Prague (36 page)

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to hear Emily express her amused disbelief. He was walking her home, crossing the Margaret Bridge toward Buda, and she thanked him warmly for introducing her to his friend. She had never met such a charming and entertaining "old woman." The term—old woman—set John on edge. He said a little testily, "That's not really a relevant description. The least relevant thing about her, don't you see that?"

"Okay, sorry. Jeez. How about amazing liar?" she offered with a laugh. "Come on, you're better than me at Sincerity, so don't tell me you don't see through this woman. She's a piano player who makes up stories. Good ones, okay. I can see why you like her. I liked her, too, she's very fun. I meant it when I thanked you for introducing me. But really, I mean, she's neat, but..." Emily stopped walking and looked John in the eye. "John, you cannot believe anything that woman tells you. Anything. She'd say anything to be good company. Or to test her skills or whatever. Anything." She watched him. "That's the thing with liars, I mean." She turned away and continued walking, left John standing perplexed for a moment behind her, watching her march on without him to the bridge's halfway point, where its gentle ascent subtly exhaled into a gentle descent.

His pain was out of proportion; he knew that right away. It made no real difference what these women thought of each other. But that she hadn't seen what John was in Nadja's company, and what Emily herself could be, that she hadn't been as he thought she had been just ten minutes earlier: This was a jabbing, breath-stealing pain. He ran, caught up with her, took her arm, turned her toward him. "Let me ask you something. Don't you want her to be telling the truth?" The traffic went silent and brushed soft lights across half of Emily's face, from cheek to nose, over and over again in irregular rhythm.

"What does that have to do with any—?"

"Everything. It has everything to do with everything. Don't you want that to be the world?" He was proud to be agitated, in defense not of Nadja but of the whole world she had given him.

Emily's face changed, relaxed into a kind of sympathy. "Oh, sweetheart, I don't want the world to be anything." John felt himself fighting to remain himself, fighting to take the word sweetheart as a lover, not as a nephew. "The world is and grown-ups react to it as best they can. It isn't made of funny stories."

He took Emily's hand. "Yes, but it's where you find—the world isn't just— doesn't it matter—" Finally, he just emitted a grunt, maddened frustration that

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smoked through his clenched teeth. "I was interviewing these soldiers tonight, your friends the marines. Nadja is the other side, the opposite of that. You can see that, can't you?"

"The marines? I'm not sure I follow you, no."

"Look there. Look!" John grabbed her shoulders and rotated her, faced her toward the Danube, stood next to her and pointed downriver where the Chain Bridge's lights had just switched off—the very moment Emily was speaking— and now left that monument lingering against the dark sky and water like an afterimage projected behind closed eyelids. 'And that!" he said, gathering sure-ness, almost shoving her to look up at the gray-black silhouette of the extinguished palace set against the blue-black sky, almost nothing more than a palace-shaped absence of stars. "Those are real, Em. Those are the world right now. Our world. And so is Nadja. Her life is—that's how it ought—" His voice softened, shifted from excited to soothing. 'And you're here with me in it." And his head inclined, and his hands held her face, and his lips found hers for a moment and another and another and one half a moment more, and he was in-arguably right, right about all of it.

"No." She leaned away. "John." She pulled away from his hands. "That's not for us." She smiled and laughed, her standard technique to help boys gracefully escape their embarrassment or anger at this moment. "We're both an Unicum or two over the limit, young man, and it's a school night. I'll walk myself home and you get some sleep. I'll catch up with you at the Gerbeaud. You can tell me what Nadja thinks up to say about me."

She's gone. John Price stands at the center, the highest point in the gently sighing arch of the Margaret Bridge, and he leans against the parapet, tries to focus his eyes on the stones of the Chain Bridge. He wishes they had been on that bridge, a few hundred yards downstream. That's where he would feel complete, where he belongs. There, she would have understood; that kiss would have made inevitable sense. After a while, he bites his lips, considers and rejects in turn going to visit his brother or Mark Payton or Charles Gabor. He pushes himself away from the steel railing, his hands gritty from the bolt heads they rested on. He walks back toward Pest, spits into the Danube.

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the Old Student with John, Charles submitted his rebelliously wordy report

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on the Horvath Press to the Presiding Vice, who read most of the first sentence of every paragraph, then had Zsuzsa fax it to New York: My strongest re.com-men... As an opening maneuver in the Hungarian thea... With dear synergies with our... The attached data leads me to confidently predict more profitable sectors than current management env... Likely exits include: grow to suitable threshold for public offer on BP exchange, 18-24 months. Alternately, an industry consolidation is rated a "highly likely" in 6 analyst reports (attached), implying a highly probable M&A opp . . . Due to a historic alignment of rare circum . . . CM Gabor, Budapest Office.

Charles then disappeared from view for nearly nine days, Saturday morning to Sunday evening. His secretary declared him out of town. His home answering machine spoke and claimed to listen but was unable to produce the man himself. He was absent from evenings at the Gerbeaud, nights at A Hazam, and everywhere else. On Thursday night, John, desperate for a heterosexual man's view on Emily, took a tram and bus out to Charles's place in the hills and rang the bell. There were lights behind the curtains, but no one came to the door. On the seventh day of Charles's absence, John's answering machine coughed up this impersonation of the missing man: "There is never an end to it, God help me." Charles was noticeably slurring. "Is there an end to it, Johnny? God help me, I don't think there is." The next evening, Sunday, Charles remate-rialized, dapper and reposeful on the Gerbeaud patio, smiling, stubbornly refusing to discuss the past week or the gray-haired couple with whom he had spent that endless week and then just dropped at Ferihegy Airport to catch their plane to Zurich, connecting to New York, connecting to Cleveland, thank sweet Jesus.

Early the next morning, he sat on the note from the Very Pathetic that had been waiting on his chair since Tuesday, four days after his report had made its own trip to New York:

Charlie—NYHQfast on the pub q. Ixnay, puppy. No way, Hosay. The guy's not even Hungarian. He's an Austrian. It's an Austrian company, Charlie. No good having the first deal be about a bunch of Austrians, right? Gotta say: I think you should have caught this.

Charles leaned his forehead against the still-cool window and passed ten minutes in disgusted consideration of the VP's belief-beggaring stupidity. He then made a few notes on a yellow pad, drew a flurry of straight arrows with big, filled triangular heads that flew from one scribbled, abbreviated idea to the next, twice ending in ornately doodled question marks. It was half a plan, any-

how. He placed one call to a lawyer friend and another to the State Privatization Agency. Finally, after four more minutes of forced meditation while furiously waiting for an international dial tone, he was connected to Imre Horvath in Vienna. "]6 napot, Horvath ur," he began brightly. "Gdbor Kdroly beszel. Jo hirem van [I have some good news]."

"It's a little complicated, deal-structure-wise," Charles told John twelve hours later as the journalist lay on the office couch watching sunset change the colors of the glass sky behind Charles's head.

"The word you're struggling for is lie. You are lying. It's a lie." "This is an ugly and overused term." Golden, heavenly sunbeams shot through silver clouds and lent his silhouette a spiky halo that forced John to squint. "Just loan me the credibility I am credibly entitled to, and everything will be fine. Check this out: I hired a cleaning lady, a cook, and a gardener this weekend," he said. "I have a staff. Is that not the funniest thing you have ever heard? A staff. The point is, just help me convince Horvath I'm the guy, and we'll explain the firm's sad position later. When the humor of it will be more readily comprehensible."

"i UNDERSTAND FROM our mutual friend you are a rising and a respected jour-nalist," Imre Horvath said as John sat, three days later, to join Charles and the publisher for the last half of their meeting over the Gerbeaud's coffee and milk, respectively. "My family has been in your newspaper business for six generations," the Hungarian continued. "I expect we shall return to this line of work in Budapest before long." As he sat in the heat of the patio, John's very first response to Imre—less than thirty seconds after meeting him—was awe, an uncontrollable emotional and physical response that John felt in his spine and his tailbone, his palms and forearms, his cheeks and his kidneys. He was taken by surprise after Charles's mocking descriptions of Imre; in person, the Hungarian was an imposing figure, and the gossipy snippets of history and suffering Charles had mentioned placed Imre in a different category of humanity altogether.

Of course, Imre certainly took himself seriously, John realized a minute later in an effort to break free of this stifling, unacceptable awe, this sharp envy. Imre was talking about something very prosaic—old newspaper-production methods—but John's mind strolled through a prairie landscape of jealousy of those who proved themselves in the ultimate test of their era and came up worthy. "There was a moment of surprise, yes, when the AVO burst through the

door," Imre was saying, and John's envy quickly disguised itself for its owner's benefit as something much more dignified and palatable: scorn: John resented Imre's failed and transparent efforts to coax envy and admiration. He began noticing with satisfaction the holes in Imre's stories, the richness of his suit, his monumental will to impress.

And so now John ^ndertook with pleasure the mission Charles had assigned him. The lies blossomed effortlessly. He pushed the conversation as far and as fast as he could, dared Charles to keep up. "Who's that playwright you are always quoting, Karoly?" John asked him. "The fellow with the biting satires? Horn, isn't it? What was the one you read aloud to us here last week?"

"Marvelous!" exclaimed Horvath. "His works are printed by our family since their first editions, all of the plays."

"Whatever happened to your plan to finance a theater, Karoly?" John asked Charles. "Karoly has often told me, Imre, that it was a love of culture, an aspiration to civility, that brought him into venture finance in the first place," John heard himself saying as Charles bit into a pastry. "Quixotic but true. I want my profile of his work to show how he's always hoped to use capital to promote culture. So far he's been disappointed at the common thinking of those who surround him. I think he doesn't realize how rare is the clarity of his vision."

"We are relying upon it," Imre intoned, "and I am glad to hear I am not the only one who sees this strength and promise in our Karoly. Your readers, Mr. Price, should be interested in the successes that can come to a man of youth, energy, and culture as Mr. Gabor is. Particularly now. Particularly in Hungary."

"Precisely. What I find striking"—John decided to use Charles's nom de guerre as often as possible—"is Karoly's literacy in a profession that too often stresses the bottom line. Karoly is an old-fashioned type, a European type, but a remarkable amalgamation of his Hungarian culture and his American upbringing." He paused to light a cigarette and pretended to search for the right words, though he felt tremendously articulate; he could have produced great chunks of this stuff without stopping for breath. "A gentleman first, a businessman second, our Karoly. I am fascinated to see if there is room for such a specimen as Karoly in the world today. One can hope, but dare not be certain."

"Take it easy, killer," Charles said when Imre excused himself. "Let's play it a hair slower. You sound like his Hungarian sycophants back in Vienna."

"Karoly tells me you are returning to Hungary with quite extensive plans," said John when Imre had returned.