Luckyboys follows the path of four expatriates in the former Czechoslovakia. At this point in the novel, it is late April 2002 in Prague. Half a world away, the city of Los Angeles has erupted in riot after a jury acquits the city police officers caught beating Rodney King on an infamous videotape. Disconnected from those events, the expatriated Americans attempt to make sense of it all (or ignore it) with limited access to television and other media.

In this excerpt, Amy Wetherall, a recent graduate of Amshire College, has fobbed her overly-amorous former teacher Nicola Ounz on a friend for a “tour” of Prague and is now going to meet her lover in a coffee shop at the top of Václavské Námestí.

* * *

It seemed to Amy Wetherall that her motion on this day would never cease.

She crossed Old Town Square once again, eluding the knots of tourists congregating there on this brilliant and sun-drenched day. She turned left at the Týn Church onto Celetná, one of the thin streets via which tourists were funneled to the square. She felt as if she was walking against some enormous tide.

As she walked, pleasantly distracting thoughts of meeting her lover ping-ponged in her brain with blacker and uglier thoughts.

She hated these tourists who were thronging to Prague, ruining the placid and languorous place that she had known in winter. She hated the smell of horseshit that had taken over the town as these same tourists clambered into horse-drawn carriages for rides through the city. She still hated the ugly meats hanging in the butcher shops and the disgusting vegetables and dumplings and the clang of hard Czech syllables in her brain. There was ugliness to Prague, in her mind, that matched its beauty. And as far as the peace and quiet of the rural towns? Well, she’d been there and undone by that.

As she slipped into the cool dark cinema arcade that served as a short cut to Na příkopĕ, she realized that there was a part of her that missed that simpler and less diffuse hate of her early days in the city. The sudden boom of Prague had left her hating everything—Czechs and non-Czechs alike. She almost preferred wallowing in the ugliness of winter in Prague and its glum sickly and poisonous gray so that she alone could possess its beauty.

Now, in the course of everyday living, she was still confronted by the ugliness of Prague’s horseshit and its nasty old women—dunning her for coins at the entrance to toilets and screeching at her in the lobby of her building when she accidentally slammed its huge doors. But now she had to share the things that she loved—the coffee bars and the Vltava and its white swans and the easy assumption of friendship—with every other ignorant human who could scrape up the money to come.

At Můstek, turning left to climb the square, Amy suddenly brightened. Her hateful thoughts evaporated. At the top of the square was her lover, Milorad, a beautiful Belgrade boy who spoke perfect English and ended up in Prague hiding out from the Yugoslav Army. He would be waiting with the pimps, moneychangers and other foreign riff-raff in the cafe at the very top of the square

Everything about Milorad excited her. His English was perfect. He recited Serbian poetry to her as foreplay to their lovemaking. Serbian seemed so much softer and more rounded to her ears than Czech. He had left Yugoslavia, he said, because he could not stand to fight those with whom he went to summer camp and university. There was a frisson for Amy also in his job—scamming tourists into changing money and helpfully directing them toward rip-off taxis in the square, lulling their fears with his perfect diction and sweet manner.

And he was so beautiful—dark hair, dark eyes that spoke to her of hunger and homesickness that echoed hers and an air of authority that no one in her life had ever shown to her.

Amy’s steps quickened as she approached the cafe.

* * *

Milorad was standing at the counter in the crowded cafe, smoking a Marlboro. Amy pushed through the milling crowd of petty criminals and their tarted-up girlfriends to throw her arms around him and kiss him. The TV behind the coffee bar was blaring MTV.

“Hi, lover,” said Amy.

Milorad just smiled and took another drag.

“Rip off many tourists today?”

“I have morning success,” said Milorad, pulling a thick wad of banknotes from his pocket and ruffling it.

“Are you ready for an afternoon success?”

Milorad stuffed the roll of banknotes deep into the pockets of his black jeans.

“I have just ordered a coffee. Let us have a coffee together. To take money from the tourists is a difficult work.”

He stubbed out his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. The barman slid a coffee behind him on the bar.

“Ješte jednou,” Milorad told the barman.

Amy frowned, but her lover wagged his long finger at her.

“The first things must be first,” he said. “First coffee, then fucking, and then coffee again. It is the Serbian way.”

To hear Milorad tell it, many things were to be done the “Serbian way.” A number of those things were alien to Amy’s way.

Milorad, for instance, believed that cunnilingus was not the Serbian way. His rationale for this was pithy: “I will not dine where I fuck.”

Peter dined, had dessert, coffee, and then tipped extravagantly where he fucked. She was often constructing the perfect lover in her mind these days: David’s brain, Peter’s tongue, Milorad’s cock.

Amy’s coffee arrived in its little brown cup. Milorad lit up another cigarette, and then offered one to Amy. She shook her head.

At that moment, a few men walked through the door, gesticulating wildly and holding a red, white and blue striped flag with a red and white checkerboard crest. They shoved their way up to the bar through the crowd, jabbering amongst themselves. They called the barman over with a series of wild hoots and ordered coffees.

They looked at Amy and Milorad and held up the flag.

“Hrvatska!” exclaimed the ringleader, who appeared to have been drinking heavily.

“Dobro došli,” Milorad said darkly, staring down into his nearly empty cup. The tangle of men laughed.

“You must finish your coffee now,” Milorad told her.

“It’s still scalding hot,” Amy said.

Behind Amy, the men were still blabbering in their tongue, almost directly into Amy’s ear. Milorad’s lips puckered.

“Do you understand what they are saying?” Amy asked. “What’s wrong?”

“It is nothing,” Milorad said, squeezing her arm. “Drink, please.”

“But I’m curious,” she persisted.

“They speak to you,” Milorad said, his voice rising steadily. “They are wondering why a pretty woman is with a Serbian pig. They say that if you want to fuck animals, they have farms in Dalmatia. So please drink now.”

As Amy turned around to face the men with the flag, she saw a fist fly over her right shoulder towards her lover.

Milorad ducked the blow and spun Amy hard around him and down to the floor. She noticed that it was filthy, with cigarette butts clinging like dead flies in the stickiness of spilled drinks.

As the bar crashed in behind her, Amy cowered. Michael Jackson’s “Black and White” video was playing on the television, but the commotion drowned it out in bursts, until a terrible crash put an end to it. The noise seemed to gather and swell to a crest, and then broke through the window of the cafe and out onto the square, where the whine of sirens already was rushing to meet it.

An excerpt from Richard Byrne’s novel Luckyboys:

Copyright © 2006, Richard Byrne, 2006