1
Vasily hated it when rats got into the system. He couldn’t blame them—they were as hungry as he was, he imagined. But it was his job to root them out. A messy, bloody job.
And always thankless.
“What is this?” his manager asked. The man held aloft a stringy bit of flesh, draped over a pencil.
Vasily looked closer. A chicken gizzard? Not unless someone had brought it in here. Which wasn’t impossible, though it wasn’t something they served on the polished inlaid tables of the Persian Palace, Kiev’s aching-to-be-most-famous hotel.
His manager’s round Slavic face radiated disgust, his low brow furrowed. “Take care of it,” he said in Russian.
Again, the not-so-subtle reminder of pecking order. This Russian thought of himself as superior to Ukrainians—even to the Finns, Balts, Poles, and Scandinavians. Yes, a firm belief that the Finns were Nazis, with that same broad Cyrillic brushstroke applied across Ukrainians and Germans. How could he imagine he was better? This Russian was as Slavic as Vasily.
“What room?” Vasily asked in Ukrainian.
“Ten-oh-four.”
The manager gave a deferential grin to two customers who advanced up the dark wood hallway. From the casual perfection of their teeth, and the man’s buttoned-down blue shirt, they had to be Americans. The manager indicated a side table adorned with a hookah. Vasily grinned, too, but not because he was trying to be polite. He imagined the day when they could finally rid his city of the Russian pretenders lording it over his people.
At least the Americans were honest. He had a sister in New York.
“Just take care of it,” the manager repeated under his breath. He dropped the pencil with the scrap of raw meat into the garbage can under the bar and turned to greet the newcomers.
The tenth floor. That was the executive level, renovated last year. Like a fortress up there.
Vasily slid past the American couple now chatting with the manager, down the hallway, and across the cherrywood lobby to the polished brass elevators. Just beyond them was a new addition, a small hallway with the security elevator to the tenth.
The Persian Palace was built at the start of the twentieth century but tried to give the impression it had been built two centuries earlier, in a more regal era. The overall impression, if Vasily bothered trying to verbalize it, was of wanting to be something more. An overhaul in the eighties had pasted on a layer of glitzy plastic that had by now acquired a faded patina.
The place was almost empty. Aside from that conference two weeks ago, February had been a grim month in Kiev.
Vasily inserted his security card into the elevator control panel, then stood in front of the new display, as he’d been instructed, for the camera to scan his retina. He was surprised this machine could do anything with his rheumy eighty-year-old eyes. He could barely see through them himself.
His identity accepted, the keypad appeared, and he entered today’s code. The lift accelerated smoothly upward.
Could it be the rats?
According to the manager, the cleaning staff had mentioned that the air in the room stank, that it didn’t seem to be venting properly. Rodents inhabited the crawl spaces between the lower floors, but the ninth and tenth had been sealed off. Military-grade security systems for important guests. Filtered air. Electronically isolated, the young men who did the work said.
Vasily strode down the plush-carpeted hallway to 1004.
An American had disrupted the manager’s orderly little world last week when he skipped out on a bill for this same room. An art dealer, Vasily had heard in the lunchroom, who stayed a week and then disappeared.
At the door, he inserted his security card and submitted again to a retinal scan. This time, he was connected to the front desk, who had to verbally accept his voice scan and unlock the door. It hissed open.
The room could be sealed from the inside. Totally isolated if the occupant so chose. The exterior windows were triple-layered polycarbonate, bulletproof, designed to deflect anything up to a rocket-propelled grenade. Maybe they could survive even that, if it came to it. Possible forms of attack this floor could withstand had been the topic of many a lunchtime rumination by the staff. The decade-long conflict in Ukraine had made a certain set of high-profile business travelers nervous—with good reason.
The Persian Palace aimed to accommodate.
Ten-oh-four was the Czar’s Suite. Twelve-foot ceilings. Thick ivory wall-to-wall carpet, adorned with winter garden embroidery, bone-colored furniture bordered in gold leaf. Vasily made his way into the bedroom and opened his tool kit, selected a multi-tool screwdriver. He shifted the attending chair by the window to the opposite wall, stepped onto it, and got up on his tiptoes to unscrew the vent cover.
Except that it was already undone, the screws nowhere to be seen.
Was it the cleaning crew? Maybe they opened it. They were the ones who found the chunk of flesh hanging from the outflow vent and described the lingering smell.
This near the vent, Vasily did pick up the scent of dead rat—probably more than one.
He slid the casing out, got down off the chair, and deposited the cover on the floor. Then he pushed the chair aside and maneuvered the vanity table into position to get more height. One foot on the bed, the other on the table, and his eyes were almost at the vent. He explored the metal shaft with the tip of the screwdriver. It dug into something soft.
“Der’mo,” he muttered.
The only rat he should be cleaning out of this hotel was that manager downstairs. He didn’t understand how the politicians could allow Russians to stay after all the mess they’d been causing. The current president, Yulya Voloshyn, seemed more intent on forgetting and forgiving than protecting. Every fifty years for the past thousand, regular as some fatalistic clockwork, either the Russians or the Germans would storm over their borders to attack the other, destroying our kraina each time in the process.
And they think we’re the Nazis?
He dislodged a hunk and flicked it from the vent. It tumbled onto the carpet. He didn’t look down, for fear of losing balance. Cursing again, he gave up on the screwdriver and reached in with his bare hand.
In his eighty years, he’d done worse things than grab a rotting rodent. Or maybe he classified those people he did these things to as less than rodents.
His fingers searched around. It didn’t feel like a rat. That was not fur. It felt like . . .
He gripped and pulled. Whatever it was, it had really jammed itself in there. He yanked and looked up. What was he holding?
Someone’s hand.
Vasily held a lump of gray-fleshed human fingers in his grip. As if they were greeting him with a handshake.
One of the fingers unstuck from the meat lump and fell onto his face. He lurched back and tried to bat it away with his other arm, but the only thing he had a grip on was the misshapen hand. He pulled as he fell into open space, and out came a decapitated torso, and innards that coiled out around him onto the gold-brocaded bedspread.
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