It smelled of perfume, diesel, and cigarettes. At least half of the people on the bus were white. But it was now obvious that this population was crazily out of whack demographically: 100 percent of the white persons were males, and most of them were over fifty. They tended to dress as if they thought they were going on some sort of safari, and they liked to wear sunglasses even when they were sitting behind tinted windows on the bus. Their English was accented in a way that Csongor could not place at first. His first guess was that they were British, but that wasn’t quite right. “These dudes are from Oz,” Yuxia said, after she and Csongor and Marlon had crammed themselves together into the rearmost row of seats. When that made no impression, she explained, “Australia. Or maybe New Zealand.” Apparently she knew this because of her experience dealing with backpackers in her former life. So Csongor gazed up the bus’s aisle at the Australians-or-maybe-New-Zealanders and tried to figure out what was going on. Maybe some sort of trade convention—a batch of retired plumbers or jackaroos, or something, who had commandeered a block of hotel rooms for a week of very inexpensive fun in the sun. But it didn’t feel that way. None of these men was acquainted, none talked to another—which perhaps explained why the guy Csongor had accosted had given him such a look. They tended not to sit next to each other on the bus. Instead, each sat alone, or else shared a seat with a young Filipino woman. The demographics of the bus’s Filipina population were just as crazy: all female, every one of them either quite young or well into middle age. The young ones could be mistaken for women in their twenties because of the way they were dressed and made up, but on closer inspection seemed to be in their late or even middle teens. Some of them seemed to be on their own, but most were accompanied, though at a distance, by mature women, old enough to be their mothers, who, by and large, were making no strenuous effort to seem glamorous.
All these impressions sunk in over the course of a fifteen-minute ride to the waterfront district that they had glimpsed from the boat. Csongor, Marlon, and Yuxia all stared fixedly ahead, as if each was afraid to make eye contact with the others and reveal what was going through his or her mind. When the bus pulled up to a terminal in front of a hotel, they waited until it had nearly emptied out, and then got up as one and marched down the aisle with Yuxia sandwiched closely between Csongor and Marlon. No discussion, no exchange of looks, had been necessary to decide upon that arrangement. When Csongor presented himself in the exit of the bus, blocking most of its door as he paused at the top of the steps, he was greeted by the sight of half a dozen Filipina girls looking up at him with widely varying levels of enthusiasm: some flashing big smiles, others pouting and bored or even openly hostile. But as he came down the steps and it became obvious that he was being followed by a petite Asian female who was, in turn, being followed by an Asian man, they all seemed to jump to the same conclusion, and they turned their backs on him and drifted away in the direction of other buses that were pulling in.
And yet it was an orderly place, and none of them felt any particular sense that they had stepped into a slum. To Csongor it felt very little different from Xiamen. The built environment was cheaply constructed three-to six-story buildings jammed in next to one another to form contiguous blocks, separated by crowded streets and fronted by a mixture of colorful signs and makeshift antitheft measures. It was, in other words, the classic streetscape of emerging Asian economies, and the only thing that made it unusual was that the signs were in English. Or, farther from the main drag, a hybrid of English and something that he did not recognize.
There was a strong argument for getting the hell out of there and taking the next ferry to Manila, but Csongor had become fixated on the idea that, only a few yards away, looming above them, were a large number of reasonably modern hotel rooms with beds and showers. It was anyone’s guess what they’d have in the way of telephones, but on the opposite side of the waterfront drive, facing the row of hotels, he was able to count three Internet cafés in the space of a single block. So, without much discussion, the three gravitated in the direction of the hotel that seemed largest and newest, and presently found themselves in its dark and cramped lobby, being evaluated by young females in tight dresses who were lounging on the few available seats, as they checked in to a room. The plan at first was to get one room for Csongor and Marlon and another for Yuxia, but halfway through the check-in process, when it became evident that the rooms were going to be situated on different floors, Yuxia changed her mind and announced that she would be sleeping on the floor or the sofa of Marlon and Csongor’s room. Which meant, of course, that she would have a bed and Marlon or Csongor would sleep on the floor. So they got only one room. As it happened, this brought the price down low enough that they were able to pay for it using American dollars from Zula’s wallet, and thereby avoid using Csongor’s credit card. Csongor had no idea whether any authorities—Chinese, Hungarian, or otherwise—had put a trace on his card, but still it seemed wisest not to use it unless he had to.
The room was up on the fourth floor, small and dark, with stained shag carpet, smelling of tobacco, alcohol, and sex. Yuxia stormed directly to the window and opened it as far as it would go—about six inches—to let in a bit of a sea breeze.
It seemed as though the shower would be busy for a while, and so Csongor went back down to the street and walked to a bureau de change that he had noticed earlier and changed all of the euros from his wallet and the Canadian dollars from Peter’s into local currency. He was slightly offended, but hardly surprised, that they would not accept Hungarian forints. He also ducked into four different Internet cafés and found them well patronized by Caucasian males who were generally using them to look at dirty pictures. They varied in size, quality of equipment, hours of operation, and general level of friendliness. Only one of them, NetXCitement!, claimed to be open twenty-four hours, which Csongor thought might be useful given that the evening was already wearing on and they would probably be busy, for a few hours yet, getting cleaned up and fed and clothed.
He bought some Chinese food from a stall on the street and took it up to the room, trying to fight back the almost overpowering urge to rip the garlic-scented containers open and plunge his face into them. A hand-lettered DO NOT DISTURB! sign was up on the door of the room, held in place by the door having been slammed shut on it. Csongor opened the door, brought the food in, then went back and carefully replaced the sign. “Why do we need this?” he asked Yuxia, who was sitting on one of the beds with a towel wrapped around her body just below the armpits. Marlon was still finishing up in the bathroom.
“Hos,” she announced, “keep coming around to ask if we want anything.” Making air quotes around the final two words.
Csongor felt as if he should be abjectly apologizing in the name of every white male who had ever lived, but he didn’t know quite where to begin. He still had not quite gotten his mind around the nature of this place and what went on here—particularly the middle-aged ladies, who seemed to be acting in approximately the same role as pimps, but who didn’t seem like professionals. They seemed almost like chaperones. But singularly ineffectual ones.
“I’m sorry that this is the first place outside of China that you have ever seen,” Csongor said. “It’s not all like this. Someday I will take you to Budapest and show you around. Very, very different.”