He was already awake when the alarm clock on the bedside table began its tired buzzing, signaling that it was once again time to roll out of bed. Time to stop the stream of fragmented memories masquerading as dreams; to stop the frantic writing of each abstract shard, each time he woke, and trying to string them together. He was lucky to get a couple hours of real sleep a night, and they usually came just before the sound of the alarm.
Rolling onto his left side, he reached with his right hand for the buttons on the top of the small, black digital clock. His left hand was useless for such fine, deft maneuvers, but in a fight it couldn't be beat. That had been its original purpose by those who had attached the damn thing to him all those years ago, but he had turned his back on all that. He was done with their kind of fighting and vowed that he'd never do it again. That was why he had run; that, and the memories of a face that haunted every step he took. The face of a man who he'd been ordered to kill, a man he wanted to kill, but who had insisted that they had been friends. And that one phrase, those six simple words, that he'd spoken as they grappled in the bowels of that hovercraft:
I'm with you to the end of the line…
He didn't experience déjà vu, not in the way that others described it. But at that moment, when the man named Steve Rogers, had spoken those words to him, he had come as close as he imagined he could.
Giving his head a gentle shake, he tried to focus on the present as he sat up, the springs of the ancient mattress groaning under his shifting weight. He grabbed the top notebook from a stack on the end table beside the alarm clock and opened it to a spot near the middle. The pages were written in his own hand; he glanced over what made some sense, and paused to read and reread portions of text that had eluded him since they'd been written. Or since the last time he'd read them- he couldn't be sure of one over the other. After four pages, the writing stopped and he allowed the notebook to fall shut in his lap.
He had nothing more to add to the abstract ramblings today.
The illuminated red digits on the clock reminded him that he had roughly two hours before he had to leave. Placing the notebook back on its stack, a shadow of the man who was once called James Buchanan Barnes rose from the rickety bed to begin his day.
His "day" was actually night; his alarm had sounded at 6:00 p.m. Work was hard to find in this little corner of the world, and even harder when you had a bizarre prosthetic arm that would give away your identity (or at least one of them) if the wrong people saw it. He had to be careful about moving around in public, especially during the daytime. All the same, a man had to eat and pay for the roof over his head, so he had taken to accepting no-questions-asked work where he could get it, and his current gig seemed to be working out pretty well. Sure, it wasn't the most scrupulous work- what with the under the table pay and the fact that his employers and coworkers didn't even know his real name- but it paid the bills and it was relatively easy; all he had to do was stand around and look imposing for several hours a night. Every now and again he would have to get tough with a drunk or high patron, but usually one good shove from his well-concealed metal arm had them kissing pavement for the night and would put and end to the issue. It wasn't much, and of course it could always have been worse…
"Cum vă numiți?" The sleazy man in the gaudy, brightly patterned shirt had asked him as they sat in worn vinyl and metal office chairs on either side of a beat-down desk in the back office of Club Sânziană three weeks before.
What's your name?
"La ce vã trãbã?" He had replied warily. He knew that that the job he'd applied for was a don't-ask-don't-tell, and paid cash under the table for each shift.
Why do you need it?
The man in the ugly shirt- Sânziană's owner and manager, Andrei- had smiled, showing his ugly, tobacco-stained teeth as he reached for a pack of cigarettes sitting beside an overflowing ashtray on the desk.
"You are smart; smarter than you let on. But maybe too cautious. You worry too much, like you have something to hide. Relax, friend; most of us have secrets here… right, Mel?" He grinned and glanced up at the long-legged, scantily clad young woman who stood at his side. Andrei lazily rapped the back of his free hand on her hip. Mel merely blinked and batted a strand of hair out of her face before continuing her bored stare at the back wall, just as she'd been doing for the duration of the interview. "I am hiring someone to help out in my establishment. If I hire you, I need to know what to call you when I need your particular kind of help."
He nodded, replying after a brief hesitation. "Call me Max."
"Max," Andrei repeated as he pulled a cigarette from the pack and slid it to his lips. Mel produced a silver Zippo lighter from her cleavage and struck a flame, holding the lighter in front of Andrei's face. The wiry, black-haired man took a few deep drags and Mel flipped the Zippo closed when he withdrew, tucking it back into the nearly nonexistent bra beneath her gauzy baby-doll robe. Andrei exhaled smoke through his nose, eyes never leaving the man seated across from him.
"You have been in my office for nearly ten minutes, Max," Andrei growled as he leaned forward, his chair creaking as his elbows came to rest on the desk's scarred surface. "In that time, you have only looked directly at my Melodie once, and that was only when you first came into the room. You looked first at Rolf, who brought you in; then at Melodie, then at me. Your eyes have not yet drifted back to her. She is the most beautiful, most popular, and most… requested girl I employ. The fact that you don't stare at her while she stands here dressed like a whore tells me that you are not just a sleazy cheapskate looking to get his pulă sucked for free by my girls after hours. They won't distract you, so you'll do the job well. I'm betting on you, Max. You've got the job. Be here tomorrow night at 8:00."
And so, wrapped in a heavy jacket and leather gloves to disguise one of his many secrets, he had become Max: Max, bouncer at a sleazy strip joint/massage parlor called Club Sânziană. It wasn't much, but it paid well enough to keep him fed and cover rent on a room he'd found over a pharmacy in the bedraggled Ferentari neighborhood, just a few blocks away from the club. He was living hand to mouth and he knew it, but for someone like him, what did the future matter? He was broken inside and out, scrambling desperately to figure out who he was, what his purpose was, and what he had survived at the hands of the first employers he could recall. The fact that he had a job at all now sometimes felt like miracle to him. It was the only part of his life that resembled anything normal.
When he slept, he was constantly plagued by dreams that, on waking, he was never sure were part of his memories or just nightmares or some combination of the two. He wrote them all down regardless. As he pulled on faded red Henley, he glanced at the stack of notebooks and briefly toyed with the idea of bringing one or two along with him that night. Something from that last dream was still teasing at the edge of his memories, making him feel like a cat swiping at a string under a sofa in order to discover where the string led. He shook his head and slid into the least-worn pair of black cargo pants that he owned, though even these were more a memory of black than the inky color they must have once been. He bent down and scraped a fingernail along the fraying hem at his ankle.
Faded and threadbare, just like me.
The sun was long since set and the winter winds whispered between the close-set buildings as he walked out the small door at the back of the pharmacy. He glanced around, trying to scope out his surroundings without looking conspicuous as he pulled his baseball cap down over his head. Nothing out of the ordinary, as usual, but old habits die hard. Stuffing his gloved hands into the pockets of his overcoat, he turned onto the main street and began walking toward the club. Two blocks down, a food cart was starting to close down for the night. He bought a paper bowl filled with fried sausages and potatoes from the vendor, and ate the greasy concoction as he walked.
The entrance to Sânziană was easy to miss if one didn't know where to look. It was a simple, brown metal door recessed about four feet into a concrete and brick foyer and about as nondescript as they came. There was a painted sign on the boarded-up front of the building, but to an unknowing eye it could easily be mistaken as a poster advertising a club somewhere else in town. During peak hours, this door was propped ajar by a stool, which would be occupied by the first bouncer as he checked the IDs and collected the cover charge from customers. The second bouncer awaited the patrons at the end of the narrow, dark hallway where it opened into the club proper, and he was in charge of maintaining order within. If things got really out of hand, the first could be recalled into the club, and the door could be latched from the inside.
Inside, the main stage was at the center of the back wall with a catwalk extending forward to the center of the room. Two staircases ran up the sides of the room: one leading up to the girls' dressing room, the other to three private massage lounges where high-paying patrons could experience Sânziană's offerings more… intimately. The long bar that wrapped in a horseshoe shape around the front of the stage was tended by three or four barkeeps- several of whom were retired dancers themselves.
The front door was closed when he arrived. On time, he thought as he pushed it open, though he didn't have any reason to think he might be late. He stepped from the darkness of the Bucharest night into a deeper darkness in the hall. Here, the light from the dimmed can lights in the ceiling cast strange shadows on the walls; the distorted sound of music and voices filtered in from the end of the hall; the smells from both outside and inside mingled to create an alien feeling of being truly between two worlds.
He did not care for that hallway. It was too much like his dreams. But once he emerged through its other end, he was not the AWOL soldier, the experiment with a fragmented mind. He was Max: reliable, professional, and dauntless- if withdrawn and aloof- bouncer of Sânziană.
He quickened his pace until he stepped into the open room at the opposite end. Rolf, the club's other bouncer, was already perched on his high stool there.
"Max," he greeted, too eagerly to come off as genuinely friendly. Max paused only long enough to offer a silent handshake and then headed to the back office to check in with Andrei. The club's owner was smoking and counting money, and didn't even look up as he barked the positions he wanted Max and Rolf to patrol that night. Within minutes, Max was back on the floor taking Rolf's spot inside while Rolf carried the stool down the hall to prop open the front door. This wasn't Max's favorite arrangement. While he didn't exactly enjoy standing outside for hours on end in the freezing cold of a Romanian winter night, he was more comfortable there than he was inside the club. There was more to keep an eye on in the club, and on nights when it was particularly crowded the patrons had a tendency to be more rowdy. He wasn't opposed to breaking up fights or pulling overzealous, drunk, and/or high men off of the girls, but he had to keep himself in careful check. He had been trained as a merciless killer, and he did not need that part of him surfacing while just trying to break up a bar brawl. So far he had remained pretty well in control, but he knew he would always have to pull his punches. Always.
He watched as Rolf got situated at the entrance of the building, weak light leaking through the propped-open door from the streetlights outside. Eight o'clock, Saturday night. Prime time.
Sânziană was not a large club by any stretch of the imagination. Its maximum legal occupancy was around fifty people, although they had squeezed in as many as ninety in at one time. Some of the bigger, higher end clubs downtown could legally hold more than four hundred at one time and employed as many as three dozen dancing girls (Sânziană had eleven total). On this night, there were only a few patrons in the club: three at the bar and six in the seats gathered around the stage. The private lounges upstairs were presently unoccupied. Andrei, in his office behind the bar, wasn't likely to come out unless there was real trouble. An all but anonymous DJ lackadaisically played an unoriginal mix of popular radio songs from America. Onstage was one of the girls he saw rather regularly- he was pretty sure she called herself Heaven. Not that he cared what she called herself, or what her real name was. Detachment from coworkers other than Rolf and Andrei was pretty much in his job description.
Although the current audience could hardly be called a crowd, he knew that a typical Saturday night wouldn't start getting busy in Sânziană until at least 10:00. And while Rolf, Andrei, the girls, and the DJ may not be clued in, he himself could usually judge fairly well what kind of crowd they'd end up having by the types of men who walked in between 9:00 and 10:00. For the next hour, he would just watch and wait.
The next few people who walked in were the girls who would be working that night. The lineup was pretty much the same as it was every Saturday night, and as they trickled in, Max tested himself to see how many names he could remember. He rarely spoke to them, even though some said a shy or disinterested hello to him as they walked in. He knew their names only from the DJ announcing them with phony enthusiasm as they took the stage for their rotations throughout the night: Nadia, Spring, Marica, Jenica, Zina, Lilli (Heaven was, in fact, the one onstage). Melodie would be in the office with Andrei until there was a real crowd, or until one of her regulars requested her.
The girls' names were not important to him, but putting their names to their faces was. It was a stretch, but he hoped that being able to do something as simple as that may help him to put a similar meaning and definition to his fragmented memories. Something concrete, some label by which to recognize and categorize them.
It didn't take long for a crowd to fill the place that night. The patrons seemed mostly in good spirits and they were spending relatively freely. Sure, the upscale places downtown would rake in twenty or thirty times what Sânziană earned overall, but not everyone was the wealthy businessman stock that those places attracted. Sânziană was the workingman's escape.
This Saturday night passed largely uneventfully. Alcohol was consumed gallon upon gallon, the crowd cycled in and out, and the girls drifted across the stage for their dance sets, most making a few trips upstairs for personal time with patrons willing to pay their premium. He watched it all happen with a cool detachment, only truly concerned with keeping the peace should something happen to disrupt it. Fortunately, on this night it did not. The club closed promptly at 4:00 am with the house lights coming up and the girls retreating to their dressing room above Andrei's office. The club's owner hadn't emerged even once during the night, although Melodie had disappeared behind the bar twice, tipping the more intuitively observant to the fact that Andrei remained in his office for the entire evening.
When the last patron had departed, Rolf locked the front doors and the staff migrated to the bar for their daily pay. Most engaged in light conversation as they awaited Andrei and their cash, but Max stood back from the bright lights over the bar and avoided being drawn into their banter. After several minutes, Andrei emerged and the dancers counted out their tips on the bar for him. The Max and Rolf got a flat salary for each shift, but the girls always shared a percentage of their tips with the bouncers. On this night, the dancer named Jenica had fared particularly well; the percentage she shared with Max was almost double what any of the other girls offered. For a moment, he felt ashamed of receiving so much money. After all, it had been an easy night for him and she must have worked hard to earn it. But he also had learned that these girls took offense to rejecting what they offered, so he accepted the money without a word. After the payouts, there was nothing to do but see the girls safely out of the club to the cars, trains or taxis that took them home. Melodie alone stayed behind, as she usually did, and Andrei locked the door behind them. Rolf called out a farewell to Max after the last girl was safely on her way, but Max was already walking down the street. He waved over his shoulder.
It was still as dark as midnight outside. The sun wouldn't rise over the frozen city until after 7:00 am. For the most part, the streets were abandoned except for early morning delivery trucks. As he walked, his exhaled breath streaming behind him, he shed the mantle of Max. He became the man without a name, whose whole life was an alias. He was the man who did not ask questions of others because he had so many for himself that he couldn't answer.
He paused on his way at a bakery on the edge of the Ferentari district; two blocks from the pharmacy. The bakery was a popular stop for overnight delivery drivers, police, and bar patrons after hours. A plump, middle-aged Russian woman, who appreciated being spoken to in her native tongue, was its proprietor.
He, of course, spoke perfect Russian. On this morning, he stepped up to the counter and asked for an apple vatrushka. Baba, as she insisted on being called, laughed delightedly at his request.
"Tough guy has a sweet tooth at breakfast!" She declared as she disappeared into the kitchen to fetch his pastry from the oven. Behind him the door opened. He could tell without turning around that that the newcomer had a light step, and was alone. Probably a woman. He could hear Baba singing a song about vatrushka in the back as she banged trays and utensils around.
"Pastry for breakfast? That's an interesting choice," the voice, speaking Romanian, was bright and clear, like clean water flowing over smooth rocks. It was also somewhat familiar. He turned.
The fluorescent lights reflected off the bright red waves that framed her face. The face itself was heart-shaped and pale with heavy, dark eye makeup that made her brown eyes appear a rich, honey-gold. The traces of mulberry stain still clung to tiny crevices in her lips, although the color had been wiped away some time ago. She was dressed in a heavy, fur-trimmed brown coat that fell to her knees; under this were thick black leggings and a smart pair of short boots of soft chocolate suede.
"I thought that was you, Max," she said when he'd turned, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
Under normal circumstances he would have struggled to recall her name, but she had been at the center of his focus just half an hour ago at Sânziană.
"Jenica," he murmured, more an affirmation that he'd properly paired the name with the face than a greeting. Her lips parted to say something, but Baba returned from the kitchen with the steaming vatrushka in a bag, which she handed to him across the counter. Baba greeted Jenica while he fished in the inner pocket of his coat for his money. He counted out enough for two pastries and handed it to Baba.
"One for her, too," he jerked his head to indicate Jenica. He turned and glanced at the dancer, giving her a small nod, and exited the bakery.
He changed his course at the corner, turning down a side street and subsequently circling the block, hoping the girl would lose track of him. The last thing he needed was her trying to follow him to thank him for the pastry. That appeared to be exactly her intent as he watched from just around the corner as Jenica emerged from the shop. She looked first up the street then across it, her eyes sweeping the landscape in search of him, no doubt. From his hiding place in the building's shadow, he watched and waited for her to leave. A street lamp cast a coppery halo around her hatless head as she stepped into the ring of its illumination. He blinked, something briefly creeping across his brain like a spark: another woman with red hair, searching the night for any trace of his presence… but that one was different: determined, driven. Deadly. He stepped back reflexively, the aging brick wall cutting off his view. The memory fizzled out as quickly as it began, but he found himself a little short of breath from its intensity. He couldn't remember who the red haired woman in his memory was or how he knew her, but he was certain she had been hunting him and vice versa. She was not his friend.
With the heels of his hands pressed to his eyes, he took several deep breaths until his pulse slowed and the memory faded. Exhaling, he lowered his hands and peeked around the corner again. Jenica had crossed the street and was continuing down an adjacent street where a taxi waited. He waited until it drove away with her inside to reemerge and continue on his own path home.