“O Jezu,” he says. “Matko boska.”
He reaches under the counter and grabs the sack of kielbasa. Then he puts on his coat and sticks his hand in the pocket to make sure the balaclava is still there. It’s black and made of wool and has holes for the eyes and mouth. When he tried it on in the bathroom, he immediately began to itch. He’s always been allergic to wool, but this was the only one he could find. In the mirror he looked like a Chechen terrorist.
He steps outside, locks the front doors, lowers the security grating, and locks it too. Then he walks over to the gleaming sedan and opens the door. “Is this your brother-in-law’s car?” he asks, lowering himself into the passenger seat.
Marek grins, his teeth white and perfect. Unlike Bogdan, he still has a head full of dark hair only slightly shorter than it was in his teens. “Nice, huh?”
Bogdan reaches for the door but hears a faint whooshing sound as it slowly closes itself. “Did you tell him what you planned to do?” he asks. “If you did, admit it right now, and I’ll get out. I’ll probably get out anyway.”
Marek throws the car into gear and pulls away from the curb. “Of course not. They flew to London to spend Christmas with their son and his family and asked me to feed their cats. I borrowed it for the evening.” His wife’s brother launched a small brewery around the time he and Bogdan founded their grocery chain. Five years ago Heineken bought it. Now his brother-in-law has a big house here, a smaller one in Zakopane, and a BMW.
It does happen. It just doesn’t happen to Bogdan. “What model is this?” he asks.
“Seven sixty something. Under the hood, there’s a V-12. If we need speed, we’ve got it. But we won’t need it.”
“How many of these cars do you suppose there are in the whole country?”
“More than you’d ever guess.”
The emphasis doesn’t pass unnoticed. Despite everything that’s gone wrong for both of them, Marek has maintained his sunny outlook. He’s been like that as long as Bogdan has known him, all the way back to elementary school. He’s enough of a realist to admit he’s never had a truly great idea but too much of an optimist not to think he’ll have one eventually.
As a rule, Bogdan finds perpetual good cheer grating. But lately, the presence of a hopeful friend, no matter how deluded, may be the only thing stopping him from walking into the frozen-food locker, lying down, and closing his eyes. The truth, which he’s incapable of admitting, is that he needs Marek. Almost everybody needs a Marek, if only to resent his existence.
“Since we’re stealing your brother-in-law’s car,” he grumbles, “why don’t we go over to their house and rob them instead of some stranger?”
Their business losses can be traced to the arrival of heavyweight Western retailers like Carrefour and Tesco, with huge inventories and cutthroat prices. They owned four stores in ’99, three in 2003, two in 2005. Now they’re down to one, with a rent payment due on January 15 that they lack the funds for. They’re in trouble with their suppliers too.
In all fairness, he and Marek aren’t complete fools. Both of them have been to Western Europe, and Marek once visited relatives in the U.S. When they first started out, they knew what Western supermarkets looked like: bright colors splashed everywhere; countless versions of the same product, all packaged differently and positioned at various price points, the label on each item fronted with military precision; aisles as broad as the Champs-Elysées so shoppers can roll their carts past one another without toppling floor displays. They understood what was coming and believed they could counter it. They took over formerly state-run shops and made few if any cosmetic changes. They offered Polish products, kept prices low, and retained the employees who’d worked in the stores when they were owned by the state. This last practice produced the first hiccups.
In a country where nearly everything belonged to the government and nearly everybody viewed it as corrupt, cheating was tolerated. Bogdan never did it, but back when he managed the warehouse, he knew that the guys who loaded and unloaded produce took a little bit home. A few apples here, a few pears there. As long as it didn’t get out of hand, he looked the other way.
The people who worked the checkout stands in the first stores he and Marek opened were mostly women in their forties and fifties. They’d learned the appropriate survival tactics. Initially, they skimmed a few zlotys from the cash registers, but he put a stop to that by switching the drawers out several times a day. So they began overcharging the customers or shortchanging them, and complaints escalated. Finally, he called a meeting. “Listen,” he told them, “things aren’t like they used to be. You just can’t keep cheating our customers. It has to stop.”
A woman who reminded him of his grandmother asked, “Why do you care? It’s not your money.”
“If you steal from the customers, they’ll quit shopping here. They’ll go someplace where they don’t get cheated. It’s really pretty simple.” Even as he made the statement, he knew it wasn’t true. It wasn’t simple for her, and it wasn’t simple for lots of others. The world was changing faster than they could. Once people accept the notion that an old car ought to cost more than a new one because the old one is readily available but you can acquire the new one only by paying up front, putting your name on a list, and waiting ten years, it’s hard to sell them the opposite reality. If you’ve lived your whole life upside down, living right-side up is like walking on the ceiling.
“I don’t want to work here anymore,” the woman said. He realized tears were on the way, and he prayed they wouldn’t flow right there in front of him and the other employees. She pulled her apron off, flung it on the counter, grabbed her coat, and walked out. He stayed awake a long time that night, drinking vodka and feeling like a predator. Now he’s become prey himself. And by this time tomorrow, if he’s not dead, he’ll be a thief as well.
Marek hangs a left, bound for the Grunwald Bridge. The snow is falling harder, in defiance of the forecast. “You know how this guy we’re about to pay a visit to got started?” he asks.
“How?”
“Summer of ’90, he begins hanging around the Auschwitz train station. This is before you had all those fancy tour buses ferrying visitors around from one concentration camp to another, giving them the Zyklon B tour. When he sees some Americans waiting on the platform for a train to Krakow, he ambles over and tells ’em the train’ll take nearly three hours, that the bathrooms are filthy and smelly and there’s no soap or toilet paper, and then he offers to deliver them in under an hour for fifty dollars. You know how impatient and finicky Americans are. A couple of times a day, all summer long, somebody accepts his offer. He converts the dollars on the black market, and come September he’s got enough to start his construction business. Next thing you know, he’s the go-to guy if you’ve made a bundle and want to build your own private swimming pool.”
They’re crossing the Vistula. Right in the middle there’s a sheet of ice, though the water’s still flowing on either side. “How rich can you get,” Bogdan asks, “building private swimming pools in Poland?”
“Did it ever occur to you that if you’ve got enough money and a big enough house, you can put the swimming pool inside?” With a gloved finger Marek thumps the steering wheel. He can only stomach so much defeatism. Even if you think the world is shit, why not call it manure? It leaves a better odor. “No, it didn’t,” he says, shaking his head. “Besides, that’s not all he does.”
“So what else does he do?”
“Builds
