Corruption Read online

  My fist relaxed. “I know. Just curious. But where in the U.S. are you from?”

  “And why exactly do you want to know where he’s from?” English said.

  “Mostly because I’m trying to be social, and have a conversation with someone who speaks more than two words of my language, but also because I’ve only been in this country a few days. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression you guys have both been here a lot longer than I have, so I was hoping I could pick your brains a little bit about what I should do and see while I’m here. Or at least, where the cheapest place is to get drunk.”

  American studied me with newfound interest. “Maybe we have. Maybe we haven’t. You’re from California, right?”

  “I am.”

  “Up north?”

  I nodded.

  “San Francisco?”

  “Close enough. Arcata.”

  The American sipped his beer. “Passed through there once. Anyway, pleasure to meet you, San Francisco. I’m Ink. This is England, but you can call him Big Ben.”

  “I’m tellin’ ya,” English said. “Knock that fookin’ shit off right now. I don’t have time fer it.”

  American grinned at me. “You know why we call him Big Ben?”

  I shook my head.

  “Of course you don’t. Story for another time.”

  Big Ben took a deep breath, rubbed his temples, and finished the dregs of his beer. “All right, Ink. I’m ‘bout ready for another. Are you buyin’?”

  “What are you boys drinking?” I said. “Maybe I can get this round.”

  “Inkie, he wants to buy you a drink. I think you found your sweetheart for the night.”

  “Hey, fuck off with that already,” I said.

  Big Ben shrugged.

  The American said, “Sure, you can buy us a drink. Then you can tell us your life story. I want to know something about the guy who just wasted five minutes of my time.”

  I returned to their table with a tray of Countryish vodka. There was a promotion at the bar, ten shots for fifteen crowns, about five dollars. That was only fifty cents per shot.

  Big Ben’s eyes went wide when I set the tray down in front of him. American’s remained obstinate.

  “You planning to drink all of that yourself, SF?” American said.

  “You accepted me at your table,” I said, sitting down with them. “So, the way I see it, it’s only fair you accept my challenge, as well.”

  I divvied up the shots so each of us had three, putting the last one in the middle. “Last one to finish their three shots has to drink.”

  “What kinda fookin stupid game is that?” Big Ben said.

  “You’re just worried you’ll lose,” the American said.

  I chuckled. Big Ben gave me the stink eye.

  “You boys ready?” I said.

  And the American, “Bottoms up.”

  I’d finished all three of my shots by the time Big Ben got to his second. The American finished next, Big Ben coming in a distant third. He sighed and grabbed for his punishment, but in his haste accidentally swiped the final shot off the table, sending the full shot glass clattering to the floor and spraying vodka on the feet of one of the Countryish guys sitting at the table next to us.

  “Oi. Sorry mate,” Big Ben said. “Did I get some of that on your shoes?”

  “Yes,” the Countryish guy said. He was huge.

  “Ey, ‘s all right. Accidents happen,” Big Ben said, bending over to pick up the fallen glass.

  Their whole table was staring at us. Big Ben turned back to me and grinned. “Na zdrovie!” he said.

  American leaned back in his chair. “So, what’s a Northern Cali boy doing in Country?”

  “Fast alcohol and cheap women,” I said.

  Big Ben scratched his head, but the American gave me the smallest nod of approval.

  My tone remained deadpan. “No, I moved here for work. What about you guys?”

  American and Big Ben exchanged a look, as if the answer should have been obvious. “Girls,” American said.

  Big Ben nodded. “The women in this country are fookin’ incredible. They’re beautiful, thin, sweet, and they’ve got these great plump arses you can just dive into like you’re jumpin’ into a nice, warm pool…”

  “And they like American guys?” I said.

  The American shook his head. “You’re not going to point at a girl on the street, and zap her panties off, just for having a blue passport. It’s not that easy. But it kind of is.”

  “Aye,” Big Ben, shaking his head into his drink. “It definitely is, you Yankee Doodle son of a bitch.”

  The American studied me. “You walk with a little bit of a slouch, and your shoes are old. Get some new clothes, stand up straight, and girls will be eye-fucking you left and right, because you’re more interesting than the potato-looking boyfriend she has at home. Use that to your advantage. Don’t try to fit in”

  “I had no idea,” I said.

  The American swirled his beer and continued. “Girls here don’t enjoy shooting men down here like they do back in the States. You won’t encounter the mean, hostile attitudes or get cock-blocked by the bitter fat friend playing mother hen. Short hair and tattoos are extremely uncommon here. Countyrish girls are nice girls... most of them. They’re feminine. Nurturing. They take care of themselves. And they enjoy treating you like a man.”

  “Wow,” I said, staring at my shoes. The leather did look exhausted. “I just sort of assumed, since so many of them look like models, they wouldn’t…”

  “Want anything to do with you?” the American cut me off. “No. You’re right. They don’t. So keep getting drunk by yourself in your apartment. Your time here in Country will be very fulfilling.”

  I didn’t say anything about getting drunk at my apartment, I thought, but was already too drunk to think much of it.

  Big Ben chuckled and slapped me on the shoulder. “Mate, you gotta believe in yourself. Good lookin’ lad like you? If I’da known what I know now, when I was your age, and I was here, I would’ve been pillaging so much arse, they would’ve thrown me in jail. Look at Ink. He should be deported. Just this week, I’ve seen him with three different girls. Not ugly ones, neither, nines and tens.”

  “Tens don’t exist,” the American called Ink said.

  “That’s not the point. The point is, well, I lost the point. But that wasn’t it.”

  “Hmmm.” I drummed my fingers on the tabletop. “So, how do I talk to the local girls? What do I say?”

  The American leaned closer to me. “The line you use, is, Are you French?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You ask them: are you French? Countryish people associate France with beautiful people, beaches, sex, and wine. By asking if she’s French, you’re complimenting her.”

  “Does that actually work?” I said.

  American stared me in the eye, softly cracked his pinkies. “Never,” he said.

  I couldn’t tell if these guys were having another go at me, or not. I decided to play it neutral. “So, how long have you both been here?” I said. “Am I right that it’s been a while? That you all flew the coop, got the hell out of Dodge?”

  “I’m from Blackburn. Where the fook is Dodge?” Big Ben said.

  The American tapped Big Ben’s arm. “It’s an idiom.”

  “Oh.” Big Ben said. “Ink lives here, but I’m only here four days, maybe five. Sixteen times I’ve been in Country. Every time gets better.”

  “Sixteen,” I said. “That’s a lot.”

  A dour look crept onto the Englishman’s face. “Or maybe it’s not enough. It’s bloody cheap to come here for us. Get drunk. Stay in a nice apartment. If you earn pounds, the money here isn’t even real. It’s like play money.” He took out a silver money clip shaped like a naked woman from his pants pocket and tossed a few twenty-crown notes onto the table. “Shhhh-it. Fook. I think I need another drink.”

  The American grinned. “Thought
we were on good behavior tonight, Benny.”

  “Do what you want. I’m on the righteous path.”

  “In that case, why don’t you go get us all one more, so we don’t stray from it.”

  Grumbling, Big Ben got up and went to the bar.

  “So, how long have you lived here?” I said.

  “Four years. Before that, I was in Thailand. Haven’t been to the U.S. in six,” Ink said.

  “Do you see yourself ever going back?”

  “No.”

  The TV blared as Russia scored a point and raucous shouts and booing filled the bar.

  When the noise died down, the American stroked his beard and said, “I think you’ll find during your time here, that this place is not really what you expect. You’ll find it gets harder and harder to go back to what you were, until you reach a point where it becomes impossible.”

  Big Ben returned with three beers, set them down in front of us.

  Ink raised his glass. “Fuck England.”

  Big Ben toasted him. “Fuck America.”

  We all clinked glasses and drank.

  Our conversation died as a pretty red-haired girl in a black dress and candy-apple high heels entered the room. We all watched as she weaved gracefully through the tangle of high-backed chairs and shaved heads toward her friends, two attractive girls sitting at the table under the TV. She was tall and thin, the cookies-and-cream of her slender legs elegantly concealed in warm winter tights, her ridiculous neck holding up a delicate skull wrapped in freckled white paper.

  She held the attention of every man in that room, my new friends and I included, as she joined her friends at their table and they all hugged, delightfully greeting each other with a word that sounded like the English word chest. She sat down, and the volume level of the bar slowly rose back to normal, as everyone except the American stopped staring and went back to their business.

  Ink didn’t move or adjust his appearance. He watched her through a gap in the chairs and waited, sipping the foam off his beer. He absent-mindedly picked up the metal spoon from his soup, licked it, and began lacing it through his fingers like a casino dealer would a poker chip.

  Across the room, the pretty redhead caught his stare and blushed.

  “Excuse me,” Ink said, standing up.

  He went over to the table of Countryish girls and asked if they were French. I couldn’t hear what he said over the din, but I knew from his body language, cool and relaxed, drawing the three of them up into his field of gravity where he towered over their table, that was what he said, or something like it. The girls took the bait, and within an instant they were all laughing and smiling at his jokes.

  “That’s why we call him Ink,” Big Ben said to me.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Because he’s a dark cloud, fast-moving, who stains anything he touches.”

  Before I knew it, Ink had the girls rising from their chairs, beer glasses in hand to come over and join us at our table. Big Ben and I had to shuffle the chairs to make room. There weren’t enough seats, so Ink grabbed a spare chair from one of the tables next to us. The dirty looks from the Countryish guys sitting there went from bad to worse.

  “These are my friends,” Ink said, introducing us, with a hand already on the small of the pretty redhead girl’s back. “This is Big Ben,” he pointed to Big Ben. “And this is Frisco. He’s from California.”

  I smiled and tipped my glass.

  The other two girls, a blonde girl in a modest green wool sweater-dress, and a black-haired girl in a short skirt and nude-colored tights, sat down between Ink and Big Ben, leaving me alone on the opposite side of the table.

  “Nice to meet you. I am Agnieszka,” the pretty redhead introduced herself.

  The girl in the green dress said, “I am Gosia.”

  “Hello. Jadviga,” the black-haired girl said.

  “This is Ink,” Big Ben said, waving his thumb in Ink’s direction.

  “We know,” Gosia said. “We already met.”

  “You know why they call him Ink?”

  Ink threw his hands up in the air in mock exasperation. “They don’t want to hear that story, Ben.”

  “Sure they do,” Big Ben said. “Look at their faces. If I don’t tell ‘em now, they’ll be disappointed.”

  “Tell us!” Agnieszka said.

  And Gosia, “Come on.”

  Ink rolled his eyes. “Fine. Ben can tell you. But you have to promise never to let this story leave this table. It could hurt my image if the wrong people hear.”

  Agnieszka put a hand on his chest. “We promise.”

  Ink winked at Big Ben, an obvious gesture to proceed with the routine.

  Big Ben cracked his knuckles and started:

  “Ink’s not his real name.”

  “We know,” the Countryish girls said.

  “We call him that because, when we was in the Army, in Afghanistan – that’s how we know each-other – Ink was a journalist. He wrote famous articles for the other soldiers about killing the Taliban. And every-fookin-where we went, the little Afghani children would run up to him and ask him for a pen.”

  “A pen?” Gosia said. “Why a pen?”

  “Fook if I know,” Big Ben said. “Pardon me, girls, but I swear like a sailor.”

  “We don’t care,” Jadviga said.

  “All right. Wonderful. Wonderful. Anyway, these little kids would always run up to us and ask Ink here for a pen. And Ink, being the wonderfully nice guy he is, always brought extra pens so he could give one to every kid who asked. Then, one day, the enemy caught us while we were sweeping a mountain pass for IEDs. We were under heavy fire, with no radio to call in air support. Every man in our squad thought for sure we’d be killed. I never wrote down me last wishes, you know – give me love to mum, and me Xbox to me little brother, and so on.”

  The girls smiled.

  Big Ben cleared his throat and continued. “So I asked Ink to write them down for me. But he’d given all his pens to the little Afghani children. The only one he had left, he hadn’t given away, because it was broken. Damn thing couldn’t write a word. So he snapped it in two, like this.”

  Big Ben illustrated by breaking an invisible pen with his hands. “He wrote down me message with the broken halves, even though there were bullets flyin' at us, and rocket-propelled grenades goin' off over our heads. He risked his life to write me last wishes with a broken pen.”

  “So… that’s it?” Agnieszka said. Her hand was on Ink’s now, stroking his black hair.

  Big Ben shrugged. “When the battle ended, we’d all somehow miraculously survived, but his face was so black from covering it with his ink-soaked hands, that we started callin' him Ink.”

  The girls gave each other a few impressed gazes.

  “He still has the note, too,” Ink said. “Framed on his mantle...”

  One of the Countryish guys said something from the other table, interrupting Big Ben’s story. It was directed at Agnieszka. Agnieszka’s face twisted in discomfort. My perception of time slowed as I, and everyone else at our table realized the guy was talking about us, and he had said something insulting.

  Agnieszka responded in Countryish. While I couldn’t understand her, her tone told me everything I needed to know. The guy had implied she was a slut for hanging out with foreigners, and she had told him to piss off.

  But the soccer thug-looking guy wasn’t having it. He and his four friends were all bad-looking dudes with shaved heads, keg-shaped guts and big muscles, and this wasn’t America. Agnieszka’s comeback had caused the guy to lose face in front of his comrades, and now he was going to make us pay for it.

  The guy said something else, and the three girls exchanged nervous glances.

  Big Ben asked Agnieszka, “You know these guys, luv?”

  Agnieszka shook her head.

  Big Ben turned around and said to the provoker, “You need somethin' mate?”

  The provoker looked at him, but said nothing.

 
Big Ben smiled a mouthful of mismatched gold teeth. “You can see we’re havin' a conversation, and it’s not polite to interrupt. So why don’t you tell us what you need, then mind your business.”

  The provoker ignored him a second time.

  “Hey, I’m talkin' to you, fookhead.”

  Then the provoker said something in Countryish to Agnieszka that scared her and her friends bad enough that they got up, took their purses, and headed for the door.

  “Hey, wait, wait,” Ink called after them. “You don’t have to leave because of this drunk idiot.”

  “Sorry,” Agnieszka said. “It was really nice to meet you.”

  And like that, they were gone.

  All five of the soccer hooligans were glaring at us now. My blood was cold sludge and all I could see in my mind’s eye was my face getting pummeled.

  “You ever been in a fight, Frisco?” Ink asked me under his breath.

  “I used to do kendo,” I said. No response.

  “I guess she doesn’t want to talk with you, English. Big Guy,” the provoker said to Big Ben, in decent English. I looked around and noticed the other tables in the bar had all cleared.

  Big Ben stood up. The Countryish guy and his friends all moved in unison as if to stand up, too.

  There was a sudden whoosh, and a zephyr flash of silver flew across the gap between our tables so fast that if I had blinked I would have missed it. The Countryish guys froze, their eyes going white as their confusion transmuted into fear.

  My vision trailed to the tail end of Ink’s spoon, where it stuck quivering in the wall inches above the provoker’s head. Only after the fact, when I saw Ink’s calmly outstretched hand – I hadn’t even seen him stand up – did my brain process what happened.

  The spoon was stuck a half-inch deep into the dartboard next to the soccer thugs’ table. Ink had thrown the spoon dead into the center of the bull’s-eye, exactly where the provoker’s face would have been if he’d been a fraction of a second quicker to his feet. I’d never seen anyone throw a knife so accurately, let alone a spoon. I’d never seen anyone throw a spoon at all.

  Ink dropped the blazer off his shoulders, a real knife appearing in his left hand from where it had been stashed up his sleeve.