[2017] The Hungarian

by Victoria Dougherty

  “Pasha,” she asked. “Have you ever been in love?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “How many times?”

  Lily felt his chest rise and fall in a deep, wistful breath.

  “Only twice,” he said.

  “Twice,” she repeated. “I’ve been in love just once.”

  Chapter 33

  Sergei Posad

  Theron Tassos stood in the center of the Church of St. Sergius refectorium, his arms folded across the breast of his navy silk suit. Indigo, blood-red and gold flickered over his travel clothes. They were technicolor shadows reflecting the lavish spread of Byzantium that covered the walls and ceiling of St. Sergius like honeycomb. Apart from their astonishing beauty, they provided a source of meditation for the troubled Greek, the sorrowful, heavy-lidded eyes of Mary hypnotizing him in particular. He could imagine them as his wife’s eyes, were she to ever learn of the danger their daughter had stumbled into.

  “Lilia,” he whispered.

  Life was full of tragic coincidences, and he’d seen his share. They were often, when one looked at the string of events leading up to them, seemingly inevitable. But the Greek was truly at a loss when it came to deciphering how his daughter had gone from vacationing on Monemvasia to being the target of a rogue assassin at the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was by God’s grace, Theron decided, that his brother, Baru, had enlisted his help in getting revenge for the murder of Etor. Had Etor not been sacrificed, the Greek would have never had any reason to seek out the Hungarian killer. He may have never even heard the Hungarian’s name until his own Lily had been found—perhaps hanging from a drainpipe like Etor—and Baru’s revenge would be his own. Yes, Etor might have been vain and idle during his life, but his death might redeem him after all, Theron reasoned. No longer was the Hungarian exclusively a favor for an estranged brother. Until Lily was safe and back in her mother’s arms, wiping Beryx Gulyas from the face of the Earth was the Greek’s most supreme priority.

  But capturing Gulyas and locating Lily were proving more difficult than Theron had expected. By the time he had been able to establish a chain of events and get word to Alyona Artemieva’s place, the Russians had gone, taking his sweet Lily with them. Theron didn’t like doing business in that part of the world—even if necessity mandated it. Telephones—when there were any—didn’t work well and were monitored by all manner of official and unofficial eavesdroppers, including men of his own. And the hand-to-hand network of any proper organization that worked like a well-oiled machine from metropolitan area to village began to break down as one headed into the badlands. These were places dug with the homes of disaffected individuals—like Alyona—and littered with drunken bands of career hobos. They were, when judged by land mass alone, what constituted most of the Soviet Empire. And once you entered their kingdom of despair and squalor, it was easy to lose your way and never return.

  “Brother,” the slender monk, Albert, beseeched him, presenting a cup of steaming black tea sweetened just to his liking. Albert had news of Lily, though nothing concrete. She and the Russians had passed through Astara some days before. The caravan they had been traveling with had moved up to Yardymli without them, leaving them at the border of Iran—it was assumed. Alyona alleged that Lily and the Russians wanted to go to Tehran. They had business there with the Americans, but about what she didn’t know. And Lily, specifically, had insisted they go, Alyona said. There was someone she wanted to see.

  “But who, in God’s name,” Theron wondered. Tehran wasn’t exactly the kind of place where Lily would cultivate friends.

  “He would cut the throat of the orange blossom; reckless act of hatred, enemy of delight.” Porphyri Ivanov stood at the entryway, his lips pressed gently into a smile.

  “It’s not the best translation, of course.” Theron bowed to the holy man. “It assumes the cutting of the orange blossom was the act of hatred—and I’ve never read Nassa that way.”

  Ivanov opened his arms wide, as if he was going to embrace Theron Tassos, but he never did. “The cutting of any vine is an act of hatred,” he said. “I think the translation, though somewhat artless, is all too accurate.”

  Brother Albert knelt at a fresco of the Crucifixion before backing out of the refectorium. Ivanov bid him a happy day, weaving his fingertips through a beam of sunlight streaming in from a slotted window.

  “Why would my daughter want to go to Tehran?” Theron inquired.

  Ivanov took a deep breath, scratching his white beard.

  “And what do you know of this?” Theron removed a bundle of singed papers from his breast pocket. They were crinkled, missing several pages and smelled of a campfire. Ivanov flipped through them as if they were pages in a coloring book.

  “This is of no interest to me,” he said.

  “You know what they say, don’t you?”

  Ivanov nodded.

  “Assuming these are authentic, your government is building a spaceship.”

  “Not my government,” Ivanov said. “I have no governor.”

  Theron Tassos folded his hands. “But you can at least acknowledge the importance of such a plan—if it is, indeed, true.”

  Ivanov smiled.

  “And you can understand that if these plans have anything to do with my daughter—that she’s probably being hunted by the Soviet regime as well as this Hungarian psychopath.”

  Ivanov shrugged and nodded.

  “That’s all?” Theron persisted. “My daughter comes here unannounced, stays for weeks on end and no one bothers to contact me, to tell me—and this”—Theron mimed Ivanov’s shrug--“is all you have to offer?”

  Ivanov took the Greek’s hand and held it. “Miss Lily is on a path that has already been charted,” he said. “It is one she has chosen and one she must finish. And I will help her in any way I can.”

  The Greek’s silk lapel moved up and down like a tortoise shell as he heaved an enormous breath.

  “You can help her?” Theron said. “I don’t even know if I can help her.”

  Ivanov leaned in and touched the Greek nose to nose. “You, I’m afraid, have no power to help her.”

  The Greek backed away from Ivanov and extracted his hand from the holy man’s grip.

  “You know, Ivanov,” he said. “I can’t figure out if you’re the damned fool or I am. But either way, I’m going to Tehran and you’re coming with me.”

  Ivanov turned on his toe and walked toward the door, kneeling at the same fresco Brother Albert had honored. “I’m not needed in Tehran,” he averred. “And neither are you.”

  Fall, 1956

  Chapter 34

  Tehran, Iran

  The poet Mansoor Nassa lived in a brick family house much too large for a single man. The house rested on a quiet, unlit street that was still host to a small procession of outdated horse-drawn carriages called doroshkehs. Though the horses were often emaciated and abused by their impoverished drivers, Nassa preferred the doroshkehs to the taxis and buses that now saturated the streets of Iran’s most populated city. It wasn’t at all that Nassa disliked modernization—he liked most of the comforts being imported by the Shah’s regime. It was in this one instance and one instance only that Nassa—a modernist, a lover of all the virtues of the imagination, a disciple of both HG Wells and Orwell—clung to the past. Mansoor Nassa’s grandfather had been a doroshkeh driver, and the poet felt a kinship with the men who made their living by them. He simply couldn’t bring himself to take a taxi any other way.

  But that didn’t mean he ever enjoyed the ride.

  Prone to motion sickness, Nassa typically spent the entire distance swallowing his nausea as the weakling horse yanked the carriage to and fro while the driver whipped the creature bloody. Every time Nassa swore he’d never take another. But then, as soon as he left his house, there they were. Like a bad woman, he couldn’t resist them.

  Mansoor Nassa thanked Jalal, his customary driver, in his native Farsi and stepped down from the wooden cart, p
ressing a rial into the man’s hand. Such was their ritual. The toothless imp, only forty-four years of age, grunted and steered away. Jalal would pretend to go off to fetch other passengers, but Nassa knew he would turn around at the end of the street and be waiting all night, if necessary, to take the poet wherever he needed to go.

  “Good evening,” Lily Tassos bid him in Arabic. Nassa turned toward her silhouette. The moon, plump and nearly full, cast enough light to expose her beauty, and for a moment Nassa felt unable to move.

  “Can I help you?” he inquired.

  “Most certainly,” she said. “May we come in?”

  Nassa put his hands in his pockets and stepped toward his front door. “We?”

  Pasha and Fedot stepped into view.

  “We were told to come here,” she said.

  “By whom?” Nassa asked.

  “By Porphyri Ivanov,” she said.

  Nassa scratched his head. “I don’t know anyone of that name,” he told her.

  “He said we should see you,” she persisted.

  Nassa watched her lips closely as she spoke, cocking his head and breathing through his nostrils. “My God,” he said in English, quite suddenly delighted. “Are you American?”

  Lily smiled.

  The walls of Mansoor Nassa’s house were of whitewashed plaster and rose to a high ceiling. Painted silk taffeta and Persian rugs—their kermans in crimson and gold and central medallions in emerald and cerulean—were splashed over the floors and walls, while English antiques had been arranged to create separate stations in the mainly open floor plan. A Star of David, imprinted into the ceiling plaster, reigned over the room as surely as the sun did the sky.

  The impeccable trappings were at odds with the cobwebs that dotted the ceiling and the undisturbed layer of dust that coated the once highly polished furnishings. Nassa’s mother, who had died in her sleep some months before, had made them her obsession. She’d been a servant, after all, until her son had done so well for himself, and the house ached of loneliness without her.

  “Please,” he said, offering them a seat on a plush rug his mother had woven.

  Although it was late—well after ten in the evening when he returned from a production of Tartuffe—Nassa insisted on their sharing a meal. He got his servant, Goli, out of bed and asked her to prepare a supper of fish and yogurt, pomegranates, tangerines and sweet lemons. Most Iranians ate on the floor around a sofreh cloth, but Nassa insisted that when the time came, they would be sitting at a table using utensils.

  “Boris Karloff is the greatest actor of all time,” Nassa asserted, twice over the blaring music. He played Persian setar and kamancheh records so loud that they had to repeat everything they said at least once.

  “Frankenstein, yes,” Lily agreed. “Great movie.”

  Pasha and Fedot nodded.

  “And Dracula,” Nassa chimed, drawing his hand in as if he were Bela Legosi. “Sublime. But nothing can defeat Nosferatu.” He closed his eyes and sucked in, pursing his lips. “Chilling.”

  Pasha glanced at Lily. She had sat through dozens of such negotiations with her father. And while her father was a Greek and Mansoor Nassa a Persian, the tell-tale social cues were there. This was a culture that never got right down to business. As eager as Mansoor Nassa was to know what an American girl and two Russians were doing lurking outside his house this late, and as much as they wanted to tell him, it would’ve been unthinkable not to share some food first and talk. So, horror movies it was.

  “My personal favorite,” Pasha intoned. “Is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But not the Spenser Tracy version.”

  Mansoor Nassa smiled wide and embarked on a lengthy monologue about the sins and virtues of the 1931 and 1941 films.

  Finally, well after midnight, they adjourned to the poet’s garden. It was a walled-in, with an oval pool surrounded by red—and only red—roses. And there were hundreds of them, making the lush garden a direct counterpart to the horrid summer heat that had left the city parched and peppered with a thin coat of powder the color of ashes. Lily, by this time, was starving—as Goli had returned to bed after fetching them some watermelon juice and the promised meal had never materialized. As far as servants were concerned, Goli was next to useless, Nassa explained. But she had been a dear friend of his mother’s and was like family to him.

  “You know, when I first saw you—for a moment I feared for my life,” the poet said, appraising Lily from head to foot. “I wondered if I had done or said anything to draw the attention of the Shah’s police.” He bit his bottom lip and narrowed his eyes as if reading tiny print. “I could think of nothing. Then, I said to myself, ‘Why would the police send a woman? And one speaking Arabic, no less? No one of any character or national pride speaks Arabic in Iran. Especially not an agent of the Shah.’”

  Pasha began to laugh, and Nassa joined in. Lily knew they understood the nature of a police state in a way she never would.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” Lily explained.

  Nassa shrugged.

  “So, Ivanhoe, you said.” The poet raised his finger in the air. “Like the novel.”

  Lily started at the beginning, more or less, telling him about meeting Ivanov and later escaping from the Lavra. She then explained his suggestion that they come to Tehran and pay a visit to the poet Mansoor Nassa.

  Nassa, for his part, listened intently. His eyes were wide, engaged—almost excited. When Lily finished, the poet sat, thinking, his chin balanced on his knuckles.

  “Mr. Nassa,” Lily said softly. “We’re not quite sure why we’re here, but we do need to get to the American Embassy somehow, and that may be a little bit difficult. Because, you see, we’ve been followed.”

  “To my house?” the poet inquired.

  “No,” Lily assured him. “But to Iran, and here, to this city.”

  “And we’re quite sure our stalker knows we intend to contact the American government,” Pasha added. “The Embassy, I fear, will be surrounded by all sorts of surreptitious characters by now.”

  Nassa paced for a few moments around his oval pool, staring at its surface until his reflection came into relief. He squatted down and pricked the water with his finger, watching his image ripple into an abstraction.

  “It’s very simple,” he said. “Assuming they truly don’t know where you are.”

  Nassa explained that the weekend was to usher in the crippling heat again, as the weather teetered between summer and fall. Anyone with any means would be fleeing to their mountain retreats—including, for instance, the British ambassador.

  “So you know Ambassador Pearce?” Pasha inquired.

  “Know him?” Nassa said. “I’m his weekend landlord. And I can tell you this—he and that American fellow—you know, the ambassador; they call him Sandy.”

  “Ambassador Chandler?” Pasha said, smiling.

  “That’s right! The three of us have had quite a game of cards going.”

  Chapter 35

  Kandovan, Iran

  They’re like modern cave-men!” Rodki Semyonov marveled as General Pushkin’s single-engine plane glided low over Kandovan, giving him a close look at the hundreds of medieval dwellings—carved out of rock and looking like beehives—that swarmed the rough, volcanic terrain of the East Azerbaijan Province of Iran. Rodki even forgot the discomfort he felt inside the General’s favorite toy as he eyed the remote village. He was charmed by its otherness, its ancient beauty and the comic indifference to it all of Kandovan’s inhabitants—men wrapped in colorful cloth resembling the desert sunset and women in plain, head-to-toe Muslim garb.

  Rodki, who had never flown until early that morning, found it ironic that he detested flying. Especially since his main objection had nothing to do with fear of crashing, but of the intense claustrophobia he experienced sitting for so long in such a confined space. He knew the Great Leader, Josef Stalin, would have found that funny, too, were he still alive, since it was he who had so ruthlessly enforced Rodki’s Moscow strictures in
the first place. And contrary to what many people thought of the Great Leader—particularly those he had sentenced to death without more cause than seeing their name written on a page—Stalin had a demonstrative sense of humor complete with a boisterous laugh and quick wit.

  Rodki missed his company sometimes. General Pushkin, though far more reasonable in his countenance, seemed to find very little to amuse him in the world. Except for his airplane, of course, and the on-command pilot that came with it. Tedious man, Rodki thought. Though it was true that without him The Great Detective would never have had the opportunity to see the Lavra, except from a photograph; or Moscow from above; or the cottony threads of cirrus clouds at close range; least of all the jagged stone dwellings of a centuries-old village in Persia. Take-off and landing were a thrill, he had to admit, as the plane skipped and skidded to a halt on a little-known Soviet-operated runway just over the border in Iran.

  “How long to Tehran?” Rodki asked the pilot. An empty, idling bus—presumably for him—waited on a dirt road that intersected with the runway.

  “I don’t know,” the pilot replied. “Hours, probably.”

  The distances were what most amazed Rodki. He had known the world was vast, but seeing an estimation of miles on an atlas and actually traveling those miles was entirely different. Where once he’d been but a single flower in a greenhouse, he was now a microbe in a forest.

  “Your map,” the pilot said, handing Rodki a folded square of thin paper, frayed at the edges.

  “You’re joking,” Rodki told him. “The General must have told you I don’t drive.”

  The pilot sniffed and cursed. He stormed out of the cockpit and jumped out of the plane, motioning for Rodki to follow him to the bus. Once there, he showed The Great Detective how to start and turn off the ignition, shift the gears and work the pedals.

  “Not so hard for a man like you, eh?” The pilot said, unraveling a cigarette and stuffing the tobacco in his mouth. “General’s waiting back in Moscow. General doesn’t like to wait.”