Somewhere East of Life

Burnell ran Monty Broadwell-Smith to ground in a bar in Pest. Monty was drinking with a few cronies and did not see Burnell. Which was hardly surprising: every line of sight ran up against gilded statuary or supernumerary columns. This nest of rooms, given over to most of the pleasures of the flesh, had been somewhere wicked under an earlier regime, and in consequence was well – indeed floridly – furnished. The posturing plaster Venuses consorted oddly with the group of tousled heads nodding over their glasses of Beck. Burnell stood in an inner room and told a waiter to fetch Monty, saying a friend wished to see him.

Monty was still wearing Burnell’s sweater. When he saw who was awaiting him, he raised his hands in mock-surrender. Burnell put a clenched fist under his nose.

‘Pax, old man. No offence meant. Honest Injun.’ He put a hand up and lowered Burnell’s fist. Barely ruffled, he explained that since he had lost his job in England he had had to find work in Europe – like thousands of other chaps down on their luck. Eventually, he had found a job acting as decoy for Antonescu and his illegal EMV enterprise. His role as an Anglophone was to lure in innocent foreigners who arrived in Budapest to take advantage of low Hungarian prices. It was economic necessity that drove him to it. His eyebrows signalled sincerity.

He knew, he said, it was a bit of a shady enterprise. ‘Rather like wreckers luring ships on the rocks in the old days.’

‘So you’ve fallen so low you’d even prey on your friends.’

‘Be fair, Roy, old man.’ He breathed alcohol over Burnell. ‘I have to pick and choose my clients. You’ve no idea, no idea, how uninteresting some people’s memories are, all through life. Mine wouldn’t be worth a sausage. But yours – well, perhaps you don’t remember, but I met you and your wife at university. She was a real stunner, so I knew your memories would be worth having.’

‘You little bastard! You had your paws in the till at university. Now you’ve had them in my mind. Stealing memory is a form of murder.’

Wincing slightly, Monty agreed. ‘Wreckers again, you see. Poor old mariners … Look, come and have a drink with my friends. No doubt there will be tighter legislation in Hungary when e-mnemonicvision becomes less than a seven days’ wonder. Until that time, Antonescu earns a modest dollar from his bootleg memory bullets and tosses me the occasional crust. Now then, let me stand you an aperitif. It’s almost lunchtime.’

‘It’s three in the afternoon, you boozy git!’

Monty put a persuasive hand on Burnell’s arm. Burnell wrenched his arm away. ‘You’ve poisoned my life, you bastard. You’d probably poison my drink. Now I’ve got you, I’m going to turn you in – you and your precious Antonescu.’ There was canned music in the room. Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ was playing, dripping away like a tap.

Monty drew himself up and smoothed the sweater down. ‘Don’t threaten me. You have a contempt for me. Fair enough – you always were a supercilious bastard. But just think how I might feel about you! I’ve had to edit ten years of your stupid life down to make a presentable bullet. It wasn’t too edifying, old sport, let me tell you. A ten-year plod down the recesses of your memory! A bit like looking down into a sewer at times – no offence meant.’ He elaborated on this in some detail, concluding by saying, ‘You ought to be glad to be rid of stuff like that. You’re free of it – Free Of All Memory!’

‘Oh, I see, Broadwell-Smith. The FOAM theory of history: never learn anything … Just bloody forget, is that it? Have you ever heard that saying about those who forget history being doomed to repeat it? Why do you think the world’s in such a fucking mess?’ With a quick move, he twisted Monty’s arm and had him in a half-Nelson. ‘It’s retribution time, Monty, and a stinking Hungarian cell for you.’ He gave Broadwell-Smith’s arm an extra wrench, till the man howled. A waiter came to watch, without interfering.

‘God, that’s no way to treat … Listen Roy, Roy, look, stop this. Do you really want unpleasant publicity? This is what I’ll do. I’ll make a deal. A generous deal.’

‘No deals, you sod. You caught me once – you aren’t going to catch me again. Out of that door.’

‘Wait, wait. Ouch! Listen, you sadist, here’s the deal. Just let me go, savvy?’

‘Don’t let him go,’ advised the waiter from the sidelines.

‘Let me go and I will nip straight round to the clinic. It’s locked but I’ve got a key. I’ll nip straight round to the clinic and I’ll steal the master-bullet and bring it back to you. Where are you staying? The Gellert again, I suppose? You plutocrats … I’ll bring you back the memory bullet we made.’

Burnell twisted the arm again. The waiter said, appreciatively, ‘This man, he never pays a round.’

Another twist, more details. ‘There are two bullets, to be honest. I’m being honest, Roy. Ow! I’ll bring them both back to you. And you can then go somewhere – England, Germany, France – and get those squalid years of yours reinserted back in your noddle, if that’s what you want. What do you say?’

Burnell relaxed his hold. ‘I’ll come with you.’

Straightening, Monty regained confidence.

‘No, you won’t. There’s a guard on the clinic door these days. He’d kill you. I’ll get the bullets. Promise. Bring them to the Gellert without fail at –’ he looked at his watch ‘– give me two hours. Say six o’clock, OK. I think I can swing it.’

With some reluctance, Burnell agreed to this plan. He let go of Monty entirely. Recent sessions with Rebecca Rosebottom had made him, he felt, unusually alert to fraudulence. Accordingly, he watched to see what Monty might do when he left the bar.

Monty performed somewhat as expected. The moment he was in the street, he started to run. Burnell ran after him. Monty dodged along a side alley, down some steps, and into a main thoroughfare. A tram car was approaching. As Monty rushed to get on, Burnell’s hand fell on his shoulder.

Only for a moment did a look of anger cross Monty’s face.

‘Oh, Roy, dear old feller – how glad I am you’re here. Thanks so much.’ The tram sliced by within a few inches of them. He fell into Burnell’s arms. The latter fended him off but, before he could speak, Monty was babbling on, eyebrows shooting up and down.

‘Roy, I have such trouble. As I left that rotten drinking establishment, the ghost of Charles de Gaulle was waiting outside for me. You know, the French chappie with the big conk who made it to President? Charles de Gaulle – an airport named after him outside Paris. There he was again! Right in the street, in broad daylight. Did you see him? I ran like billy-oh. Thank God you saved me! Sometimes he follows me into the old W. Never knew a case like it.’

Burnell hailed a cab and bundled Monty in.

At the Gellert, Burnell paid off the cab and heaved Monty, now in a collapsible state, into the ornate foyer.

‘All right, Broadwell-Smith, now let’s have the truth. No bloody ghost stories. I have every reason to beat you up, so vex me no further. How do I get my memory back? How do you get it back for me?’

Pulling himself upright and tugging his little beard, Monty said, ‘Please don’t threaten me in a place I’m well respected. Besides, I’m feeling unwell after all the exertion. Let me be honest with you, Roy, your last ten years were crap. Full of crap … There, I don’t want to be too hard on you. Everyone’s last ten years were probably full of crap. I ought to know – I’ve edited enough of Antonescu’s silly symphonies in the last few weeks. What utter shits men are … Now I think of it, I feel sorry for you.’

Burnell stuck his knuckles between the other’s thin ribs.

‘Stop bullshitting me, you little cheat. You robbed me. You buggered up my life and then had me dumped on Salisbury Plain.’

Shaking his head, Monty looked out miserably across the Danube to Pest with its dense Magyar thoroughfares where fat profiteers of many nations were sweating over their calculators. ‘You were lucky. Believe me. As a compatriot, as an old friend far from home, I interceded for you. Generally our victims – well, patients, let’s say – get dumped outside the city, still drugged, on a refuse-tip twenty kilometres away from here. And what happens to them then? Peasants rob ’em or kill ’em.

‘You’ve had an easy time of it. You should be grateful. Your pater was always well heeled, not to mention being a bit of a crook, eh?

‘In your case – Roy, old chap, I shouldn’t be telling you this. It puts my very life in hazard. In your case, I interceded. “Cedo, cedere, cessi, cessum”, to beg or something. A flight was being planned to deliver arms to the UK, to the BRI. British Revolutionary Islam, savvy? Totally secret of course. A secret arms drop on Salisbury Plain, paid for by Muslims over here. I pulled a few strings and got you flown over too. Drugged. You were dropped along with the weaponry. Better than the refuse-tip, admit it. You owe me a big favour.’

‘I owe you nothing. You’re going to give me back those memory bullets right now.’ Knuckle in deeper. A passing sheikh, wafting perfume, looked surprised, but not extremely surprised.

‘You’re hurting me, Roy. I don’t feel well. The drink in that place was poisoned. I need to go to the Gents. I am about to be sick.’ He writhed realistically, and made appropriate noises in his throat.

Burnell got him up to his room. He bound Monty’s hands behind his back with a tie.

‘This talk about a master-bullet in Antonescu’s clinic. Are you lying? You’d better tell me, Broadwell-Smith, or I’ll lock you in the wardrobe and leave you there to die.’

By this time, Monty was the same shade of trampled grey as the carpet. ‘Really, old boy, you can work that one out for yourself. Antonescu runs an illegal operation. Is he going to leave evidence lying about? He might be raided any day – not by the police, of course, but by a rival gang. From the master-bullets we make about five hundred copies. Not much profit in it, really. As soon as these are sold to a dealer, they’re off our hands and the masters are destroyed.’

‘Five hundred copies? You made five hundred copies of my precious memories?’ He was almost bereft of speech. While he knew nothing of his recent past, the whole world could be laughing over it.

‘You weren’t exactly in the Casanova league, old chum, let’s face it. We had a Pole in the clinic a couple of months ago … He was in the two-thousand-copy bracket, because—’

‘Never mind the Poles. You said you made two bullets. Was that also a lie?’

Presenting an expression of blameless honesty, Monty explained that Mircea Antonescu dealt in more than one market. He extracted all Burnell’s professional knowledge, editing it from the ten-year period. That knowledge was reproduced in an edition of maybe a hundred copies. A limited scholarly audience existed for such things, and paid well. Lazy students of architecture, teachers needing a short cut – such people formed a ready market. Pausing to gather courage, Monty added that Burnell’s store of learning made up one bullet; his love life made up the other. All skilfully edited, of course – by himself.

‘Oh God!’ Burnell sat down and hid his face in his hands. ‘You swear this is truth, you little chiseller?’

‘Would I lie? Read my lips.’ He started to go into details of what he referred to as ‘the choice bits’, but Burnell interrupted him.

‘So where have all these copies of my memory – my life – gone?’

Monty declared that that was up to the dealer to whom Antonescu sold. Antonescu was naturally secretive about such matters, but he had heard that the dealer traded the bullets on promptly to Eastern Europe and beyond, where they could not be traced. ‘Buchuresti is one market. Bootleg EMVs move from there further East. All the old nations and raggle-taggle once coerced into the Soviet Union are avid to feed on porn.’

‘Porn! You call my sacred memories porn, you little skunk?’