The Set-Up & Things Turned Ugly...

The Set Up -

It was quite an elaborate set-up for the sake of a hundred pound digital camera - a set up involving two main perpetrators with a knowledge of the area. It's a part time job, an opportunist thing for a set of local villains living in a part of Prague that sees it's fair share of dumb foreigners.

The first guy, a piss artist, let's call him "El Capitano", spends the night drinking in a bar popular with expats and foreign visitors to the city. All he's doing is pissing it up, but he's also got an eye open for potential marks.

When the targeted tourists are preparing to leave, he's on the phone to friends, who are hanging out in the neighborhood somewhere. By the time the targets have their jackets on and leave, a car is already waiting - the second character in the little play that will unfold, plus a few other guys as back up in case things turn ugly.

El Capitano follows close behind the two marks, making an extravagant deal out of being stumbling drunk, and gets his coat jammed in the bar door. He's a friendly, leathery sort of old bastard, just the kind of person to elicit an equal amount of humour and fear in a pair of innocent foreigners.

After going through his drunk routine, he approaches the male target, drunk-friendly, over bearing, insistent on shaking hands, slapping the guy on the back and calling him "El Capitano", generally being over-the-top.

Enter "The Hero", a younger guy, clean clothed and pleasant looking, not drunk or deranged in any way, but clearly looks like he knows how to handle himself. The Hero strolls down the street and gently moves El Capitano along, no fuss.

The Hero, after a few friendly words and a little joke, kindly offers to take a photo of the grateful foreigners outside the bar they've just had such a good time in.

If they are mug enough to hand over the camera, The Hero suddenly turns villain, scarpers down the road with it and hops into the waiting getaway car.

If not, things turn ugly...


Things Turned Ugly -


Two hours later, I was standing in a Herna Bar just around the corner from where my girlfriend and I had narrowly escaped a mugging at the hands of El Capitano and his young friend.

I stood with a cobble in my hand, the front door locked, as a trio of like-minded locals shuffled across the block any potential exit.

There was me and an oblivious English girl from the hostel, a girl whose blind optimism would take her around the globe without a scratch or an ugly situation.

Outside in the street were two blond Australian beefcakes, who were so clearly wracked with fear when we told the story of the attempted mugging in the hostel bar that they took each step along the path to the Herna Bar like they were walking the plank.

Then they stopped, a few feet from the door, a few feet away from where me and this silly English girl were now cornered, locked in, trapped, in a very unenviable situation indeed.

We were only there for cigarettes.  Not that any of my fellow crusaders smoked, but they still accompanied me on my quest in a sense of traveler's camaraderie and solidarity, even after hearing our tale of almost getting turned over a street down from where we were all staying.

On entering the bar, me and the English girl ran straight into El Capitano, whose face lit up on seeing me, clearly thrilled about the prospect of setting up the same dickhead twice in one night.

He came off his stool at the bar with the same drunk-friendly El Capitano bullshit as previously, except this time I backed away and let the girl do all the talking.

She was in her element, clearly thinking it a super wheeze to be out in the local sleazy bars conversing with the locals of Zizkov in the small hours of the morning.

Her blind optimism and enthusiastic innocence might take her around the globe without so much as a scratch; but then a comet might circle the sun for millions of years without any kind of skirmish. Until, of course, a planet veered into it's path - and here I veered, a world away from the other travelers she met, because I was the only one carrying a curse.

It was a curse I picked up in Romania and left in Prague, a curse that met me off the plane every time I came back, a curse that threatened to bring the saints and cherubs of this hallowed, haunted city down on my head.

The English girl probably wasn't expecting to be grabbed by El Capitano the way she was, especially as she was doing such a sterling job of promoting Anglo-Roma relations. She was probably expecting my intervention even less.

From the moment the barmaid ducked around behind us and bolted the door, I descended into such a sense of tranquility. I'd seen El Capitano, I'd seen her bar our exit, and I'd seen the three other guys shuffle in front of the door. My hand slid into my pocket, and there I caressed the cold hard block of cobble.

I once sat on a bus, and at a junction, the driver brought us to such a shuddering, break-stomping halt to avoid collision that time froze; at that moment, I saw all points in time - I saw my life up to that point, I saw the imminent collision with the car ahead, and I saw the potential for a beautiful, tumbling, bone-shattering somersault along the length of the bus if the impact came...

And that's how I felt, calmly standing with cobble in hand, very comfortable and calm in the few moments before a lot of pain was about to be inflicted upon us. Someone, anyway.

So when El Capitano decided it was now time to grab the English girl by the shoulder and try dragging her to nowhere in particular, my left arm corkscrewed up in a smooth motion and grabbed his hand. I recall the roughness of his square palm a brief moment before I twisted his whole arm against the natural motion of his shoulder socket.

And I recall the confused, apologetic look in his weepy, boozy eyes an instant before the cobble clenched in my right fist demolished his teeth. A sickening wrench up my arm as teeth scattered and blood poured out of his mouth.

I wasn't quite done with him yet - with his arm locked in such an unnatural position, he had no choice but to follow my motion as I pulled him past me and slammed his ruined face into the leading edge of the bar.

All this happened in the peculiar silence violence sometimes brings - not silence exactly, because El Capitano was now whinging and gurgling on the floor, and the fruit machine away off my left shoulder was making muted fruit machine sounds.

But nobody was yelling, nobody was busting beer bottles on the bar, nobody was swinging across the room from the light fittings; it was an awful vacuum of a bar room brawl where all the participants operated in a stunned silence.

The other three guys up until now hadn't done much apart from block our exit. Now they made a sudden unified move that reminded me of players on a foosball table. The English girl, whose mouth was hanging open and getting all dry, hadn't moved since I'd crushed the old bastard's face against the bar - she stood in exactly the same pose as when he'd grabbed her. She went to say something, and the three guys made to move forwards.

I knelt down in a very deliberate manner, and brought the cobble stone down on El Capitano's forehead, shutting the old cunt up for the first time that evening, and the three table football players went from counter attack to all out defence.

This total lack of pandemonium was beginning to piss me off. I wondered what the two Australian beefcakes were doing out there on the street, wondered why they weren't busting the door down to help us out. At the same time, I realised not a word had been said, not a yell shouted, even though a man now lay on the bar room floor with his head split open. For all they new, we were in here playing backgammon together.

The stand off might have lasted forever, but a surge of anger came up from within me, and I bowled my cobble from a distance of maybe six feet, straight into the face of the middle guy. I didn't see where exactly it hit him, but it sounded like his face was made out of iceberg lettuce, and he went down without a twitch.

Then it broke loose. The left hand guy lunged at me with a wide, drunken cowboy swing, which I caught mid-flight and propelled him into the fruit machine. In my mind just before he hit, I pictured his head disappearing through the glass in a shower of sparks and a deluge of coins in the drop tray, but he bounced right off it and came around after me in an unsteady circle.

By this stage, I'd decided the best place for me was the bar, and delivered a swift kick flat under the barmaid's jaw, which sent her sprawling to the floor.  As the last guy lunged towards me, I made good use of my former five-a-side football days, striking El Capitano's half-empty beer glass straight into guy number three's face.

Half a second later, I was back at ground level ready to catch the fruit machine guy's second half-arsed haymaker, freeze it in position long enough to shatter his elbow with one downward blow, then fling him through the glass pane of the front door.

I grabbed the English girl by the hand, took a moment to survey the scene, then dragged her out of the bar, stepping through the smashed glass into the crisp night air.

"Right." I said, rubbing my hands, "I still need to get some cigarettes. Where's next?"