Welcome to the Hotel Yalta by Victoria Dougherty

Author:Victoria Dougherty
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780997465730
Publisher: Wilderness Press
Published: 2016-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

Brasov, Romania

“You’re certain?” Beryx Gulyas demanded, as he rubbed the turquoise and pyrite between his fingers. The minerals, according to his fortuneteller, aided digestion—and Beryx was suffering from terrible heartburn after eating smoked lard, washed down with a glass of palinca brandy for lunch.

“Yes, of course,” Etor insisted.

Beryx hated to delegate his work. He’d spent too long and worked too hard to allow blunders to sully his reputation. He’d only delegated one other time and it had kept him up for two nights in a row, drinking a near overdose of morphine as he awaited word that the job had gone off fine. It wasn’t without a hitch: the idiot Spaniard had left the woman alive, bludgeoning her with a silver-bound new edition of The Conquistadors, of all things, rather than using a pistol or a knife. An amateur should never get creative, Beryx Gulyas believed, and to him everyone was an amateur. Everyone but himself.

The woman was still in a sanitarium somewhere, cleverer than the leeches the doctors used on her bedsores, but not quite as sharp as the pigeons that perched on her windowsill. Gulyas would’ve done the job perfectly, but in fairness, the Spaniard’s work had been adequate enough. The injured woman’s husband never did openly challenge Gulyas’s boss, Nicolai Ceausescu, ever again, and the ambitious Romanian was elected to the Politburo less than a year later.

It was lucky for Beryx Gulyas—and it was luck, and not the Spaniard’s skill—that the black hole of a vegetative state had an even more menacing effect on Ceausescu’s nemesis than a clean kill. It dampened the man’s ambition as surely as his wife’s intellectual disfigurement snaffled his sexual attraction for her. It was, after all, their love of books that had brought them together, the man had explained to her doctor as Beryx lurked in the waiting room.

“You’d better be right,” he told Etor.

Beryx slammed the phone down, chipping the cradle in the process. Etor was a lousy assassin, but the only assassin available in Greece—let alone Monemvasia—on such short notice. His effete tastes irked the Transylvanian native, especially since he knew Etor had spent most of his adolescence and early manhood as a rough for a Cretan gangster known as Baru. Now he sashayed around like he was better than everyone else and took assignments from Baru only when he was broke. Beryx would’ve made an example out of him if he were the big Greek, but there went Etor, eating his fancy food with his fancy girlfriends. Beryx Gulyas hated the Greeks almost as much as he hated the Romanians.

“Burn that little turd . . . ” he said aloud before catching himself. He looked back into the living room and was relieved to see his Aunt Zuzanna was still asleep on the couch and hadn’t heard his crass slip of the tongue.

Whenever Gulyas came to Brasov, he stayed with his Aunt Zuzanna, his uncle’s second wife. She lived on the edge of the valley, where the gondola left hourly for the tops of the Southern Carpathian Mountains.

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