[2017] The Hungarian

by Victoria Dougherty

  Lily resisted, of course, but he’d tied her wrists behind her back and secured them to her ankles, binding them with a kind of slipknot that pulled her hands and feet closer together as she struggled. The more she moved, the more unnatural the position became, and the more agonizing. He enjoyed her struggle—although not because it gave her pain. He enjoyed it precisely because she was able suffer the pain. It was yet another attribute they shared.

  Gulyas reached over to the dying Bunsen burner at his side and removed a dish from its frame. It was filled with a pharmacological capsaicin mixture and bubbled the way he imagined lava might bubble inside a volcano on the brink of erupting. An active component of the chili pepper, the capsaicin would certainly feel like hot coals.

  “This shouldn’t take too long,” he said.

  Slowly, Gulyas poured the mixture down Lily’s throat. She gasped and coughed as the capsaicin foamed in her mouth, but finally, she was forced to swallow. It was either that or drown.

  “There we go,” he murmured.

  In most cases, Gulyas found mock executions to be an extremely effective method of psychological torture. The capsaicin provided the added benefit of physical anguish as well.

  But Lily, as he’d come to expect, was not most cases. She rolled onto her side, her wrists and ankles pulling closer together. Her eyes were tearing heavily and she was wheezing, but she’d suffered her fear and discomfort very well. There was almost a sense of serenity to her countenance.

  The Hungarian took a sip of his wine and blotted Lily’s forehead with a cool, damp cloth he dipped frequently in a tin of rosewater. He heaved a breath, admiring the strong slope of her nose and the elegant line of her jawbone. She whispered something, but Beryx Gulyas couldn’t hear it. He bent down, putting his ear to her lips. “Love, did you say? Yes, love.”

  Lily Tassos had been changed by love, he mused to himself. His love. And Beryx Gulyas had waited all his life for someone like her. The funny thing was . . . she wasn’t even Hungarian.

  “What was that?” he asked her. She endeavored to speak again, this time meeting his eyes with an intensity that surprised him, given her general condition. With the burns from the capsaisin, she was difficult to understand, but he was pretty sure she’d said love you.

  But this time Gulyas was wrong.

  Lily had, in fact, said, “Fuck you.”

  Chapter 39

  Pasha felt as if he was going to crawl out of his own skin. Lily had been gone for more than two days, and he feared the worst for her. A marked man, absent his usual channels and back-ups, he felt powerless to help her and frantic to remedy the situation.

  “Bolván!” Pasha smacked his palm to his forehead. He hated himself for having caved in to her demand to go with Nassa to the market. It had seemed at the time that she would simply not take no for an answer, but why, he wondered, hadn’t he forced her to stay? She was certainly no match for him physically. And since when did he take his orders from a woman? Since you met Lily Tassos, it would appear, an inner voice told him. Since, for the first time in nearly twenty years, you put a woman’s interests ahead of your own. He had long forgotten how such a simple action—so natural to a young groom, or a new mother—began to forge a bond that is increasingly difficult to break. And how easy it was to make a habit of such a dangerous endeavor.

  In addition to this disturbing storm of emotions, he was beginning to chafe at his increasing dependence on Fedot, especially since his friend had seemed the slightest bit unreliable since they’d reached Tehran. But no, he thought. Unreliable was too strong a word . . . unfocused, perhaps.

  “Where have you been?” Pasha demanded as Fedot slid in through the doors of the servant’s entrance. “You were gone an awfully long time.” He held up the note Fedot had written and placed next to his pillow. It stated quite simply that he had gone out and would return soon.

  Fedot smiled, removing a box of Persian pastries from his sack and placing them on the engraved silver coffee table that stood as the centerpiece of Mansoor Nassa’s living room.

  “Breakfast,” he said. “And where is the poet?”

  “Out,” Pasha told him. “On one of his doroshkeh rides. He wants us to depart for his mountain retreat this afternoon as we planned.”

  Pasha had lost affinity for Nassa since he’d returned from the market without Lily. How he could have allowed her to fall behind and be abducted was beyond Pasha, but then poets did tend to dwell in the sanctuary of their thoughts far more than most beings. At least they knew it was the Hungarian who had taken Lily. Nassa and his servant had described him definitively, from his doughy form to his striking eyes.

  And the fact that the Hunagian had taken her and not killed her meant that she held some value for him—although how much was difficult to say. Pasha knew their only chance to help Lily now was to reach the Americans. He hoped that Chandler fellow knew something or could at least contact Lily’s father. If anyone could extract a hostage from a hired assassin, it was Theron Tassos—especially if that hostage was his daughter.

  “Ambassador Pearce should already be at Nassa’s house,” Pasha continued. “An invitation has also been extended to the American ambassador, as I understand it. He certainly won’t want to stay in the city with this kind of heat.”

  Fedot sat down.

  “Fedot?”

  The Russian shook his head. He picked up a nut-filled koloocheh pastry and took a small bite, chewing slowly. “You should go to the Americans,” he said.

  Pasha Tarkhan squatted down at the coffee table. “Alone?”

  “Someone should be here in case we hear word of Miss Lilia,” Fedot said, weaving his hands together in his lap. “There’s no need for both of us to go, is there?”

  Pasha Tarkhan dipped his fingers into one of many small bowls of anise seed that Mansoor Nassa kept around as breath freshener. He pinched some of the seed between his thumb and index fingers and placed them on his tongue, crunching the tiny pods between his molars.

  “I suppose not,” Pasha said.

  “You don’t like this idea?” Fedot asked. “I thought you would.”

  “It’s just a change, that’s all,” Pasha said. His eyes met Fedot’s, and he studied the little man. Calm, still as a puddle. “I’ve never been afraid of change, Fedot, and I sense that neither have you.”

  Pasha turned away from Fedot and ran his hand over his breast pocket, feeling nothing but the smooth bed of muscle and bone that Lily liked to lay her head upon. Gone were the brown bottle of Myer aspirin and the scroll of microfilm that had left Brandy France lying in a considerable pool of her own blood. Pasha Tarkhan blinked heavily and chuckled. He bent down and slid the metal card, with its symbols and Cyrillic lettering, out of his shoe and ran his finger over the Russian word for tree—дерево.

  “When did we meet, Fedot, was it five years ago or six?”

  The Russian spiritualist shrugged. He cared little for time.

  “You were involved in smuggling then,” Pasha recounted. “Religious artifacts for The Patriarch.” Pasha rubbed the card between his fingers the way he used to rub his daughters’ hair when they were little. “You gave me this card, do you remember? You said it guided you during times of moral dilemma.”

  Fedot smiled his prim, monastic smile and touched Pasha’s forearm. He took another bite of his pastry, washing it down with the sulfurous-tasting mineral water Nassa kept around the house.

  “Perhaps we should pray for an answer to our troubles,” Fedot offered.

  Pasha returned the card to his sole and looked up at his friend. “I’m afraid that’s your domain.”

  Fedot put his pastry down. He stood up from the coffee table and knelt directly under the Star of David embossed onto the ceiling plaster. As he closed his eyes and held his palms up, Pasha Tarkhan walked behind him, placing his giant hands on Fedot’s shoulders. The young Russian inhaled deeply, making them rise and fall like a wave. Outside, he could hear the clippety-clap of the poet’s doroshkeh c
art as it pulled up to the front doors. The horse was antsy, and it brayed. Fedot relaxed, as Pasha dug his fingers deeply into the base of his neck. He anticipated the crack of the doroshkeh driver’s whip, and it came as Pasha’s mighty hands squeezed tighter, compressing his esophagus and fully impeding Fedot’s ability to breathe. The young Russian remained impassive and unmoving, except for gently unfolding his hands.

  Chapter 40

  It was only the light that Lily remembered from those first few hours—or maybe they were days, it was hard to tell. Light that seemed foggy and yellow—blurred shapes, indecipherable. It must have been how an infant viewed the world shortly after birth. Lily wondered, at first, whether she had died and been reborn. Ivanov believed in reincarnation. It was his contention that when a child was born, he remembered everything from his former life, but would slowly forget as he might a vivid dream after being jerked awake.

  As her pain swelled and the man she assumed was the Lavra assassin called her Lily—my Lily, it’s breakfast time, Lily—get your strength up, Lily, we have a long day ahead of us—she knew that she was still inhabiting the same life, the same body. And that revelation made her wish she was dead, even if she had never had a suicidal thought in her life.

  Then Ivanov came to sit with her.

  He knew a thing or two about torture—Pasha’s torture specifically—and held her hand, talking to her about the whispers of God heard only in times of unbearable agony. A gift. Candy stuffed into your shoe on St. Nicholas Day, Ivanov sang. A gift of love. And God didn’t speak to just anyone—but wait—yes, he did, Ivanov insisted. Most people just didn’t hear him. Lily wasn’t sure she heard him, either. But she did hear Ivanov.

  “Are you hungry?” The Hungarian had broth for her. All she could stomach was broth. Beryx Gulyas smiled often at her now, but it didn’t soften his appearance. How dare you smile at me? she wanted to say. But Lily had neither the strength nor the inclination to speak to anyone but Ivanov, or Pasha if he had been there.

  Lily missed Pasha—desperately. It was Ivanov’s chronicling of the Russian’s every move and emotion that kept Lily from going insane. That, and the holy man’s assurance that Pasha was looking for her. Spaceship or no spaceship, he would never leave her behind, the Holy One insisted. Any more than she would leave him. She believed Ivanov, even if she couldn’t quite figure out what a man like Pasha Tarkhan saw in her—apart from what men usually saw in her.

  “I could’ve been killed on Monemvasia and would’ve left behind a few ex-friends, an ex-fiancé, and a great wardrobe. Hardly Nobel Prize material,” she’d told Pasha one night, as their caravan neared Astara. He’d smiled at her in that way she loved. A smile that told a thousand stories about women he’d cherished and men he’d buried—with his own hands if necessary. It was a smile, she realized, that was not unlike her father’s.

  “Courage is a muscle you didn’t have to develop,” Pasha had said, stirring the liver stew the circus Mongols had shared with them. “It’s not one I had to develop, either. I knew more gifted men than myself who stayed in Georgia, pretending to be mediocre so that they never had to leave home and never had to make a hard decision.”

  Lily looked up and away from her reverie. Beryx Gulyas was smiling at her again. He had untied her wrists and ankles for the time being, knowing she hadn’t the strength to fight him off. The Hungarian seemed to welcome the prospect of Lily struggling a bit, anyway. It meant he could subdue her. And he seemed to enjoy doing just that—twisting her arms and panting onto her face.

  Gulyas was uncouth, and that was what Lily hated most about him. It wasn’t lost on her that Richard Putnam’s mother—and eventually Richard—had hated her for that same reason. It was why she wasn’t good enough for the Putnams of Philadelphia, even if her father could’ve bought and sold them with the wave of a hand. She wondered if Richard Putnam would even recognize her now if they passed each other on the street. Or Tony Geiger? She decided Tony would. There was a lot about her that made him roll his eyes, but there was one thing Lily was sure of now. Tony had known she was capable of making hard decisions. It was something in her blood, and she couldn’t shake it no matter how much jewelry and how many bad parties lay between her and men like Tony. Pasha knew that, too.

  “Now look at us,” Lily had told Pasha. “Hard decisions are leading us to Persia, being chased by some goon.”

  “Beryx Gulyas is no goon, and we’ll do best to remember that,” Pasha cautioned her. “He’s a hard-driven sadist and a Hungarian nationalist who lacks polish. It wouldn’t serve us to dismiss him as an ignorant psychopath. Beryx, after all, has had some hard decisions to make, too.”

  Fedot had filled them in on Beryx Gulyas at Alyona’s underground apartment: Born in Transylvania to Hungarian parents; a talented assassin with psychological flaws; the personal lapdog for Nicolai Ceausescu—rumored successor of the current Secretary General of Romania. Pasha, of course, had heard of him. He was surprised that General Pushkin would send a man like that to take him out, but Fedot explained that he hadn’t. Whoever the Hungarian was working for had hired him out of Romania, not brought him into the Moscow fold.

  “Romania,” Pasha repeated, shrugging. He seemed incurious as to why someone other than the Soviets would want him dead—as if it was an expected development in his life’s story and the particulars were hardly important.

  “Never underestimate your enemy,” Lily had said. “Sun Tzu says as much in The Art of War. My dad told me that.”

  “I’ve never read it,” Pasha told her. “My knowledge of war is through experience.”

  Lily felt the gentle press of a warm palm against her head and for a moment thought it might be Pasha. But no, this hand wasn’t big enough. The Hungarian petted her hair, raking his fingers across her scalp. She heard him burrow into the front pocket of his trousers, grunting as he yanked his hand out from under the snug woolen material. He placed several small stones and crystals on the floor tiles next to her: dioptase, moonstone, opal, rhodochrosite and green amber—all for love, he told her. He added garnet this time, for physical love.

  Beryx Gulyas then forced her mouth open with a spoon and dropped the various stones—one by one—into the back of her throat, forcing her to swallow them. He lit a match, tossing the box, labeled Hotel Salonika, on the floor near Lily’s shoulder. As he heated the cradle of the metal spoon, boiling the pharmacological capsaicin again, Beryx Gulyas’s breath became audible. Lily listened to the way he exhaled—like a bull, in short and forceful puffs—and walked her fingers over to the matchbox. Slowly, she slid the box toward her shoulder, tucking it into her armpit.

  Pasha was right. Lily nodded. It was of no use thinking of Beryx Gulyas as a goon—a coarse and simple caricature of a man. He’d gotten this far. Both of them had. Lily rolled onto her back and looked fully at him. The Hungarian’s face was contorted in a mask of concentration. If he messed up, like he had once before, the capsaicin would become too acidic, too volatile. It could even explode, he had told her. The substance needed to be just right so that, when he poured it down her throat again, it would merely burn and savage—like shards of scorching glass—leaving her with a raw and excruciating sore throat for a number of hours and swelling her lips and tongue until she thought she would suffocate.

  Lily touched the Hungarian’s knee, and he glanced down at her, careful not to take his eyes—the color of English peas, and his only desirable feature—off the spoon for too long. In its purest form, the capsaicin was odorless—and needed to stay that way. As soon as the substance began to overheat, a sour smell would tinge the air—scarcely detectable at first. The white curl of smoke emanating from the tiny pool inside the spoon would become highly combustible from that instant. It would ignite if ever the tip of a flame crossed its ribbon and would spread toxic acidity to every available molecule in the air around it.

  Lily rolled over slowly, pulling the top of the Hungarian’s sock down with the tip of her finger and pressing her lips to his expose
d ankle, biting gently and playfully along the bone. She let the matchbox drop from her armpit into her hand, pushing it open with her thumb.

  In a distant corner of the room, Lily could swear she heard Ivanov giggling.

  Chapter 41

  Pasha opened one eye. There was light—morning light—in the top tier of his field of vision and clear, bold cerulean in the bottom. He rubbed his hand over the short, silken rug that he was lying on facedown and lifted his head, moving his neck to and fro. Nothing hurt—not really—but he felt dull and groggy, like the victim of one too many glasses of young wine. Standing up was dizzying, but not painful—another good sign.

  A few feet in front of him, on a table next to the settee, was a small tray left for him by Fedot, he assumed. Fedot. Yes, now he remembered. Something had changed with Fedot, something that had given Pasha enough cause to kill him—his friend. Who are friends, after all? Most of his own friends had tried to kill him at some point or another, for this or that reason. Not Fedot, however. He hadn’t expected it of Fedot—and he turned out to be right. It was a good thing the little Russian was so strong and resourceful. It made Pasha laugh. Nobody ever saw it coming with Fedot.

  The last Pasha remembered, he had been strangling Fedot, his own considerable might halting any flow of oxygen to his friend’s lungs or brain, and then he, Pasha, was on the floor. Was it minutes later now? An hour? Couldn’t have been more than an hour, judging by the light in Mansoor Nassa’s living room.

  Pasha walked over to the tray that had been assembled for him. There was a cup of Turkish coffee, a colorless shot of something severely alcoholic, a fresh apricot pastry with poppy seed and nuts, and a small, mint green envelope. Pasha touched the coffee—it was still hot—and drank the liquor (quite a good vodka—thank you, Fedot, he said aloud), before forcing the pastry into his mouth. He didn’t want it, not exactly, but he knew that he needed it and so had his Russian friend. Inside the envelope lay an official type photo of a policeman. It was some years old.