[2017] The Hungarian

by Victoria Dougherty

  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 Tony Geiger 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 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.”

  Chapter 4

  Prague

  Couldn’t we get a better hotel?”

  Brandy France stood outside the Hotel Yalta and squinted up at the glimmering, concrete monolith. It looked like a vertical ice cube tray and was positioned in stark contrast to the centuries-old buildings that also lined Wenceslas Square.

  “My dear, this is the best hotel in Prague.”

  Pasha led her inside.

  Bulo, a young bellboy of about sixteen, neither greeted them nor offered to take their bags until Pasha made him get a luggage cart. Miffed at having to exert himself, he sucked in his pimply cheeks and pouted all the way to their room.

  “I’m glad you didn’t tip him,” Brandy sniffed as the boy stomped away, but Pasha wasn’t listening. He opened the large metal door of their suite and held it for Brandy as she peeked inside.

  The room was as big as a regular suite—in fact bigger, like everything else in the Hotel Yalta—but with hardly any furniture and none of the usual amenities. No bar, no welcome basket or pretty chocolates, and no robes or slippers to get cozy in. Ironically, what little furniture the place had was downright miniature compared to the antique bedroom set in Brandy’s Vienna suite. If it weren’t for the uniformed bellboys in the lobby—dressed like performing monkeys—the place could have doubled for a sanitarium.

  “Don’t just stand there, my dear,” Pasha said, as he pulled their luggage cart from the entryway. “Come in.”

  The suite was a patchwork of beige and white, except for the institutional yellow linoleum in the bathroom. Their two low, single beds had been pushed together and were even harder than the ones in Austria. Brandy sat down and bounced a little on the corner of one of the mattresses. They were as stiff as dry sea sponges. The covers had been pulled tight, like they were in a military barracks, and the pillows were no bigger or softer than the decorative ones adorning the sofas of countless American living rooms. Those might read King and Queen, respectively, and be stuffed with wool. These were plain white and looked to be stuffed with crumpled tissue paper.

  “I don’t think I’ll even be able to fit all my things into these little drawers,” Brandy lamented of the bureau. “That man at the desk bragged that this hotel is state of the art. Better than anything in America. He said it’s only been open for a month and pointed to that big banner that read, ‘WELCOME TO THE HOTEL YALTA’ as if it was some sort of proof. Clearly,” Brandy huffed, “the man is a liar.”

  “And what is it exactly you want me to do? Shall I ask for another suite?”

  Pasha opened his suitcase and began placing his folded clothes into the top drawer of their bureau, leaving the three drawers beneath it for her. Years of travel had taught him to make himself at home immediately and not live out of his baggage.

  “I don’t know. Some of the older hotels we passed looked nice.” Brandy squinted out of their white nylon curtains onto Wenceslas Square several stories below. “I rather like the look of the Hotel Europa. It seems comfy and pretty.”

  “The Hotel Europa is falling apart. At least we’ll get working faucets here.” Pasha eased up behind Brandy and massaged her delicate shoulders. He wanted to say “welcome to the worker’s paradise,” but he knew the irony would be lost on her.

  “Hotel Yalta, my dear, is where men of my position stay. It’s a monument to socialist productivity and skill.” Pasha opened his palms in a grand, presentational style. “How would it look if I stayed in one of the older, bourgeois-built hotels?”

  Brandy hung her dresses—a robin’s egg Oleg Cassini, jade Givenchy and watermelon Dior—in a wardrobe not much wider than their bureau.

  “I just don’t see why anyone would care who built a hotel and when they built it. And it’s not as if this place is cheap. It’s just . . . big.”

  Pasha had forgotten how much Brandy liked to complain. Normally their liaisons supported only a few minutes of talk—thirty at most—as they were short on time and wanted to get down to business.

  “Will you excuse me, darling? I’ll need to shave before the party tonight. Zablov should be here any minute. You remember Kosmo Zablov, don’t you? He was in Paris before getting assigned here, and used to come to Rome.”

  Pasha took his razor and shaving soap out of his toilette case and entered the bath, closing the door behind him. Brandy heard the faucet turn on and the unmistakable click of the door lock.

  “Pasha . . . ” she started, and then thought better of it. A practiced wife and mistress, she knew a man needed his privacy sometimes. Brandy didn’t really feel like company right then anyway. She had a splitting headache and was upset that her clothes were all squashed together in an ugly wardrobe.

  Brandy marched over to her luggage and searched her Louis Vuítton chest until she found the matching makeup case at the bottom, under her brassieres. She opened it, rummaging through her hair combs, toothpaste, mascara, eye shadow, Rouge Classique nail polish, Chanel #5, Crème la Perle hand cream, night oil, eye balm, sedatives, her toothbrush, breath mints, countless tubes of lipstick and a small vial of “pick me up’s.” She laid every item on the bed like they were evidence, but among all of her beauty supplies, powders and pills, there was not one single aspirin to help relieve the rhythmic pounding at her temples.

  “Pasha!” she called, but he couldn’t hear her with the water running. “Pasha, do you have any aspirin?”

  Brandy sat down and put his toilette case in her lap. She unzipped it and pulled out several medicine bottles, leaving his hair balm, a comb and pillbox inside. Amidst the antacids, laxatives and boric acid lay a small, brown bottle of Myer aspirin.

  “Pasha, I’m going to have one of your aspirin, okay? My head’s about to split.”

  She opened the bottle and tipped it over into her hand, but nothing came out. She shook it, hearing a swooshing inside, and stuck her pinky into the bottle.

  “Pasha, I think I’m taking your last one? Is that all right?”

  Her pinky dug further until her nail hooked onto something that was sliding against the wall of the bottle. Slowly, she pulled her finger out, dragging with it a long, curly stretch of what looked like camera film, only smaller. She held the film up to the light and looked closely at some tiny Cyrillic letters printed on what looked to be an architect’s drawing. She’d seen one of t
hose when she and her husband, Buster, built their beach house.

  “S-P-U-T-N-I-K,” she sounded out. Pasha had taught her his alphabet.

  “What are you doing?”

  Brandy hadn’t heard Pasha open the bathroom door and jumped up, dropping the film and the bottle onto the bed with all of her other beauty products. He was standing before her in his royal blue bathrobe with only his trousers on underneath. He didn’t look angry exactly, but all of his usual warmth was gone, replaced by nothing but a stare.

  “I just wanted an aspirin, that’s all. Didn’t you hear me asking you?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry.” Brandy swallowed and looked down at the coiled roll of film. “Do you have any?”

  “What?”

  “Aspirin?”

  Pasha took a deep breath, relaxing his shoulders and letting his features soften. He knew that unless he was smiling, he could look terribly mean.

  “Of course,” he said. “They’re in my suit jacket.”

  Pasha went back into the bathroom and came out a moment later with his suit jacket draped over his forearm. He handed her a plain, clear bottle of pills and a cup of water and watched as she took two pills out and swallowed them.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He nodded.

  When she finished drinking her water, he took the cup out of her hands and placed it on the bedside table. He walked to the end of the room and hung his suit jacket on his valet, turned back to her and grabbed her wrist, abruptly twisting it behind her. He slit her throat with his shaving blade, splattering their white curtains and a bad painting of a grain-processing factory with an arched spray of her blood.

  She would die in less than a minute, and he was glad. Pasha hadn’t wanted her to suffer and made sure that the cut was deep and completely severed her artery. Though she would be unconscious, at least, if not dead, by the time she fell to the beige carpet, he guided her body down slowly and into a position that would be comfortable. When she seemed at rest, he went back into the bathroom and washed her blood off his hands and wrists. The arms of his bathrobe were finished, so he peeled it off, rolled it into a ball, and threw it into the bathtub. He rinsed his arms one more time before putting his white undershirt back on.

  Pasha cursed himself for having put the microfilm in an aspirin bottle. He should’ve put it into his stomach medication, but the Myer aspirin bottle was the same brown color of the film and a safer bet. It had been since before his last regular mistress, Aprilia, that he’d traveled with a woman, and he’d forgotten the way they got into everything.

  It didn’t appear as if she’d gotten a look at the film, and she wouldn’t understand how to read a blueprint if she had—especially one of a spaceship. But the fact that Brandy had seen it at all sealed her fate. He could’ve made up a story that she would’ve believed the way she believed everything else he told her, but that would’ve been one more lie on top of the many he’d already woven, and he had to draw a line somewhere.

  And she was eminently capable of making a slip in front of one of his colleagues or pestering him for a deeper involvement in his so-called patriotic missions for Mother Russia. When the time came to break things off with her completely, she might’ve even put some of the puzzle pieces together and blackmailed him. It never ceased to amaze him how a woman of limited intellect could become uncharacteristically sharp when her ego had been bruised and her heart broken by a lover. His mistresses had always been fair-minded, but he’d seen it happen before. A more rational man might have killed Brandy after she’d mentioned knowledge of the metal card, but Pasha was an emotional creature, whose heart was made up of poetry. He had a soft spot for his mistresses.

  Pasha rolled up the microfilm and put it back in the aspirin bottle, tucking it into his pants pocket. He would be delivering it to the safe house late that evening. Plucking Brandy’s beauty products off the bed, he placed them in her makeup case according to size, returning it and her clothes to her luggage. Pasha then removed some bogus classified documents—Russian—from the lining of his suitcase and laid them out on the bed, throwing a mini-camera—the type used in American espionage—on top of them as if it had been dropped there. He dug a small pistol out of the same lining where he’d stored the bogus documents and opened Brandy’s hand, placing the pistol in her palm and squeezing her fingers around the handle. He always carried props with him in case of an emergency. Remembering the bathroom, he went to the tub, removed his bloody robe from its cradle and filled it a quarter of the way with cold water. He was finishing hanging his suit jacket and dress shirt on a rack in the bath when Kosmo Zablov came knocking—late, as usual.

  “Why aren’t you dressed, you ox?” Kosmo feigned outrage when he saw Pasha in his undershirt. He, on the other hand, was dressed in his usual close-fitting, second-rate clothes, trying to affect the look of a Venetian gangster.

  “What the . . . ?” It was hard to miss Brandy’s body and the copious amounts of blood she’d spilled. Kosmo glimpsed her nearly severed head from the doorway and entered the suite to get a better look at her.

  “You could’ve at least saved the artwork, my friend. What did it do to you?”

  “She’s an American spy.”

  Kosmo looked down at the surprised look on Brandy’s face, and at the gun in her hand.

  “This little idiot?”

  “No idiot, I’m afraid.” Pasha picked the documents up off the bed and held up the camera. “I’ve been trying to trap her for months.”

  Kosmo whistled his approval of his comrade’s cool air. He assumed the same kind of detachment as he eyeballed the contents of the documents in Pasha’s hand.

  “You just leave those around for anyone to find?”

  “These?” Pasha held up the documents. He’d enjoyed taunting the agent with them, but it was time to wrap up this whole ugly scene. “These are useless. Go ahead—look at them. I made them up.”

  Kosmo grabbed them, devouring the first page.

  “This is great stuff,” he chuckled. “How did you come up with it?”

  Pasha shrugged. “I wanted to arrest her, not kill her, but she tried to shoot me.”

  Pasha went into the bathroom and returned with his suit jacket and dress shirt. He dressed slowly as Kosmo sat on the edge of the bed and continued to amuse himself with the false documents. He had one foot on the bloodied carpet and one resting on Brandy’s shoulder. When Pasha finished tying his tie, he tore the top blanket off the bed and covered Brandy’s body with it, making Kosmo put his feet up elsewhere.

  “Have this cleaned up, will you? I need to go downstairs and request another suite—one with a clean carpet.”

  “You are a cold bastard, aren’t you?” Kosmo stood up, slapping Pasha’s back before going over to the telephone. “I’ll get right on it. You know this is going to get some attention. She’s a Hollywood type—the denials will be fervent and angry.”

  “We have the evidence right here—they can deny it all they want.”

  Kosmo smiled, revealing his crossed front teeth.

  “What the hell?” he said, picking up the receiver. “I’ve always loved to annoy the Americans.”

  He dialed the three-digit number, but the front desk was busy.

  “Of course, you’ll be sent back to Moscow for this,” Zablov continued. He dialed again and this time the line rang. “And you’ll miss your dinner with the French President next week. Bastard—you always get the greatest of the great boondoggles. President Coty has the most exquisite chef—or so I’ve been told.”

  Pasha Tarkhan nodded and tried his best at a smile. “We can fly back together.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll be flying back alone, my friend,” Kosmo Zablov lamented, placing his fingers over the mouthpiece. “You know General Pushkin and how he likes to keep our satellite countries in line. I have to go to Romania now—they’ve been very naughty you know, those Romanians.”

  The phone stopped ringing and a bored voice came on the l
ine. “Yes, hello, front desk?” Zablov inquired. “We have a dead mouse up here.”

  Chapter 5

  Bucharest, Romania

  Kosmo Zablov’s neck was killing him. The damned cots in the overnight compartment on the train from Prague to Bucharest reminded him of the war. Not that he’d seen much action. Ironically, a neck injury he’d been able to exaggerate had kept him busy and mostly out of harm’s way. But he’d still had to brave those cots. Too short and too thin, they actually did give him something of an injury. His neck had never been the same.

  He was sure Pasha Tarkhan wouldn’t be complaining of a sore neck. Or a sore anything. He’d flown back to Moscow in first class like he always did, while Zablov had to make his way to Romania on his considerably smaller travel budget.

  Kosmo Zablov loathed Romania, but it was the only way he could meet with Nicolai Ceausescu and his ever-present wife, Elena, without arousing suspicion. And he detested coming to their home. For reasons beyond his understanding, the Ceausescus eschewed fresh air and kept the doors and windows of their villa closed tight, trapping the stenches of their pantry, the daily “accidents” carried out by their coiffed pack of lap dogs, and Elena’s dreadful perfume of waxy lipstick, talcum powder and mustard-laced breath. Of course, he went a long way back with the Ceausescus, and aesthetic grounds were no reason to discontinue his relationship with them.

  Zablov, it could be argued, had helped insure Nicolai Ceausescu’s election to the Romanian Politburo by alerting him to his greatest competitor and inspiring him to act upon that information, much like he planned to inspire him about Pasha Tarkhan today. Ceausescu’s old rival had been ten times the intellect of Nicolai Ceausescu, and twice the intellect of Kosmo Zablov. The man had a promising career indeed before his wife’s tragic injuries.

  Unfortunately, the rival’s intellect and promise had uncovered Zablov’s weakness as well: that he had no idea how to do his job and had risen in the ranks of the KGB by inventing espionage escapades that allowed him to save the day and passing off the blame for the very real exploits he’d overlooked. Politics were where Zablov’s core abilities lay, and it was imperative that he rise out of the KGB and into areas of diplomacy. There, his inadequacies could take years to surface, giving him much more time to invent a trail that could transfer the blame.