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 made 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.