which provided all the protein I required), you had your choice of six inches of smoked kielbasa, some pierogi, or maybe even some steak tartare, if the zakaska was fancy enough. This wasn’t one of those zakaskas. I went with the herring, which was difficult to ruin. I needed the protein.
As I raised the next shot glass to my lips the scout raised her own glass and said, “Na zdrowie.”
I held the glass in place, muttered a quick “Na zdrowie” in return, then downed the shot. Some part of my brain knew that I was reaching my limit, the redline, but other parts of my brain told that annoying part to shut up. We’d paid good zlotys for those three remaining shots, and goddamnit we were going to do them, death squad or not.
Oh, if only the pretty little scout hadn’t offered the Polish cheer. That meant the gunmen and butchers were nearby, closing in fast. I needed to down these shots now. They might be my last for a while. I just wanted to linger here and watch the street scene, let my brain go pleasantly fuzzy for a while.
I was in Warsaw for a simple snatch, dupe, replace, and grab of a potentially incriminating and embarrassing set of cables. This was my job: cleaning up mistakes or documents or communiqués. Sometimes I was tasked with producing a pseudo doc, for misinformation purposes. Sometimes not. Almost always they had me destroy the real doc, but this time they wanted it back for some reason. So I hid it in a place only I knew about, then came here to the Pijalnia Wodki for extraction.
The presence of the ample-chested scout, however, meant there would be no extraction. My transport man had no doubt been captured or killed, this petite girl sent in his place, and the Grizzlies would soon force their way into this dingy place, and they wouldn’t care how many shots of vodka I had lined up in front of me. They would simply take me. And then—
I didn’t want to think about then.
I’d spent all night working on the dupe and switch and had been sipping steadily at an oversized steel flask of Canadian Club, as well as some bottles of port wine I’d found in a wooden cabinet. Sitting here, our pre-arranged meeting point, I decided to go with the local tipple. Someone had named this joint Pijalnia Wodki — “Drinking Room for Vodka.” You had to admire the straightforwardness. The walls were badly chipped, and the fixtures and furniture were scavenged from at least four different ruined hotels. Why bother repainting the walls if they’re chipped? The people weren’t here for the walls. They’re here for the vodka and ennui. Maybe a plate of herring on the side.
“We have a car outside,” the scout said in Polish, though it took a few moments to translate the words in my mind. “Are you ready to leave?”
“That’s nice,” I replied, in English. “But, uh, who are you?”
She slid off her chair and moved close to me, pushing her breasts into my upper arm, smiling at me a little.
“You know me.” Again in Polish. Translation approximate.
“You’re pretty. Let’s have some vodka together.”
Eyes narrowed. Suspicious, but willing to play along. In English she said, “Sure.”
I signaled the bartender. As he retrieved the bottle from under the bar I downed my second, barely feeling the cold-warm burn, and then the third shot, turning the glasses upside down and slamming them on the bar top after each. By the time bowtie was pouring four more shots into fresh glasses, I knocked back the final vodka. The scout watched me with vague disbelief in her eyes. Which is exactly what I wanted her to do, because she didn’t notice me dose one of the new shots as I slid it toward her across the scratched wooden bar top.
So much of this came down to simple sleight-of-hand. The human mind can only focus on one thing at a time. While the scout was watching my hand raise the fourth shot of vodka to my lips, she was physically incapable of seeing my thumb and middle finger pinch open a hush puppy directly above the shot glass I was sliding in her direction.
She drank the vodka. I downed another and smiled. Goodnight, honey. In under a minute you’re going to be facedown on the bar top. Which at home might get us ejected from the premises, but not here. Passing out is part of the whole experience.
Double
Sixty seconds later she was not asleep. She was bright-eyed, amused. Showing me her perfect teeth, which were on the lupine side. Maybe she was an Eastern European werewolf and totally immune to the Agency’s finest knockout drops. She certainly looked feral.
I thought to myself, damnit, what if she’d switched shot glasses on me, and I was the one digesting the knockout serum?
I’m not proud of it, but I had no choice. In the desperation of a given moment, you do things you may regret later. And what I did was this: I took a leisurely mouthful and hooked my shoes under the rungs of her stool. Then I spat the vodka into her eyes, point-blank range, and simultaneously jerked my feet back, sending her tumbling from her seat at the same time. Then I ran.
Poor kid. The sting would be in her eyes most of the morning, and her tush might be sore. But it was nothing compared to what they would do to her later when her new employees decided to punish her. The alcohol in her eyes would be a memory of heaven. Hell, she might not even have realized she was working for the Grizzlies. She might have thought it was us all along.
But I had my own problems to sort out. I knew my chances of escape were nil. If the Grizzlies were smart enough to switch out my transport man for one of our own scouts then they would have all possible exits covered. Didn’t mean I shouldn’t try.
My legs were wobblier than I thought, which made for an interesting and somewhat amusing exit from the zakaska. My internal compass was a little off. I had been here in Warsaw less than fifteen hours and still had the afterimages of the last city I’d visited (Krakow) burned into my brain.
There was an amusing chase interlude on the relatively quiet streets. The Grizzlies had sent multiple agents to intercept me. There were dodges, fakeouts, some backwards walking. All the usual. It might have worked on one of them, but not the baseball team they’d sent after me. At this desperate juncture I made a heroic attempt at a subterranean escape, diving into an open sewer, but thick hands grabbed me by my HST suit and yanked me back into the daylight. I suggested we all get a drink together, discuss this like men. While my Polish was good, I don’t think my words carried the amount of bonhomie I’d been attempting. A rank-smelling hood was slipped over my head and something sharp pinched the crook of my arm.