Welcome to the Hotel Yalta: Six Stories of Cold War Noir

  “You’d better be right,” he told Etor.

  Beryx slammed the phone down, chipping the cradle in the process. Etor was a lousy assassin, but the only assassin available in Greece—let alone Monemvasia—on such short notice. His effete tastes irked the Transylvanian native, especially since he knew Etor had spent most of his adolescence and early manhood as a rough for a Cretan gangster known as Baru. Now he sashayed around like he was better than everyone else and took assignments from Baru only when he was broke. Beryx would’ve made an example out of him if he were the big Greek, but there went Etor, eating his fancy food with his fancy girlfriends. Beryx Gulyas hated the Greeks almost as much as he hated the Romanians.

  “Burn that little turd . . . ” he said aloud before catching himself. He looked back into the living room and was relieved to see his Aunt Zuzanna was still asleep on the couch and hadn’t heard his crass slip of the tongue.

  Whenever Gulyas came to Brasov, he stayed with his Aunt Zuzanna, his uncle’s second wife. She lived on the edge of the valley, where the gondola left hourly for the tops of the Southern Carpathian Mountains.

  Zuzanna thought he was some big shot party official, and he proved her right by sending her twenty American dollars every month. It was a fortune for her and he was sure that she’d saved every dollar he’d sent and kept it buried in her yard somewhere. This simple pay-off allowed him the freedom to come and go as he pleased and discouraged his aunt from gossiping for fear of losing her meal ticket. These were the very practical reasons he sent her money. The personal reasons were more complicated.

  His aunt had taught him how to make love some two and a half decades earlier. She was slender then and a youthful thirty. She had shapely calves, and full hips, and almost no bosom. At the time, she was perfection to him, and he would favor her physical type all of his life.

  They had eight encounters total, but it was the first that was most exciting and played over and over again in his mind when he needed to summon the proper enthusiasm with his wife. He’d seen Zuzanna sunbathing in her yard, lying face down, with her bathing suit pulled slightly down over her hips so that just a wee bit of her cleavage showed at the top of her buttocks. He lost himself staring at her, and was startled when she called out his name and summoned him to her side. “There’s some oil in the kitchen, would you bring it out here for me?”

  He nodded yes and ran back into the house, retrieving the oil.

  “Now, rub it on my back, will you?”

  Gulyas bent over to cover his lap as he massaged the oil into her skin. Without any warning, she turned over and poured the oil over her tiny breasts and stomach. Zuzanna took young Beryx’s hands and dipped them into the oil, guiding them over her body until he took over the motion himself.

  “Such fine-looking eyes,” she purred at him. “I could pluck one out and wear it on my finger like an emerald.”

  The tension in his loins became unbearable, and to Beryx’s horror, suddenly released. Zuzanna giggled and he wanted to slap her. Instead, Beryx ran into the house and closed himself off in the cellar. It was quiet for several minutes there—he could hear no small, bare feet making their way into the house, and no voice giving gentle words of apology. Only the squeak of a fruit bat that had entered the house in a basket of freshly picked crab apples.

  After little less than an hour, Beryx grew tired of the dark, damp cellar and made his way back to his room again. The house was quiet and still, and Zuzanna was nowhere in sight—neither inside in the kitchen, her usual place, nor outside on the lawn, where she’d been sunning.

  It was to Beryx’s great surprise when he opened his bedroom door and found Zuzanna, naked and asleep, on his bed. She pointed her toes and stretched a bit at the sound of the door, and slowly opened her eyes. He’d sworn she said ‘come here’ and he walked over to her shaking and fiddling with his trousers. Zuzanna helped him get undressed and then took over for the rest.

  How different it was seeing her now. She’d become pear-shaped and had grown weary, having been shunned by her neighbors. Marrying a Hungarian was almost as bad as being one in those hapless years.

  Zuzanna had tried to rekindle their affair once, but Beryx could no longer look on her with desire the way he had when he was seventeen and she was beautiful. He used his wife as an excuse, but Zuzanna knew the real reason behind his faithfulness. It was then that he started sending her money, and she started treating him like a nephew.

  She dithered over whether he’d eaten enough and spent entire days washing his laundry, trying to erase age-old stains from fine shirts that were too good to throw away. This was all done without affection, and Beryx now felt like a young boy with a distant mother when he was in her company. The hungry woman in his fantasies bore no resemblance to the busy, ashen woman who kept his underwear clean and smelling like freshly cut grass.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked, without looking at him. She got up from the couch and pushed her feet into her slippers.

  “I’m not hungry,” he told her.

  Regardless of their past, Zuzanna had never fully liked him, as she had never fully liked her late husband, Beryx’s uncle by blood. They were, after all, ethnic Hungarians, and she was no Hungarian, as she’d liked to remind them—even during their most intimate moments.

  “Az apád faszát,” he snarled to himself in Hungarian—do it to your father’s cock. Beryx Gulyas fingered his ring—a bequest from his grandfather’s time in the Royal Hungarian Army.

  Though Beryx was born and raised in Transylvania, and carried a Romanian passport, he’d never felt like one of them, and the Romanians would never let him forget that he was by origin a Hungarian. Despite the overt snubs he’d endured throughout the years, his birth-country had not left him uninfected by its history and culture either. He loved the brittle air of the Southern Carpathian Mountains and the wide, sensual faces of the women who called them home. Their broad shoulders, made strong by carrying milk jugs, piles of pelts, and heavy buckets to and from the water pumps, were rippled from behind and particularly alluring when covered with perspiration. Romanian women sweat like their men and smelled like animals.

  And there was a palpable sorrow present in even the freshest newborn—a thirst for the agonies of life that courted lucklessness for the sheer thrill of surviving it. A Hungarian, though also drawn to the melancholy and macabre, might kill himself to end his grief, while a Romanian—particularly a Transylvanian—would hang on to the bitter end. Beryx Gulyas had a Hungarian heart, unable to truly love anyone except one of his own, but he possessed the soul of a Transylvanian.

  “I’m going out,” he said, as he retrieved the keys to his new Berlina from a wooden bowl by the door. He told her he wouldn’t be coming back for at least a week, and would appreciate the holes in his trouser pockets being mended by then. It was a terrible inconvenience not being able to wear them, and they were his favorite pair—forgiving in their cut and capable of retaining their shape and crispness for hours longer than the other pants he owned. They also made him look at least five kilos slimmer.

  Strangely, the pants meant more to him than the Berlina, which had been a recent gift from his boss. He’d “Oo’d” and “Aah’d” the way he was expected to, but a car was little more to him than a vehicle that got him from one place to another. Certainly, it spared him the inconvenience of having to take a bus or a train, but even at that moment, with his foot pressing the pedal to the floor and nothing but an empty, winding road ahead of him, Beryx did not feel the rush of adrenaline that consumed so many ardent drivers. There was only one thing that gave him that kind of rush.

  A muffled groan pierced his reverie.

  “Quiet!” he bellowed, and finally there was some peace in the car. Beryx had grown used to the incessant whining of the doomed over the years, but Leon Kunz, his regular pilot, had been begging since the Hungarian had returned to the car, repeating, “Please, no,” over and o
ver again in various intonations like an actor rehearsing his one big line. Although the moans were hushed by the trunk walls, they were beginning to wear on Beryx’s already raw nerves, and he’d almost pulled over and shot the man like he had his co-pilot at the airfield.

  “What have you done to yourself?” he’d demanded, as the co-pilot had begun slurring and sputtering that they weren’t expecting him—no one had called. “You’re too drunk to hear a phone, you mongoloid.”

  Beryx had broken their bottle of Boza on the concrete floor and carved the word idiot into the man’s forehead before shooting him in the groin, stomach, and finally mouth. That was when Leon Kunz started whimpering and “Please, no,” became the only words in his vocabulary. It was a common enough phenomenon amongst the very frightened—getting stuck, like a needle on a defective record album—but Beryx was in no mood for it tonight and was relieved that the German had been able to reign himself in. Now, he could sit at the wheel for a few moments after pulling over into the dead stillness of the mountain overlook, and think through what he wanted to do in the next twenty-four hours.

  Anyone who had ever heard of Beryx in a professional capacity would know better than to lie about a botched job, but Greeks were unpredictable, and men like Etor had a far less exacting definition of success than a man in Beryx’s position. He couldn’t look Nicolai Ceausescu in the eye until he knew without a doubt that the American agent was dead and there were no loose ends to be tied up.

  That realization changed his plans for the night. He tucked his gun into his holster, slipped on the thick, tobacco wool turtleneck Zuzanna had knitted for him, and stepped out of the warm car and into a freezing drizzle.

  “Get up, Leon,” Beryx ordered as he unlocked the trunk. Leon Kunz was rolled up into a ball with his face buried in his knees.

  “Please, no,” he started, and once he said it he couldn’t stop.

  “Leon,”

  “Please, no,”

  “Leon!”

  “Please, no,”

  “Shut up!”

  “Please, no. Please, no. Please no.”

  “Leon,” Beryx whispered, taking a long, deep breath. “I’m not going to kill you tonight, Leon. I’m not even going to beat you.”

  “Please, no.”

  “I’m an honest man, Leon. If you were going to die, I’d tell you. And if I was going to torture you, I would torture you. We wouldn’t have to talk about it.”

  Leon Kunz stopped begging, but continued to cry, keeping his eyes closed tight and his kneecaps pressed against his brow.

  “Let tonight be a lesson to you, Leon.”

  Leon Kunz nodded his head feverishly and vomited.

  “Now take your stinking clothes off before coming into the car. It’s almost dawn, and you’re flying me to Greece in an hour.”

  Etor was not as stupid as Beryx had originally thought him to be. He was careless. He was trivial. But he wasn’t an idiot, like Leon Kuntz’s co-pilot had been, according to the crude carvings on his forehead.

  “I shouldn’t use so much salt,” the Cretan gigolo reproved, helping himself to a liberal pinch for his baked eel. He had finished explaining to Beryx why he’d chosen to kill the American agent with poison instead of the sniper’s rifle the Hungarian had championed, and was now looking forward to digging in to a costly lunch that wouldn’t cost him a thing.

  “What if you hadn’t used enough of the toxin?” Beryx queried.

  Etor shrugged and shook his head in the same manner he had used to dismiss their waiter when the young boy offered them another bottle of Retsina. The noonday sun was beaming into his eyes, but the gigolo wouldn’t squint. It put his wrinkles on display.

  “Then he would have died in three hours instead of three minutes. You only need enough to cover the head of a pin. And there’s no antidote.”

  “Good,” Beryx murmured.

  Throughout the ages, poison had been referred to as “the coward’s weapon,” but the Hungarian assassin disagreed. Poison takes knowledge and a strong stomach. It can disfigure, distort and liquefy, forcing the perpetrator to watch an often gruesome process. It wasn’t a coward’s weapon, no, but it was certainly a feminine one.

  “An Arab’s Kiss, you called it.”

  “Arab’s Kiss, yes. Very potent. Fast acting. It’s cultivated from a type of passionflower that grows in the Middle East. They call it a . . . a . . . I can’t remember, but it’s a nice word. Beautiful. Like a woman’s name—Alehlah.”

  Although Etor relayed all of this with his mouth full, he managed to avoid looking uncouth. He spoke equally with his hands, which moved in sensual, dancing motions and drew attention away from his lips.

  “Alehlah. A very clever poison,” Beryx acknowledged, and Etor smiled.

  “Of course, if I’d used a gun, I would’ve been better prepared for circumstances created out of my control. If something or someone else emerged, I could’ve fired another bullet. The darts are more complicated. They’re difficult to handle because you don’t want the poison to come in contact with your skin.” Etor stuck his fork into a heavily salted yellow potato the size of a walnut, and held it up while his tongue fished a piece of eel skin out of his back molar.

  “But,” he continued. “The fact is I’ve never liked blood. It’s ugly and it stains the clothes.”

  Beryx knew how to get a man like Etor going. Initially reticent, the gigolo was growing more forthcoming with every glass of wine. All he needed to be assured of was a sympathetic ear, which would give him permission to bask in the sound of his own voice and boast an expertise in something other than luxury clothing and women’s genitalia.

  “Who could get in the way?” Beryx probed.

  “I don’t know. A lover, perhaps. Someone who wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  Beryx moved closer to Etor, putting his hand on the gigolo’s thigh. “A lover?”

  Etor nodded and leaned in to the Hungarian, his lips brushing the curve of his ear. He didn’t desire men sexually, in fact, he preferred the company of women on almost all occasions—but his days of picking and choosing were over, and men like Beryx Gulyas had deep pockets. “A very good lover,” he whispered.

  Beryx smiled, showing his teeth, which he didn’t often do. Not out of vanity, although the state of his teeth was nothing to be proud of, but because it felt entirely unnatural to him. Smiling on command was difficult enough, but grinning was so contrary to his character that he looked more like an animal baring its teeth than a happy, amused human being.

  “Then let’s go to your place.”

  Etor pushed his plate away from him and leaned his elbows on the table. “My place is small. I’m not here very often. A couple of months here and there—mostly in the early summer.”

  “I don’t like hotels,” Beryx insisted. “They don’t have kitchens. I must have a kitchen.”

  Etor shrugged, thinking, “Suit yourself.” His Athens apartment was a depressing concrete matchbox of a place, and unlike Beryx Gulyas, he loved hotels. They were always so clean—the good ones anyway—and everyone did everything for him. “We should ask for a carafe of wine to take with us.”

  “Oh, yes,” Beryx agreed. “In a glass carafe. Only a glass carafe will do. Because they’re so pretty.”

  The Hungarian hadn’t struck Etor as the type who cared much about pretty things, but then people often got very particular when it came to sex. And the Cretan didn’t care if the man wanted a glass carafe or a glass giraffe, as long he got paid in American dollars. “I’ll make sure to get the prettiest one.”

  Beryx smiled again and waved a hundred drachma note at the waiter. He got up to use the toilet, telling Etor he’d meet him outside. Having not had anything to drink, he didn’t need to go, but he did need to purge himself of the heavy lunch he’d shared with the gigolo. Beryx was planning on having a nice dinner with a girl that nigh
t and wanted to save his appetite for his real date. He also wanted to look trim, and was depressed that he’d lost only two kilos. This, despite nearly starving himself on a diet of raw vegetables and vomiting every time temptation grew too great and he cheated with a sweet pastry or a sausage. He was sure to build up a good sweat with Etor, though. Maybe once he was finished with the Cretan, his pants would fit just a little bit better around the waist.

  “Are you ready?” Etor cooed, pushing his shoulders back and sucking in his stomach.

  Beryx Gulyas nodded. “Tell me,” he said. “Do you have any salt at home, or will we need to stop at a market?”

  “Ah, salt—it’s good for the skin,” Etor nodded, rubbing his palms over his chest.

  “It’s good for so many things,” the Hungarian told him.

  Adonia was clearly an invented name and Beryx imagined that the youngish woman the madam had offered him was born an Agatha or Acacia in some remote Greek fishing village. These thoughts about her were ruining his fantasy, and he swept them away as surely as he’d swept away the salt and broken glass on the floor of Etor’s cramped city apartment. When he hired a woman for the night, he liked to pretend that they had met somewhere other than a brothel—in this case a bus stop—and would instruct the woman to bump into him and look up—or in this case down—into his eyes. She would feel an immediate and uncontrollable passion for him and agree to dinner, knowing full well that he intended to take her afterwards. She would love it and be anticipating it all night—frightened, ashamed, titillated.

  “What’s this place called again?” Adonia asked, gazing up at the lighted Acropolis, which sat high above the tiny, outdoor restaurant her customer had chosen. Forgetting to act in his thrall, she recovered quickly by licking her lips and pushing her bust together, while she stroked his calf with her open-toed sandal.

  “Socrates’ Prison. The chicken is good.”

  “I like chicken,” she cooed. “Do you like chicken?”

  “Yes, I like chicken,” Beryx breathed. From his pocket, he removed five stones with properties for bolstering will power—rose quartz, black onyx, rock crystal, chrysoprase, and tiger’s eye—and lined them up on the table in front of him.