The spooky Dead Sea hotel, the Tulip Inn
(This story is a continuation of a previous post—keep scrolling down—about an adventure I had while traveling to Israel in March.)
KITT slammed the door in the man’s face, dropped to her knees and pressed her body against the door in a half-hearted attempt to keep him out. I rushed in from the balcony. Pointing to the door and between bursts of shocked laughter, she whisper-screamed, “He’s right outside the door! He’s right outside the door!”
She crawled to the other side of the room as I ran to the door and pressed my eye to the peephole while slipping the flimsy door chain into the lock. Sure enough, the man’s face filled my view. He looked like a substitute teacher: thinning hair, pale, pock-marked complexion, crisply but casually dressed in an oxford and slacks. In other words, he looked like your average child molester/psycho killer, but Russian.
“Holy crap,” I backed away from the door, and whispered, “How the heck did he find our room?”
“I don’t know,” Kitt gasped. “I don’t know.”
It wasn’t that the situation was particularly funny. Far from it. We were both petrified. But there was something supremely absurd about picking up a Russian stalker at a garish hotel compound at the Dead Sea. The phrase ‘circling the drain’ seemed decidedly apropos.
I backed away from the door. “He’ll go away. Just ignore him.” I scanned the room for a weapon. There was a sealed bottle of wine on the dresser. “And if he doesn’t, you crack that bottle over his head while I….bite his ankle?”
“Okay,” Kitt stopped laughing. She nodded as if trying to convince herself that the situation could turn ugly.
We uneasily resumed our perch on the balcony—as far away from the door as possible—and tried to change the subject. We assumed the longer we ignored him, the sooner he’d bugger off. We discussed the number of bones we might break in the event he kicked down the door and we had to jump off the 4th floor balcony into the courtyard below.
Fifteen minutes passed. The room felt very still. Kitt looked toward the door. “I think he’s gone.”
But then we heard a very soft, almost inaudible knock-knock-knocking on the door….like if he was trying to show what a refined, gentle guy he was. (A gentle stalker…how nice.)
“He’s still out there!” Kitt got up and headed for the phone on the bedside table. “I’m calling the front desk.”
She dialed the front desk. After a minute, she hung up. “It’s just ringing and ringing and ringing….nobody is picking up.”
We remembered that when we returned to the hotel earlier that evening, the concierge had the lobby phone cupped to his ear and was speaking in low, intimate tones, presumably to his mama or girlfriend.
“He’s totally ignoring our call,” Kitt exclaimed, incredulously.
“Call again.”
She dialed and still no answer. She tried once more…then hung up.
“He isn’t picking up the phone!”
The soft knock-knock-knocking began again—low, gentle, terrifying.
“Gawd! Go away!” Kitt murmured.
It occurred to me that Kitt and I — all 213 pounds between us — were truly on our own, trapped in a hotel room in the lowest point on Earth.
We tried to keep ignoring him, but the soft knocking wouldn’t cease. Thirty minutes had passed since Kitt first opened the door. The knocking had now become a slow and steady drumming.
I was frightened, but I understood that nobody was going to come to our rescue. It was clear that we were going to have to deal with this problem on our own.
I marched to the door and, without opening it, yelled: “Go away! We don’t want you here! Go away!”
I waited a few seconds and listened. The knock-knock-knocking began again.
“That’s it!” I yelled to Kitt. “I’m not letting this asshole make us prisoners of our own room!”
Summoning my inner wild-eyed she-bear, I threw open the door. There he was, leaning arrogantly and casually against the frame, his hand poised to knock again.
With my finger in his chest, I yelled, “Get. Out. Of. Here. We don’t want you here! Go away!”
He looked at me and shrugged, “Slikha.” Which means ‘sorry’ in Hebrew. He didn’t move.
“What is your problem?” I screamed. “We. Don’t. Want. You. Here! GO AWAY.” I took a step closer to make him think I wasn’t afraid (I was petrified) and that if he didn’t back off, my teeth would tear through his ankles. Kitt was right behind me brandishing the wine bottle, ready to smash it over the bald patch on the top of his head.
“Slikha,” He shrugged again and took a baby step back. Ah-ha! The crazy she-bear strategy was working.
I followed him out into the hall. “GO AWAY! We don’t want you here! You hear me? Get lost!”
He put up his hands as if in surrender. “Slikha, slikha.”
He looked petulant.
It was a mock surrender. His eyes told me he wasn’t ‘sorry’ at all. To him, this was all a coy, flirtatious game. I sensed that he genuinely felt that if he just hung around long enough….. we’d eventually invite him in. After all, he’s a big klassy Dead Sea roller and we’re just two women.
That was my first clue we weren’t dealing with your average creep. This was a guy who wasn’t used to being told ‘no,’ someone unconstrained by civil conventions and manners. In an instant, I saw him for what he was: A Russian mobster. A low-level Russian mobster. Rather, he was the Dead Sea mob boss’s second cousin, the guy who commands no respect and gets assigned all the menial mob tasks like fetching sandwich and filing kill orders, yet who is a beneficiary of mob perks, all the same—like scoring with all the ladies who stay at Dead Sea hotels.
To be continued….
Tags: Dead Sea
