[2017] The Hungarian

by Victoria Dougherty

  Lily rolled her eyes, but instead of Tony giving her some smart-ass comment, he looked down and swallowed hard.

  “Look,” he said, meeting her eyes again. “I need you to do this for me.”

  Geiger stepped closer to her and held his hands up as if he were going to put them on her shoulders. For a second, she thought he was going to kiss her. And for a second, he wanted to.

  “You’ll walk around for a couple of days, go to a party or two, and on the third day you’re there—three minutes before noon—a man with a doctor’s bag is going to ring the bell at your suite. When he arrives, you’ll show him the card, go to the safe in your chest of drawers and give him the contents. The combination will be your birth date. Easy to remember.”

  “I don’t need it to be easy—I remember everything.”

  “Yeah, you do, don’t you?” Tony said. It was funny to him how she remembered every line from every book she’d ever read. It was not funny how he remembered the soft curve of her hips and the way her toes tasted in his mouth. “Anyway, you can go home any time after that. Or stay and see Mr. Lenin’s mummy if you want.”

  Lily backed up and eyed Geiger from close-cropped hair to tightly laced shoe. This was definitely different from the other times, and Lily didn’t like it. Tony was edgy and distant—but as if he was acting that way on purpose. It wasn’t like he was a soft, warm blanket the other times they’d met, but he wasn’t stiff either and could laugh here and there, even if it was at her expense. She wondered if everything else up until now had been a warm-up—a series of little tests meant to help him discern whether or not she could cross a line. And whether Tony ever acted real at all.

  God, she was sick of men.

  “I’m going back to my hotel.”

  “Lily!” Geiger called as she turned on her heel and stomped toward the slim path leading back to the castle. A thornflower bush caught the painted silk scarf Lily had tied around her waist, and the wind blew it off the tiny dagger of a petal, catching it around Tony Geiger’s ankle.

  “Lily! Are you going to leave a legacy or a residue?”

  Lily stopped and spun around.

  Geiger opened his palms and smiled like he meant it.

  “This,” he said, holding up her airline tickets, “is a legacy.” Tony Geiger bent down and retrieved her scarf, letting it flail in the air. “What do you think a thing like this is? Bet it cost a pretty penny, but what’s it worth?”

  Lily rolled her eyes and turned back toward the path. It was one of her favorite scarves—and it had cost a pretty penny—but he could keep it.

  “Who’d you tell, Lily?”

  Lily stopped and cocked her head.

  “What?”

  “Who’d you tell I was here?”

  “Nobody.”

  Tony Geiger took a step forward and wobbled a little. He closed and opened his eyes like he was shaking off a hangover, then fell over onto his face.

  “Jesus. Tony!”

  Lily sprinted over and knelt beside him, running her hand down the length of his back. Something small and shaped like a pen cap was stuck between his shoulder blades. She pulled it out and saw that the thing had a thick needle that protruded from the top. Lily gasped and threw it to the side.

  “Can you talk?” she asked him.

  Tony’s eyes were open and his lips were still moving—not as if he was trying to tell her something, but rather in a struggle to keep breathing. She took his hand on impulse, holding it and squeezing his fingers until Tony Geiger was gone and she was alone.

  “I didn’t,” she whispered. “I didn’t tell. I swear.”

  Lily wanted to cry, but her head wouldn’t let her. She stood and rubbed her eyes, inching cautiously back from Tony’s corpse as she watched the sky and the sea. They mingled together into one black mass that could only be distinguished by sound—a whistle of the wind and whoosh of the waves.

  “Oh, God,” she murmured.

  She looked down into Tony’s face and swallowed a sickening pool of saliva that had collected under her tongue. It almost made her vomit. “Dear God,” she said, fully aloud this time. Tony’s eyelids were half-closed, like he was falling asleep to the sound of a radio show. Lily thought about what it was Tony might like to listen to when he was alone. Maybe one of those detective stories her mother was so fond of.

  “God damn,” she shouted. She’d drunk with Tony and made him laugh. She’d fed him pieces of smoked trout from room service china. He’d been inside her, for Christ’s sake!

  And he’d been one of the good guys. Maybe Lily didn’t know all that much about the dead man at her feet, and maybe she hadn’t loved him, but part of her wished she had. Because if there was one thing that she was one hundred percent sure of, it was that in the big picture Tony was okay. More than okay.

  “Bastard—where are you?” she gasped. She squatted down, waiting, watching.

  Nothing changed—at least not out there. Inside, though, she could feel the shift, the adjustment from her old life—the one with Etor and Malvasia wine and without a thing to do—to her new one.

  The new one she knew nothing about, except that a CIA agent was dead on top of the ruins of Monemvasia and she was hunched there on a cliff with a billowing, white dress on—an easy target for another poison pen cap. Lily took in a sharp breath and started untying her belt and fumbling with her buttons. Her fingers were shaking and wouldn’t cooperate, so she grabbed the top of her dress at the neck and yanked as hard as she could, until half the buttons popped off and it fell to her ankles. Her tanned skin blended well with the night air, and she figured at the very least Tony’s killer would have a hard time distinguishing her from a Greek fir. Lily ducked behind the eroded fortress wall and pulled her airline tickets and the metal card from under Tony’s fingers.

  Running naked back to her hotel room, Lily did not go unnoticed in the Hotel Malvasia’s lobby. But this was Kástro, after all, and there was little that could have surprised the hedonistic clientele or jaded hotel clerks.

  Once inside her room, she locked the door and drank three shots of Ouzo—compliments of the house. Out her window, the one she’d left open for fresh air, Lily saw the same panorama she had admired earlier in the evening after she and Etor had returned from the seaside. The little lane, two floors down, had been bustling, a stream of worshipers filing out of the only church on Monemvasia—a small Greek Orthodox temple with a domed roof shaped like a breast. Now, the lane was gloomy and still, with only the click-clack of a pair of high-heeled sandals sounding off its cobblestones. The footsteps seemed ominous, like they could have, conceivably, belonged to Tony’s killer, and Lily shuddered.

  After closing the window and locking the latch, Lily crouched down and slithered beneath her bedframe, pulling with her the copper spine of her bedside lamp and the coverlet from her mattress. She balled the soft, cotton spread into her arms like a loved one and hid under her bed in the dark—naked, but with her wits about her—until the sun rose out of the sea and filled her room with its butter and lemon glow. It was there, under her bed, and in a fetal position, that Lily got hold of herself and made some decisions about her life.

  Chapter 3

  Brasov, Romania

  The static fizzed at Beryx Gulyas’s ear, an unwelcome background noise to an already troubling conversation.

  “You’re certain?” Gulyas demanded into the telephone receiver. He rubbed turquoise and pyrite between the fingers of his left hand to soothe himself. The minerals, according to his fortuneteller, aided digestion—and Beryx was suffering from terrible heartburn after eating smoked lard, washed down with a glass of palinca brandy for lunch.

  “Yes, of course,” Etor insisted. Even through the poor reception on the line, Etor’s voice cooed like that of a crooner.

  Beryx hated that about Etor. And he hated to delegate any of his work. He’d spent too long and worked too hard to allow blunders to sully his reputation. He’d only delegated one other time, and it had kept him up for
two nights in a row, drinking a near overdose of morphine as he awaited word that the job had gone off fine. It wasn’t without a hitch: the idiot Spaniard had left the woman alive, bludgeoning her with a silver-bound new edition of The Conquistadors, of all things, rather than using a pistol or a knife. An amateur should never get creative, Beryx Gulyas believed, and to him everyone was an amateur. Everyone but himself.

  The woman was still in a sanitarium somewhere, cleverer than the leeches the doctors used on her bedsores, but not quite as sharp as the pigeons that perched on her windowsill. Gulyas would’ve done the job perfectly, but in fairness, the Spaniard’s work had been adequate enough. The injured woman’s husband left politics altogether, and Gulyas’s boss, Nicolai Ceausescu, was elected to the Politburo less than a year later.

  It was lucky for Beryx Gulyas—and it was luck and not the Spaniard’s skill—that the black hole of a vegetative state had an even more menacing effect on Ceausescu’s nemesis than a clean kill.

  “You’d better be right,” he told Etor.

  Beryx slammed the phone down, chipping the cradle in the process. Etor was a lousy assassin, but the only assassin available in Greece—let alone Monemvasia—on such short notice. His effete tastes irked the Transylvanian native, especially since he knew Etor had spent most of his adolescence and early manhood as a rough for a Cretan gangster known as Baru. Now he sashayed around like he was better than everyone else and took assignments from Baru only when he was broke. Beryx would’ve made an example out of him if he were the big Greek, but there went Etor, eating his fancy food with his fancy girlfriends. Beryx Gulyas hated the Greeks almost as much as he hated the Romanians.

  “Burn that little turd . . . ” he said aloud before catching himself. He looked back into the living room and was relieved to see his Aunt Zuzanna was still asleep on the couch and hadn’t heard his crass slip of the tongue.

  Whenever Gulyas came to Brasov, he stayed with his Aunt Zuzanna, his uncle’s second wife. She lived on the edge of the valley, where the gondola left hourly for the tops of the Southern Carpathian Mountains. The views were stunning, even if her cottage was marred by peeling paint and fungal growths.

  Zuzanna thought he was some big shot party official, and Gulyas proved her right by sending her twenty American dollars every month. It was a fortune for her, and he was sure that she’d saved every dollar he’d sent and kept it buried in her yard somewhere. This simple pay-off allowed him the freedom to come and go as he pleased and discouraged his aunt from gossiping for fear of losing her meal ticket. These were the practical reasons he sent her money. The personal reasons were more complicated.

  His aunt had taught him how to make love some two and a half decades earlier. She was slender then and a youthful thirty. She had shapely calves, and full hips, and almost no bosom. At the time, she was perfection to him, and he would favor her physical type all his life.

  They had eight encounters total, but it was the first that was most exciting and played over and over again in his mind when he needed to summon the proper enthusiasm with his wife. He’d seen Zuzanna sunbathing in her yard, lying face down, with her bathing suit pulled slightly past her hips so that just a wee bit of her cleavage showed at the top of her buttocks. He lost himself staring at her and was startled when she called his name and summoned him to her side.

  “There’s some oil in the kitchen, would you bring it out here for me?” He nodded and ran back into the house, retrieving the oil.

  “Now, rub it on my back, will you?”

  Gulyas bent over to cover his lap as he massaged the oil into her skin. Without any warning, she turned over and poured the oil over her tiny breasts and stomach. Zuzanna took young Beryx’s hands and dipped them into the oil, guiding them along her curves until he took over the motion himself.

  “Such fine-looking eyes,” she purred. “I could pluck one out and wear it on my finger like an emerald.”

  The tension in his loins became unbearable, and to Beryx’s horror, suddenly released. Zuzanna giggled, and he wanted to slap her. Instead, Beryx ran into the house and closed himself off in the cellar. It was quiet for several minutes there—he could hear no small, bare feet making their way into the house, and no voice giving gentle words of apology. Only the squeak of a fruit bat that had entered the house in a basket of freshly picked crab apples.

  After little less than an hour, Beryx grew tired of the dark, damp cellar and made his way back to his room again. The house was quiet and still, and Zuzanna was nowhere in sight—neither in the kitchen, her usual place, nor outside on the lawn, where she’d been sunning.

  It was to Beryx’s great surprise when he opened his bedroom door and found Zuzanna, naked and asleep, on his bed. She pointed her toes, stretching a bit at the sound of the door, and slowly opened her eyes. He’d sworn she said ‘come here,’ and he walked over to her, shaking and fiddling with his trousers. Zuzanna helped him get undressed and then took over for the rest.

  How different it was seeing her now. She’d become pear shaped and grown weary, having been shunned by her neighbors. Marrying a Hungarian was almost as bad as being one in those hapless years.

  Zuzanna had tried to rekindle their affair once, but Beryx could no longer look on her with desire the way he had when he was seventeen and she was beautiful. He used his wife as an excuse, but Zuzanna knew the real reason behind his faithfulness. It was then that he started sending her money, and she started treating him like a nephew.

  She dithered over whether he’d eaten enough and spent entire days washing his laundry, trying to erase age-old stains from fine shirts that were too good to throw away. This was all done without affection, and Beryx now felt like a young boy with a distant mother when he was in her company. The hungry lover in his fantasies bore no resemblance to the busy, ashen woman who kept his underwear clean and smelling like cedar mulch.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked without looking at him. She got up from the couch and pushed her feet into her slippers.

  “I’m not hungry,” he told her.

  Regardless of their past, Zuzanna had never fully liked him, as she had never fully liked her late husband, Beryx’s uncle by blood. They were, after all, ethnic Hungarians, and she was no Hungarian, as she’d liked to remind them—even during their most intimate moments.

  “Az apád faszát,” he snarled to himself in Hungarian—do it to your father’s cock. Beryx Gulyas fingered his ring—a bequest from his grandfather’s time in the Royal Hungarian Army.

  Though Beryx was born and raised in Transylvania and carried a Romanian passport, he’d never felt like one of them, and the Romanians would never let him forget that he was by origin a Hungarian. Despite the overt snubs he’d endured throughout the years, his birth country had not left him uninfected by its history and culture, either. He loved the brittle air of the Southern Carpathian Mountains and the wide, sensual faces of the women who called them home. Their broad shoulders, made strong by carrying milk jugs, piles of pelts, and heavy buckets to and from the water pump, were rippled from behind and particularly alluring when covered with perspiration. Romanian women sweat like their men and smelled like animals.

  And there was a palpable sorrow present in even the freshest newborn—a thirst for the agonies of life that courted lucklessness for the sheer thrill of surviving it. A Hungarian, though also drawn to the melancholy and macabre, might kill himself to end his grief, while a Romanian—particularly a Transylvanian—would hang on to the bitter end. Beryx Gulyas had a Hungarian heart, unable to truly love anyone except one of his own, but he possessed the soul of a Transylvanian.

  “I’m going out,” he said as he retrieved the keys to his new Berlina from a wooden bowl by the door. He told her he wouldn’t be coming back for at least a week and would appreciate the holes in his trouser pockets being mended by then. It was a terrible inconvenience not being able to wear them, and they were his favorite pair—forgiving in their cut and capable of retaining their shape and crispness for h
ours longer than the other pants he owned. They also made him look at least five kilos slimmer.

  Strangely, the pants meant more to him than the Berlina, which had been a recent gift from his boss. He’d “oo’d” and “aah’d” the way he was expected to, but a car was little more to him than a vehicle that got him from one place to another. Certainly, it spared him the inconvenience of having to take a bus or a train, but even at that moment, with his foot pressing the pedal to the floor and nothing but an empty, winding road ahead of him, Beryx did not feel the rush of adrenaline that consumed so many ardent drivers. There was only one thing that gave him that kind of rush.

  A muffled groan pierced his reverie.

  “Quiet!” he bellowed, and finally there was some peace in the car. Beryx had grown used to the incessant whining of the doomed over the years, but Leon Kunz, his regular pilot, had begged the whole ride on the way to Zuzanna’s that afternoon and was now starting up again, repeating “Please, no,” over and over again in various intonations like an actor rehearsing his one big line. Although the moans were hushed by the trunk walls, they were beginning to wear on Beryx’s already raw nerves, and he’d almost pulled over and shot the man like he had his co-pilot back at the airfield before lunch.

  “What have you done to yourself?” he’d demanded, as the co-pilot had begun slurring and sputtering that they weren’t expecting him—no one had called.

  “You’re too drunk to hear a phone, you mongoloid.”

  Beryx had broken their bottle of Boza on the concrete floor and carved the word idiot into the man’s forehead before shooting him in the groin, stomach, and finally mouth. That was when Leon Kunz started whimpering, and “Please, no,” became the only words in his vocabulary. It was a common enough phenomenon amongst the very frightened—getting stuck, like a needle on a defective record album—but Beryx was in no mood for it tonight and was relieved that the German had been able to reign himself in. Now, he could sit at the wheel for a few moments after pulling over into the dead stillness of the mountain overlook and think through what he wanted to do in the next twenty-four hours.