Welcome to the Hotel Yalta: Six Stories of Cold War Noir, Page 2

  “I’m glad you didn’t tip him,” Brandy sniffed as the boy stomped away, but Pasha wasn’t listening. He opened the large, metal door of their suite and held it for Brandy as she peeked inside.

  The room was as big as a regular suite—in fact bigger, like everything else in the Hotel Yalta—but with hardly any furniture and none of the usual amenities. No bar, no welcome basket or pretty chocolates, and no robes or slippers to get cozy in. Ironically, what little furniture the place had was downright miniature compared to the antique bedroom set in Brandy’s Vienna suite. If it weren’t for the uniformed bellboys in the lobby—dressed like performing monkeys—the place could have doubled for a sanitarium.

  “Don’t just stand there, my dear,” Pasha said, as he pulled their luggage cart in from the entryway. “Come in.”

  The suite was a patchwork of beige and white, except for the institutional yellow linoleum in the bathroom. Their two low, single beds had been pushed together and were even harder than the ones in Austria. Brandy sat down and bounced a little on the corner of one of the mattresses. They were as stiff as dry sea sponges. The covers had been pulled tight, like they were in a military barracks, and the pillows were no bigger or softer than the decorative ones adorning the sofas of countless American living rooms. Those might read King and Queen, respectively, and be stuffed with wool. These were plain white and looked to be stuffed with crumpled tissue paper.

  “I don’t even think I’ll be able to fit all of my things into these little drawers,” Brandy lamented of the bureau. “That man at the desk bragged that this hotel is state of the art. Better than anything in America. He said it’s only been open for a month and pointed to that big banner that read, ‘WELCOME TO THE HOTEL YALTA’ as if it was some sort of proof. Clearly,” Brandy huffed. “The man is a liar.”

  “And what is it exactly you want me to do? Shall I ask for another suite?” Pasha opened his suitcase and began placing his folded clothes into the top drawer of their bureau, leaving the three drawers beneath it for her. Years of travel had taught him to make himself at home immediately and not live out of his baggage.

  “I don’t know. Some of the older hotels we passed looked nice.” Brandy squinted out of their white nylon curtains onto Wenceslas Square several stories below. “I rather like the look of the Hotel Europa. It seems comfy and pretty.”

  “The Hotel Europa is falling apart. At least we’ll get working faucets here.” Pasha eased up behind Brandy and massaged her delicate shoulders.

  He wanted to say ‘welcome to the workers’ paradise,’ but he knew the irony would be lost on her. “Hotel Yalta, my dear, is where men of my position stay. It’s a monument to socialist productivity and skill.” Pasha opened his palms in a grand, presentational style. “How would it look if I stayed in one of the older, bourgeois-built hotels?”

  Brandy hung her dresses—a robin’s egg Oleg Cassini, a jade Givenchy, and a watermelon Dior—in a wardrobe not much wider than their bureau. “I just don’t see why anyone would care who built a hotel and when they built it. And it’s not as if this place is cheap. It’s just . . . big.”

  Pasha had forgotten how much Brandy liked to complain. Normally their liaisons supported only a few minutes of talk—thirty at most—as they were short on time and wanted to get down to business.

  “Will you excuse me, darling? I’ll need to shave before the party tonight. Zablov should be here any minute. You remember Kosmo Zablov, don’t you? He was in Paris before getting assigned here, and used to come to Rome.”

  Pasha took his razor and shaving soap out of his toilette case and entered the bath, closing the door behind him. Brandy heard the faucet turn on and the unmistakable click of the door lock.

  “Pasha . . . ” she started, and then thought better of it. A practiced wife and mistress, she knew a man needed his privacy sometimes. Brandy didn’t really feel like company right then anyway. She had a splitting headache and was upset that her clothes were all squashed together in an ugly wardrobe.

  Brandy marched over to her luggage and searched her Louis Vuitton chest until she found the matching make-up case at the bottom, under her brassieres. She opened it, rummaging through her hair combs, toothpaste, mascara, eye shadow, Rouge Classique nail polish, Chanel #5, Crème la Perle hand cream, night oil, eye balm, sedatives, her toothbrush, breath mints, countless tubes of lipstick, and a small vial of ‘pick me ups’. She laid every item on the bed like they were evidence, but among all of her beauty supplies, powders, and pills there was not one single aspirin to help relieve the rhythmic pounding at her temples.

  “Pasha!” she called out, but he couldn’t hear her with the water running. “Pasha, do you have any aspirin?”

  Brandy sat down and put his toilette case into her lap. She unzipped it and pulled out several medicine bottles, leaving his hair balm, a comb, and pillbox inside. Amidst the antacids, laxatives, and boric acid lay a small, brown bottle of Myer aspirin.

  “Pasha, I’m going to have one of your aspirin, okay? My head’s about to split.” She opened the bottle and tipped it over into her hand, but nothing came out. She shook it, hearing a ping inside, and stuck her pinky into the bottle. “Pasha, I think I’m taking your last one? Is that all right?”

  Her pinky dug further until her nail hooked onto something that was sliding against the wall of the bottle. Slowly, she pulled her finger out, dragging with it a long, curly stretch of what looked like camera film, only smaller. She held the film up to the light and looked closely at some tiny, Cyrillic letters printed on what looked to be an architect’s drawing. She’d seen one of those when she and her husband, Buster, built their beach house.

  “S-P-U-T-N-I-K,” she sounded out. Pasha had taught her his alphabet.

  “What are you doing?”

  Brandy hadn’t heard Pasha open the bathroom door and jumped up, dropping the film and the bottle onto the bed with all of her other beauty products. He was standing before her in his royal blue bathrobe with only his trousers on underneath. He didn’t look angry exactly, but all of his usual warmth was gone, replaced by nothing but a stare.

  “I just wanted an aspirin, that’s all. Didn’t you hear me asking you?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry.” Brandy swallowed and looked down at the coiled roll of film. “Do you have any?”

  “What?”

  “Aspirin?”

  Pasha took a deep breath, relaxing his shoulders and letting his features soften. He knew that unless he was smiling, he could look terribly mean. “Of course,” he said. “They’re in my suit jacket.”

  Pasha went back into the bathroom and came out a moment later with his suit jacket draped over his forearm. He handed her a plain, clear bottle of pills and a cup of water, and watched as she took two pills out and swallowed them.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He nodded.

  When she finished drinking her water, he took the cup out of her hands and placed it on the bed table. He walked to the other side of the room and hung his suit jacket on his valet, turned back to her, and grabbed her wrist, abruptly twisting it behind her. He slit her throat with his shaving blade, splattering their white curtains and a bad painting of a grain-processing factory with an arched spray of her blood.

  She would die in less than a minute and he was glad. Pasha hadn’t wanted her to suffer and made sure that the cut was deep and completely severed her artery. Though she would be unconscious, at least, if not dead, by the time she fell to the beige carpet, he guided her body down slowly and into a position that would be comfortable for her. When she seemed at rest, he went back into the bathroom and washed her blood off of his hands and wrists. The arms of his bathrobe were finished, so he peeled it off, rolled it into a ball, and threw it into the bathtub. He rinsed his arms one more time before putting his white undershirt back on.

  Pasha cursed himself for having put the micr
ofilm in an aspirin bottle. He should’ve put it into his stomach medication, but the Myer aspirin bottle was the same brown color of the film and a safer bet. It had been since before his mistress, Aprilia, that he’d traveled with a woman and he’d forgotten the way they got into everything.

  It didn’t appear as if she’d gotten a look at the film and she wouldn’t understand how to read a blueprint if she had—especially one of a spaceship. But the fact that Brandy had seen it at all sealed her fate. He could’ve made up a story that she would’ve believed the way she believed everything else he told her, but that would’ve been one more lie on top of the many he’d already woven, and he had to draw a line somewhere.

  And she was eminently capable of making a slip in front of one of his colleagues or pestering him for a deeper involvement in his so-called patriotic missions for Mother Russia. When the time came to break things off with her completely, she might’ve even put some of the puzzle pieces together and blackmailed him. It never ceased to amaze him how a woman of limited intellect could become uncharacteristically sharp when her ego had been bruised and her heart broken by a lover. His mistresses had always been fair-minded, but he’d seen it happen before. A more rational man might have killed Brandy after she’d mentioned knowledge of the metal card, but Pasha was an emotional creature, whose heart was made up of poetry. He had a soft spot for his mistresses.

  Pasha rolled up the microfilm and put it back in the aspirin bottle, tucking it into his pants pocket. He would be delivering it to the safe house later that afternoon. Plucking Brandy’s beauty products off the bed, he placed them in her make-up case according to size, returning it and her clothes to her luggage. Pasha then removed some bogus classified documents—Russian—from the lining of his suitcase and laid them out on the bed in order, throwing a mini-camera—the type used in American espionage—on top of them as if it had been dropped there. He dug a small pistol out of the same lining where he’d stored the bogus documents, and opened Brandy’s hand, placing the pistol in her palm and squeezing her fingers around the handle. He always carried props with him in case of an emergency.

  Remembering the bathroom, he went to the tub and removed his bloody robe from its cradle, and filled it a quarter of the way with cold water. He was finishing hanging his suit jacket and dress shirt on a rack in the bath when Kosmo Zablov came knocking—late as usual.

  “Why aren’t you dressed, you ox?” Kosmo feigned outrage when he saw Pasha in his undershirt. He, on the other hand, was dressed in his usual close-fitting, second-rate clothes trying to affect the look of a Venetian gangster.

  “What the . . . ?” It was hard to miss Brandy’s body and the copious amounts of blood she’d spilled. Kosmo glimpsed her nearly severed head from the doorway and entered the suite to get a better look at her.

  “You could’ve at least saved the artwork, my friend. What did it do to you?”

  “She’s an American spy.”

  Kosmo looked down at the surprised look on Brandy’s face, and at the gun in her hand.

  “This little idiot?”

  “No idiot, I’m afraid.” Pasha picked the documents up off the bed and held up the camera. “I’ve been trying to trap her for months.”

  Kosmo whistled his approval of his comrade’s casual air. He assumed the same kind of cool as he eyeballed the contents of the documents in Pasha’s hand. “You just leave those around for anyone to find?”

  “These?” Pasha held up the documents. He’d enjoyed taunting the agent with them, but it was time to wrap up this whole ugly scene. “These are useless. Go ahead—look at them. I made them up.”

  Kosmo grabbed them, devouring the first page. “This is great stuff,” he chuckled. “How did you come up with it?”

  Pasha shrugged. “I wanted to arrest her, not kill her, but she tried to shoot me.”

  Pasha went into the bathroom and returned with his suit jacket and shirt. He dressed slowly as Kosmo sat on the edge of the bed and continued to amuse himself with the false documents. He had one foot on the bloodied carpet and one resting on Brandy’s shoulder. When Pasha finished tying his tie, he tore the top blanket off the bed and covered Brandy’s body with it, making Kosmo put his feet up elsewhere.

  “What on earth is this?” Kosmo bent down next to the bed and swept a small, metal rectangle up off the floor. “Soul,” he said, reading the tiny script.

  Pasha bit down on his lip. He could still detect a faint residue of Brandy’s sex in the corners of his mouth. “It’s mine,” Pasha told him. It must have fallen out of his suitcase lining when he removed the fake documents. “She gave it to me as a symbol of—oh, I don’t know—love, I guess. You can have it if you want.”

  Kosmo chuckled, tossing it on the bed. “Love,” he repeated.

  Pasha went to the vanity and applied a light dab of Chanel Pour Monsieur to his neck—a gift from Brandy. He stepped back, appraising himself as casually as he could.

  “Have this cleaned up, will you?” he said. “I need to go downstairs and request another suite—one with a clean carpet.”

  “You are a cold bastard, aren’t you?” Kosmo stood up, slapping Pasha’s back before going over to the telephone. “I’ll get right on it. You know this is going to get some attention. She’s a Hollywood type—the denials will be fervent and angry.”

  “We have the evidence right here—they can deny it all they want.”

  Kosmo Zablov smiled, revealing his crossed front teeth. “What the hell?” he said, picking up the receiver, “I’ve always loved to annoy the Americans.”

  He dialed the three-digit number, but the front desk was busy.

  “Of course, you’ll be sent back to Moscow for this,” Zablov continued. He dialed again and this time the line rang. “And you’ll miss your dinner with the French president next week. Bastard—you always get the greatest of the great boondoggles. President Coty has the most exquisite chef—or so I’ve been told.”

  Pasha Tarkhan nodded and tried his best at a smile. “I always end up back in Moscow sooner or later.”

  “Don’t we all?” Kosmo Zablov lamented, placing his fingers over the mouthpiece.

  The phone stopped ringing and a bored voice came on the line. “Yes, hello, front desk?” Zablov inquired. “We have a dead mouse up here.”

  Monemvasia, Greece

  The rosy sun skimmed the water, as if dipping its toe to test the temperature. The simple beauty of the sky made Lily smile. It was one of the few uncomplicated things in her life right then. The sun, the water, and Etor, the hotel gigolo, who sat beside her imparting his particular brand of wisdom.

  “A woman should never travel alone,” Etor chided. “Especially one of childbearing age.”

  Lily chuckled at how he could sound like a prim schoolmaster, all the while sporting a most fashionable pair of chartreuse swimming trunks that left little to the imagination. She tossed her head back, enjoying the tickle of a lone droplet of sweat that rushed down from her neck and into her cleavage.

  “I’m not alone,” she teased. “I have you.”

  Etor had taken to joining Lily around sunset, sitting cross-legged on the rocks, as they watched jellyfish bob on the swelling surface of the Pélagos Sea. His lined face was still handsome, but Lily figured he was only a couple of years shy of retirement, as men half his age courted the attention of the same vacationing countesses who used to buy Etor’s supper and handmade Italian shoes. The ladies were only a decade or so older than the bronzed Cretan now, and stared with growing resentment at the silvery roots of his auburn hair.

  “You need a man,” Etor asserted. “A Greek man. The Americans can’t handle you.”

  Lily had had a man. Richard. Of the Philadelphia Putnams, not the Boston Putnams, as he’d been quick to point out.

  Aquamarine eyes, a thick, ungovernable mane of honey and rust hair, and a mother who hummed “Tangerine” as she sne
ered at Lily through her gin and tonics. Pooh was her name, of all things. Pooh, short for Abigail. Pooh, as in Oh, Pooh. No, Pooh! And Pooh, you didn’t! Pooh, who’d talked of Richard’s old girlfriends—girls who hadn’t seemed quite right to her in their time—with a breathy nostalgia usually reserved for the one that got away. And Pooh, who had bullied her son into law school and dangled that victory in Lily’s face like a diamond watch. Never mind that Richard would make a terrible lawyer, at least as Lily saw it. Even if he did continue to breeze through his studies with the same ease that he claimed to absorb Byron.

  Poor Richard. He has the soul of an artist, his friends would say. Although not the talent, Lily had wanted to add on more than one occasion after their relationship had begun its slow flush down the pink porcelain toilet of his mother’s new powder room.

  Poor Richard, he’s too much of a gentleman to give that Greek girl the heave-ho now that it’s come this far. No one actually said it—that Lily knew of—but the sentiment was there. It was the uninvited guest at every party she and Richard attended together, every family dinner; unrelenting in every look, polite question, and feigned interest in what Lily was reading. Even that was subject to censure in the most well-bred possible way, naturally. It was, to the people in Richard’s circle, unseemly for a woman to enjoy Bellow, Hemmingway, O’Connor, or Nabokov, God forbid.

  But it wasn’t Richard’s friends who really got to Lily in the end. It was the barely concealed look of relief on Richard’s face the night she “released him from their engagement” that Lily found so damned infuriating. His crafty, humiliating way of manipulating her into doing his mother’s will.

  Spineless bastard.

  “Lilia, Lilia, Lilia,” Etor yawned, splashing his sun-torched chest with palmsful of chilly salt water.

  Lily patted Etor’s shoulder and ran her fingers through her waist-length hair. The thick, black threads tangled around her knuckles, as day upon day of sunbathing was making her ends brittle.