Welcome to the Hotel Yalta: Six Stories of Cold War Noir

by Victoria Dougherty

  Adonia was just his type: Black hair, a small bust and soft, rounded hips. She would pucker her lips and whisper when she talked of sex—the way all of them did, the girls for hire. The way Etor had.

  Etor. He’d been an idiot after all, Beryx concluded.

  Not only had he admitted to leaving his gloves in his hotel room—discouraging him from loading another lethal dart if the need had presented itself—but he acknowledged leaving a witness behind.

  “She’s a harmless girl,” he’d begged. “A tourist. I liked her.”

  He was adamant that she hadn’t seen him and positive that she had nothing to do with the American agent professionally.

  “They probably m-m-m-met somewh-where and ag-ag-agreed to m-meet for a p-p-private rendezvous,” Etor had insisted. He was stuttering by then, so it took him a considerably long time to say what he needed to say.

  “Then why wouldn’t they meet in a hotel room?” Beryx had hissed. He’d left Etor’s handsome face intact, but carved a Hungarian insult into him whenever the gigolo said anything stupid. Geci (asshole) joined kurva (whore), and puhapōcs (impotent), which were engraved on his buttocks, chest and thigh as Etor hung—arms above his head—from a water pipe in his kitchenette.

  Beryx despised sloppiness in his line of work and took enormous pride in leaving no loose ends. He was particularly contemptuous of assassins like Etor, who took occasional jobs and wanted to get them over with as soon as possible—leaving behind bystanders because they liked them.

  “Where,” he had demanded, “is there room for favoritism in what we do?”

  Etor hadn’t been able to answer, as his throat was filled with nearly a pound of finely milled sea salt. The Hungarian had broken the Cretan’s jaw, prying his fingers behind the man’s teeth and pulling hard until he heard a crackling noise—like splintering wood—that made Etor shriek. It was a sickly sound that Beryx didn’t like, but the gigolo was unable to close his mouth afterward, and it made pouring the salt down his throat a much easier task. Beryx was unclear as to whether the gigolo had died of cerebral edema—the most common outcome of salt poisoning—or asphyxiation, and wrote a note to himself to remember to contact the medical examiner and find out.

  Whatever the case, Etor was gone and Beryx was glad. He was yet another black mark erased from Beryx’s profession.

  “I like the little lights around those poles,” Adonia mused. “They’re like twinkling stars.” She never got to go to restaurants, let alone nice ones where a husband might take his wife.

  “Those aren’t poles,” Beryx explained. “They’re prison bars. For Socrates’ Prison.”

  “Oh.”

  The waiter sauntered by, depositing two plates of chicken—broiled in an oily tomato sauce and accompanied by the small, yellow potatoes that Etor had liked so much. Adonia smiled and bit her lip, digging into the food with her knife and fork, and dripping grease from her lips into the hollow of what would have been her cleavage, if she had any breasts to speak of.

  “So what did he do, the man who owns this place?” Adonia not only chewed with her mouth wide open, but spoke with it full. “You know, why’d he go to prison?”

  “He didn’t,” Beryx enlightened her. “Socrates was a teacher who was poisoned in his prison cell a long, long time ago.”

  Adonia grimaced. “They name a restaurant after a guy who was poisoned? That doesn’t seem very smart.” It was only once Beryx heard her say a full sentence—without food in her mouth—that he realized she was no girl from a village. Adonia spoke a lower class Greek dialect direct from the Athens tenement slums.

  “Ew, poison,” she shuttered, looking down onto her oily chicken.

  Beryx smirked and ran his crooked index finger from her elbow to her wrist, tracing it all the way down to the tip of her thumb. “Are you saying you have no craving for dessert?”

  Adonia knocked back her glass of Retsina and slammed the empty pewter goblet onto the table with gusto. “Hell, yes I want dessert. I want baklava and strong coffee.”

  She laughed and tipped her ear to her shoulder, kicking off her sandal before wedging her foot between his legs and tickling his groin with her big toe. “Oh, and I want that kind of dessert, too. I’ve just got to go take a piss first.”

  Eying her ample bottom as she wiggled away from the table, Beryx believed in that moment that if he and Adonia had become acquainted under different circumstances—perhaps at a grocery store or in a doctor’s waiting room—without her madam as a middleman, that she would’ve been with him tonight regardless of whether he was paying her. He could tell by the easy flow of their conversation, and by the way she looked to him for explanations about the simplest things. She wanted him, he was convinced, more than she’d ever wanted any man, and would do to him things she’d never done—even to her best customers.

  “Excuse me, sir.” The waiter bowed respectfully and presented Beryx with the key to an airport locker. “The young woman asked me to give this to you. She said not to worry, that a man with a mustache had taken care of her, and that you would know what she meant.”

  Beryx sighed, his fantasies shattered like the carafe of red wine he’d smashed against Etor’s bedroom wall. It was time to go back to work, and Nicolai Ceausescu didn’t pay him to have romantic encounters in foreign cities. He knew exactly what he would find in the airport locker: A photograph of his next mark, a schedule of his usual comings and goings, and a deadline. His Beretta was dirty now after the airport incident, so he’d have to procure another gun.

  The Hungarian paid the check, leaving a little extra for the waiter, and hailed a cab to the airport. Perhaps on his next visit he could ask for Adonia again, and they could finally consummate their passion.

  Moscow

  Rodki Semyonov was 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. She was an amateur, anyway. A rich girl who’d gotten in over her head and should’ve stayed on her vacation in Greece, instead of involving herself in situations she had no real imagination for.

  General Pushkin would’ve preferred he had 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 the American woman’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 man she had always known by only one name—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 a painting of a peasant woman in a pale, blue babushka. She reminded him of his mother.

  “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 embolden
ed 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 in her hair and took her against a scratched up writing table. It’s 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, asked her to leave while he performed his investigation. She saluted him before she departed—even clicking the heels of her walking shoes.

  Semyonov liked being in a room so recently after its inhabitant had left. It allowed him to touch upon what his subject might have been thinking as well as doing. And most importantly, why? He caressed the nub of an open tube of lipstick with his index finger. Revlon, it read. He then wiped the waxy film on his trousers, leaving a crimson smudge. The American girl’s toiletries remained largely untouched, and her bath, though wet, contained a couple of straight, black hairs. 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 make-up 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 most of Europe for that matter.

  The Hungarian assassin put his gun away quietly.

  “Pardon me, Comrade,” the Hungarian 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.

  “I’m Hungarian,” he 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?” the Hungarian 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.”

  The Hungarian forced a smile.

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

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

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

  The Hungarian 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 broken features. His interest turned to annoyance when the Russian detective put his arm around him and squeezed his shoulder.

  The Hungarian 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.

  “Good morning,” the pretty receptionist bid him as she checked her appointment book. The Hungarian nodded at her instead of returning the greeting. He hated speaking Russian.

  As soon as he slipped the unmarked, bulging envelope into the mail slot, the girl found his name, saying, “Yes, here it is,” and reached behind her for a towel, which the Hungarian rejected.

  “I brought one,” he explained and the girl told him to suit himself, but insisted he take her towel anyway. Rules were rules.

  The Hungarian seized the graying rag and threw it to the floor as soon as he entered the bathhouse.

  “Fabi,” the Hungarian called to the preparatory masseuse. Fabi was dripping in perspiration—a pool of it having formed in a palm-sized ledge perched at the top of his domed belly. When he tipped forward to crack his knuckles, the pool dribbled over Fabi’s middle and tinkled off the tip of his penis as if he were taking an unconscious piss. The masseuse then smacked his hands together three times, letting the echo bounce off the sopping tile walls of the steam chamber, and signaling to the Hungarian and a meaty woman who had come in behind him, that it was time for them to strip naked.

  Fabi took the Hungarian first, slapping and pounding his back and legs, before grabbing his head in his hands and cracking his neck in two quick spins to the right and left. It was a sudden and unlikable way to be handled, but left the Hungarian feeling strangely titillated—much like he felt after completing a job.

  With a slight bow, Fabi took the Hungarian’s hand, shaking it hard, before moving on to the woman. She raised her arms over her head—as if she were being arrested—and the Hungarian watched the masseuse slap her breasts with a towel.

  The key Fabi had given him was cupped tightly in his palm as he entered the next chamber. The Hungarian would’ve loved to bypass the rest of the gauntlet and head straight to the locker room for a rendezvous with his new gun, but once he entered the bath house, he knew there was no turning back or skipping any of its prescriptions. With his usual resolve, the Hungarian looked out onto the four marble beds and chose the one closest to the single gas lantern that illuminated the chamber. He placed the key inside his cheek, laid down on his stomach and waited for one of the baton girls to come. To his chagrin, he got a fatty with yellow skin tone and sodden pubic hair.

  “Take it easy around my bladder,” the Hungarian ordered. He’d forgotten to use the toilet. The girl ignored him, and he watched her belly-folds waggle as she beat him with a club wrapped in a hot, wet towel until his muscles felt like noodles.

  His luck in treatment providers got no better until he entered the fifth chamber, where he was oiled by a fair brunette. Fit and graceful, her only shortcoming was an engorged upper lip. She was also kind enough to use the loufa he provided instead of the ones dubiously sanitized by the house. He thanked her by patting her bare buttocks.

  “Atta girl,�
� he grumbled.

  The Hungarian felt good and was especially glad that he’d chosen not to eat that morning. The gauntlet was a vigorous cleansing ritual that partnered well with a liquid diet and the Hungarian decided it was high time for a forty-eight hour reprieve from solid food. He entered the last chamber—the sauna—confident that his reflexes would be sharper and infinitely more precise due to his fast and looked forward to handing Fabi’s son the key in exchange for a rolled bath mat that contained his new weapon.

  “Hello there,” a reclining man rasped, before clearing his throat and trying again. “Hello, I said. Fancy meeting you here.” The ugly hotel detective sat up, leaning his elbows onto his knees.

  “I’m sorry, have we met?” the Hungarian lied.

  “Quite late last night. At the Hotel Rude.”

  The Hungarian leaned forward and squinted as if he was trying hard to place him. “Yes, yes of course. I’m not wearing my eyeglasses, so I didn’t recognize you.”

  “Nor were you last night. You must be ashamed of them, like I am. I’ve yet to touch mine and they were imposed on me over a year ago.” The detective sat up and leaned against the wall—his bent up face at odds with his body. Back at Hotel Rude, he’d looked rather lumpy in his overcoat, but here, naked and in unforgiving light, his physique revealed itself as lean and muscular.

  “You lift weights?” he asked.

  The Hungarian shook his head no.

  “You should try it,” the detective counseled. “It helps keep the weight off. Look at me—I’m over fifty, although I won’t tell you by how much—and I don’t look much different than I did twenty years ago.”

  He patted his taut abdomen and the Hungarian’s face flushed.

  “No, really,” the detective continued. “I know it works. I fight—or at least I used to. What’s more, I use a punching bag in the mornings.”