That terrible night, a fellow who had been to the motel several times, always with a different woman, rented the “Roller Coaster Fun Park” for two hours. After half an hour he came to the front desk to get change for a fifty-dollar bill. I got a better look at him and saw how strangely he was dressed. His black raincoat had a fur collar, and his head was covered with a baseball cap that had “I Love Berlin” embroidered in red across the front. Previously, I remembered him being bald, but this time he had chin-length black hair sticking out from under the hat. I recognized him for the distinctive pockmarks on his face that had the shape of half moons on both his high cheekbones. He usually signed in as Santa Claus, but that day he signed the name Julius Caesar.
“Hello, how are you today?” I gave him my usual greeting.
“You recognize me?” he shot back.
“It’s your handwriting. Santa Caesar, Julius Claus, it makes no difference—you have a very distinctive half-moon shape to your…letter C, sir.”
“Santa Caesar, I like that,” he said.
I heard the door to the Roller Coaster Room open, and then a woman’s voice. “Hey, what are you doing? I thought you’d be right back. I’m feeling lonely all by myself in here.” She had left the door half open.
To my regular customer I said, “Julius Caesar was a very complicated man.”
“Was he now? You are a smart little lady.”
As he turned to go to the room, he looked back at me and said, “What is now amiss that Caesar and his senate should redress?”
It took me a moment, but I added, “Act Three, Scene Four.”
“Act Three, Scene One,” he said as he tipped his baseball hat with the wig attached.
He was in the room for less than an hour, and then he left without the woman. As he passed the front desk, he said, “She’s resting up for the time we have left. Here’s an extra twenty in case she needs more time.”
An hour passed, and I heard nothing from the room, and there was no answer to my phone call. A hardening knot of unease began to grow sharp tentacles in my stomach. I chewed an antacid, which helped, but I still felt that something was terribly wrong.
The crow was making a huge racket outside the room. There is an ugly side to the short-stay world, and this was one I would like to say never happened. As I opened the door, the strong smell of the woman’s perfume hit me, and then I saw her, a scarf pulled tight around her twisted neck. She was hanging dead from the roller-bed-coaster.
I called the police. Two came quickly. Many of them are my customers. They help to keep my business going smoothly and don’t want any trouble for their comrades. The woman, a local prostitute, was one they knew well.
As one of the officers picked his teeth with a matchbook, he said, “We’ll call this a suicide. No worries—we’ll take care of the body. You can go back to work.”
The other officer said, “No need to mention this to anyone, Ms. Folskaya. We’ve got your back.”
“My lips are sealed,” I replied. The poor woman; what brought her to such a sad end I can never know.
Most of my work here at the motel is very routine, but as you can see, at times it can try my patience. And as with the events of that night, they can sometimes do much worse. Booking rooms, taking inquiries from hushed voices in random phone booths, or dealing with the demands of my regular customers who act like this is their own private club. This is my life, my work, my world now.
“What do you mean the Roller Coaster Room is booked?” one of them snapped just the other day.
“Sorry, it’s first come first served; that’s our policy,” I responded.
“But I use the Roller Coaster Room every Thursday at three o’clock. I have now for a year.”
“Why not try the Caribbean Room? It’s very popular.”
He is an older gentleman who always signs himself in as Mark Twain, a local hero here in the Hartford area.
“You’ve got me over a barrel. She’s not going to like it; she likes to eat cotton candy while we…”
“Yes, I understand, but the Caribbean Room has its own romantic charms.”
“Maybe I’ll bring her a piña colada instead of the cotton candy.”
“That’s the spirit,” I said.
Time somehow always moves on. Last week Carmela found half a green rubber sexual pleasure device. I believe it is called a dildo. It was cut in half and left on the back seat in the Highway to Heaven Room. She never found the other half. People get crazy. I gave her a twenty-dollar bonus for dealing with that, and we had a good laugh. Another time a pair of fur-covered handcuffs was left in the Gazebo Room locked onto one of the bedposts. We had to dismantle the bed to remove them. Carmela wanted to give them to her boyfriend, but I warned her that without the key they could prove to be dangerous. She hung them on the wall of the linen room, where the cats love to swat at them. Yes, now we have more than one cat. Amalia recently went back to Russia to take care of her mother and left her cats, Shosta and Kovich, at the motel with me.
“They always liked you better,” she said when she brought them by the motel before leaving.
I would miss my old friend. It was hard to hold a grudge after so long, and her referrals from the Majik Cleaning Agency were always very helpful at the motel. We talked about the bras and everything else.
“The past is the past,” I told her. “Both the good and the bad.”
“I am sorry, Stalina, it was a time when I had much confusion. And little money.”
“You are a survivor, Amalia; we both are. I have many reasons to be grateful to you. Go to your mother; she needs you. I can promise you your cats will have a good life here at my motel.”
Shosta and Kovich are that special breed of cat born and bred in Leningrad. Not many cats survived the siege, but the ones that did produced a very hardy strain of felines. These tough cats are a big part of the city’s post-Soviet economy. The babushkas rescue the kittens from back alleys, sewers, and roofs and then sell them on bridges and corners near metro stations. Shosta and Kovich have become fat and lazy here in America, but occasionally they show their “Leningrad” side. They hunt with Svetlana, who learned everything from her surrogate mother, Zarzamora. The only photograph I took of Svetlana and the crow sits along here with the rest of my photo collection. I believe Shosta and Kovich were jealous of ZZ and her relationship with Svetlana. One day the cats chased the crow across the driveway, and she was struck and killed by a car leaving the motel. Svetlana was shaken, as was I. She did not eat for days and just sat under the pine trees where we buried the poor crow.
All in all, this place is not for the faint of heart. Overdoses and fires. Panty hose stretched, ripped, and tied around pillowcases, cigarettes burning on the edge of the toilet. Once a set of false teeth were found in the cup by the bathroom sink. How could someone forget those? It can all make for a very long day. As I recline in the heart-shaped tub, the photographs are my confidants, and with a glass or two of chilled vodka, my words flow freely. Nostrovya!
Thip!
Today, dear friends, marks my tenth anniversary here at the Liberty Motel in 2001. I am now Citizen Stalina, no longer Comrade Stalina. Giving up on my country was like severing ties with a lover. Like a haunting, sometimes I still catch a smell or see a shadow from a streetlamp that could only be Russia. Carmela and I call each other “comrade.” It keeps our spirits up.