A Hotel of This Caliber by Robert Duffy

A Hotel of This Caliber by Robert Duffy

Rostov and Kozlov pulled up in front of the storied Continental Hotel and deliberately parked in a red zone. The small vehicle rocked back and forth as they clambered out of the seats like twin bears emerging from a log hollow. A bellman tried to wave them away, but a quick look at their dark trench coats and oversized fedoras caused him to stop and rethink the necessity of enforcing hotel parking restrictions. Rostov further warned the hapless bellman away with a malicious scowl as the two men strode past him to the front entrance.

“Remember,” Rostov growled as they stalked through the lobby. “Buran said to keep it clean. Very clean.”

“Clean, yes. Very clean,” Kozlov repeated like a dutiful child, as he struggled to keep up with his colleague’s purposeful stride.

Rostov gave his companion a sour look. It was galling for him to be sent on such a middling assignment like a pimply recruit, but he understood the need to redeem himself in Buran’s eyes following the Meyerbeck fiasco. Even so, it felt unnecessarily insulting to be assigned a cretin like Kozlov as partner. It was like being made to wear a dunce cap in public. He looked around the lobby for any concerning individuals, and seeing none he breathed a brief sigh of relief. The only saving grace to this humiliation was the fact there were no other colleagues around to witness him walking next to this clown.

Instead of maintaining a stern, no-nonsense focus on their assignment, Kozlov’s head swiveled to and fro like an American tourist as he gazed in open-mouthed wonder at the grand lobby of the Continental Hotel. Or at least the remnants of the grand lobby of the Continental Hotel, as years of declining fortunes had left the once-imposing space with only a shade of its former glory.

“I always thought it was supposed to be nicer than this,” Kozlov observed, his head tilted back, looking up at the dusty cobwebs dangling from the ornate chandelier. “It looks like our job will be the only clean thing here,” he quipped, glancing at Rostov to see if he’d get the joke.

Rostov, in even less of a mood for small talk than usual, didn’t respond. But he did notice the worn carpets and chipped paint on the walls as they approached the bank of elevators. It was a tad disappointing to see so much disrepair in a hotel of this caliber. Kozlov was a fool, but in this he had a point.

“Which floor?” Rostov demanded, pointing at the bank of elevator buttons. He knew of course, but he wanted to see if his moronic partner remembered.

“Twenty-eight,” Kozlov announced with a ridiculous semblance of a smile, like a satisfied student giving the correct answer on an oral exam.

Rostov calculated the height in his head. Approximately four meters per floor, times twenty-eight, meant somewhere north of one hundred and ten meters. More than enough to do the trick. Four to five seconds before completion. He cracked the tiniest of smiles. “That will work.”

“But cleanly,” Kozlov reminded him.

“Cleanly. Of course.” Rostov scowled, as if he needed to have this dullard reminding him of the obvious.

An empty elevator car arrived and the two men walked in. An elderly couple started to approach the open elevator but they stopped short as soon as they saw the twin black trench coats and oversized fedoras. “We can take the stairs,” the man told his wife, grabbing her arm and backing away slowly.

When the elevator door closed, Rostov muttered, “He’ll probably have a stroke before he reaches the second floor.”

Kozlov grunted. “It might save us another trip out here.”

It was a nonstop ride to the twenty-eighth floor. The two men walked out into a quiet hallway with thick red carpeting and ornate lighting fixtures on the walls. The once imposing room doors had tarnished brass fittings and door handles, and many were dinged and nicked from years of collisions with suitcases and luggage carts.

“Do you have the master key?” Kozlov asked as they searched for Room 2805.

Rostov frowned. “Don’t you have it?”

“No one gave it to me.”

“You don’t still have it from Buran’s briefing?”

“I returned it to Kalyakov.”

Rostov swore, bitterly, in his native dialect. “That idiot. How are we supposed to do this cleanly if we have to break down a door?”

Kozlov thought for a moment. “We can still do this. We can talk our way in. Cleanly.”

They stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the door. Rostov looked at Kozlov.

“Well?”

Kozlov reached out and rapped politely on the door. He cocked his head forward to listen for a response.

Nothing.

Kozlov rapped again, a little harder.

Again nothing.

Kozlov made a fist and went to pound on the door, but Rostov grabbed his arm. “We have to do it cleanly. We can’t make a big racket. Remember how the Meyerbeck business started out.”

“I won’t pound too loud. But we have to get his attention.”

“What if he’s not here?”

Suddenly they heard a muffled voice from behind the door. “Who’s there?”

Rostov and Kozlov exchanged urgent glances. “Uh…room service,” Kozlov called out.

“I didn’t order any room service. You must be at the wrong door.”

Rostov glared at Kozlov. Kozlov moved his face closer to the door. “We have a—I have a complimentary bottle of champagne from the hotel management for Professor Rabin.”

“Thank you, but I don’t drink.”

Kozlov looked at Rostov, mystified. Rostov, his face growing red with impatience, pushed his partner to the side. “Professor Rabin! Please open the door. We must speak with you. It’s urgent.”

“Ah, so a bottle of champagne is urgent now?”

Rostov’s face was turning crimson with rage. He stepped backwards and lifted his right foot, aiming squarely for a spot just next to the door handle.

Kozlov suddenly stood in front of the door. “Cleanly, Rostov! The entire floor will hear if you kick the door in.”

Rostov swore again, this time blasphemously. He lowered his foot, arranged himself and took a deep breath. He leaned his head forward until his forehead almost touched the door. “Professor Rabin. We are authorized government officials and we have urgent business with you. I am demanding that you open this door.”

There was a pause, and for a moment both men thought the door was about to open. Instead the muffled voice called out again, a bit weaker this time.

“I have an embarrassing medical condition that prevents me from opening the door.”

Now Rostov’s fury boiled over. Swearing with an intensity to cause a stablehand to blush, he stepped back in preparation to charge at the door. Kozlov reached out and grabbed his arm. “Rostov! Wait! I have a solution.”

Without waiting for a response, Kozlov turned and trotted, rather clumsily given his bulk, down the thickly carpeted hallway. Rostov turned and saw, at the end of the hall, a chambermaid’s cart, laden with towels and sundries. Kozlov lumbered toward the cart. Placing one meaty hand into his overcoat pocket, he pulled out his credentials and waved them in the face of the slender young maid who suddenly emerged from an open doorway with an armload of soiled bedding. She froze, then dropped her bundle on the floor. Even from this distance, Rostov could see how her hand trembled as she reached into the pocket of her apron and pulled out a ring of keys.

Kozlov grabbed the keys and trotted back to Rostov. His face was red and flushed from the exertion, and his perspiration appeared to spark some kind of chemical reaction with his cologne, as Rostov was able to smell him quite distinctly when he was still a couple of doors down the hall.

Kozlov held up the key in triumph. A minor victory to be sure, but he appeared quite proud of himself.

Rostov grunted, the closest thing to an expression of approval Kozlov had ever heard from the man. “Let’s get on with it,” he ordered with an impatient gesture toward the door.

Kozlov put the key in the lock and opened the door. He started to enter, then caught himself and stepped back to allow Rostov to muscle past him into the room. He followed close behind in an attempt to display a united front of authority as they confronted their assignment.

Professor Rabin stood by a disheveled bed in worn pajamas and bare feet. He was a thin man of medium height with a long scraggly white beard. That, along with a thick head of unkempt hair and a pair of bony chicken feet protruding from his pajama bottoms, gave him the almost stereotyped appearance of an academic. He stared defiantly at Rostov and Kozlov through a pair of thick eyeglasses badly in need of cleaning.

“What is the meaning of this intrusion?” he demanded in a shaky voice.

“Professor Rabin,” Rostov said. “There’s no need to make this difficult. We need you to step over to the window.”

Rabin’s eyes widened behind his murky eyeglasses. “So. I’m being fired. Is that it?”

“The window. If you please.”

Professor Rabin threw his shoulders back and stood as erect as he could. “I will not.” His attempt at a defiant stance, admirable as it was, was undercut by a slight wobble as his knees trembled.

Kozlov, still riding the heady high of his success with the master key, stepped forward to grab the initiative. “You will step over to the window or by god, I’ll—”

Rostov grabbed his partner’s arm, immediately silencing him. He took his own step forward and lowered his voice. “We can either beat you to a pulp first or you can avoid that and let the sidewalk do its work. The sidewalk is much quicker, I can assure you.”

Professor Rabin looked at him with raw disdain. “You cannot fire me. You have no authority. I can only be terminated by a formal vote of the executive committee.”

“We are the formal vote of the executive committee.”

“Bah!” Professor Rabin spat. “You are nothing but faceless bureaucrats.”

“And you are an Enemy of the State,” Rostov replied. He reached into the pocket of his overcoat, pulled out a blackjack and struck Professor Rabin on the side of his head. The unfortunate academic dropped like a sandbag, hitting the desk on his way down, knocking it over and spilling the heavy desk lamp onto the floor.

Kozlov cringed at the racket. “Cleanly, Rostov! Cleanly! Remember!” He looked down at the crumpled shape on the floor. The man rolled over with a groan, revealing a bright bloody wound on his head. “He’s bleeding! We can’t leave blood on the rug!”

Rostov, still panting from delivering his blow, gestured toward the bathroom. “Get a towel, you fool!” As Kozlov bolted to respond, he looked down at their assignment, slowly writhing on the floor. He estimated the man’s weight at about sixty to seventy kilograms. Much easier to deal with than that tub of lard Meyerbeck who had almost given him a hernia.

Kozlov returned and handed Rostov a threadbare bath towel. Disappointing linens for a hotel of this caliber, Rostov thought as he knelt down and wrapped the towel around their man’s head. He shifted his body and reached under the armpits. “Grab his feet.”

Kozlov did as he was instructed and the two men lifted the body. The room was small, so they had to struggle to maneuver their load in the space between the bed and the overturned desk. Rostov had to pause in order to kick the overturned chair behind him out of the way, which caused Kozlov to shush him, which in turn generated a snarl of impatience from Rostov.

When they reached the window, Rostov turned and saw that it was closed and latched. He swore again in his home dialect, this time on the genitals of various female deities. Since he held the heavier end of their burden, he barked at Kozlov to drop the man’s feet and open the window. He stood grunting and gasping to hold up the man’s shoulders while Kozlov struggled with the window latch.

Kozlov quickly discovered the latch was either rusted shut or had been painted over multiple times—again, disappointing for a hotel of this caliber—and after straining for several minutes and breaking a fingernail in the process, he turned and asked Rostov for his blackjack.

“It’s in my right pocket,” he grunted. “Hurry up. I don’t want to have to lift this bastard again.”

Kozlov reached into Rostov’s coat pocket and pulled out the blackjack. After two quick whacks on the uncooperative hardware, the latch yielded to the pressure of Kozlov’s fingers, and he was finally able to pull the window up.

A fresh breeze rushed into the room, carrying the distant sounds of city traffic and causing the curtains to billow like a pair of grasping arms. Kozlov swatted his way through the swirling fabric and emerged triumphant, again proud of his significant, albeit minor, accomplishment.

But Rostov was in no mood for a performance assessment. In estimating his target’s weight, he forgot to account for his own lack of fitness, and as he held up his half of the man’s body, he felt sweat pouring down his face as the muscles in his arms began aching and trembling. “Feet!” he gasped.

Kozlov rushed to grab the man’s ankles, and together the two men lifted the semiconscious academic and positioned his shoulders on the windowsill. “Ready?” Rostov panted, preparing to shove the man out.

“Wait! What about the towel?”

“The towel?”

“Should we dump it out with him? Someone might question it.”

Rostov opened his mouth to again berate his companion for his idiocy but then paused, realizing the overstuffed dolt had a point. Why would a suicide take the time to wrap his head in a bath towel? To cushion the blow from a twenty-eight-story plunge? Swearing again on the sexual proclivities of their target’s matrilineal ancestors, Rostov reached out the window to where the man’s head lolled like a limp rag doll and snatched off the bloodstained towel.

Dropping the towel on the floor, he looked at Kozlov and barked a final order: “Heave!” The two men grunted in unison as they pushed the man over the threshold and out into the darkness. On the way out, one of the man’s bare feet banged against the window frame and barely grazed Kozlov’s own head with a toenail.

Rostov and Kozlov stood side by side catching their breath when there came the sound of an impact, much too loud and much too soon, followed by a strange banging and twanging. It was nothing like the sound that Meyerbeck made when he hit the pavement, which Rostov recalled as the sharp crack of a firecracker echoing off the surrounding buildings.

The two men carefully poked their heads out the window and looked down. One floor below them, a window washer’s scaffold dangled and bounced against the side of the building, recoiling from the impact of the academic’s body as it landed squarely in the middle of the catwalk. On either side of the window, the ropes and cables that stretched from the scaffolding all the way to the roof vibrated and hummed in response to the energy of the impact, producing a kind of stereo effect.

Kozlov looked flummoxed. Rostov’s blood pressure increased by several points as he saw that the man was still alive, although apparently stunned as he lay on the narrow catwalk.

“Idiot! You didn’t look out the window first?”

“We’re not supposed to be seen,” Kozlov pleaded. “We shouldn’t even be poking our heads out now.”

“What do you think Buran is going to do when we report back that we tossed this bastard out a twenty-eight-story window—and missed the ground?”

Kozlov’s face grew pale.

“There’s only one thing to do,” Rostov said. “You have to climb down there and push him off.”

“Me? Why don’t you do it?”

“Because I’m senior!”

Kozlov’s face fell. This fact was inarguable. He leaned forward, looking doubtfully out the window. “Maybe I can use the master key to access the scaffold from the room below.”

“And alert the occupants? We’d have to throw them out too.”

“Give me a minute,” Kozlov said, unhappily surveying the scene outside the window. His two minor achievements of the evening—securing the master key and opening the troublesome window—suddenly struck him as possible preludes to an even greater triumph. Even Rostov would have to admire him if he came up with a solution to their current dilemma.

And studying the situation, something he was learning to do more and more on these assignments, he saw the answer. An even better idea than Rostov’s. He reached out and grabbed the rope and cable by the side of the window and pulled it toward him. Then he released his grip, letting the rope and cable swing back into place. He looked down and saw that this in turn caused the scaffold to bang against the building and dangle outwards, which in turn caused the man’s left arm to swing out over the edge of the catwalk. If he kept tugging and releasing the rope and cable, eventually he should be able to shake the man off.

He heard Rostov’s voice behind him, impatient and irritated: “What are you doing?” But remembering the hoary cliché that actions speak louder than words, Kozlov declined to explain his strategy and instead leaned a little farther out the window in order to get an even stronger grip on the cable and the rope. He pulled on them even more forcefully and was surprised to discover that the harder he pulled the lines toward him, the stronger they rebounded away. Which turned out to be quite unfortunate when his hand became wedged between the cable and the rope and he found himself yanked forward by the full weight of the scaffold. He felt his belly slide over the threshold of the windowsill and he barely had time to register the shocked realization that his center of gravity had shifted before he tumbled out the window.

Rostov was stunned to see the shiny seat of his subordinate’s trousers suddenly rise up and disappear into the void, followed by his helplessly flailing feet. He stuck his head out in time to see Kozlov’s bulky shape bounce off the edge of the scaffolding with a clang and pirouette over into the darkness below. If Kozlov screamed at all, the sound was swallowed up by the hum of nighttime traffic and the whistling wind. This time the right interval of time passed—a good five seconds, just like with Meyerbeck—before Rostov heard an explosive bang, accompanied by a faint echo of breaking glass and the sudden piercing blare of an automobile horn.

All around him, Rostov heard the sounds of windows opening and the sounds of curious hotel guests poking their heads outside to see what was happening. He wasn’t particularly worried about being observed at this point; he was sure he looked like another curious guest wondering what had just dropped by the window. But what really bothered him was the sight of someone in the room directly below discovering a semiconscious man sprawled out on the window washers’ catwalk right outside his window.

Rostov pulled his head back into the room. It sounded like there was more than one occupant in the room below. There was no chance of him single-handedly defenestrating multiple people at once (not to mention his original target). He looked around the room. Maybe there was still a chance to rectify this colossal blunder.

His gaze landed on the lamp that had fallen to the floor during their brief struggle. He lifted it, hefting it and gauging its weight. It wasn’t ridiculously heavy, but it did have a solid base. Dropped from a height of four meters, it might just strike the target’s head with enough force to finish what the blackjack had started.

He yanked the cord from the wall and lifted the lamp. At this point, he knew all attempts at keeping this affair clean had, quite literally, flown out the window, so Buran was going to have to deal with it. But at least he would accomplish his mission.

Rostov leaned out the window again and saw to his relief that the target’s head lay almost directly underneath him. He simply had to hold the lamp out a few feet from the window, take into account the motion of the scaffold as it swayed and bumped against the building, time his release, and drop the lamp.

He did so, and his aim was true. So true (down to the millimeter) that when the occupant of the room below suddenly stuck his head out the window to steady the swaying scaffold, the lamp landed squarely on his unprotected occipital bone, cracking it like a coconut husk before bouncing out over the scaffold into the darkness. The man slumped onto the windowsill, his arms dangling uselessly down the side of the building. A woman’s voice screamed, and five seconds later a faint crash echoed through the night.

Rostov pulled his head back into the room and swore as profusely as he ever had in his life, aside from the night he arrived home to find a handwritten note in bed where his wife was supposed to be. He paced around the room. He needed to think. In the distance, sirens began screaming, adding to the urgency.

It was time to cut his losses, Rostov realized. That skinny rat bastard Rabin will probably die anyway from the blow to the head, which surely cracked his traitorous skull, combined with the impact of the fall. It still might look like the cowardly suicide it was supposed to be.

And Kozlov? Kozlov was a fool. Rostov was certain he’d be able to explain away Kozlov’s blunder as the act of a certifiable moron. Even Buran would have to admit the truth of that.

Rostov breathed a little easier. Yes, this was all going to work out. It’ll end up being maybe not the cleanest operation, but in the end the objective would be achieved. All he needed to do now was calmly exit the building. There would no doubt be a crowd gathering below to gape at Kozlov’s splattered remains, and that would work to his advantage, as he’d be able to slip away unnoticed in all the commotion.

Satisfied that he had everything worked out, Rostov took a deep breath, then checked himself in the mirror. He licked his fingers and smoothed down a few strands of his thinning hair, straightened his overcoat, picked his hat up from where it had fallen onto the bed, and made his way to the door.

He opened the door and saw two men in dark trench coats and oversized fedoras, his colleagues Yarovsky and Tolyanov, standing in the doorway. He felt the blood immediately drain from his face as he realized there had been time for a performance assessment—just not the one he was expecting.

“Step back into the room,” Yarovsky ordered.

Rostov briefly considered slamming the door in their faces, but he abandoned the thought as a hopeless fantasy. With a fatalistic sigh he stepped back and allowed the men to into the room.

“If you don’t mind moving to the window,” Tolyanov said.

Rostov suddenly laughed. “You do know there’s a—” he chuckled, then immediately kicked himself, realizing he might not want to tell them about the window washers’ scaffold.

“We know,” Yarovsky said. “We observed your little clown show out there.”

“Don’t worry,” Tolyanov assured Rostov, breaking into a broad smile. “We’ll make sure you miss it.”

“Ah,” said Rostov in a quiet voice. He turned and regarded the open window, the curtains still billowing in the night breeze. He wondered if this was how Meyerbeck felt.

He turned to face the two men. “Before you do, can you tell Buran—”

He never got to finish the sentence as the two men suddenly grabbed him by both arms, leaned him backwards, stuck his head and shoulders through the window, and gave him a mighty shove.

Rostov barely saw the metal catwalk flash by him and he was out into the cool night air. He just had time to think this won’t take long, should be over in less than five sec—

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Robert Duffy 2025