Welcome to the Hotel Yalta

by Victoria Dougherty

The Hungarian sat down on the wooden bench facing the detective and stood up again. He looked out the small porthole of a window into the locker room, but Fabi’s son was nowhere in sight. The masseuse had asked him explicitly to wait in the sauna until his son was ready for him.

  “You should try it.”

  “What?”

  “A punching bag,” the detective clarified.

  The Hungarian sat down again, crossing his arms over his chest. “I travel a lot,” he mumbled.

  “All the better,” the detective prodded. “Pillows and blankets make decent punching bags, and it’s much easier than finding weights—unless you don’t mind lifting furniture. But I don’t recommend that. You can strain your back.”

  The Hungarian nodded, looking out the porthole window again. “I’ll take a crack at it,” he grunted.

  “Wonderful,” the detective exclaimed. “Say, I could show you some moves. I’ve got time. Besides, lunch is coming up and what better way to work up an appetite?”

  The Hungarian didn’t answer his invitation.

  “Don’t you think?”

  “Hmm?” Gulyas scowled.

  “Punching works up an appetite, I said.”

  The detective put his fists up again and mimed a few fighting moves. The Hungarian stared numbly at his dodges and thrusts until Semyonov punched him with a right cross. It propelled him backwards onto the wooden bench, leaving him slumped nose to bellybutton. A few drips of water plunged from an IV onto the hot rocks, and a billow of steam obscured the Hungarian’s head until evaporating into the parched air.

  “Bombah!” Fabi’s son, a frizzy-headed youth with a faint, black mustache and candy-red lips imitated the Great Detective’s knock-out punch before pulling open the sauna doors. He took the Hungarian by the feet, dragging his sweaty body off the bench and letting his head thump to the floor and down the one step into the unisex locker room. The meaty woman from Fabi’s chamber followed, still naked, but bone dry as if the heat had no effect on her. She carried a coil of steel wire and pulled up a chair—not for herself, but for the Hungarian, whom she proceeded to tie to it.

  “Mr. Gulyas,” the Great Detective urged, slapping the Hungarian’s cheeks and dousing his face with a cup of coffee with cream that had been sitting on top of locker 32 since the early morning. “Are you ready for that drink now?”

  Long before he became known as The Great Detective, Rodki Semyonov had harbored different ambitions. They were grand in neither scope nor mission, but they were ambitions nonetheless. He wanted his own apartment, where he could live with his wife, Polina, and not have to share space with a gaggle of relatives. He wanted a decent factory job in the burgeoning industrial town where he was born, and he wanted to have one child of either sex that he hoped would inherit Polina’s earth-brown eyes.

  The job had been provided for him, as he knew it would. A man of his size and strength was a welcome addition to most factory crews. Rodki was confident the child would come once he and Polina were settled. But obtaining an apartment for him and his family alone was another story altogether and Rodki Semyonov knew he would have to use his brain more than his back if he were to pull off such a coup.

  “Az isten bassza meg a bu’do’sru’ csko’s kurva anya’dat!” the Hungarian, Beryx Gulyas spat, spraying blood and a chipped tooth into Semyonov’s face.

  Semyonov broke the Hungarian’s nose with the back of his hand for the insult. He didn’t appreciate the visual of God “fucking his stinking, wrinkled whore mother,” especially considering the way she’d died—in a gulag, he was told, buried alive next to his Polina.

  It was his mother who had told him not to enter into the Shchelkovo underworld, but Semyonov had seen an opportunity for himself. The bare-knuckle tournaments that went on after the factories closed for the day promised big bucks, and more importantly, could win him some influence with the Housing Authority.

  “It’s illegal,” his mother had warned. “Maybe they look the other way today, but tomorrow is always another story.”

  She was right, of course, but not about the fights. Those were protected by a man named Belnikov, who was at that time a favorite pet of Stalin’s. Belnikov loved the tournaments and grew fond of the eleven-time tournament champion, whom he had personally nick-named The Iron Knuckle.

  “Mr. Gulyas, I know who you are and what you do.”

  The Great Detective held the Hungarian’s discarded Beretta above his bloody nose, letting him get a good look at it.

  “It has an abnormal land and groove pattern, did you know that? It’s a manufacturer’s defect that makes it easy to track from a ballistic standpoint.”

  Beryx Gulyas eyed the gun, reacquainting himself with its blunt nose and quarter moon trigger. It had been cleaned.

  “Antosha Sidorov, Lev Kretchnif, Teo Anghelescu, Anna and Magnus Karlsson, Charles Monks . . . I have thirteen other confirmations in addition to five other assassinations I suspect can be attributed to you, although no gun was used. It would appear you’ve branched out into other methods lately. Then, there was that unpleasant killing at the airfield which combined your methods. An improvisation, I suspect, since the co-pilot you savaged was the son of a German attaché.”

  Semyonov had always found interrogations distasteful, but they were a fact of life. There was nothing that made a man reveal his secrets or his character better than discomfort. Beryx Gulyas, of course, had no intention of disclosing any information no matter how badly he was beaten. Semyonov had encountered his type before, but their exchange wouldn’t be for nothing.

  “I’m confused, Mr. Gulyas, why you would be dispatched here to kill an American tourist when your prey is normally so distinguished?” Semyonov lit a cigarette and put it in the assassin’s mouth. “You can’t have fallen on hard times when there’s so much work out there.”

  Gulyas spit the cigarette out and Fabi’s son picked it up and began to smoke. It was a fine Turkish brand.

  “Unless there’s someone else you’re after and the girl is incidental. I’d be careful about these incidental players, though, if I were you. You never know who they are.”

  Semyonov produced the metal card he’d found in the American girl’s suite. He held it up close enough for Beryx to see and then put it back into his breast pocket. “Funny little thing—wouldn’t you say? Your friend—the American girl—had it amongst her belongings. You wouldn’t happen to know what it is, would you?”

  Semyonov punched Beryx Gulyas in the kidney before he could answer. He bore down on the assassin’s shoulder—not enough to break it, but enough to make the Hungarian wonder if it was broken.

  “My biggest question to you, Mr. Gulyas, is—what now?”

  It had become a stock phrase for Rodki Semyonov. He’d first used it on a British naval officer who was trying to pass himself off as a Kim Philby, ex-patriot, insisting that he was eager to betray his country and move to Moscow. Semyonov knew he was a spy the moment he saw him in his civilian clothes. Dressed to appear like a disillusioned member of the British upper classes, he wore a gold-tinted watch that he’d recently scrubbed free of tarnish and attached to a new leather band.

  It was one of his first cases after being recruited into the Moscow police force. Belnikov felt they needed more good fighters on the force and thought “The Iron Knuckle” would be a boon at interrogations. He’d never suspected that Rodki Semyonov could be useful as anything other than a strong man, and Rodki Semyonov never suspected that his natural gift for puzzles and mysteries would draw him into Stalin’s inner circle.

  “Junior?”

  The Great Detective stepped back and let Fabi’s son box Beryx Gulyas’ ears and kick his groin. The Hungarian bore the abuse well, so Semyonov took a couple of gentle cracks at him to make the eager youth feel like less of a light weight.

  Long before joining the ranks of the Moscow police, where socialist protocol m
ade mediocrity essential, Rodki Semyonov had learned not to flaunt his talents. It could be dangerous to distinguish oneself on the force, even if it was more results-focused than the postal service or the universities. Semyonov had always been a likeable fellow and figured out how to handle threatened superiors by using just enough working class humility and appearing genuinely surprised when he solved a case—as if it were by accident.

  Belnikov wasn’t fooled. “Aren’t you a revelation?” he’d always remark when he visited Semyonov at his office. “Stalin has his eye on you.”

  It would appear Stalin had his eye on Belnikov, too: The trusted advisor’s intestines were gored at his whore’s apartment on New Year’s Day in 1938—the same day they came for Polina and the rest of Semyonov’s family.

  Comrade Stalin felt he needed a personal detective without any conflicting loyalties and in one stroke, Rodki Semyonov’s personal life had ceased to exist.

  “Mr. Gulyas, I’m sure you understand that whoever sent you—perhaps your Secretary General or one of his henchmen—is himself a servant of Moscow.”

  Semyonov clutched Beryx Gulyas by the hair and yanked his head backwards. The Hungarian, choked by his own blood, coughed and gurgled, taking deep gasps of air when the fluids from his nose drained to the back of his throat.

  “All we want to know is why you’re here,” the Great Detective said. Like the Hungarian, he was bored. Both men knew a thing or two about applying and surviving pressure, so their encounter was becoming an endless game of tic-tac-toe.

  Beryx Gulyas rolled his eyes into the back of his head as if he were about to have a seizure, but Semyonov would brook none of his dramatics. He beat the Hungarian with his knees and elbows until the man really was on the brink of unconsciousness, and perhaps, just the slightest bit sorry that he’d tempted fate with such a wise-ass move.

  “You’re looking tired, Mr. Gulyas,” Semyonov teased. “I think you need rest.”

  Fabi’s son was keen to continue the interrogation, but The Great Detective took him aside and explained how things were done. He wanted to give the Hungarian a bit of time to get his confidence back before he destroyed it again.

  “I could use some lunch,” Semyonov told Fabi. “Is there a decent cafeteria around here?”

  Fabi told him there was, and directed him to a small greasy spoon nestled next to a book store. Semyonov bought a book of poetry by Mayakovsky and sat down at a window seat, ordering borscht and some boiled potatoes. He opened the book and pretended to read. Thirty minutes—no more. That’s what he would give the Hungarian, assuming, of course, that his soup was brought to him in a timely manner.

  Fabi’s son had a look of both surprise and determination frozen upon his face. His lips—no longer the color of cherry candy—had faded into a grayish-white, and blood ran in one smooth line from the pellet-sized hole above his right eyebrow into his hairline, where it disappeared. He was lying on the floor, clutching a baby blue towel with his left hand. His right hand—the one that had held Beryx Gulyas’ Beretta—was empty, but his fingers looked like they were still coiled around the thing.

  Fabi himself had been moved to one of the marble tables in the second chamber, where his big, round belly pointed to a vent in the ceiling. His brains remained in the first chamber, where they had already dripped down the wet, tile walls and slid towards the drain in the center of the floor. A blob of them jiggled over the drain, causing it to slurp.

  “I’m leaving my key on the front desk,” the receptionist informed. The noise of the drain made her queasy. She’d been in the toilet when Beryx Gulyas showed himself out, and had stayed there until The Great Detective returned from his lunch.

  “I’m impressed with his accuracy,” Rodki Semyonov told General Pushkin’s aide, a nervous type who tried to cover his emotional frailty with an overdone military posture. Semyonov went on to explain that while Fabi’s son had been shot at close range, Fabi had been a moving target who was blasted at a distance of several meters. That was no easy feat for a man who had been worked over as thoroughly as the Hungarian—a man whose eyes were nearly swollen shut, his body bruised to the bone, and his nose completely shattered. Semyonov held the aide’s gun and followed what he imagined the Hungarian’s movements would have been.

  “Right there,” Semyonov said, as he moved into the first chamber and found the angle at which Beryx had shot the gun-trading masseuse. Coming in from the second chamber, the Hungarian would’ve been totally exposed and Fabi would’ve had all of the advantages. There would have been no time to position for a shot—only a moment’s grace to allow Beryx to aim by instinct and fire a single round.

  “Perfect,” The Great Detective whispered.

  Beryx, he recognized, was the highest caliber of professional. Despite his skill, Semyonov could see why General Pushkin hadn’t snagged him for his office, and let him continue working for one of the lesser states. Sadists had never bothered Pushkin, but instability did—and Beryx Gulyas’s penchant for creative murder was a sign of both deep insecurity and staggering hubris.

  If he could manage to stick to one method and do what he did best—as he had with poor Fabi and his son—he could have a long career ahead of him, Semyonov reflected.

  “The General will be most unhappy about this development,” the aide carped. “If they weren’t already dead, he would have purged this operation of these two hacks and replaced them with more talented operatives.”

  Semyonov nodded. His special status left him largely immune from blame for problems like this. Fabi and his son may have been hacks, but they were KGB hacks and it was their responsibility to keep the Hungarian in line. If their superior had any common sense, he would’ve immediately noticed that this father-son team was a losing proposition. Semyonov had noticed. In fact, he had counted on it.

  “What should I tell the general?” the aide implored. He tried not to seem worried about being the bearer of bad news.

  “That I’ll follow Mr. Gulyas and let the Comrade General know as soon as I discover anything.”

  The general held his cards close and hated to surrender any control. Semyonov knew, on the other hand, that surrendering a bit of control was precisely what broke a case wide open. The Hungarian would’ve rather died than talk, and all they would’ve gained by detaining him indefinitely was another prisoner. With Beryx Gulyas loose, Semyonov could wait for his movements as if he were monitoring a radar screen for a cloaked submarine. Eventually, it would have to surface.

  “What if he disappears for good?” the aide moaned.

  “It’s possible, I guess. But trust me, my friend; I did quite a number on him. And he’ll be far more likely to make stupid errors after the trauma of one of my interrogations—they take a lot out of man. You can tell that to the general.”

  The aide seemed pleased, jutting his chin forward and standing “at ease,” while jotting Semyonov’s exact words in his notebook.

  “In the meantime, I’m afraid I may need permission to leave Moscow in the near future. It’s just a hunch, but I’d rather the general give me authorization now instead of waiting until our friend reappears and risk losing him again.”

  It had been eighteen years since Semyonov had been allowed to leave the Moscow city limits. Stalin had guarded him so jealously that he hadn’t even been allowed a visit to the provinces and conducted all of his investigations—no matter how far reaching—from the city proper. When Stalin died and he acquired a new master, the restraints upon his movements didn’t change. But then, he’d never questioned them, either.

  Semyonov didn’t know exactly what made him question them today. He didn’t want to leave Moscow. It had become a comfortable cell for him after all of these years. But something inside him, something perhaps all too human that had nothing to do with his desire or ability to solve this case, made him want to get a look beyond his city prison.

  “One more thing,” Se
myonov added, as the aide looked up from his notepad. “If I’m to follow this man myself, I’ll need a gun.”

  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.