[2017] The Hungarian

by Victoria Dougherty

  “I’m Hungarian,” Beryx answered. “Here on holiday.”

  The Hungarian spoke in a distinctive Transylvanian accent. Semyonov had never been particularly good at speaking foreign languages, but he had an ear for detecting dialects. It was a skill he’d sharpened on the police force, when he’d been required to shadow visiting aliens.

  “I’ve never been out of Moscow, but I encountered a student from Budapest once,” Semyonov continued. “He sent me a recipe for stuffed cabbage that he wrote on cigarette paper and smuggled to me through one of the prison guards. He was crazy. I still haven’t made the cabbage.”

  “Are you the house detective?” Beryx asked.

  “Yes, I’m a detective.” Semyonov yawned and cracked his neck, feeling an attack of bursitis coming on in his shoulder. “Most of my job is boring, but being sent after a nice-looking girl isn’t so bad.”

  Beryx forced a smile. His crotch burned from the Aqua Regia injected into it, and he was in no mood for small talk. Though most of the acid had gone into the Russian’s arm, it didn’t take much of it to cause an inexorable amount of damage. Aqua Regia was, after all, primarily used to melt gold and platinum, as the inflamed blisters poking out of his pubic hair could attest.

  “Can you tell me anything about her?” the detective inquired.

  Beryx shrugged.

  “Not really. Pretty piece of ass. Throws her money around.”

  Semyonov continued to rifle through Lily’s toiletries, picking through them one by one and lining them up on the bathroom counter. “Do you know where she gets her money?”

  Beryx curled his lip and folded his arms across his chest. “Maybe her daddy,” he replied.

  Semyonov took out a small pad of poor-quality paper and made notes for himself in his own shorthand. There was an unmistakable clarity to finding the spigot of any investigation—the person from whom all of the answers would flow sooner or later, in one way or another. It was the same when he’d been investigating murders and black market rings and was especially true now, when his detecting revolved solely around espionage.

  “Must be her daddy,” he agreed. “Say, you wouldn’t want to have a drink with me, would you? Since your plans with the American girl have fallen through?” Semyonov’s nose pointed left as he smiled, and the Hungarian was transfixed by the man’s features. His interest turned to annoyance when the Russian detective put his arm around him and squeezed his shoulder.

  Beryx Gulyas shrugged him off and walked out of the suite. He knew it was imprudent to be rude—even to mid-level hotel employees—but he didn’t plan on sticking around Moscow long enough to need any favors or fear petty repercussions.

  The Great Detective, for his part, had expected the slight.

  Chapter 16

  Athens, Greece

  It was taken just this Christmas,” Theron Tassos expounded as he removed a photograph from his ostrich leather attaché case.

  Baru o Crete adjusted the pocket square he’d hastily tucked into his jacket, its indigo dye leaving a faint stain on his fingertips. He dipped them in his tea and wiped them on a linen napkin before taking the Polaroid from his younger brother and holding it at a distance to get a proper look. Baru hadn’t seen his niece in nearly a decade and was struck by what a beauty she’d become. The sight of the color photograph—a rarity in his world—was equally impressive. He could even make out the eggplant tint of Lily’s eyeshadow.

  “She favors you,” Baru commented, scrutinizing the picture further.

  “You think so?” Theron Tassos dismissed him. The man Lily called Daddy looked hardly at all like his daughter. It seemed to him she had absorbed all of her mother’s lovely features as she developed in the womb. Her high cheekbones and plump lips. Her wide-set eyes.

  “She doesn’t resemble you, but she does favor you,” Baru insisted. “It’s here,” he said, pointing to the girl’s nose. “And here,” he continued, indicating her eyes. “It’s not their shape, no, but what’s behind them.”

  The two brothers nodded.

  “Gulyas is his name, you say. That’s Hungarian,” Theron concluded as he slid Lily’s picture back into its home in a plastic sleeve and restored it to his case. They’d been drinking tea for over an hour, having indulged in the kind of over-the-fence chatter that would’ve been impolite to forgo entirely. Even under these grave circumstances.

  “No, he’s Romanian. Perhaps a Hungarian by family origin.”

  Theron knelt down on two of several Turkish pillows that were strewn about Baru’s living room, and the Cretan gangster followed him.

  “And it’s important to you that he suffers.”

  “More than Christ,” Baru hissed.

  Theron put his hand on Baru’s bald head. His hands weren’t as lethal as his brother’s—made for holding weapons, not being them—but possessed the even touch of a man long accustomed to power. “No one can suffer more than Christ.”

  It would’ve been sacrilegious for him to contend otherwise, but Theron Tassos had indeed made men suffer much more than Christ. Christ, it could be argued, had the added burden of humanity, which made his suffering infinitely greater from a spiritual perspective, but pain is pain when you’re made of flesh and blood, he believed.

  Etor himself had once narrowly escaped one of Theron Tassos’s punishments after he’d been late with a one-time delivery to an Oriental. It was a small order from a bit player in an even smaller country, so it was just as easy for Tassos to tell Etor to get lost and stay lost than it was to teach him a lesson.

  But he’d never forgiven Baru for his poor judgment. The two, who had once been as close as soldiers in a death battle, had become distant in the seven-odd years since the Etor incident. While they’d never officially fallen out with one another, they hadn’t spoken in all of this time, either.

  “Do you wish to be present?”

  Baru exhaled and closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Oh, yes,” he whispered.

  Whatever their conflicts over family and business, a Greek would never deny a brother his revenge. Especially over the death of a child—no matter how disappointing that child might have been.

  “Do I know the man you’ll use?” Baru asked. The Cretan’s eyes were leaden and glassy, bearing the look of an old man’s eyes in the long year before his death.

  “I’d never use a Greek,” Theron insisted. “He must be a Russian. I never trust anyone but a Russian to inflict pain.”

  Baru straightened his shoulders and swallowed hard, as if confronting his first glimpse of Etor’s mutilated body.

  “This Gulyas. He’s no Russian, yet he’s built a savage name for himself.”

  Theron Tassos lit a cigarette and shrugged. He knew that men like Beryx Gulyas came and went all the time—burning bright for a few short years before descending back to earth—or rather, beneath it. Sadists rarely lasted very long. Egoists let their vanity override their intellect. Gulyas had both marks against him.

  In the arms dealer’s experience, it took an impersonal character—someone imminently flexible, who took neither pleasure nor pain from his work—to last for any meaningful length of time.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I have the perfect man in mind.”

  Chapter 17

  Sergei Posad, Russia

  Lily was drenched from her waist down and freezing. Fedot, despite her vigorous objections, had flung bucket after bucket of ice water on Pasha Tarkhan at ten minute intervals. He did so with the precision of a physician, as though performing life-saving surgery on the ailing Russian and not merely making the ride in the back of the medical wagon unbearable.

  “Can’t you just soak his arm?” Lily implored. “It’s the only part that’s blistered.” Fedot’s clothes were as wet as Lily’s, but he seemed unbothered by the fact. “Hey, hey! Are you talking to me?”

  It became increasingly clear to her that he was not. Fedot was standing over Pasha Tarkhan, half singing and half chanting a Russian verse. For the third ti
me in their two-hour journey, Pasha—as Lily had taken to calling him in her mind– opened his eyes wide and took in his surroundings. Fedot ignored his awakening and continued chanting until the wagon came to an abrupt halt.

  “Quickly,” he ordered.

  Fedot opened the doors and hopped down, helping Lily into the darkness before wheeling Pasha out. He pounded twice on the back, and the wagon pulled away.

  They were standing outside a tall, white wall that looked like it belonged to a fortress. In the night, with no streetlights to provide guidance, it appeared as if the wall went on forever. A village surrounded the wall, nestled into the countryside. Even in the darkness, it looked old, though not as old as the stone fortress wall that sat in its midst. The village was, Lily thought, post-medieval, but not by much. Clearly, the wall and whatever lay behind it had come first.

  “Miss Lilia,” Fedot whispered.

  Lily spun around, but Fedot and Pasha were gone.

  “Down here.”

  Lily followed the voice and spotted Fedot’s head popping out of a trapdoor hidden in the grass.

  “How did you get down there?” she asked him.

  “There’s a ramp,” he said. And yes, of course, she saw it now. It folded out of the trapdoor.

  Fedot held out his hand, and Lily accepted it, locking eyes with him as she descended into a stone tunnel lit every few meters by two crisscrossed torches. The tunnel was narrow and the sandy color of the desert pyramids that she’d seen as a child on a family trip to Egypt.

  Pasha stirred, letting out a groan as Fedot pushed him along. The little Russian placed his palm on the big Russian’s forehead and seemed to put him at peace. It occurred to Lily that Fedot, like the pyramids, was perhaps one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

  “Where are we?” she whispered.

  “Sergei Posad. About seventy kilometers north from Moscow,” Fedot answered.

  “That’s very exact of you, Fedot, but I was referring more to this tunnel, these walls, this place.”

  Fedot stopped and looked at her. He took off his glasses and placed them on top of Pasha’s chest. Lily’s eyes tracked the movement, and she found herself focused on the numbers of Pasha’s wristwatch, positioned behind the lenses. Even in the torchlight, Lily could see that Fedot’s lenses did nothing to magnify the numbers of the watch. They were plain glass.

  “Miss Lilia,” Fedot said, prompting Lily to look into his perfect, tiger-brown eyes. “You’re standing beneath the Lavra—the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church.”

  Fedot turned away from her and grabbed the last torch at the end of the tunnel. He walked another ten meters to a metal door and rang a hollow-sounding bell—like a cowbell—which hung from the ceiling. Within seconds, they could hear the rattle of a series of locks being opened on the other side, until finally the door wheezed open.

  “Ivanov,” Fedot breathed.

  In the doorway stood an uncommonly tall, athletic man with flowing, white hair and a thick salt-and-pepper beard. He was dressed only in white undershorts and held his arms out wide, repeating the same chant Fedot had sung inside the medical wagon. When he had said the verse three times, he put his arms down and smiled, extolling a greeting in Russian.

  “What did he say?” Lily inquired.

  “He said, ‘Good morning, my babies,’” Fedot told her. “And I will answer, ‘Swathe us in your holiness, sainted one.’” This he apparently said before bowing at the white-haired man’s feet and kissing them both.

  Chapter 18

  Porphyri Ivanov bounced up the stairs on the balls of his bare feet. He hummed as he helped Fedot carry Pasha to the surface and stopped once—not to rest, but to tighten the straps that held the Russian to the gurney and to kiss the man’s damp forehead. When they reached the top of the staircase, Ivanov kicked open the door and strode into the pale, blue light of early dawn.

  “Soak me in your liquid brilliance, oh, too good to be true to have lived another day,” he praised in English as they entered into the great courtyard of the Lavra.

  Lily felt that she’d penetrated a world that had become all but extinct in Russia. Although only forty years had passed since 1917, the force of the revolution had erased religion from daily life, replacing it with an apathy that loomed every bit as pervasively as God had before Mr. Lenin and his cronies had come along. The Byzantine structures before her looked like pieces of chipped pottery, but there was an aura of purpose in the air, embodied in two cloistered monks who were now scampering to first Mass at the Holy Trinity Cathedral—the centerpiece of the Lavra.

  “This is a monastery,” Fedot explained as he draped a scarf over Lily’s head and pointed out the various religious structures. “Do try to look pious.”

  Though she was not pious, the decaying majesty of the Lavra was comforting to Lily. The Trinity Cathedral still held services, as did the Assumption Cathedral, the Church of the Virgin of Smolensk and the half a dozen other churches and chapels that had been erected on the grounds since the start of the fourteenth century. The rooftops—shaped like Hershey’s kisses—were pointing to the sky for a reason.

  “It’s beautiful,” Lily uttered.

  “Oh, yes, beautiful!” Ivanov pronounced. “The shrubs are beautiful, the air is beautiful, my fingers are beautiful, your lips are beautiful—it’s all beautiful and beauty is beautiful.”

  Most of the holy buildings Lily had seen in Moscow had been turned into monuments to bureaucracy. Churches had been converted to museums or libraries if they were lucky and factories if they were not. Many weren’t converted at all, but destroyed, along with their priceless treasures. Ivanov pointed to the empty bell towers and described the horror of the faithful as the bells—including the sixty-five-ton Czar’s bell—were removed from their places and smashed to smithereens.

  Why is this still here? Lily wondered to herself, and Fedot answered her as if she’d said it aloud.

  “After a brief interlude as a civic institution,” he said, “Stalin returned the Lavra to the Russian Orthodox Church.”

  From a practical standpoint, it seemed to Lily that even Josef Stalin had to admit that the Lavra was one of Russia’s most important cultural heritages. As a result, it became an island left largely alone, with visitors kept out and the inhabitants of the monastery kept in. Ivanov described it simply as “God’s will,” but Fedot had another explanation.

  “The Holy One prayed for its return, and it was returned. How else could a man like Stalin change his heart and go against his own dogma?”

  Lily looked to Ivanov, but the Holy One had moved on from their conversation.

  “My Lord, my Jesus,” the Russian mystic chanted as he spun and danced, pausing to hug a tree in the central courtyard. He fluffed its leaves and kissed its branches, calling it Tatiana, and explaining that she was the love of his life, apart from his dear wife in Orekhovka, and God, of course.

  “Of course,” Lily repeated.

  The man Fedot referred to as a living saint led them around the blue and white baroque bell tower to a minor, wooden chapel in ruins. Inside, Ivanov had made a bed of hay, pulled cotton, wool and leaves that lay where the altar once presided, surrounded by half-destroyed Byzantine frescos dating back to the fifteenth century.

  “Lay my new baby here,” he said, pointing to his nature bed.

  Lily took Pasha’s feet as she and Fedot lifted him off the gurney and placed him beneath a fresco of St. Sergius of Radonezh, the founder and patron saint of the Lavra. Lily knelt next to Pasha, stroking his hair and checking the status of his burns, while Fedot left the chapel.

  Ivanov’s mood hadn’t changed. He sang to himself as he picked at his toes, largely ignoring Lily and Pasha, until Fedot returned with a monk named Matvei, who flashed a smile of tea-stained teeth resembling tombstones. Like Fedot, he made kissing Ivanov’s feet his first priority.

  With that out of the way, Fedot and Matvei stripped away Pasha’s remaining clothes and carried the naked Russian to a tiny rector
y adjacent to the chapel. The walls were thin and bare, and the windows had long ago been robbed of most of their stained glass, leaving the room open to the elements. In the center of the rectory sat a substantial tin tub filled nearly to the rim with ice and water.

  “You’re not going to put him in that!” Lily cried.

  Fedot and the monk not only immersed the unconscious Pasha Tarkhan in the ice bath, but poured several ladles of the frigid water over his head, as if they were basting him.

  “Only for a few minutes at first,” Fedot explained.

  Lily felt the urge to protest again, but did nothing. She was inside a chapel within an Orthodox fortress, in a Godless country surrounded by religious zealots. She looked down at Pasha, who seemed serene, though he was turning blue, and watched as Fedot and the monk lifted him out of the tub, continuing to ladle him with ice water until he opened his eyes and panted like a man who’d been holding his breath for too long. After blotting him dry with an oil cloth, they lifted Pasha off the floor and carried him back to the nature bed, where Ivanov was waiting.

  “This is happiness,” the Russian saint declared before sitting at Pasha’s feet and pulling his muscular body into a tight knot. He closed his eyes and expelled a breath, not seeming to take one again for nearly a quarter hour. When he did, it was a soft inhale, like the ripple of a wave, instead of a sharp intake of air.

  “The lake of your soul must be absolutely serene. Only then can God be reflected in it,” Fedot enlightened her.

  “Is he praying for Pasha?”

  “No,” Fedot smiled. “He’s not praying at all. Only Pasha can save himself. We merely give his body the tools.”

  “Ice water?”

  Fedot nodded.

  Fedot sat behind Ivanov and knotted himself like his master. Unwilling and unable to follow in their example, Lily moved anxiously around the chapel and examined the frescoes that were wasting away on its walls. She assumed they were replicas of the great icons from the Holy Trinity Cathedral, as the showpiece was Rublev’s The Trinity. A copy had hung in her Greek Orthodox Church in Boston and over her parents’ dining room table.