The Hungarian

by Victoria Dougherty

  The moment he’d caught a whiff of the danger, he’d left his offices at the Kremlin—casually—and disappeared into the Moscow maze. At least until now, when he’d shown his face in the Hotel Rude’s Revolution Room, at a party for a South American official. He could hide in the shadows by day, but in the night, it was better to take cover in a crowd—especially a drunken one. Part of him had hoped that he might run into Lily Tassos there. If General Pushkin was on to Pasha, then it couldn’t be long before he found his way to Tony’s Lily, and the sooner he, the girl and the Sputnik information got out of Russia the better.

  But Lily had been out all day and Pasha was feeling worried about her. She was clearly an amateur wanting to play in the high stakes game of espionage—and worse, she was an amateur with a good measure of pluck. Her association with the likes of Tony Geiger and her reckless deed of taking the microfilm from the contents of the safe were evidence of that. Pasha had tried to send a message to Geiger—it was possible Tony had learned of his compromise at the Kremlin and had asked his Lily to take the film as a safeguard—but to no avail. Tony had gone “AWOL,” as he would say.

  It occurred quite suddenly to Pasha that he had taken a liking to the American girl, and this made him the slightest bit uneasy. Although their encounter in her hotel room that morning had been brief, he’d found himself thinking about it throughout the day, when his mind should have been on other things. Instead of presuming duplicity on her part for taking the film, he had assumed her innocence. And now, he found himself concerned for her safety, rather than bothering first about his own. Chivalry had never paid off for Pasha. He’d seen first-hand what a liability a kind heart was in Russia, and had worked diligently over the years to harden his.

  Mortals! Hear the sacred cry:

  “Freedom, freedom, freedom!”Hear the noise of broken chains,see the noble Equality enthroned.The United Provinces of the South have now opened their very honorable throne.

  The Argentine National Anthem was being warbled by a drunken chorus of diplomats and bureaucrats. Pasha remembered that it had always played at midnight in Buenos Aires on official holidays. It was performed any old time by Argentine tourists after they knocked back a few drinks. The music swelled as the door to the men’s toilet opened behind him.

  And the free people of the world reply:“To the great Argentine people, Cheers!”

  Pasha couldn’t know if it was chance or instinct that made him raise his arm to his neck after closing his zipper. He howled as a needle dug into his forearm while a substance that felt at once hot and cold bubbled under his skin.

  “The more you struggle, the faster you’ll die,” the assassin hissed as he wrapped his arms around Pasha’s neck. But the Russian moved too quickly to let the man grip his elbows in a stranglehold. He backed up and slammed the assassin against the wall, then used all of his weight to push evenly against the man’s chest to keep him from being able to take a breath. It was a difficult way to kill someone—requiring a lot of strength—but Pasha had done it before. The problem was, his arm felt as though it was being liquefied, and the poison the man had injected into it was giving him fever and draining his stamina.

  Pasha could hold on only long enough to render the man unconscious and then collapsed to the floor. The burn had spread to his shoulder and into his chest cavity, and taking a simple breath was agonizing.

  Pasha turned to look at his assassin: the man was dressed well, but pudgy and pale with maroon circles under his eyes. He wore a distinctive ring bearing the insignia of the Royal Hungarian Army. The Russian had never seen him before and had no interest in meeting him when he awoke. He pulled the syringe out of his blistering forearm and aimed to inject his would-be killer with whatever poison was left. His vision failing, he missed the man’s femoral artery and ended up plunging the needle close to his groin.

  Pasha crawled to the door and managed to turn the handle after several tries. He struggled past the disinterested toilet minder—now ten American dollars richer—and exited through the service elevator just as the assassin began to stir.

  Chapter 14

  Hi, Mom,” Lily said to the painting of the Soviet woman liberated from tyranny as she strode into her suite at last. She felt oddly at home there after a day of Moscow peculiarities, including the loss of her room key somewhere between the bar and her suite on the tenth floor. The bartender shrugged with indifference when she quizzed him about it, and Fedot was forced to produce another key for her. He seemed disturbed about having to accommodate her in this way—even reluctant—but it wasn’t Fedot’s mood that alarmed Lily when she re-entered the lobby. It was a man—thick and muscular, with a face like a Picasso—who had made himself at home in one of the lobby chairs. He looked at her in a nakedly curious way that made it unclear as to whether he was really dumb and couldn’t figure things out or wickedly smart and questioning everything. Whatever the case, his brazen attention prompted Lily to hurry back to the elevator, get off on the seventh floor, and take the stairs the rest of the way.

  On impulse, she went to the bureau where the safe was housed. Nothing. The safe had disappeared as surely as her room key. It would be just like Tony to pull a trick on her like that—taking her key and the safe to put her off balance. He’d always liked to razz her, and for a moment there, she missed him.

  It was an odd thing, missing someone you didn’t know all that well, but Lily was more than aware that what she really missed was the fact that Tony had existed at all. After watching the guy get murdered and spending only one full day in Moscow, Lily was, for the first time in her life, aware of what it felt like to be in danger. Not just the kind of danger that could get under your skin when you walked through a dicey part of town, but the kind of danger you didn’t have any control over. The kind you couldn’t be rescued from by a good Samaritan, like when a guy snatched her purse on 7th Avenue and a hot dog stand owner chased him down for her.

  By the end of the day, Lily had found herself wearing the same disillusioned expression that all the Russians she’d seen in this city wore. It was a hell of a difference from New York, she marveled, where people wore their personalities on their shirtsleeves, and Boston, where they wore their smug self-satisfaction.

  Only Fedot, who had the energy of a small child, and Pasha Tarkhan had seemed different. The big Russian had a level of confidence that Lily had observed in none of his fellow countrymen, and an élan that was conspicuously absent in almost all aspects of Moscow life, except for the pre-Revolutionary architecture and the mismatched furniture in her hotel. Pasha Tarkhan could’ve belonged to the Czar’s Russia, and Lily Tassos wondered what the hell he was doing in Moscow at all. She stepped out of her shoes and into her bathroom, taking the bobby pins out of her twist and letting hair fall down her back.

  “Holy Mother of God!” Lily cried. Now she had to wonder what the hell he was doing in her bathroom.

  “Don’t scream,” he whispered, but it was too late.

  Lily made the kind of noise she’d only been able to imagine herself making in the middle of having a baby or maybe making one—assuming it could ever be that good. Pasha Tarkhan was lying in her bathtub stripped to the waist. His suit jacket and shirt were crumpled behind his back, and his legs were hanging over the side. Cold water dribbled from the faucet onto his arm, which looked as if his skin had been ripped off, and he was shaking. She touched her hand to his forehead and found he was having cold sweats—not a fever.

  “What happened to you?”

  Pasha didn’t respond except to breathe in quick, outward breaths like a human time bomb. It was Tony all over again, she thought as she was seized by a sudden desperation to keep Pasha Tarkhan alive.

  “Fedot, get up here!” she shouted into the telephone receiver after dialing the only number that worked and reaching the only line it allowed. Whoever had answered the phone hung up and left her with nothing but an annoying buzz cranking in her ear.

  “I can help you,” she said, but more to herself t
han to Pasha.

  Lily pulled out two small towels the maid had left in her vanity and soaked them in hot water before placing one on Pasha’s head and the other on his chest. She then rifled through her makeup bag until she found her last remaining bottle of aloe vera gel. Lily turned off the water and dried his arm delicately, spreading the burn-soother all over it, being careful not to irritate any of his blisters. They were monstrous—filled with bright yellow pus. Finally, she thought to strip the covers off her bed and tucked them around the Russian. It didn’t make him stop shivering, but he at least looked more comfortable.

  “Miss Lilia?” Fedot inquired, and Lily nearly fell into the bathtub with the half-dead Russian.

  “Jesus Christ, Fedot, can’t you announce yourself?”

  Fedot ignored her, bumping her aside as he knelt by Pasha and took his arm in his hands, examining it like a scientist would a jar containing a diseased liver. He said something in Russian and left the room without another word. Lily heard the door to her suite close and thought for a minute that she should get out of there, too. It was only a thought, though. She couldn’t leave the big Russian like she had Tony’s body on Monemvasia. At the very least she could concoct some story when Fedot brought the Moscow police back with him.

  But he didn’t bring the police. He brought an acne-scarred guy in a red sweater who helped him pick up the Russian and carry him into the suite next to hers. They didn’t do it the regular way—out the door and through the hallway—but moved the Biedermier sofa and the liberated Soviet woman to reveal a door that connected the two suites.

  “Get your coat,” Fedot instructed her, having lost most of the nasal tone he employed when he was “at your service for you.” His English had gotten better, too.

  She grabbed her ugly new coat, shoved the lipstick tube containing the microfilm into its pocket and followed them into the neighboring suite. There, slumped over an antique British office desk not nearly as nice as the desks in her suite, was her neighbor. She’d only seen him once before, wearing the same eggplant suit that made his skin and hair look even whiter than it was. Quite dead, he was staring dreamily into oblivion.

  “Do you know him?” Lily asked. Fedot, surely, had killed him.

  “A Swede, I think,” Fedot grunted as he and the man in the red sweater heaved Pasha onto the bed. “And a malicious hotel spy.” Fedot injected the big Russian with something, and Pasha’s body relaxed as his breathing slowed. He opened his eyes, and Lily smiled.

  “He looks better,” she said.

  “He’s not,” Fedot countered. “He’s just not in pain anymore.”

  Fedot signaled the other man, who wheeled a gurney out from the bathroom. Lily watched as the two men went to work strapping the hulking Russian to the underside of the gurney before laying the Swede on top of it and covering him with a sheet.

  “I’m coming with you,” Lily said.

  Fedot seemed at first as if he were going to protest. “Button your coat,” he told her. “And when we reach the lobby, slip out the back, then follow around to join us at the entrance. There will be a medical wagon waiting.”

  But when they stepped off the elevator and into the lobby, Lily began to wail. “Oh, my God,” she cried. “He was fine before dinner!”

  Fedot’s eyes widened, his lips parting.

  “And he was so cute,” Lily spluttered. “I thought, you know, that maybe he could be the one.”

  Lily buried her head in her palms, moaning and sniffling a cry that sounded pretty real to her if not anyone else. She then threw herself over the gurney and heaved a sob, gripping its sides and making sure neither Fedot nor his cohort could leave her behind the way she bet they’d planned to.

  Nobody addressed her in the quiet lobby, because no one was there. Hardly anyone, at least. Just the concierge and a bell boy who snorted awake when he heard the commotion. It was only right before Lily crawled into the medical wagon behind Fedot that she spotted the brute with the messed up face who’d eyed her earlier. He stood between the double front doors of the Hotel Rude and stared at her like he knew exactly what she was doing—even if she didn’t have the faintest idea. Right then, his eyes looked more sad than mean, but she guessed you could say that about almost any Russian. He turned and walked back inside the hotel as the man in the red sweater closed the wagon doors, pounding twice on the back before slipping into the driver’s seat and revving the engine.

  Inside the wagon, Lily sat beside the gurney on a small stool bolted to the floor. Tin buckets filled with ice water lined the back and sides of the vehicle like votive candles surrounding an open casket at a wake.

  “Miss Lily, your performance was unwise,” Fedot said.

  “Oh, you thought I was going to stay back there alone?”

  “Not alone,” Fedot said. “I would have made accommodations for you.”

  “I don’t need accommodations,” she told him. “Now, where are we going?”

  Fedot pushed the Swede’s corpse off the gurney and released Pasha from its underside. Reaching behind him, Fedot grabbed a bucket and dumped its contents over the diplomat’s unconscious body. Ice cubes scattered over the floor and Lily screamed, jerking her feet up to keep her shoes from getting soaked.

  “To see about a sorcerer,” he answered.

  Chapter 15

  Rodki Semyonov turned his back on the medical wagon, untroubled about letting the American girl get a few steps ahead of him. Russia, for all of its big cities and vast terrain, was as small a place as any other police state. Especially for a first-time visitor whose passport had been in the hands of a front desk clerk and now resided in Semyonov’s coat pocket.

  General Pushkin would’ve preferred he have an encounter with the girl right away, but Semyonov opted for a more subtle approach. He hated to beat women. It was at times a part of his job, but he went to great lengths to avoid such confrontations. That was work for the secret police and KGB.

  “The key sticks,” the woman dressed as a maid told him as she accompanied him to the tenth floor. She jiggled the lock before it released, letting him into Lily Tassos’s suite.

  “She bought a green coat at a textile store near the Kremlin,” the woman testified, “a bowl of sausage and pickle soup in the Red Square cafeteria, a coffee, two creams and no sugar, Kulich bread—though she didn’t eat it—four vodkas, bear cutlets—of which she had only one bite—and stole a pencil from the front desk.” One of ten assistants to the deputy head of hotel security, the woman was intent on distinguishing herself to the Great Detective. “I was told she’s a communist.”

  The Great Detective nodded. “So was she.”

  The woman didn’t understand exactly what he meant but pretended to, raising her eyebrow as if they were in on a very important clue together. But the Great Detective never returned the gesture and remained in the middle of the living room, his eyes fixed on the Soviet woman liberated from tyranny.

  “Comrade Detective,” the woman entreated, “I hope it is not imprudent of me to tell you what an honor it is to meet you. If I can be of any help to you at all, I could go to my death a satisfied woman.”

  She hadn’t intended on propositioning him, but his quiet demeanor and general ugliness had emboldened her. Had he appeared conceited, she would’ve never thought that a woman with her pleasant but ordinary features could interest him. Especially since men had often accused her of having a stern manner that lacked sensuality.

  The Great Detective, for his part, gave no witty remark or double entendre. He simply buried his face into her hair and took her against a scratched-up writing table. Its delicate, fawn-like legs clashed with the assistant’s upturned thighs and ankles, and the Great Detective thought briefly that the writing table reminded him of his late wife. That thought alone made the encounter worthwhile.

  When they finished, Semyonov helped the woman restore her appearance, and with a sufficient amount of respect, he asked her to leave while he performed his investigation. She saluted him before
departing—even clicking the heels of her walking shoes.

  Semyonov liked being in a room so recently after its inhabitant had left it. It allowed him to touch upon what his subject might have been thinking as well as doing. Had Lily Tassos really gone back to her suite to freshen up before joining her new lover next door—and discovering his body—she might’ve washed or at least put on lipstick. But it was clear she’d done none of those things. Her toiletries remained largely untouched, and her bath, though wet, contained a couple of straight, black hairs—the kind from a man’s head. The floor in the bathroom had been wiped down, as had the path from the bathroom door to the sofa, and a white bottle containing a clear gel appeared to be the only grooming product she’d used. The detective didn’t have to touch her bedding to see that it was wet.

  At the bottom of her makeup case, underneath a disk of powdered rouge, he found a small mirror—the kind that could fit in a pocket book and be used to touch up lipstick. The Great Detective slid the mirror out of its embroidered linen sleeve and noticed that something remained inside the silk lining. Casually, he slipped his finger behind the lining and pulled out a metal card embossed with a plus sign, a star and the Russian word for tree, derevo.

  “Unless you have an urgent message for me, I would prefer to continue my investigation alone,” Semyonov announced. The smell in the air had changed. It was infused with the scent of a man who bathed every day—an uncommon practice in Russia and Europe.

  Beryx Gulyas put his gun away quietly.

  “Pardon me, Comrade,” Beryx said in Russian. “I met a girl at a party downstairs and she gave me her key. I hope something terrible hasn’t happened.”

  “Are you from Bucharest?” Semyonov asked in Russian, and then repeated the phrase in Romanian, pocketing the metal card before turning to face the intruder.