Roman and I are seated in the VIP area on the third story, right at the edge where the floor falls away. We preside over the party happening below within the jagged, blown-apart foundation walls that look like the inside of some enormous creature’s jaw. Beautiful people dance beneath the moonlight and strobes on what would be the creature’s tongue, oblivious that they’re about to be swallowed. Das Herz stands on a platform behind an impossibly complicated spread of turntables and Mac laptops, headphones pressed to one ear, arm pumping in the air.
We are here so that we may be seen to be here. Among the glamorous. Among the people who mean something. Das Herz is only last week out of rehab in Helsinki, and this is his first gig in nine months. Reporters have come for the occasion and will remark on Twitter about how even Roman Kladivo, the gangster and heir apparent to the biggest crime family in Mitteleuropa, showed up with his new girlfriend.
There is Cristal champagne in the ice bucket at our feet, sent over by an American rapper everyone but me seems to know. There is cocaine on the table before us, being snorted by Roman’s coterie of tracksuited friends. Someone shows off his new tattoo—a pink-orange devil riding a motorcycle. Someone else shows off his new Glock 9mm—a handsome pistol of plastic composite with a fifteen-round magazine.
“What happened to you?” someone important asks Roman, taking note of the swollen eye and the bandage on his hand.
“Car accident,” Roman says. “Flipped my Lambo on the 18.” Lambo is short for Lamborghini, saving time for those who have to use the word often.
He’s still on Percocet and morphine. These and the champagne and the whiskey and the beer are making Roman especially friendly tonight, eager to show off his new girlfriend and position as the reigning and very hetero king of Prague’s club scene.
I smile at all who come to pay tribute and laugh generously at their jokes. I accept the caviar sent over by the visiting pop star from Japan. I kiss the cheek of a sultan’s son from Dubai.
But the celebration is thankfully short-lived. It’s only half an hour into the show when an intruder arrives. It’s Emil, sweating, angry. “You don’t answer your fucking phone?” he shouts at Roman in English over the music.
“Relax. Have a sniff. Let me get you something. Where the fuck did the waitress go? Servírka!”
“Four, maybe five texts I sent you,” Emil says. “Roman, there’s trouble.”
“There’s always trouble,” Roman says. “Servírka!”
“Libor got picked up by the police. Stolen merchandise, they said.”
Roman pinches the bridge of his nose. “So bail him out in the morning.”
Emil glances in my direction. “Libor and me, we have that thing tonight. You know, the cargo we were supposed to pick up, then drop off at the tábor.”
Tábor—it’s the word Kladivo had used for the secret police station.
“Let me help,” I say.
Emil gives a shrug. “Look, no offense to the boss’s girlfriend…”
“Take her,” Roman says. “Take Sofia.”
Emil laughs incredulously. “Seriously, Roman…”
“My father says she is to learn the business,” Roman says, squeezing Emil’s shoulder.
“So what?”
A kind of nasty smirk crosses Roman’s face. “So teach it to her.”
Twenty-Four
It’s midnight, and a light rain has started falling along Sokolovská Street. This stretch of it is mostly asleep, metal shop shutters rolled down, curtains pulled over apartment windows. There’s a wood fire burning somewhere. It smells cozy, and I wish I were there, reading Kafka all snuggled up in a blanket, or whatever normal people do in front of a fireplace in Prague. Instead, I’m drinking coffee from a paper cup, the strong Turkish stuff with the texture of river mud I bought at the last open kebab stand two blocks ago.
It’s here Emil is supposed to pick me up after he went to get the truck and I went back to the apartment to change out of my club clothes. Down the street, I see a small, boxy truck turn the corner, yellow headlights strafing the pavement in front of it, heading straight toward me. Even from this distance, I hear the hip-hop blasting from inside.
It slows to a stop in front of me, and I climb into the passenger seat. Emil’s face glares at me, his anger at working with a woman, me, especially, looking somehow more dangerous in the blue cast of dashboard lights. He accelerates down the street and makes a left. In a few moments, we’re on a highway heading north.
“Why does Roman want you slamming it with the street side now?” Emil says. “Thought you were too fancy for us.”
“The English phrase is ‘slumming it,’ not ‘slamming it,’” I say over the awful Czech rap blasting from the speakers.
“Fuck do you know? You’re Russian,” he says.
“Can I turn down the music?”
“That’s me. That’s my album. MC Vrah is my name. It means, like, gangster, assassin. Did you know I was a rapper?”
I turn the music down anyway. “What are we picking up?”
“Cargo. That is all I am permitted to say.” He cuts into the left lane, guns it past a row of trucks, the colorful tarps covering their trailers rippling like sails in the light of the sodium lamps.
There’s a knapsack in the space between the seats, and I pull it onto my lap. “What’s this?” I ask.
“What we’re trading for the cargo,” he says.
I unzip the knapsack and pull out three clear plastic bags stuffed with yellowish crystals that look like rock candy. Each one weighs a little over two pounds, I estimate, or a kilo each. “Drugs?” I say.
“You just come in from the farm? Crystal meth. The finest. Imported from Oklahoma,” Emil says, then adds proudly: “That’s a territory in the United States.”
I have no idea how much the three kilos are worth, but it must be a lot. Considering we’re taking the truck and not a car, we have to be trading it for something substantial.
“Almost forgot,” he says, digging through his jacket. He pulls out a pistol and places it on my lap. “In case.”
“In case what?”
“You’ll know,” he says.
We drive without talking for a long time, the only sounds coming from the highway and the speakers, a low, grating drum machine and the voice of MC Gangster-Assassin. Then Emil downshifts as he moves over to the right. The lane separates from the rest of the highway and we pass beneath a sign marked NěMECKO. Germany.
*
We cross out of the Czech Republic sometime after 2:00 a.m. There are no real border crossings anymore, just the remnants of them: boarded-up guard posts and barrier arms permanently raised. What the European Union did to ease the burden on commerce and travel also eased the burden on criminals. People like Emil, and now, apparently, me.
We exit the highway a few kilometers past the border and pass through a little village where every building is dark for the night. He slows down and takes a left at the very last street before it turns to farm fields. It’s an alley, and we follow it to a loading dock behind a little shop.
There’s a guy in jeans and leather jacket waiting there, leg cocked on the wall. When he sees us, he flicks his cigarette into a puddle like some German James Dean and approaches.
“Was geht ab, bro,” Emil says through the open window.
The two slap their way through a complicated handshake that ends in an embrace and backslap.
James Dean notices me and nods. “Who’s the chick?” he says in English.