Reamde

Hungarians had a thing for math. Contrary to rumor, this was not genetic. It couldn’t be. As anyone could see from walking down the streets of Budapest, they were absolute mongrels—the Americans of Europe. Lots of blue eyes in faces where one would otherwise not expect to see them. Expensive billboards, all over Budapest’s airports, touted the expertise, the might, the global reach of German engineering and construction firms. Engineering! Another luxury of nationalities with huge populations and intact landmasses. Hungary, severed from half of the population and most of the natural resources that it had once claimed, had now to practice a sort of economic acupuncture, striving to know the magic nodes in the global energy flow where a pinprick could alter the workings of a major organ. Mathematics was one of the few disciplines where it was possible to exert that degree of leverage, and so the Hungarians had become phenomenally good at teaching it to their children. Part of that was awarding recognition to those who excelled at it. Bartos had participated in mathematics contests that were broadcast on national television as if they were football championships. He even looked like a mathematician.

Meanwhile Csongor, who didn’t, was skulking through the corridors of his school trying to avoid the coach of the wrestling team, who tracked him down at least once a day and did everything short of putting him in a headlock to make him show up for practice. Csongor had just barely managed to keep the athletic department at bay by joining the hockey team. But he could not bring himself to skate backward, so they made him the goalkeeper. This he was actually good at, because of an unusual combination of puck-blocking bulk with extremely fast reflexes (he had once tried to capitalize on the latter by becoming a saber fencer, but, as the coach explained to him, “There is too much of you to hit”).

He could not have known, during his young puck-stopping years, that this would provide so much conversational fodder for his eventual boss: a Russian organized crime figure and hockey fanatic who wanted to be addressed as Ivanov.

Don’t you want to get old and grow the mustache? Drive the bus?

Ivanov insisted that he was a great admirer of the Hungarians and was always marveling over the miracle of their continuing to exist at all, which at first Csongor naively took as a compliment but later came to understand as an implicit threat. His way of bonding with Csongor had been to make all sorts of remarks about Csongor’s appearance. “You do not look like hacker. Seeink you on street, I would say captain of water polo team. Then, bouncer in nightclub. Then, bus driver. When you going to grow the big mustache?” For it seemed as though Hungarian men, though they looked all sorts of different ways when young, converged on a few basic body shapes when old. The Grizzled Bullet Head. The Highbrow, with receding silver hair swept back. The Carpathian Wild Man, preceded everywhere by his eyebrows. Csongor, a classic Bullet Head, knew it was only a matter of time before he grew the Mustache. But for now it was his practice to just mow his hair down to stubble on the first Tuesday of each month and to keep his face, which he thought unobjectionable but far from handsome, clean-shaven.

He had learned that certain women were drawn to big men, and he had not been above taking advantage of this from time to time. He had had only one serious girlfriend, a year ago. Yesterday, he had decided that Zula was the woman for him.

He had not exactly lost consciousness when Ivanov had pistol-whipped him across the jaw, but become, as it were, extremely distracted and somewhat disconnected from control of his body during the moments that the other gunman had made his surprising intervention. He had felt, and profoundly appreciated, the feel of Zula’s hand on his cheek as she broke his fall, but he was a little fuzzy as to what else had happened, largely because his head had been aimed in the wrong direction and he’d been unable to move it.

Now he was not the least bit fuzzy. He knew that he was in the cellar of a building that was in the process of collapsing. That the immensely strong stairway core was holding up well and creating a pocket of relatively safe breathing space around it. And that he was trapped in that pocket with the semidecapitated corpse of Ivanov and a Kalashnikov assault rifle. And while on one level the situation was, obviously, ridiculously chaotic and dangerous, the Hungarian in him said, I was wondering when I was going to end up like this.

From time to time he had wondered how his grandfather had died, since no one had a clue where, or even in what year, it had happened. Maybe he had been in the cellar of some building in Stalingrad, just like this.