“Then show.”
I pull the cap off and smear it around my lips. The truth is, I’ve worn makeup only six or seven times in my entire life. I hate the stuff, lipstick especially—something about the taste and smell.
Rozsa clucks her tongue and shakes her head as she snatches the lipstick from my hand. “Ach,” she says. “Let me do it. Make a face like so.”
I copy her expression and stretch my lips as Rozsa spreads the stuff around. The lipstick is followed by eye shadow and eyeliner and blush. “Have you met the other dealers?” Rozsa asks as she works.
I tell her I haven’t, and she fills me in, confirming that it’s just as Beran had said, that we are all orphans of one sort or another here, drifters from Europe’s damp, shadowy corners. Rozsa lists off the ones she likes: Marie and Vika, the Romanian Gypsies, are her favorites. Followed by Aida the Croatian Muslim and Gert the daughter of German radicals. As for Ivan the Ukrainian anarchist, he’s quiet at first, but cool once you get to know him. Finally, Rozsa tells me about herself—Hungarian, speaks nine languages, and is a practicing witch. I raise my eyebrow at this latter point, and she tells me she dreamt of my arrival at the casino, saying that in her dream a woman with short hair whose name started with the letter S would show up one day soon, bringing with her a gift for them all.
“What kind of gift?” I ask.
“The dream did not say,” she says.
“And how did your dream end?”
At this, she smiles, and I can tell she’s about to lie. “I don’t remember,” she says.
I’m about to press her for more information on the dream, but suddenly Rozsa turns me by the shoulders so that I face the mirror. Staring back at me is a face I haven’t seen before: cheekbones pink from the blush; eyes wide and alive thanks to the ten different things Rozsa did with them; mouth full and plump from the lipstick. I look like a premonition of my adult self, a woman a good five years older than I really am. My new face is pretty only in a matter of speaking. I look like what I’m quickly becoming: a hard woman, crueler than the girl she left behind, cynically hiding behind a mask of skillfully applied makeup.
“You like?” Rozsa asks.
“I—I don’t know,” I say.
“It is a woman’s, ah…” She waves her hand in the air, impatiently searching for the English word. “Verkleidung,” she says finally, finding the German word instead.
“Disguise,” I say.
“Yes, that. If men want to see their women pretty and happy, then we will wear the disguise and pretend.” She begins gathering her makeup back into her clutch. “The men in charge here, they demand pretty and happy, always. You must be careful.”
“I know. Emil and the others are dangerous.”
“Pfft, they are nothing,” she says as she turns to me. “It is Beran and the ones above him who you should fear.”
The skin on my neck tingles. There’s information to be had here. Rozsa is friendly, but she’s also wise, and this is her world far more than it’s mine.
“Isn’t Beran the boss?” I say naively.
“Of the casino and street boys only.” She puts her hands on my shoulders, tilts her head. “You know who is the owner of this casino, yes?”
My body tenses—please, Rozsa, let me hear you say it aloud. I shake my head.
“His name is the devil,” she says flatly. “But he calls himself Kladivo.”
*
Even as Rozsa says the words, what wells inside me isn’t fear, but pride. I’ve found the devil, and now I’ve come for him. So with confidence and calm hands, I work my first table of customers in the devil’s casino.
I call out the total of the cards in four languages, and a heavy, unshaven Russian smoking cigarette after cigarette gets his third blackjack in a row. I summon the waiters, and they appear a moment later with a silver ice bucket from which is sticking the neck of a champagne bottle. It looks like the mast of a sinking ship.
Eventually, the Russian loses, though. As does everyone. Some of the dealers show no emotion as they sweep the bets from the table, but Rozsa says it helps your tips if you give a little sympathetic smile. I do, and it does.
I go back to my room at Hedvika’s place that first night, and for the next twenty nights afterward, with more money than I know what to do with. I’m earning more than my dad earned working for the government. I start eating at cafés instead of bringing street food back to my room. I buy some new clothes, some makeup of my own, and a pair of stylish flats for work. I have to remind myself every night to fight off the prosperous novelty of it all and remember why I’m here.
I’ve taken the job in the casino to get close to the thugs holding my dad. Monitoring them isn’t difficult, as they’re coming and going from the casino all the time. In only a matter of days, there’s a rumor going around that I’m a lesbian. Rozsa informs me of this—it’s the short hair, she says, and the fact that I kicked Emil’s ass. In any case, the boys seem to believe that lesbianism should be taken as a challenge to try harder, and the race is on to see who’ll sleep with me first. It is Emil who tries hardest of all, perhaps seeing it in his inscrutable scrotal logic as a way to resurrect his dignity and standing among his fellow bro-thugs.
Maybe you come with me sometime, baby, see my sweet-ass apartment. You ever drive a Porsche before? They’re full of poor dead Christian’s cheap seduction and English they learned from American TV bad guys. It takes all my strength not to rebuff them. Instead, I swallow hard and smile back, ask them about their apartments, tell them no, I’ve never driven a Porsche before. I have to watch the glasses I drink from, never letting them out of my sight.
In between fatuous questions about their Porsches, I make inconspicuous inquiries about Kladivo. But all I ever hear is that he’s largely a mystery and occupied elsewhere, appearing at the casino only for a few brief moments now and then before disappearing just as quickly.
It is difficult to be patient. Every time I look at Beran the Boss or Emil or Libor or the twenty other thugs making their way through the casino, I wonder whether they laid hands on my dad, whether they punched him, or slit his throat, or threw a shovelful of dirt on his body. Because I will do the same to them when the time comes.
*