The Hungarian

by Victoria Dougherty

  She considered her father for a moment and realized that she couldn’t remember a time when he’d actually enjoyed any of the expensive architecture around him. Luxury and routine were interchangeable to him. While his cars, hotel rooms, clothing and the like were essential, just as compulsory was his black coffee in the morning—Illy brand only, please—with a cigarette. Nothing more until eleven, then yogurt and honey—regardless of where he was. No lunch until two, that being his only meal unless he was obligated to have another. Necessity often forced him to eat the local fare out of courtesy as well, but Theron preferred Greek food no matter how good the cuisine happened to be in his host country.

  Lily had always assumed that her father’s particular tastes were a form of snobbery, but recent events had caused her to rethink a great many things. Certainly, Theron Tassos surrounded himself with fine effects—very specific, fine effects—but a man of his position needed something besides his own wit that he could rely on. And fine things tended to be reliable—whether they were automobiles or delicate threads of saffron in a honey pudding.

  It occurred to Lily quite suddenly that she hadn’t had a proper meal since the morning of her abduction by Beryx Gulyas. On that day, Goli, Mr. Nassa’s servant, had laid out a delicious assortment of fares that Fedot had purchased in the markets: flatbreads, feta cheese and exotic fruits ranging from sweet dates to the pomegranates that Pasha loved so much—placing fingers-full of the tiny, juice-bubble seeds on Lily’s tongue. The large, tough-skinned fruits hung heavily from trees all around the city and lined the increasingly open road before her father’s Imperial. The mountains seemed so close, and her ears began to pop.

  It won’t be long now, Lily told herself. The Americans could surely give her some idea of where the Russians had taken Pasha.

  “You would like Pasha, Daddy,” Lily said, so softly that her father didn’t seem to hear. Unlike Richard Putnam, Pasha was no Malaka.

  Lily leaned toward the front seat. She wanted to ask Fedot once again about the last thing Pasha had said to him, and about the final moments before the two of them were separated. Fedot had told her so very little—only that Pasha had been searching for her and that a man he called the Great Detective had found them in the street. Lily touched Fedot lightly on the cheek. His eyes were closed, and his breathing exhibited the steady rhythm of sleep—or perhaps merely deep meditation.

  “Fedot,” she said, but as soon as the words left her lips, Lily heard the shrieking crush of metal upon metal. A split second later, she was thrown against the right-hand window in the back seat. The window cracked, cutting Lily’s head as she fell unconscious into her father’s lap.

  From the outside, the crash site was lonesome and quiet except for a hiss coming out of the Imperial’s engine. The truck that had rammed the left side of the Imperial was mangled in the front but still running. Had there been a driver in its cab, he no doubt would have suffered the same fate that Theron Tassos’s driver had suffered.

  Staggering toward the crash—about twenty meters behind the truck—was a grimy and tousled Beryx Gulyas. The Hungarian had jumped out of the truck only seconds before the crash and rolled like tumbleweed across the arid terrain before landing in a silver-leafed shrub.

  Gulyas circled around to the unmarred portion of the Imperial and opened the back door. Gripping Lily under the arms, he dragged her out of the car and sat down, panting heavily. Although he’d lost two kilos in the excitement of the past few days, he felt no lighter in his bearing, and this realization made him kick the Imperial’s tire from his seated position. It would take at least five kilos until he would start feeling more agile, and a few more after that to notice the difference in a mirror.

  The Hungarian wanted to take a longer rest, but the sun—nearing noonday—was intolerable and causing him to sweat. And the salty beads of perspiration that were rolling from his scalp to his face stung terribly as they settled into his burns.

  He got to his feet, stretched and shook off his aches and pains. Finally, with his back muscles feeling less taut, he crouched down, hoisted Lily up over his shoulder and, with a grunt, tottered over to the truck, depositing her in the passenger’s seat of the cab. The hood of the truck was crumpled like tin, but the engine was purring softly, with only an occasional sputter from the generator. It sounded like a cymbal’s ching after a low drumroll.

  Down the long, straight road leading out of Tehran, Gulyas could see a small, blue dot that with every ticking second was growing bigger. Traffic. Quickening his step, the Hungarian climbed into the driver’s seat of the truck, reversed away from the mangled Imperial and drove back in the direction of the city well ahead of the approaching car.

  His father’s ring glinted in the dazzling sunlight, and Gulyas admired it as he drove. Although he’d never liked his father, Gulyas did respect him, as he did anyone who had served in the Royal Hungarian Army. Lily had noticed his ring when he was holding her in the baker’s apartment. She even recognized what it was, so Gulyas knew she respected him, too. That was why he couldn’t understand how she could have betrayed him so. He would find out soon enough, however, and when he finished punishing Lily for her transgression, perhaps they could finally have that dance he’d been longing for.

  Chapter 51

  Theron Tassos could feel pearls of sweat behind his ears and under the collar of his shirt. At first, the Greek baron thought it might be blood, but the wetness he felt all over—on his back, his legs, under his arms, soaked into his underclothes—was too thin and pervasive.

  “Lily?” he whispered, and opened his eyes. A swooshing sound—sudden, fast—came and went, and Theron looked out the window. A blue sedan had driven by and continued on toward the mountains, uninterested in the steaming, mangled Chrysler Imperial on the side of the road.

  “Lily,” he said—louder this time—as he looked around the automobile. The muscles in his neck tensed, making him wince.

  The back seat showed no sign of her, except for a stripe of blood on the leather seat that continued over his pant leg as if she’d dragged herself—or been dragged—out of the car.

  Theron opened the door and spilled out onto the parched ground. He crawled to the front of the car, steadied himself on the bumper and stood up. The truck that had rammed into them was gone. The grooved imprints of its tires showed a forward-crash-reverse-and-turn pattern, then led back in the direction of Tehran.

  The Greek went to the driver’s side of his Imperial and leaned in through the shattered window. There, the driver sat nearly decapitated by a shard of glass that came from the other vehicle. The man’s hands were still gripping the steering wheel, and his right foot was on the gas pedal. His one intact eye was open, but not wide—there was no look of surprise frozen on his face. The eye was fixed on the road, as if the driver had been deep in thought when they were struck.

  Fedot, on the other hand, looked as if he were sleeping. A gash in his skull had matted his honey-brown hair with blood, but otherwise he appeared unharmed. He was certainly breathing—although in the restrained way that a deeply unconscious man takes his breath, as if he were sucking his air cautiously through a straw.

  Between Fedot and the dead driver was a perfectly undisturbed bottle of Limonata, and when Theron spied it, he became consumed by a rabid thirst. The Greek uncorked the bottle and put it to his lips, drinking down the warm soda in nearly a single gulp. He tossed the empty bottle at Fedot’s feet, whereupon it hit another glass object. Theron ducked out of the driver’s side window and walked around to the passenger’s side, where Fedot was seated. He opened the door and squatted down, lifting the empty Limonata and hoping another drink had survived the crash.

  But it had not.

  Underneath the empty bottle of Limonata was a small, brown bottle, cracked in half. It was a bottle of Myer aspirin—easily recognizable—and when the Greek looked closer, he could see a coil of equally brown film amidst its broken glass.

  Theron plucked the film from the floor of the Im
perial, blowing the dusty glass particles off its thin, shiny surface. He slipped it into his front trouser pocket, where he would have kept his car keys had he not had other people drive him where he needed to go.

  The Greek was not in the least surprised that Fedot had kept this precious information from him. But with Lily gone again, the microfilm was secondary at the moment.

  In the warped air of the heat, a smoky gray mass caught Theron’s eye in the distance. He mounted the hood of the Imperial and shielded his gaze from the sun. It was, indeed, an automobile. Theron Tassos climbed down, careful of his back, and stepped into the middle of the road. His right shoulder was growing sore, but he shook off his discomfort and began waving his arms until the gray car—a Ford—began to slow. It pulled up, stopping just where the truck and the Imperial had collided.

  “You need a hospital?” the driver asked Theron in Farsi.

  The Greek shook his head. “Tehran. Just Tehran,” he said, and the driver of the Ford motioned for him to get in.

  “Terrible accident,” the driver said. “The others are dead?”

  Theron Tassos nodded.

  The driver pulled a jug of water out of his back seat and offered it to the Greek, who took several massive swigs.

  “Please, let’s go quickly,” Theron said.

  “Yes, yes—hospital.”

  “The city.”

  “Yes, the city.”

  As they pulled around the Imperial, Theron looked into the passenger’s seat where Fedot had been lying unconscious. The bench was empty—the imprint of Fedot’s body in the leather being the only evidence that the spiritualist had ever been there at all.

  Theron spun around, taking in the arid landscape—but there was no Fedot. A pair of footprints—new and small—was visible near the passenger-side door but disappeared as they rounded the hood of the Imperial. Otherwise there was nothing.

  Fedot Titov was gone.

  Chapter 52

  It is said love can tame the most ferocious monster,” Beryx Gulyas whispered, not wanting to wake her. Not yet. “Perhaps even the most stuck-up slut.”

  The Hungarian patted Lily’s bottom lip with the tip of his index finger. Her lips—they were his favorite of her many splendid attributes—pouted unwittingly as she lay unconscious. He was disappointed, however, that she had painted them with lipstick, even if it had, for the most part, faded, leaving only a dessert-cherry stain. The Hungarian was still furious with her, of course, and she would pay for his injuries. But for these last few moments as she lay wound into a feline curl in the truck’s cab, he wanted to admire her.

  Re-buttoning his pants—they were too tight for his comfort when he was sitting down—the Hungarian stepped out of the truck and went to the passenger’s side door. The road was quiet—not a visible soul in this verdant and empty part of Tehran, an oasis away from the bustling shops and dusty streets that characterized much of the city. He looked once more to the right and left, then wrenched open the cab door.

  Lily screamed—a little too quickly—when he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her out of the truck. She hadn’t been unconscious after all, and Beryx Gulyas wondered how long she’d been pretending. She writhed and dug her nails into his wrists as he pulled her inside the small, brick building hidden by the side of the road. He’d spied it when he was tailing the American car belonging to Lily’s father, and it had seemed ideal for his purposes. Modest, off the beaten path, and leading into what looked like a garden. That was the feature he liked most of all. Lily looked most beautiful when she was surrounded by flora. He had laid lilies, her namesake, and palm fronds around her when she was his captive.

  A man in a black robe appeared from behind a gated door, yelling in Farsi and waving his arms. Gulyas let go of Lily’s hair and shot him in the face, the sound of gunfire echoing unpleasantly around them. He then darted around the foyer and behind the gated door, poking his gun around corners and into structural crannies until he was satisfied they were alone.

  “What is this place?” Gulyas wondered aloud, tapping his fingers on a thick plate of colored glass that separated the entrance from the main body of the interior.

  Like many places in Tehran, the structure’s outward appearance did not match its inner character. While the exterior was that of a simple brick bungalow, its only flourish being a light green metal roof resembling a beret, the interior was magnificent. Silver and gold—pressed into thin, decorative motifs—ran along the border of an arched ceiling, while gemstone mosaic tiles, so tiny, embellished the walls, breaking only for a line or two of Arabic script. The floors were a cool, blue marble.

  “It’s a cemetery,” Lily told him.

  “How do you know?” The Hungarian loved her less when she spoke.

  “Because it says so.” Lily pointed to the wall.

  “You can read this?”

  Lily shrugged.

  “It’s not just any cemetery,” she explained. “It’s for the Imam-born. For any immediate descendant of a Shi’a Imam.”

  Beryx Gulyas ran the barrel of his gun along the ocean-like waves of the engraved script that Lily claimed to be able to decipher. He’d never understood the need for elaborate death rituals. Upon his own death, he couldn’t care less if he was picked apart by vultures, although Nicolai Ceausescu had promised him a fine stone somewhere in a cemetery designated for men who served him.

  “Idiotic,” he sniffed.

  He led Lily out into the back garden, where several dozen tombstones lay like single beds in a dormitory. Most were covered by a smooth, black cloth—blacker than night and undamaged by the Persian sun.

  “You know, you could’ve just shot me on the road back there,” Lily said. “That’s what I would’ve done.”

  Beryx Gulyas actually chuckled. Low and grunting, but it was a chuckle. Lily smiled, gazing over the shrouded tombstones.

  “Of course, a cemetery is sort of like one-stop shopping for you. I mean in terms of having to dispose of a body—you couldn’t ask for a better place.” Lily unpinned her hair, running her hands through it. “Much better,” she said, shaking it out.

  Gulyas adjusted his pants. “I don’t dispose of bodies,” he informed her. “Not my job.”

  “Mmm.” Lily rolled her neck from side to side. “Well, I would think in this case you’d make an exception.” Lily leaned on her hip and dropped her hand, running her knuckles along one of the black cloths. She took in a deep, slow breath. Her hand was shaking, and she made a tight fist. Lily bit down, and when she released her fingers, they were still. “I love black,” she said. “It seems like such a shame that people only wear it to funerals.” Plucking a burial cloth off one of the tombs, Lily held it to her cheek. “I think this would flatter me, don’t you? I mean if I took my dress off right now and laid down on one of these tombs, draping only this cloth over me?” She traced her neckline with the cloth and swept her eyes over his body. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Gulyas was breathing heavier now.

  “I bet you’d take me dead or alive,” she said, reaching back and unzipping her dress.

  He took a step forward. Lily took two.

  “But if I’m alive, I can run my hands all over your body.” Lily blew on her fingers, then trailed them under the black shroud. “And if I’m not, you have all the power. That’s a very difficult decision on your part.”

  Both options certainly were appealing to him, but one more so. He imagined her bathing him, the way his Aunt Zuzanna had done, guiding the slippery bar of soap over his body, lathering his most sensitive places. Lily had delicate hands—unlike Zuzanna. With long, slender fingers. And she was trembling—the way he used to tremble with Zuzanna in the beginning. When he still loved her. When her very presence made him quiver with anticipation.

  “I want you to touch me,” he said. “Everywhere.”

  “I thought you would.” Lily took another step toward him. “I bet you’d like me to do a lot of things.”

  Gulyas swallowed
and blinked hard. The many, many things that he wanted Lily to do to him flashed through his mind. They involved her teeth and fingernails, her hair, of course, and her lips most of all. He wanted her to look on him fully naked and with desire. And to eat a pistachio out of his navel. Just one.

  Sadly, for him, his erotic musings were cut short when Lily flung the cloth over his head. He clawed and pulled at the thing, shooting randomly until he could yank it off and aim his gun. But Lily was no longer standing before him. Gulyas spun this way and that, peering around the tombstones. He pointed his barrel into the shrubbery and was about to shoot again when he heard a scratch coming from behind a narrow marble wall near the back entrance to the brick edifice. It was the heel of a woman’s shoe scraping over a groove in a tile.

  “You didn’t get very far, did you?” he said.

  Lily had not. She’d hoped to make it into the building and, with any luck, out onto the street, where Gulyas had parked the truck, but she’d only gotten as far as a small cubicle meant for ceremonial bathing. “Maybe I was just wanting to play a little hide-and-seek,” she said.

  The Hungarian pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dipped it into a bowl of water that floated several blossoms of Persian Lilac. Sweat rolled from his hairline down his temples. Gulyas blotted the handkerchief over the burns on his face and neck, all at once wincing and sighing with relief. “Do you believe in destiny, Lily?”

  It was a rhetorical question.

  “Some of us create our own destinies, Mr. Gulyas,” said a man’s voice.

  The Hungarian twisted around and trained his pistol on Theron Tassos. It was the first time he’d gotten a good look at Lily’s father, and he was impressed by the man’s presence. Although his suit had been sullied and his hair was out of place, the Greek baron stood with the confidence of a brigadier general. It was because he was fit; Gulyas knew it. A man with a good physique was always poised, regardless of what shape his clothes might be in. The Hungarian envied him his metabolism and self-discipline. Gulyas sucked in his belly as he cocked his gun. “You don’t seem like a man who wants to lose his balls,” he said.