The Hungarian

  “Lilia,” Ivanov breathed behind her.

  “You scared me,” she said, turning to Ivanov’s collarbone and tipping her head up to connect with his eyes. They were compelling, his eyes, she had to admit, but she didn’t see in him what Fedot saw. She saw only a kind, puckish man who cut a hell of a figure and was willing to risk his life to help total strangers. Perhaps that was enough to make him a saint.

  Chapter 19

  Moscow

  Beryx Gulyas shifted the telephone receiver from his left ear to his right. He fingered three stones in his trouser pocket, though he couldn’t remember which ones and what they could be for. He hoped persuasion, assurance.

  “I’m sure he’s dying as we speak,” the Hungarian editorialized.

  Nicolai Ceausescu said nothing, letting the drama of his breath do the talking.

  Gulyas didn’t often provide his master with predictions, preferring to stick to the facts and not make any promises he couldn’t keep or verify. It occurred to him for one unpleasant second that he was sounding like Etor.

  “Of course, I don’t make my plans based on assumptions,” he added.

  “Yes,” Ceausescu grumbled. Gulyas could hear the unmistakable Elena, her voice like a muffled buzz saw, demanding to know what had been said. The line went dead before her husband could answer her. Gulyas hesitated about calling back, but then dialed the operator. It had been a spring storm and not a poor connection that had ended the conversation, and Gulyas was grateful. He would call back when he had good news to report and hurried out of his hotel room—grabbing his own towel and loufa sponge—before the lines were restored and the phone could ring again.

  Finding the hospital or clinic that was tending to Pasha Tarkhan’s injuries was but a small impediment to his scheme compared to getting his hands on another firearm in Moscow. Guns were not a readily available commodity in Russia, and apart from mugging a KGB agent, Gulyas didn’t have a lot of choices. Comrade Ceausescu could no doubt have helped him secure one, but Gulyas had no intention of letting on that he’d lost his gun.

  The Beretta had vanished at some point between his leaving the Hotel Rude and arriving at the less glamorous Park Pobedy hotel, where he was staying. He’d taken a brief nap on the subway and was sure that was when the theft had taken place. A greasy-haired youth for whom he’d taken an instant dislike sat behind him at Arbatskaya, but had gotten off by the time Gulyas jerked awake to the sound of his stop being announced.

  “Good morning,” the pretty receptionist bid him as she checked her appointment book. Gulyas nodded instead of returning the greeting. He hated speaking Russian.

  As soon as he slipped the unmarked, bulging envelope into the mail slot, the girl found his name, saying, “Yes, here it is,” and reached behind her for a towel, which Gulyas rejected.

  “I brought one,” he explained, and the girl told him to suit himself but insisted he take her towel anyway. Rules were rules.

  Gulyas seized the graying rag and threw it to the floor as soon as he entered the bathhouse.

  “Fabi,” Gulyas called to the preparatory masseuse. Fabi was dripping in perspiration—a pool of it having formed in a palm-sized ledge perched at the top of his domed belly. When he tipped forward to crack his knuckles, the pool dribbled over Fabi’s middle and tinkled off the tip of his penis as if he were taking an unconscious piss. The masseuse then smacked his hands together three times, letting the echo bounce off the sopping tile walls of the steam chamber and signaling to Gulyas and a meaty woman who had come in behind him that it was time for them to strip naked.

  Fabi took Gulyas first, slapping and pounding his back and legs, before grabbing the Hungarian’s head in his hands and cracking his neck in two quick spins to the right and left. It was a sudden and unlikable way to be handled, but left Gulyas feeling strangely titillated—much like he felt after completing a job.

  With a slight bow, Fabi took Gulyas’s hand, shaking it hard, before moving on to the woman. She raised her arms over her head—as if she were being arrested—and Gulyas watched the masseuse slap her breasts with a towel.

  The key Fabi had given him was cupped tightly in his palm as he entered the next chamber. Gulyas would’ve loved to bypass the rest of the gauntlet and head straight to the locker room for a rendezvous with his new gun, but once he entered the bath house, he knew there was no turning back or skipping any of its prescriptions. With his usual resolve, the Hungarian looked out onto the four marble beds and chose the one closest to the single gas lantern that illuminated the chamber. He placed the key inside his cheek, laid down on his stomach and waited for one of the baton girls to come. To his chagrin, he got a fatty with yellow skin tone and sodden pubic hair.

  “Take it easy around my bladder,” Gulyas ordered. He’d forgotten to use the toilet. The girl ignored him, and he watched her belly-folds waggle as she beat him with a club wrapped in a hot, wet towel until his muscles felt like noodles.

  His luck in treatment providers got no better until he entered the fifth chamber, where he was oiled by a fair brunette. Fit and graceful, her only shortcoming was an engorged upper lip. She was also kind enough to use the loufa he provided instead of the ones dubiously sanitized by the house. He thanked her by patting her bare buttocks.

  “Atta girl,” he grumbled.

  Gulyas felt good and was especially glad that he’d chosen not to eat that morning. The gauntlet was a vigorous cleansing ritual that partnered well with a liquid diet, and the Hungarian decided it was high time for a forty-eight hour reprieve from solid food. He entered the last chamber—the sauna—confident that his reflexes would be sharper and infinitely more precise due to his fast and looked forward to handing Fabi’s son the key in exchange for a rolled bath mat that contained his new weapon.

  “Hello there,” a reclining man rasped, clearing his throat and trying again. “Hello, I said. Fancy meeting you here.” The ugly hotel detective sat up, resting his elbows on his knees.

  “I’m sorry, have we met?” Gulyas lied.

  “Quite late last night. At the Hotel Rude.”

  Gulyas leaned forward and squinted as if he was struggling to place him.

  “Yes, yes of course. I’m not wearing my eyeglasses, so I didn’t recognize you.”

  “Nor were you last night. You must be ashamed of them, like I am. I’ve yet to touch mine and they were imposed on me over a year ago.”

  The detective sat up and leaned against the wall, his bent-up face at odds with his body. Back at Hotel Rude, he’d looked rather lumpy in his overcoat, but here, naked and in unforgiving light, his physique revealed itself as lean and muscular.

  “You lift weights?” he asked.

  Gulyas shook his head.

  “You should try it,” the detective counseled. “It helps keep the weight off. Look at me—I’m over fifty, although I won’t tell you by how much—and I don’t look much different than I did twenty years ago.”

  He patted his taut abdomen, and Gulyas’s face flushed.

  “No, really,” the detective continued. “I know it works. I fight—or at least I used to. What’s more, I use a punching bag in the mornings.”

  Gulyas sat down on the wooden bench facing the detective and stood up again. He looked out the small porthole of a window into the locker room, but Fabi’s son was nowhere in sight. The masseuse had asked him explicitly to wait in the sauna until his son was ready for him.

  “You should try it.”

  “What?”

  “A punching bag,” the detective clarified.

  Gulyas sat down again, crossing his arms over his chest. “I travel a lot,” he mumbled.

  “All the better,” the detective prodded. “Pillows and blankets make decent punching bags, and it’s much easier than finding weights—unless you don’t mind lifting furniture. But I don’t recommend that. You can strain your back.”

  Gulyas nodded, looking out the porthole window again. “I’ll take a crack at it,” he grunted.

  “Wonde
rful,” the detective exclaimed. “Say, I could show you some moves. I’ve got time. Besides, lunch is coming up, and what better way to work up an appetite?”

  Gulyas didn’t answer.

  “Don’t you think?”

  “Hmm?” Gulyas scowled.

  “Punching works up an appetite, I said.”

  The detective put his fists up again and mimed a few fighting moves. Gulyas stared numbly at his dodges and thrusts until Semyonov punched him with a right cross that propelled the Hungarian backward onto the wooden bench and left him slumped nose to bellybutton. A few drips of water plunged from an IV onto the hot rocks, and a billow of steam obscured the assassin’s head until evaporating into the parched air.

  “Bombah!”

  Fabi’s son, a frizzy-headed youth with a faint, black mustache and candy-red lips imitated the Great Detective’s knock-out punch before pulling open the sauna doors. He took Beryx Gulyas by the feet, dragging his sweaty body off the bench and letting his head thump to the floor and down the single step into the unisex locker room. The meaty woman from Fabi’s chamber followed, still naked, but bone dry as if the heat had no effect on her. She carried a coil of steel wire and pulled up a chair—not for herself, but for Gulyas, whom she proceeded to tie to it.

  “Mr. Gulyas,” the Great Detective urged, slapping the Hungarian’s cheeks and dousing his face with a cup of coffee with cream that had been sitting on top of locker thirty-two since the early morning. “Are you ready for that drink now?”

  Chapter 20

  Long before he became known as The Great Detective, Rodki Semyonov had harbored different ambitions. They were grand in neither scope nor mission, but they were ambitions nonetheless. He wanted his own apartment, where he could live with his wife, Polina, and not have to share space with a gaggle of relatives. He wanted a decent factory job in the burgeoning industrial town where he was born, and he wanted to have one child of either sex that he hoped would inherit Polina’s earth-brown eyes.

  The job had been provided for him, as he knew it would be. A man of his size and strength was a welcome addition to most factory crews. Rodki was confident the child would come once he and Polina were settled. But obtaining an apartment for him and his family alone was another story altogether, and Rodki Semyonov knew he would have to use his brain more than his back if he were to pull off such a coup.

  “Az isten bassza meg a bu’do’sru’ csko’s kurva anya’dat!” Gulyas spat, spraying blood and a chipped tooth into Rodki’s face.

  Rodki broke Gulyas’s nose with the back of his hand for the insult. He didn’t appreciate the visual of God “fucking his stinking, wrinkled whore mother,” especially considering the way she’d died—in a gulag, he was told, buried alive next to his Polina.

  It was his mother who had told him not to enter into the Shchelkovo underworld, but Rodki Semyonov had seen an opportunity for himself. The bare-knuckle tournaments that went on after the factories closed for the day promised big bucks and, more importantly, could win him some influence with the Housing Authority.

  “It’s illegal,” his mother had warned. “Maybe they look the other way today, but tomorrow is always another story.”

  She was right, of course, but not about the fights. Those were protected by a man named Belnikov, who was at that time a favorite pet of Stalin’s. Belnikov loved the tournaments and grew fond of the eleven-time tournament champion, whom he had personally nick-named The Iron Knuckle.

  “Mr. Gulyas, I know who you are and what you do.”

  The Great Detective held Gulyas’s Beretta above his bloody nose, letting him get a good look at it.

  “It has an abnormal land and groove pattern, did you know that? It’s a manufacturer’s defect that makes it easy to track from a ballistic standpoint.”

  Gulyas eyed the gun, reacquainting himself with its blunt nose and quarter moon trigger. It had been cleaned.

  “Antosha Sidorov, Lev Kretchnif, Teo Anghelescu, Anna and Magnus Karlsson, Charles Monks . . . I have thirteen other confirmations in addition to five other assassinations I suspect can be attributed to you, although no gun was used. It would appear you’ve branched out into other methods lately.”

  Rodki Semyonov had always found interrogations distasteful, but they were a fact of life. There was nothing that made a man reveal his secrets or his character better than discomfort. Beryx Gulyas, of course, had no intention of disclosing any information, no matter how badly he was beaten. Rodki had encountered his type before, but their exchange wouldn’t be for nothing.

  “I’m confused, Mr. Gulyas, why you would be dispatched here to kill an American tourist when your prey is normally so distinguished?” Rodki lit a cigarette and put it in the assassin’s mouth. “You can’t have fallen on hard times when there’s so much work out there.”

  Gulyas spit the cigarette out, and Fabi’s son picked it up and began to smoke. It was a fine Turkish brand.

  “Unless there’s someone else you’re after and the girl is incidental. I’d be careful about these incidental players, though, if I were you. You never know who they are.”

  Rodki Semyonov produced the metal card he’d found in Lilia Tassos’s suite. He held it up close enough for Gulyas to see and then put it back into his breast pocket.

  “Funny little thing—wouldn’t you say? Your friend—the American girl—had it amongst her belongings. You wouldn’t happen to know what it is, would you?”

  Rodki punched Gulyas in the kidney before he could answer. He bore down on the assassin’s shoulder—not enough to break it, but enough to make Gulyas wonder if it was broken.

  “My biggest question to you, Mr. Gulyas, is—what now?”

  It had become a stock phrase for Rodki Semyonov. He’d first used it on a British naval officer who was trying to pass himself off as a Kim Philby ex-patriot, insisting that he was eager to betray his country and move to Moscow. Rodki knew he was a spy the moment he saw him in his civilian clothes. Dressed to appear like a disillusioned member of the British upper classes, he wore a gold-tinted watch that he’d recently scrubbed free of tarnish and attached to a new leather band.

  It was one of his first cases after being recruited into the Moscow police force. Belnikov felt they needed more good fighters on the force and thought The Iron Knuckle would be a boon at interrogations. He’d never suspected that Rodki Semyonov could be useful as anything other than a strong man, and Rodki Semyonov never suspected that his natural gift for puzzles and mysteries would draw him into Stalin’s inner circle.

  “Junior?”

  The Great Detective stepped back and let Fabi’s son box Gulyas’s ears and kick his groin. The Hungarian bore the abuse well, so Rodki took a couple of gentle cracks at him to make the eager youth feel like less of a lightweight.

  Long before joining the ranks of the Moscow police, where socialist protocol made mediocrity essential, Rodki Semyonov had learned not to flaunt his talents. It could be dangerous to distinguish oneself on the force, even if it was more results-focused than the postal service or the universities. Rodki had always been a likeable fellow and figured out how to handle threatened superiors by using just enough working class humility and appearing genuinely surprised when he solved a case—as if it were by accident.

  Belnikov wasn’t fooled.

  “Aren’t you a revelation?” he’d always remark when he visited Rodki at his office. “Stalin has his eye on you.”

  It would appear Stalin had his eye on Belnikov, too: The trusted advisor’s intestines were gored at his whore’s apartment on New Year’s Day in 1938—the same day they came for Polina and the rest of Rodki Semyonov’s family.

  Comrade Stalin felt he needed a personal detective without any conflicting loyalties, and in one stroke, Rodki’s personal life had ceased to exist.

  “Mr. Gulyas, I’m sure you understand that whoever sent you—perhaps your Secretary General or one of his henchmen—is himself a servant of Moscow.”

  Rodki clutched Gulyas by the hair
and yanked his head backward. The Hungarian, choked by his own blood, coughed and gurgled, taking deep gasps of air as the fluids from his nose drained to the back of his throat.

  Gulyas took a good look at his tormentor and noticed for the first time that there was a piercing intellect behind his plum-black eyes. It wasn’t the kind a bookworm would value, but it was the most effectual kind—the kind paired with instinct and experiential knowledge. Had his lips not been so swollen, he might’ve smiled.

  “All we want to know is why you’re here,” Rodki said. Like the Hungarian, he was bored. Both men knew a thing or two about applying and surviving pressure, so their encounter was becoming an endless game of tic-tac-toe.

  Gulyas rolled his eyes into the back of his head as if he were about to have a seizure, but Rodki would brook none of his dramatics. He beat the Hungarian with his knees and elbows until the man really was on the brink of unconsciousness and, perhaps, just the slightest bit sorry that he’d tempted fate with such a wise-assed move.

  “You’re looking tired, Mr. Gulyas,” Rodki teased. “I think you need rest.”

  Fabi’s son was keen to continue the interrogation, but Rodki Semyonov took him aside and explained how things were done. He wanted to give the Hungarian a bit of time to get his confidence back before he destroyed it again.

  Chapter 21

  Sergei Posad

  A day and night of tossing and sweats had been followed by a regimen of ice water, dumped bucket by bucket, over Pasha’s head and body—as if those were separate entities. Fedot assured Lily that they were and talked with scientific specificity about the various “elements” the cold water addressed. He was able to deliver his medieval logic—based one part in faith and the other in alchemy—with a tone so utterly reasonable that Lily found herself chanting with him at times, urging Pasha to find it within himself to heal.