[2017] The Hungarian

by Victoria Dougherty

  There was a selfish motive behind her sudden leap of faith. Lily didn’t want to be left alone in this place, with these people, without Pasha. Though in truth she understood him least, he seemed like the closest thing to home.

  “Sit with him and take his hand,” Fedot prescribed as he covered Pasha with a thin, dry blanket. “He’ll be coming around soon.”

  Lily did as she was told, noting that Pasha’s hands resembled T-bone steaks. God, I’m hungry, she thought. The monk, Matvei, had been providing them with a single noon-day feeding of thick, borscht-like stew with bread. Although it had only been three days, Lily had come to rely on her only daily meal with the focus of a laboratory rat and was well aware that the monk was over an hour late with their food.

  She couldn’t help obsessing over the stew’s contents and the various reasons why Matvei had been detained. It was a disturbing combination of appetite and paranoia that lead her from analyzing the taste profile of marjoram to worrying if their whereabouts had been discovered. She imagined a hard-stepping mob of KGB agents were on their way to the broken-down chapel.

  “Lily?” Pasha whispered.

  Lily jerked at the sound of his voice. His eyes were glassy and soft, the most gentle she’d ever seen them, or any pair of men’s eyes for that matter. Lily hadn’t appreciated until that moment how handsome he was.

  “Lily,” once again.

  It was lovely to hear the sound of her name on his tongue.

  Pasha slurred a request for drink and it occurred to Lily that she was gazing at him like a school girl, so she turned her attention to his comfort. She saw her mother in herself as she began offering him water and stuffing her green coat under his head. He was fully awake now and not merely opening his eyes for a brief second and mumbling the way he had been. She asked him his name, his age, and the town where he was born, but he was more interested in recounting what had happened in the men’s toilet of the Revolution Room at Hotel Rude.

  “Why did you come to my room?” she asked him. “How did you know I’d help you—or that I even could?”

  Pasha reached across his belly and touched the arm savagely burned by the assassin’s chemical.

  “It wasn’t a master plan, my dear. I had nowhere else to go.”

  The dark Russian accepted another sip of water but declined her stew, feeling sickened by the smell of food. Lily spooned a few hot morsels into her mouth and put the bowl down.

  “I should thank you, Lily, for saving my life. I should also tell you that I think under the circumstances I probably wouldn’t have done the same for you.”

  Lily grinned at him and realized it was the same lopsided grin she used to give Tony Geiger after he’d insulted her.

  “I’m not sure I believe that,” she told him.

  “You don’t know me,” Pasha explained. “My altruism is largely dependent upon my situation.”

  “You’re a pretty lucky guy, then,” she quipped. Like Tony, he could never let a moment be, and always had to impose upon her the realities of the situation—as if she was prone to forget.

  Pasha smiled at their cultural impasse.

  “If I were truly lucky, I would’ve never been born a Russian,” he lamented.

  Lily could hear Ivanov outside the chapel, his mellifluous voice as distinctive as his playful step. Fedot was with him.

  “Welcome back to the natural world,” Ivanov greeted Pasha. “Did you happen to speak to our Lord while you were away?”

  Coming from anyone else, such a comment could’ve been interpreted as a tease, but Ivanov was never anything but sincere.

  “I’m afraid not,” Pasha answered. “But it is an honor and a pleasure to see you, Holy One.”

  Ivanov reached on top of a crumbling pedestal and retrieved a small crucifix he’d fashioned out of a dead birch tree branch, laying it on Pasha’s chest. The Russian fingered the crucifix and thanked the mystic, who bent down and kissed it. Fedot looked at the cross as if it had come alive. Lily could see how badly he wanted to touch it.

  “When and how can we get out of here?” Lily asked.

  Fedot tore his eyes away from the crucifix and folded his hands in front of him. “You’re in the only good place in Russia.”

  Unspoken was what Lily knew he should have said—You’re the one who wanted to come.

  “Yes, but we can’t stay here forever,” she insisted. “I’m an American. I came here to do . . . something for someone, but I have to get back to America.”

  Fedot’s expression didn’t change, and Ivanov smiled at Pasha. Lily felt as if she were the only one of them not in on a tantalizing piece of gossip. It occurred to her that maybe Tony knew it would be this way—that she could get stuck here and never be able to return home—and in that moment, she hated him for it.

  “I want to go home,” she whined, and then she hated herself. It was, after all, she and not Tony who decided to come here after he was killed. And it was she who had decided that she wanted his life. Now she had it, and like some two-bit Welsher, she was trying to give it back.

  “What I mean is: I’ve finished the job I came here to do.”

  Pasha reached back with his unburned arm and adjusted Lily’s coat, propping himself up and straining to lean forward.

  “Fedot,” he said. “Would you be so kind as to bring me the extraneous contents of my clothes?”

  Fedot stood and removed an old collection box from underneath a pile of cushion stuffing that had been heaped inside the remains of the sacristy. Within it was the dossier Pasha had taken from Lily’s suite and the brown bottle of Myer aspirin. Pasha moved his injured arm for the first time, and Lily watched him grimace. He shook off the pain and stretched his fingers, using them to peel away several pages from the dossier and handing them to Lily.

  “I know you can’t read Russian,” Pasha explained. “But I’ve read them and can tell you roughly what they say. In no less than two years, the Soviet Union plans on launching a vessel into space, intending to beat our greatest rival—your country—into the universe by a comfortable margin. The blueprints for this vessel—called Sputnik—are located on a piece of microfilm that used to be inside the little bottle Fedot is holding in his hand.”

  Lily bent over Pasha and drew her lipstick tube from her ugly coat’s pocket. She opened the container and plucked out the microfilm as if it were a long, wavy hair.

  “Is this what you mean?” she asked.

  Pasha Tarkhan chuckled and shook his head. “I think a better question is: do you understand what it means?”

  Lily looked down at the film she was holding and the papers Pasha had furnished.

  “That America will be embarrassed, I suppose?”

  Pasha took Lily’s hand and pulled her closer. A few of his scabs cracked and tiny beads of blood sprang to the surface of his ravaged skin.

  “In my village, when I was a boy, there was a man who gave out candy to the local children. His name was Andrei, and we loved him. Our parents loved him, because he gave us joy and offered us things they could not afford.”

  He took the film from her fingers and watched as Lily tightened her grip on the papers, crunching them in her impatient fist. Pasha squeezed her forearm.

  “When the revolution came to our doorstep, it was Andrei—so beloved—who made the call for us to rise up. How were we to know that Andrei was no better than a pimp and that he—and many like him—had come to the far reaches of the countryside, not to give happiness to some poor farmers, but to incite a peasant revolution?”

  Lily let go of the papers and intertwined her fingers with the Russian’s. Her brow wove into a tight braid across her forehead, and her eyes welled up. She watched three of her tears drip in succession onto one of Pasha’s broken scabs. She’d always hated the weak, and right then, more than any other time in her life, she felt like one of them.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “I think you do.” Pasha looked up into the chapel ceiling and traced the remnants of
a hand that had once been attached to yet another devastated artwork. It was probably the hand of Christ, given its location above the missing altar.

  “Man’s entry into the universe is not about Flash Gordon. The military implications are great—as arsenals will undoubtedly make their way above the Earth. But there is a more immediate threat than that. We are battling for people’s imaginations. In my tiny village, it wasn’t candy alone that led us down a false path, but I can tell you, my dear, that I remember the way that candy tasted to this day.”

  Pasha took a deep breath and moistened his lips. “And the launch of a vessel into space is a very big piece of candy, wouldn’t you say?”

  Lily wiped her eyes and cheeks, pushing the hair off her face and using a tattered oil cloth to blow her nose.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” she said. “I’ve never done anything like this before—I go to parties and I go places where I can get a tan. That’s what I do. I didn’t even finish college when I had one class to go. I can speak a few languages—I’ve always been good at that—and I’ve got a memory like a Kodak camera, but I don’t know that I’m any good at this.”

  Ivanov had been standing next to the pedestal with his arms folded across his breast plate like a sarcophagus. He went to Lily without any of his usual effervescence, stepping soundlessly across the rotting floor. There wasn’t a hint of either a smile or frown on his face. He touched her forehead, nose and chin with a finger that felt more like a cool breath of air than a pillow of flesh and blood.

  “Every morning when I wake up, I have no idea how to talk to God,” he told her. “It is as if I’ve forgotten our common language during the simple course of a night’s sleep. Yet I find that no matter what I say—no matter how poorly I phrase it—God understands me.”

  Lily took a shallow breath and nodded, trying to seem appreciative of his comforting words. She felt she owed him that.

  “I don’t believe in God, Mr. Ivanov,” she whispered. She’d never admitted that to anyone, but it had been true for as long as she could remember.

  “And I don’t believe in evil, Miss Lily. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

  Chapter 22

  Moscow

  Fabi’s son had a look of both surprise and determination frozen upon his face. His lips—no longer the color of cherry candy—had faded into a grayish-white, and blood ran in one smooth line from the pellet-sized hole above his right eyebrow into his hairline, where it disappeared. He was lying on the floor, just outside of the sauna, clutching a baby blue towel with his left hand. His right hand—the one that had held Beryx Gulyas’s Beretta—was empty, but his fingers looked like they were still coiled around the thing.

  Fabi himself had been moved to one of the marble tables in the second chamber, where his big, round belly pointed to the vent in the ceiling. His brains remained in the first chamber, where they had already dripped down the wet tile walls and slid toward the drain in the center of the floor. A blob of them jiggled over the drain, causing it to slurp.

  “I’m leaving my key on the front desk,” the receptionist said. The noise of the drain made her queasy. She’d been in the toilet when Beryx Gulyas showed himself out and had stayed there until Rodki Semyonov, The Great Detective, returned from his lunch.

  “I’m impressed with his accuracy,” Rodki told General Pushkin’s assistant.

  While Fabi’s son had been shot at close range, Fabi had been a moving target who was blasted at a distance of several meters. That was no easy feat for a man who had been worked over as thoroughly as the Hungarian—a man whose eyes were nearly swollen shut, his body bruised to the bone, and his nose completely shattered. Rodki held the assistant’s gun and followed what he imagined the Hungarian’s movements would have been.

  “Right there,” Rodki said, as he moved into the first chamber and found the angle at which Gulyas had shot the gun-trading masseuse. Coming in from the second chamber, the assassin would’ve been totally exposed and Fabi would’ve had all of the advantages. There would have been no time to position for a shot—only a moment’s grace to allow Gulyas to aim by instinct and fire a single round.

  “Perfect,” Rodki whispered.

  Gulyas, he recognized, was the highest caliber of professional. Despite his skill, Rodki could see why General Pushkin hadn’t snagged him for his office and let him continue working for one of the lesser states. Sadists had never bothered Pushkin, but instability did—and Beryx Gulyas’s penchant for creative murder was a sign of both deep insecurity and staggering hubris.

  If he could manage to stick to one method and do what he did best—as he had with poor Fabi and his son—he could have a long career ahead of him.

  “The general will be most unhappy about this development,” the assistant carped. “If they weren’t already dead, he would have purged this operation of these two hacks and replaced them with more talented operatives.”

  Rodki nodded. His special status left him largely immune from blame for problems like this. Fabi and his son may have been hacks, but they were KGB hacks and it was their responsibility to keep the Hungarian in line. If their superior had any common sense, he would’ve immediately noticed that this father-son team was a losing proposition. Rodki had noticed. In fact, he had counted on it.

  “What should I tell the general?” the assistant implored. He tried not to seem worried about being the bearer of bad news.

  “That I’ll follow Mr. Gulyas and let the comrade general know as soon as I discover anything.”

  The general held his cards close and hated to surrender any control. Rodki knew, on the other hand, that surrendering a bit of control was precisely what broke a case wide open. The Hungarian would’ve rather died than talk, and all they would’ve gained by detaining him indefinitely was another prisoner. With Beryx Gulyas loose, Rodki Semyonov could wait for his movements as if he were monitoring a radar screen for a cloaked submarine. Eventually, it would have to surface.

  “What if he disappears for good?” the assistant whined.

  “It’s possible, I guess. But trust me, my friend; I did quite a number on him. And he’ll be far more likely to make stupid errors after the trauma of one of my interrogations—they take a lot out of man. You can tell that to the general.”

  The assistant seemed pleased.

  “In the meantime, I’m afraid I may need permission to leave Moscow in the near future. It’s just a hunch, but I’d rather the general give me authorization now instead of waiting until our friend reappears and risk losing him again.”

  It had been eighteen years since Rodki had been allowed to leave the Moscow city limits. Stalin had guarded him so jealously that he hadn’t even been allowed a visit to the provinces and conducted all of his investigations—no matter how far-reaching—from the city proper. When Stalin died and he acquired a new master, the restraints upon his movements didn’t change. But then, he’d never questioned them either.

  Rodki Semyonov didn’t know exactly what made him question them today. He didn’t want to leave Moscow. It had become a comfortable cell for him after all these years. But something inside him, something perhaps all too human that had nothing to do with his desire or ability to solve this case, made him want to get a look beyond his city prison.

  “One more thing,” Rodki added, as the assistant looked up from his notepad. “If I’m to follow this man myself, I’ll need a gun.”

  Chapter 23

  Sergei Posad

  Lily entered the Holy Trinity Library and sat at a little corner table behind a soaring row of free-standing bookshelves that housed dozens of gold-leafed volumes. They depicted the lives of Russian saints, church officials, noteworthy nobles, politicians, builders of cathedrals, fighters of crusades and others who—in short—had lain the foundation for much of Russia’s spiritual existence prior to the demise of the House of Romanov. The library was quaint by Byzantine standards—a perfect square with high, high ceilings—and favored density over expanse. It
felt strangely informal to Lily as well, despite its cool climate and sumptuous woodwork—like a great room belonging to a man of science rather than industry.

  Lily held in her hands Fedot’s translation of the Sputnik papers Pasha had squirreled away from his office in Moscow. In the spiritualist’s direct language, he distilled highlights of the emerging Soviet space program along with factoids of his own meant to help clarify the situation for Lily.

  1955—In announcements made four days apart, the United States of America and the Soviet Union publicly state they will launch artificial Earth satellites by the end of the 1950s decade. This was the starting shot, as Tony Geiger might say, and was preceded by the pillage of the Nazi German V2 ballistic missile program after the war. Liquid-fueled rockets capable of flying long distances at high altitudes, they are the very foundation of astral voyaging.

  Von Braun, a German, heads the design team for United States, while a man whose identity is a state secret heads the Soviet design team. His name is Sergei Korolev and he was recently brought out of retirement after spending many years imprisoned in Siberia; a victim of Stalin’s Great Purge in 1938.

  Eisenhower will not allow Von Braun to use any military launchers for United States satellites because he fears looking like a warmonger. As a result, Von Braun must develop his own, non-military launchers for his satellites. Soviet Union places no such restrictions on their designer, giving them a timeline advantage.

  It is known by Pasha Tarkhan that propaganda is not the only victory Soviet Union hopes to gain. If the Sputnik launch is successful, Soviet Union hopes by end of decade to launch the first of a secret nuclear arsenal into space.

  Lily put the papers down and folded her hands. She couldn’t bear sitting for another moment. Tucking Fedot’s Sputnik translation into her coat pocket, Lily ran outside. There, in the front yard of the library, she found shelter under the very stars and moon the Soviets and Americans were hoping to claim. She located Venus immediately, and the planet stared back at her while the surrounding stars twinkled. The moon, nearly full, was bone white. It was an unspeakably clear and beautiful night. Serene. Deceptive. Lily had never wanted the dawn more. She went over to the one great Manchurian Maple in the Lavra and sat at its foot, leaning against its trunk and hugging her knees.