The Hungarian

by Victoria Dougherty

  He got up from the bar and walked to a corner of the room, where he was sheltered from the bartender’s view by a potted rubber tree. Swallowing a massive breath of air, the Hungarian bent over and vomited into the urn-shaped pot that held the rubber tree’s roots. He had become expert at gagging and heaving, able to do so with nary a sound that might alert a bystander or member of the staff.

  Once back at the bar, he stood as he drank the brandy and petted a piece of amber the size of a quail’s egg. It was the Hungarian’s favorite gemstone, his most powerful, imbuing the body with vitality and absorbing negative energy. He had paid a whopping five American dollars for it, but it had been worth every penny, as it contained a spider, possibly as old as twenty-five million years, that had been trapped in the fossilized resin just as it was about to feed on a dance fly.

  Chapter 11

  Athens, Greece

  The blood and broken glass on the vinyl floor of Etor’s kitchen had been cleaned up, more or less—the largest pieces from the smashed carafe swept to the side and the sticky mess of body fluids swabbed with wet towels by a gang of grizzled and beefy Greeks. The men had performed their task in complete silence, not daring a glance at their master as he walked around Etor’s mangled body.

  “This is unspeakable,” the Cretan gangster lamented, running his thick hand—made for chopping wood, spear fishing and gripping a man at the throat—over his bald head. “What kind of animal would do this?”

  Baru o Crete, as he was known, stood eye to eye with Etor, studying the death grimace on the gigolo’s face as his gruesomely abused body still dangled from the water pipe in his kitchenette. The congealed blood had been wiped off Etor’s smooth, tanned skin, but the gangster’s men had yet to cut him down. He’d asked all of them but his man, Christo, to leave him alone with his boy. The men had filed out, one by one, as if in a funeral procession.

  Until that day, Christo had been the only one who had known Etor was Baru’s son. The two Cretans had grown up together, and Christo had been there when Baru became a father at thirteen. It was Christo’s parents and not Baru’s mother—a notorious drunk and whore—who had raised Etor as if he were their own.

  “He’ll die a worse death, this Gulyas,” Christo assured him, but both men knew Baru’s fingers didn’t extend very far beyond Greece. The Cretan didn’t understand the Soviet Union and cursed himself for having taken a subcontract from one of their assassins. He thought he was doing his boy a favor by throwing him work and hoped the prospect of more plum assignments would lure Etor away from the folly of resorts and rich women and back into the folds of the family business. Baru o Crete could have finally introduced Etor as his son, instead of protecting him like he had and letting him have his fun. The Cretan gangster had thought he was being a good father, allowing his only son to indulge his fantasies, but what he’d feared had finally come to pass. Etor’s frivolous pursuits were interpreted as weakness, and a more hardened predator had trapped and killed him.

  “There’s Zeki in Istanbul,” Christo continued. “His men are appropriately vicious.”

  “But not very smart,” Baru countered. There were at least a half dozen other gangsters with whom he was on friendly terms who either owed him a favor or would’ve been happy to have a debt they could collect upon in the future. None of them were a match for a man like Beryx Gulyas, whose reputation had grown so fearsome in such a short period of time.

  “He’s not unbreakable,” Christo said. “He just knows how to make a statement.”

  Baru took out his handkerchief and spit on it, using the cotton cloth to wipe the white dribble caked around Etor’s mouth. On impulse, he tasted the sediment—salt.

  “I know how to make a statement, too,” the Cretan snarled.

  Christo put his hand on Baru’s shoulder, and the gangster shuddered.

  “You know what you have to do. He owes you a thousand debts and should be honored to get justice for Etor.”

  As any father would desire, as any Cretan would demand, Baru o Crete wanted the pleasure of at least watching Beryx Gulyas die, if not crushing his skull with his bare hands. But Baru’s men were parochial Greeks, who spoke no other languages and had no heads for strategy. Hunting down a prized assassin required an international operation with ties deep inside the Soviet Union.

  “Get my boy down,” Baru ordered, stepping away from his bloodied son. “I want to bury him myself.”

  Chapter 12

  Moscow

  What had begun for Kosmo Zablov as a mere simmer of jealousy had raged into a full boil of hatred.

  Hatred for Pasha Tarkhan.

  Zablov hated his intellect, despised his panache and found his rise in Moscow deplorable, his beautiful mistresses loathsome and his facility with language utterly contemptible. The funny thing was, despite the fact that Zablov had arranged to have Nicolai Ceausescu put out a kill for Tarkhan, he hadn’t actually hated the man until the moment Pushkin had identified him—“dark, cultured, dapper,” and let’s not forget “quite a lover”—as a traitor. A man like Tarkhan couldn’t be satisfied with ascending to the top of the Soviet hierarchy, could he? Zablov vexed. He had to become a philosopher on top of it all and start working for the other side!

  All of this would have been fine if Zablov didn’t have the niggling feeling that General Pushkin had commanded him to do the honors of bringing in Comrade Dark and Cultured for a purpose. But what purpose? And why not use a lower-ranking brute—one who had the muscle to fight Tarkhan if need be? Tarkhan was, after all, nearly twice Zablov’s size. It was a nightmare-inducing quandary.

  “On the pavement of my trampled soul, the steps of madmen weave the prints of rude, crude words.” The steps of madmen, yes, thought Zablov. And on my soul!

  These were the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s words. Mayakovsky, who was perhaps the only thing Kosmo Zablov and Pasha Tarkhan truly had in common. Both his and Tarkhan’s favorite poet. They had even mused about Mayakovsky on that most damning trip to Prague only a few days ago.

  “He’s Georgian—like you,” Zablov had told him.

  “Yes, but that’s not why I like him,” Tarkhan said. “His energy was demonic, and his words a disjointed lullaby.”

  Of course, everyone had a favorite poet in Russia. Several, as a matter of fact. But for Zablov, his affinity for Mayakovsky went so much deeper than an appreciation of the poet’s way with words or feverish rhythms.

  Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide at the age of thirty-six by playing Russian roulette until he lost. Both poet laureate and shameless Bolshevik flack, he’d always fascinated Kosmo Zablov, and the KGB spy found disturbing parallels between his own life and that of the young, brooding poet’s.

  First and foremost, what Mayakovsky was and what he wanted to be were two very different things, and Zablov knew this pain well. Although he wasn’t a poet and had never cared about being a revolutionary like his imagined counterpart, Zablov was a remarkable manipulator who had always wanted to be a brilliant tactician.

  And Mayakovsky had no interest in nature or things spiritual. He’d embraced the beauty of industry and the simple logic of atheism as suddenly and completely as Constantine had embraced Christ, yet his poetry, quite unintentionally, exemplified the very things the poet disdained.

  Tender souls! You play your love on a fiddle, and the crude club their love on a drum. But you cannot turn yourselves inside out, like me, and be just bare lips!

  Similarly, Zablov had no grasp of situations in their whole, yet was somehow able to flawlessly execute any plan that revolved around his own self-interest. He’d never questioned his instincts in this regard and certainly never considered any moral implications.

  What wouldn’t he have given, he wondered, for the mental agility that could’ve freed him to apply his gifts of self-preservation to his actual job? It seemed like such a small leap, and yet somehow he’d never mastered it.

  If Zablov could’ve been more like Pasha Tarkhan in this regard, he’d be a much
less troubled man. Then it would be he who hobnobbed with world leaders instead of having to associate with the likes of Nicolai Ceausescu and his rat-faced wife.

  The problem was made worse by the fact that Zablov had no insight into his one and only talent, either. He didn’t know how he had come to the decisions he’d made or why things had always worked out for him. He only knew that his judgment had so far remained intact. It was important that Zablov reminded himself of this, as he tried desperately to shake the curly-headed man with the dented face General Pushkin had sent to follow him. The Neanderthal had made no effort to hide his intentions and strolled around the metro station—hands in his pockets—admiring the Cathedral ceilings and giant Deco chandeliers until he hopped onto the same coach Zablov was taking.

  “Try this, you box-eyed bastard,” the spy grumbled as he muscled his way out of the train’s sliding doors before they closed and jumped onto another train going in the opposite direction. Pushkin’s thug was left wedged behind them—stuck on a coach to Oktyabrskaya.

  Zablov needed all the time he could steal in order to get in and out of the secret apartment he kept in Leningradsky Prospect. It had been a stroke of genius on his part to secure the place for his own use—genius and blind luck. The one-bedroom flat had been formerly used to spy on a biologist who ended up dying in a drunken skiing accident. Instead of having the flat reassigned, Zablov had burned all files on the unfortunate scientist and transferred the place to a man he’d invented.

  While the flat was certainly nothing to write home about, it did possess one critical perk, apart from its non-existence. It had a working telephone.

  “Immediately, please. I want to place a call to Bucharest, Romania.” Zablov used his best Belarus accent to disguise his voice. All outgoing and incoming calls were recorded and deliberated ad nauseum by young intelligence officers eager to make a name for themselves.

  Zablov hung up the phone and waited for the operator to call back, hoping against hope that for once the Moscow switchboard would operate with a modicum of efficiency. There was no food in the cupboards, only a few satchels of tea, so Zablov made himself a cup and sat a few feet away from the window.

  “Mother of God!” he yelped, nearly falling off the old piano stool that served as the only chair in the flat. Pushkin’s thug—with his smashed-in face and walk like a rhinoceros—was lumbering down Tverskaya Street, his shape unmistakable under the lamplight. He nodded at an old woman carrying a beehive satchel and crossed the street, looking up at Zablov’s apartment.

  “Bastard!” Zablov cried, crouching to the floor. It would’ve been impossible for the thug to see him, but he was taking no chances. The agent reached up and dialed the phone again, peeking just enough over the window to see the top of the thug’s head as he entered the building.

  “International operator,” he begged. It took a little under four minutes for a normal man to walk up to the ninth floor. This allowed time for a half minute rest on the sixth floor and the eighteen paces it took from the top of the staircase to Zablov’s apartment door.

  “Operator, I called a few minutes ago regarding a line to Bucharest. Yes, yes, I know. Very busy, I’m sure.” Zablov held his palm over the receiver and took two deep breaths before continuing. “This is an extreme emergency, you see. My mother is very ill. It could be any moment now.”

  He nodded as the operator explained procedure and ground his knuckle into a groove on the telephone table.

  “Yes, I’ll hold.”

  It occurred to him suddenly that he hadn’t put together what he was going to say to Nicolai Ceausescu. He couldn’t tell him the truth for obvious reasons—that killing Tarkhan now would make it look like Zablov was trying to rid himself of a co-conspirator. One who could implicate him—wrongly—as a double agent. The Romanian couldn’t care less about the mess Zablov had stumbled into.

  Great news, my friend. The report will be glowing after all! Zablov tried it on, but it was wrong. Nicolai Ceausescu would never buy it.

  Call it off, unless you want to lose your only advocate in Moscow.

  “No,” Zablov murmured. Far too much information, and no guarantee that he was the Romanian’s only advocate.

  You’re in danger. Call it off.

  “Perfect.”

  The message was simple and mysterious—just the right combination for a man as paranoid as Nicolai Ceausescu.

  “Yes, I’m still holding,” he stuttered. Zablov put the telephone receiver down and crept to the foyer. He held his breath as he put his ear to the door, as if any noise he made could be yet another piece of evidence against him. He could hear, on the seventh floor, the unmistakable thud of a pair of police boots climbing the stairs at a steady pace.

  “Too soon,” he whispered.

  The thug was making excellent time, having foregone the need for a rest stop. Zablov’s shoulders dropped, surrendering into a slouch as he pondered his predicament. The catalog of his alleged crimes, he realized, was impressive: treason, conspiracy, murder. He could even hear himself listing the evidence against him, as Jarko, his enforcer, stood behind him with a billy club.

  Isn’t it true you met with Pasha Tarkhan in Prague?

  Isn’t it true you were his accomplice in treason against the Soviet Union?

  Isn’t it true that you had Pasha Tarkhan murdered before he could corroborate any evidence against you?

  “Horrific coincidence,” Zablov wailed.

  It was, to Zablov, profoundly unfair that a mere scheme for a promotion had entangled him in much larger events that he had so little control over. He reached into his wallet and took out a small, twenty-six-year-old newspaper clipping detailing Mayakovsky’s unfortunate end. It showed a picture of the poet—taken when he was twenty-two, but looking forty. Even then, when he was in the thrall of his revolutionary dreams, Mayakovsky’s eyes looked doomed, and Zablov wondered if his own eyes, at twenty-two, had told a similar tale.

  It was a mere fifty-seven seconds later when the thug, or Rodki Semyonov, as he was known to General Pushkin, called his chief to let him know what had happened.

  “I wouldn’t have seen it, but once the blood started to drip down the wall, the words became visible. He wrote, ‘I’ve set my heel upon the throat of my own song.’” Semyonov squatted under Kosmo Zablov’s body and listened as the General vented his frustrations about the dead agent, calling Zablov a moron and a traitor, then demanding to know the meaning of his last written words.

  “He liked poetry, I guess—but then, who doesn’t?” Semyonov remarked. “There was one more thing, though.” Semyonov reached over to the window and took Zablov’s tea cup off the sill, drinking it down in three, large gulps. It was hot and stung the back of his throat.

  “The operator was on the line. He was trying to reach Romania.” Semyonov looked up at Kosmo Zablov—slumped on the piano stool, but still leaning against the wall, as if he were bent over, trying to light a cigarette in the wind. The spy’s gun was cradled in his hands, and his lips were wrapped tightly around the barrel. Semyonov, who possessed all of the acumen Kosmo Zablov had coveted while he lived, was able to listen to the general’s detailed instructions and simultaneously observe the dead man’s body as it slid down the wall—slowly and deliberately, as if the spy was still controlling his motions. He appreciated the beauty in such a moment. It was, he realized, a rare event to witness a man’s body so soon after his death, and Semyonov felt a deep respect both for life and life’s end—even if he was unsentimental about the person who had actually died.

  “He’d just returned from Bucharest a couple of days ago,” Semyonov explained. “If I had ordered an assassin there, I wouldn’t be too eager to keep making contact.” He nodded and hmm’d. “Yes, a moron, as you said.”

  He took a tin case out of his pocket and retrieved a thickly rolled cigarette from it. He peeled off the paper and deposited the tobacco into his palm before scooping up the dried leaves with his lips and lodging them between his lower gums and his che
ek.

  “I’ll go back to the Hotel Rude,” he told the general. “I can be there within the hour.”

  Chapter 13

  Moscow

  Kon da ti go natrese!” a formally dressed Bulgarian shouted as he bolted out the door to the toilet in the Revolution Room at Hotel Rude. He shoved by Pasha, pursued by the man he’d told to go “get fucked by a horse.”

  Pasha Tarkhan waited until the ruckus had passed before entering the men’s room—now quiet and empty. Toilets at most crowded gatherings like this were used primarily for homosexual encounters, so the majority of guests piddled outside. The dark Russian, however, wanted to avoid mingling with the other partygoers and thought it better to brave the odors of semen and concentrated urine.

  “Don’t allow anyone to enter,” he’d told the toilet minder, slipping her five American dollars that she promptly hid under the reserves of weak, gravelly toilet paper she meted out for a coin. His donation would allow him at least a couple of minutes’ peace while he relieved his bladder and thought about how he was going to convince Tony Geiger’s Lily to leave Russia with him.

  “The urinals are clogged,” the old woman reported as Pasha closed the door. Men’s room urinals were foul as a rule, and Pasha never used them. He entered the second of only two stalls, having glimpsed a full bowl of excrement in the first, and unzipped his trousers.

  Pasha’s instincts had always been sharp, and the tiny needles of truth that pricked at him like acupuncture had told him his cover had been blown. There had been no searches of his villa or out of the blue discussions about fantastical promotions, but there had been a change in the air that Pasha could smell as surely as a peasant farmer could smell an oncoming drought. Having stolen the information about Sputnik—though his greatest and most recent transgression—was hardly his only one.