[2017] The Hungarian

by Victoria Dougherty

  “Hello, Great Detective,” Pasha said, scrutinizing Rodki Semyonov’s jagged features. They’d met before, at Stalin’s Kuntsevo residence, not long before the Great Leader headed off to the Great Beyond or the Great Below, as many of faith would believe.

  “Now here’s one that makes sense,” Pasha said. Beryx Gulyas and why he would have it in for Pasha was a mystery, but the Great Detective? Who else would General Pushkin send after him? Pushkin was no fool, after all.

  Next to the tray lay the thin, paper box that had contained the pastries Fedot had bought for their breakfast. It was white and stained with large, greasy ovals, but at the bottom right was a small stamp of partially smeared Hebrew words and numbers. Sabourjian, it read—the name of the bakery—and listed the address.

  “My favorite bakery!” Mansoor Nassa had exclaimed as he fed them Sabourjian’s flatbread the morning after they arrived. Fedot had been dispatched to the Jewish quarter at the crack of dawn while he and Lily slept.

  Pasha didn’t know quite what Fedot and Nassa were up to, but it was clear they were keen to take him along. Maybe not to Mansoor Nassa’s mountain retreat—at least not today—but to wherever Fedot believed God was leading them. And wherever that was, Pasha needed to find Lily there.

  He wondered if it was Lily’s uncommon beauty and smarts that had put a spell on him. Of course, Pasha had known plenty of fine-looking and intelligent women, some of whom had loved him with a passion that he found as touching as he did curious. No, beauty was a commodity for a man like him. Intelligence was nice, but even that wasn’t necessary for his emotional fulfillment. His ex-wife hadn’t been particularly bright, and he’d loved her. Even if he did begin to tire of her early on in their marriage.

  More likely, it was as simple as the fact that Lily had cared for him when he was unable to care for himself. Selflessly, or at the very least, not in her self-interest. Such a cliché of love. Yet as he’d fought for his life after Beryx Gulyas had tried to kill him, as he struggled to regain consciousness, it was primarily because he wanted to see Lily’s face. Her skeptical gaze and prickly demeanor. Her smile that both understood the joke and told it. In fact, now he found himself in the same fix. To both his thrill and dismay, he’d never needed something so much right then as to glimpse the face of the woman he loved.

  “Lily,” he said aloud. “I fear you’ll be the death of me.”

  The Mahalleh, the Jewish Quarter of Tehran, looked nothing like the Jewish Quarters Pasha had known in cities like Krakow or Prague—at least before the war. Those were clean, dignified and showed evidence of prosperity even during dark times.

  The porous, graffiti-engraved walls of the Mahalleh, the rusted iron bars on the windows, and the broken metal doors indicated not only decay, but impending abandonment. Mansoor Nassa himself lived outside these parameters, and Pasha wondered what it must have looked like here when Nassa was but a boy, running wild through the narrow alleyways and central courtyards studded with fuzzy-leafed trees. Perhaps it had been bustling then, or maybe its very paucity had been what led Nassa to poetry and out of the Mahalleh for good.

  A young boy—no older than eight—peeked his head out from behind a sky blue door with a large diamond shape on it. It was a door left unmolested by rust and apathy, clearly leading to a family home.

  “Young one,” Pasha called in Hebrew, and the boy craned his neck to get a better look at him. “I’m but a visitor,” Pasha explained. “Could you tell me how to find this address?” None of the street signs were written in Hebrew, and Pasha couldn’t read the Persian language.

  The boy pointed down the alleyway and spoke rapidly of several twists and turns the Russian would have to make in order to reach his destination. He then took off into a courtyard and hid behind a wooden drum, watching the giant stranger as he made his way.

  In truth, Pasha didn’t know if the address meant anything—or at least anything concrete. He was sure, however, that Fedot and Nassa had left it for him deliberately. And given that he had nowhere else to go and really nothing else to do since they had—presumably—already left for the mountains, he might as well have a look.

  As he rounded onto a wider street, he finally saw evidence of vitality—the kind of commerce, game-playing and conviviality that Pasha would have expected in any living, breathing city neighborhood. Next to a cobbler stood two gentlemen, deep in conversation while their sons played jacks in the street. A fruit merchant sang a complex melody in a sonorous voice barely tamed by years of heavy smoking. And from a tiny door—a door straight out of a children’s book—came two women carrying a bounty of bread. Above that door was a scratched wooden sign no bigger than a license plate. It read: Sabourjian.

  Pasha took out his handkerchief, wiped his neck with it—already hot at this time in the morning—and took a step toward the bakery. It had long ago ceased to amaze him how ordinary a place could look—a place that was perhaps an important link in a dramatic chain of events. But then again, maybe it was only a bakery.

  He ducked through the door and found himself in a space even smaller than the one he had anticipated. There was little room for more than a handful of customers at the counter, which was brimming with stacks of flatbread, soft loaves, and the pastries Fedot had brought to the poet’s house. Behind the counter stood a man and his wife, their three children huddled around their mother’s ankles.

  Pasha greeted them in Hebrew and pointed to a pairing of honey-glazed buns. The baker nodded, his eyes darting toward his wife, who looked to the floor. The children were unmoving, except for the littlest one, a child of about three, who stroked her mother’s calf with her tiny fingers. It was quiet in the bakery—unnaturally quiet, it seemed, for this time of day. There should have been a line out the door, the bounty picked through.

  The baker held out the thin, white box containing the honeyed buns, and Pasha took it, handing him a few rials he’d collected from the poet’s house and telling him to keep the change. He had the distinct feeling the baker did not want him to leave. Pasha looked over at his wife. Her eyes were still held to the floor, petting the head of her youngest child, when he noticed what looked like a deep cut around her wrist—the kind of cut that came from a pair of tight handcuffs.

  “Your wife doesn’t look well,” Pasha said. “Would you like me to fetch a doctor?”

  The baker shook his head. In the silence that followed, Pasha heard a baby crying upstairs. The child’s cry turned to a wail when it was clear no one was going to tend to his needs. Now Pasha understood.

  “Good day,” he said. “And God bless you.”

  Pasha exited the bakery, staying close to the wall, and looked up at the small, dark window on the second floor—the one that looked out onto the street and, from the proper angle, into the baker’s flat.

  “Mr. Gulyas,” Pasha said under his breath, “I’ll bet you’re a terrible houseguest.”

  Chapter 42

  Rodki Semyonov had been following Fedot Titov all morning, and it could have been a tedious ordeal. Going to this place and that, looking for meaning in mostly banal transactions. Rodki, by fate, had been forced to accomplish most of his detecting work within his imagination and had few fond memories of tracking suspects gum-shoe style. In this and only this regard, Stalin had done him a favor by plucking him from the police force.

  But Fedot Titov was never what he seemed and did little that was straightforward. That, in and of itself, captured Rodki’s interest. They had been playing what was to the Great Detective an amusing game of cat and mouse. Amusing not because Rodki enjoyed such activities. Being good at something didn’t necessarily translate into pleasure for him. He’d never liked bare-knuckle fighting, after all, even if he did gain a certain sense of achievement from it.

  What had amused him was the walking tour of Tehran it had provided—especially the affluent northern neighborhoods with their wide boulevards and sumptuous gardens. He almost felt as if he were back in Moscow—pounding the pavement, riding the buses�
��and it gave him a sense of well-being that had eluded him since he’d left home to find General Pushkin’s old friend and once-trusted ally.

  “Mister, how bouta cigarette?” a young man pleaded in English.

  Rodki flipped him a butt and motioned for him to move along. He realized how much he must look like an American to someone young and relatively untraveled outside of Iran. Even a rich kid like the boy who’d wanted a cigarette. The Great Detective had bought a beige linen suit at an American luxury hotel, wanting to look like a tourist. He could never credibly fit in as a Persian and didn’t bother trying to don their style—even if most of them wore Western dress. Much like the young man, in his loafers and banana-hued linen trousers, there was something other about the way the Persians wore their Western attire. The fabrics were overly crisp, as if pressed twice a day, and the colors tended to be brighter, complimenting their darker skin tones. The Persians looked, overall, quite beautiful. In this way, they appeared in stark contrast to the dreary uniform of factory dress and quasi-military style that had been imposed upon the Moscow citizenry. The forced ugliness of Soviet Russia had made even his Polina look haggard and sullen on the days she visited Rodki’s imagination. Her plump cheeks and full lips, however, would always defy the look of collective doom and unspeakable boredom that Rodki had grown so accustomed to in his native land.

  “More cigarette, for later day? Yes, please?” The young man—Banana Pants, as Rodki had begun to call him in his mind’s voice—had returned, wanting to make a friend. The Great Detective shushed him.

  Out of a shuttered house—one that looked as if it were still closed for the summer months—came Fedot Titov. The Great Detective had lost him once he’d entered the Elahiyeh neighborhood—an elegant and cosmopolitan-looking district. The homes were stately but tasteful there, housing senators, scientists, artists, writers and a good population of Persian Jews. It was a mystery as to how a man like Fedot Titov could have gained entry to a manor house, but then, perhaps the little man had befriended a hotel guest at some point or another. It wasn’t unheard of. Also likely, Fedot Titov’s accommodations were the result of having friends in high places—friends like Theron Tassos—even if Fedot seemed too capricious a character to reap such favors. And Theron Tassos, as far as Rodki could tell, was hardly the type of man who provided anything for anyone in his employ—apart from loyalty and a very nice paycheck. Anything else could give the impression of favoritism, or worse, could lay the groundwork for a personal relationship.

  Still, the Great Detective had first spotted the former assistant manager of the Hotel Rude that morning entering a decent but cut-rate hotel run by one of Tassos’s minions. Fedot Titov wasn’t there long—barely long enough to finish a cup of coffee –before he slipped out onto the street and travelled back to the manor house where he was staying.

  “You wanna supper?” Banana Pants inquired, although it was still morning. “My mother inspires so good food in our servants.”

  Rodki gave him the kind of look that had always stirred fear in his adversaries. A look of ruthless indifference that he’d cultivated for intimidation purposes. A look that told the young man, “You will suffer if you persist in wanting to satisfy your curiosity.”

  But Banana Pants was too enthralled with the idea of having garnered the attention of such a curious foreigner to care. He practiced his English, deluging the Great Detective with questions and invitations, imitating Bogart as he smoked his cigarette and centered his hat, tossing a gemstone in the air and catching it in his breast pocket.

  “You like, Louie?” he said. “Is this start of our beautiful friendship?”

  Near the front entrance of the splendid house out of which Fedot Titov had come, a doroshkeh appeared, its withered horse releasing an anguished bray. Fedot Titov got in. He whistled twice, and the doroshkeh began to move, pulling onto the boulevard and immediately rounding a bend.

  The young man looked up from his gem-tossing. “In the shadows of the rose garden,” he said, quoting the first line of what the Great Detective believed to be a poem. One by a Persian poet, if memory served him. Something about the blood of spirits infusing the white roses in a garden—making them red.

  “What was the next line, Bogie? I can’t remember.” The Great Detective called him Bogie, as Banana Pants seemed too condescending.

  But Bogie wouldn’t say. In the flash of a moment, he was gone—running down the boulevard, his crisp banana pants fluttering around his slender legs.

  Funny people, these Persians, Rodki thought.

  He flagged a taxi and motioned for the driver to round the same bend as the horse and cart carrying Fedot Titov. There, the boulevard curled onto another tree-lined street, where the tops of the trees curved together like interlocked fingers, and the road was quiet—determined not to disturb its illustrious residents. The doroshkeh had vanished, and for the life of him Rodki could not see where it had gone. He asked the driver to creep along the street, looking for an alley or driveway where the weary horse could have wandered in.

  The taxi driver gestured, shrugging to ask his customer where he wanted to go. They couldn’t inch along a prosperous street indefinitely, after all. It attracted all the wrong kinds of attention.

  The Great Detective sat back and sniffed, scratching his crooked nose.

  “The Mahalleh,” he said, though he didn’t know why. It was just a hunch.

  “Okay, Mahalleh,” the driver said. He turned around and headed back to the boulevard.

  As they drove by the shuttered house where Fedot Titov had emerged, the Great Detective peered out the taxi window, admiring the brick manor home. It was handsome, yes, but a bit lonely. As if it had once been loved deeply and was mourning the loss of that affection. It was a feeling familiar to Rodki. One he ate for breakfast nearly every morning at his apartment in Moscow, his wife’s spirit seated quietly next to him—her soft-boiled egg untouched, her tea too hot to sip—asking him, as she had the morning she was taken from him, “Do you think we could acquire an extra satchel of milk this week? Your mother would like me to make her a Charlotte russe for her birthday.” That morning he had replied, as he had every time since, “Charlotte russe? Rich tastes for a woman who grew up eating kissel.” Polina’s laughter still echoed at their table.

  Out of the corner of his vision, Rodki spotted something—a color—sticking out of a barberry bush. As the taxi moved closer, he recognized Banana Pants, kneeling amidst its plum wine leaves, his Bogie hat crushed to his chest. He was talking to someone—Rodki could see the outline of a man’s figure behind the bush. Banana Pants seemed to have lost his look of wide-eyed curiosity, replacing it with a rather cool demeanor.

  “Ah,” Rodki said. “I should have known. The boy was an agent of the Shah.”

  Chapter 43

  Pasha was flicking his cigarette butt into the gutter when the ground shivered beneath him and the sound of a minor explosion, like a collective sneeze, shot out from a second-floor window above the Sabourjian bakery. A plume of smoke looped up into the air and a wild scream—kurva anyádat! Something about a whore, from Pasha’s understanding—was hurled in Hungarian from the broken window.

  “Lily,” Pasha said.

  He rushed to the bakery entrance, but it was locked, bolted shut by the slide of a wooden plank. “Let me help you!” he shouted in Hebrew, pounding the door with his fist. He heard scuttling inside the bakery—the family was gathering their few things and moving toward the back of the building through the bakery kitchen, where a back door must have lain in wait.

  The Russian looked up and down the street, searching for a shortcut to the back of the shop—one that didn’t require his circling the block—but there was none. The street itself was emptying rapidly, as if its population had been waiting for something like this to happen. The children were gone, and the remaining handful of adults was fast disappearing into windows and behind the metal gates that guarded every home and commercial structure.

  “You, ther
e,” Pasha called to a middle-aged man as he jiggled his keys just a few doors down from the bakery. The man let go a torrent of blasphemies, then slipped in and quickly slammed the door before Pasha could intercept him.

  “Lily!” Pasha cried, kicking at the middle-aged man’s door. The hinges were strong and the metal unforgiving.

  Pasha stopped and looked up. All was silent now from the second story window. Black smoke belched from its empty frame, and his eyes began to sting as if they had been sprayed with onion and lemon. It may not have been the type of explosion that would tear limb from limb, but it was diabolical—clearly chemical in nature. He had an uncanny suspicion that it was Lily’s doing and not the Hungarian’s. “Hold on, Lily,” he said as he began to sprint down the now-deserted street. It would take him as long as two minutes to race around to the back of the Jewish bakery, and he had to believe that his Lily could take care of herself in the misery of that chemical haze for such an interminable length of time.

  The blast had blown away from Lily as she’d hoped it would, though refuse still clung to her body—some of it embedded in her skin, as tiny rivulets of blood steamed down her bare arms and legs. She was in a pair of panties and nothing else, but she didn’t care. Despite being battered and half-conscious, she knew enough to grab a sheet wet with spills from rosewater and wrap it around her body. A naked woman wouldn’t do well on the streets of a Muslim country, even one as forward-looking as Iran.

  “Goodbye, lover,” she rasped. Her throat was still raw. “See you in hell, I’m sure.”