Cheesy Movie | ONC translation

Scene One

"Da, I applied for the ad". the man replied, opening the door to the living room where Arnošt was desperately trying to create the illusion that this apartment was regularly cleaned once a week... or at least once a month...

When the visitor emerged from the darkness of the hallway, however, Arnošt stopped his cleaning, which only made the overall impression of the room worse, and laughed in surprise.

"Wow! You don't look at all as I imagined you!" He exclaimed, rising from the floor from where he had been trying to scrape up the remains of last week's lunch. He was quite surprised, when he saw that the man he had hired as his personal bodyguard was, contrary to his imagination, not a tall bodybuilder with firm tattooed muscles towering over his arms, but a thin, frail man in his fifties, with a mop of unkempt light brown hair flowing around his stern face.

"Why?" the strange man asked coldly, placing his suspicious black briefcase on Arnošt's desk, somewhere between an empty box of cask wine and a stack of unopened envelopes bearing the address of the revenue service.

"Nothing." Arnošt corrected himself quickly, seeing that his new friend didn't have much of a sense of humor. "Then we'd better get started. What's your name?"

"Láďa." The man replied with his unwavering calm and opened the briefcase in one swift motion.

"Yeah, well..." muttered Arnošt, who no longer had the courage to make any remark on Láďa's name or to inquire about his surname. "So you have everything you need for the job? I have a pepper spray hidden somewhere, so I could lend it to you."

Láďa fixed his black eyes on Arnošt in a look of utmost disbelief. For a moment he wondered if this was another joke he didn't get, but then he quickly moved on to something he was much better at- the frighteningly graphic display of his pocket arsenal.

"Everything I need is in that suitcase. First, the gun..." Láďa pulled a small silver pistol from the suitcase, loaded it, pointed it at the mirror, and then handed it to Arnošt with the same casualness with which they hand you a glass of water in a restaurant.

Arnošt's hands froze when he felt the cold touch of the bloody iron on his skin, and the pistol almost fell through his fingers.

"Careful!" Láďa shouted at him. "It cost a lot of money. But you can try to shoot with it."

"No, thanks. That's all right..." smiled Arnošt nervously and put the pistol on the table, where it could cause damage to at most one expensive-looking but in fact worthless elephant statue.

"Good. Then I have a garotte here..." continued Láďa, pulling a long metal wire from his briefcase, the purpose of which Arnošt preferred not to try guessing.

Nor did he have to guess. Láďa gladly explained to him what the garotte was used for.

"A handy tool. For example, if I'm guarding a politician who urgently needs to make a speech, and someone attacks him on his way to the podium, I simply grab the attacker from behind and strangle him. Easily. Silently. The politician then proceeds to the podium while I dispose of the body." Láďa, with a concentrated expression, demonstrated to Arnošt a move that would disarm a possible assassin.

"But you're only talking theoretically now, aren't you?" Arnošt said nervously as Láďa handed him the Garotta.

"Da, yasno. Theoretically." Láďa nodded, but soon added: "But practically it works too."

Arnošt just bulged his eyes in concern and very carefully placed the garotte, the edges of which were too suspiciously redish for his taste, on the table next to the gun.

Then he leaned over the lid of the open suitcase to get a closer look at the rest of Láďa's tools (everything is much scarier if you don't know it... yeah, I guess this rule doesn't apply to torture instruments...). When his eyes finally fell on a certain very strange jagged object that insistently attracted his attention, Arnošt asked in alarm, "And what is this for?"