With a strange urge to escape he paid for his Pilsners and ducked out into the fresh snow. A prostitute strolled past and he eyed her without slowing. On the pavement the snow was building into slush that came through the sides of his shoes.
A taxi eased by and he waved it down. “How far to Moldova?” he asked in German. The driver answered in Slovak; Neill tore a piece of paper from his notebook, wrote “Moldova 21” and handed it to him. Get in, the driver beckoned, did a U-turn, and drove through town upriver. Ten-forty, a clock said. Late again, Neill thought.
The tires whammed as the taxi dropped from macadam to cobbles. There were buildings with empty windows now, no pavements, here and there a truck trailer alongside an unlit opened door, men moving without lights, black warehouses three stories high, potholes and ruts laced with ice, once a dead horse at the side of the street, legs frozen in the air.
No cobbles now, just dirt. In and around skeletons of old trucks and piles of scrap timber, wire, and steel, red flash of rat eyes. The taxi stopped. “One thousand korunas,” the driver said in German.
“Moldova 21?”
The driver pointed down a wide empty street, toward the river. “One thousand.”
“Take me there.” Neill pointed at himself, down the street.
The driver moved one hand over the other to signify a car over the street, crashing in potholes, crumpling to a halt. The driver had narrow, sunken cheeks, emaciated skin over bone. He walked two fingers down one of his hands, showed a crossroads. “One.” The fingers loped to the next, the next, all the way to five.
Neill could see nothing down the street. “Das is gefährlich?” he said – is it dangerous? – made the motion of cutting his own throat.
The driver chuckled. “Im Bratislava, alle ist gefährlich.”
Neill paid the thousand korunas and got out. The taxi spun round and its taillights vanished the way they'd come. Neill drew his coat close, tripped over a piece of cable, stood rubbing his knee through the torn cloth. No streetlights, barely enough reflection off the smog to show rooftops high on either side, here and there a grim glimmer of window, dark gape of a door. Car lights were coming down the road, stopped a block away, went out.
He stumbled on something hard, moved round it – broken bricks. At the second crossroads several trucks clustered like great dark buffaloes feeding, between them a fire with two men crouched before it.
Ice on the puddles crunched under his feet.
At the fifth crossroads he turned left into the cold sewery wind off the river. This street was wider, cobbled in places, a skein of transmission cables over tilting dark buildings.
In London you never worry about dark places, he realized, because the crooks are too cowardly to go in them. But here...
He kept to the middle of the street. The whole thing was crazy but if there was this Moldova 21, he might as well get there instead of trying to go back. They wouldn't have put it on the poster if it didn't exist.
Unless the taxi driver had made a mistake. Or he'd brought him to the wrong place on purpose, radioed some friends and told them where to find him.
The darkness deepened on his left – an alley, at its far end a red glimmer. He hesitated, trying to watch all directions, fearing someone behind. If he went down the alley they'd grab him. But the red light was probably 21 – this must be Moldova. If he went back he'd have to pass the men at the fire, by the trucks. He moved a foot into the alley, hit his knee against hard metal, cold. A car. There seemed to be cars down both sides, a narrow pavement between them.
Silly to be fearful in such a silly situation. Down there, that red light had to be Moldova 21. Or a place with a phone, maybe.
The red glimmer was a light over a red door. Under its aura a Mercedes coupé, an Audi, a Harley with a Portugal license, a Lancia with Stuttgart plates. Reassured, he pushed the lit doorbell.
The red door opened, blocked by a big man in a black jacket, a wild black beard, thick red-rimmed glasses. “You're late,” he said in English.
Neill glanced at his watch. “The cab left me. I had to walk.”
“Where's the woman?” At the man's back a whitewashed stone stairway dropped toward the sound of heavy metal.
“Woman?”
“You're supposed to bring at least one. This is a couples place.”
“It didn't say that.”
“You don't read Slovak?”
To Neill his own words seemed ludicrous, a servile postulant's. “I saw it in English.”
“Welcome to Hell,” the man snorted. “But you pay the couples price.”
Another song was playing now, though the first hadn't had time to stop. Neill went down the narrow deep stairs to a wooden door with black metal studs. Now the music seemed overhead. The door wouldn't open.
He went back up but the man with the wild beard and red glasses was gone and the front door was locked. Or was this a different door? Had he come up the wrong stairs? The music was loud, from everywhere at once; it made it hard to think. The man must have locked up – too late, no more people allowed in. Neill shoved the door but it was solid as stone. He went back downstairs, the music fading, but the door was open now on a squat smoky room with couples dancing to Poison between gauze banners hung like cloth walls. This isn't Hell, Neill thought. Not Poison but Scorpions, the couples sliding through smoke and gauze banners. A woman dropped a cigarette, snuffed it with a high-heeled shoe, smiled at Neill and swung back to her partner. At the end of the room was a bar and behind it a movie showing a room of haze and smoke and slowly writhing couples. It wasn't a film but a silk curtain, and beyond it a room of sheepskin, leather, and low couches, men and women making love.
“You didn't come with anybody?” the bar girl said.
“Why does everyone speak English?”
“It's the only other language I know. You take a drink? It's in the price.”
He nodded at the two women and the man naked on the floor behind her. “This happen every night?”
She shrugged, unwrapped the cork of a bottle of champagne, pulled the cork, filled his glass and set the bottle beside it.
There were no stools at the bar. He hung his coat over one arm, his back to the bar. The champagne tasted of roses. Dancers shifted in and out of darkness, the melody changed, occasionally people moved from one side of the silk screen to the other. You think you're wildly passionate lovers, Neill thought, but you're just two flabby people twitching on the floor.
He had such a wearying sense of so many things always going wrong, no let-up. Job and family and fate, remembering when things were different. No wonder. The music ebbed and returned, over the nearer voices, the air thick with cigarette smoke. A woman came naked through the silk screen and took a bottle back into the room. The music broke and couples jostled beside him at the bar, glued to each other or nonchalantly distant, a woman's hot haunch against his thigh as she embraced her lover. Another man raised his partner's dress to her waist while she rubbed up and down against him and they took turns drinking from a champagne bottle. A couple came in the door, leaned to each other briefly, then moved apart. The woman pushed past Neill to the bar, took a long drink from his bottle. She was breathing hard and her black hair stuck to the back of her neck. “Couldn't wait!” she said. “I'll give you some of mine.”
“It's all right. I'm not staying.”
“Not staying? It's just beginning.”
“Why does everybody speak English?”