“One more thing,” Semyonov added, as the aide looked up from his notepad. “If I’m to follow this man myself, I’ll need a gun.”
THE PERFECT MAN
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 within the Soviet Union.
“Get my boy down,” Baru ordered, stepping away from his bloodied son. “I want to bury him myself.”
“It was taken just this Christmas,” Theron Tassos expounded, as he removed a photograph from his ostrich leather attaché case.
Baru o Crete adjusted the pocket square he’d hastily tucked into his jacket, its indigo dye leaving a faint stain on his fingertips. He dipped them in his tea and wiped them on a linen napkin before taking the Polaroid from his younger brother and holding it at a distance, to get a proper look. Baru hadn’t seen his niece in nearly a decade and was struck by what a beauty she’d become. The sight of the color photograph—a rarity in his world—was equally impressive. He could even make out the eggplant tint of Lily’s eyeshadow.
“She favors you,” Baru commented, scrutinizing the picture further.
“You think so?” Theron Tassos dismissed him. The man Lily called Daddy looked hardly at all like his daughter. It seemed to him she had absorbed all of her mother’s lovely features as she developed in the womb. Her high cheekbones and plump lips. Her wide-set eyes.
“She doesn’t resemble you, but she does favor you,” Baru insisted. “It’s here,” he said, pointing to the girl’s nose. “And here,” he continued, indicating her eyes. “It’s not their shape, no, but what’s behind them.”
The two brothers nodded.
“Gulyas is his name, you say. That’s Hungarian,” Theron concluded as he slid Lily’s picture back into its home in a plastic sleeve and restored it to his case. They’d been drinking tea for over an hour, having indulged in the kind of over-the-fence chatter that would’ve been impolite to forgo entirely. Even under these grave circumstances.
“No, he’s Romanian. Perhaps a Hungarian by family origin.”
Theron knelt down on two of several Turkish pillows that were strewn about Baru’s living room, and the Cretan gangster followed him. “And it’s important to you that he suffers.”
“More than Christ,” Baru hissed.
Theron put his hand on Baru’s bald head. His hands weren’t as lethal as his brother’s—made for holding weapons, not being them—but possessed the even touch of a man long accustomed to power. “No one can suffer more than Christ.”
It would’ve been sacrilegious for him to contend otherwise, but Theron Tassos had indeed made men suffer much more than Christ. Christ, it could be argued, had the added burden of humanity, which made his suffering infinitely greater from a spiritual perspective, but pain is pain when you’re made of flesh and blood, he believed.
Etor himself had once narrowly escaped one of Theron Tassos’s punishments after he’d been late with a one-time delivery to an Oriental. It was a small order from a bit player in an even smaller country, so it was just as easy for Tassos to tell Etor to get lost and stay lost than it was to teach him a lesson.
But he’d never forgiven Baru for his poor judgment. The two, who had once been as close as soldiers in a death battle, had become distant in the seven-odd years since the Etor incident. While they’d never officially fallen out with one another, they hadn’t spoken in all of this time, either.
“Do you wish to be present?”
Baru exhaled and closed his eyes for a moment. “Oh, yes,” he whispered.
Whatever their conflicts over family and business, a Greek would never deny a brother his revenge. Especially over the death of a child—no matter how disappointing that child might have been.
“Do I know the man you’ll use?” Baru asked. The Cretan’s eyes were leaden and glassy, bearing the look of an old man’s eyes in the long year before his death.
“I’d never use a Greek,” Theron insisted. “He must be a Russian. I never trust anyone but a Russian to inflict pain.”