[This is the third and final installment of an adventure I had while traveling to Israel in March. Keep scrolling down if you want to read parts 1 and 2, or click the 'travel' category at right.]

“WELL?” I glared at the Russian stalker. I had deduced he was a low-level mobster used to glomming on to lady tourists—such as Kitt and myself—staying at this tacky but stiff Dead Sea hotel compound. 

“Slikha, slikha.”  The man put up his hands, in a cool, mock surrender.  He took a few steps back into the hallway. ‘Slikha’ means ’sorry’ in Hebrew, but his demeanor  only said: ‘Can I have my three-way now?’

His arrogance angered me. (Typical perv!  They all think they’re god’s gift.)  With a wide stance and hands on my hips,  I stared him down—like how I imagined Barbara Stanwyck might do in an old Western—as he continued to back away from the door of our room. The more distance  there was between him and me, the more I was able to convince myself Kitt and I could take him. 

I could feel Kitt right behind me. 

“Kitt, you got the bottle?” I whispered.  If we had to attack him, I wanted to be sure we had something hard to crack over his noggin.

“Right here,” she murmured, slapping it in her hand.  

“Get lost!” I bellowed. “Get moving! You big creep!” 

“Uh….yeah,” Kitt offered. “Go away!”  She sounded about as intimidating as Tinker Bell in a cage fight. 

I gave her a look, and was met with a sheepish grin that said, ‘Hey, sorry….this kind of thing doesn’t usually happen back home.” 

He finally turned his back to us and walked—unmistakeably briskly—down the hall toward the staircase leading to the lobby. Apoplectic and beyond any rational thought, I followed him.  

“Jessie!” Kitt’s voice trailed after me. 

I ran down the four flights of stairs to the lobby…but the stalker was nowhere to be seen. He must have exited on one of the preceding floors.

 I marched over to the front desk where the African conceirge was still speaking in hushed tones on the phone.

“There’s someone following us,” I interrupted. “We have a stalker outside our room.  He won’t leave us alone. We’ve been calling you and calling you and….”

The guy looked up at me, surprised. He ended his call and rose from his seat. “What is this?” He said in broken English. I noticed he still had a gun in his holster. “Stalker?” 

“Yes, there is a a stalker outside of our room and….”

 As I relayed what happened we walked together toward the staircase.

As we began climbing the stairs, we met the mobster on his way down.  He still had the same placid look on his face, like he didn’t have a care in the world.  

“That’s him!” I pointed right at him. “That’s the guy!! This is him!!”  I thought, now would be a perfect time for you, concierge, to grab your gun from your holster and SHOOT HIM IN THE LEG OR FOOT, or something.

All three of us were in the lobby now. The two men began speaking in Hebrew, clearly neithers native tongue. 

Kitt joined me. When I caught her eye, we couldn’t help but stifle a laugh, despite the severity of the situation. I knew she was thinking the same thing I was: ‘This is so…..cool. We are having an adventure.”

I couldn’t decipher what was being said, but their body language told me exactly what was going on.  The young concierge appeared conciliatory, almost regretful, while the mobster reacted with dismissive exasperation.  I imagined the following exchange taking place:

Concierge: “Sir, I’m very sorry to inconvenience you, but these two ladies have kindly requested not to be date-raped by you this evening. Perhaps I can interest you in the keys to 7B instead, where two female Bulgarians are staying? Again, my apologies.” 

Mobster:  ”And to think I was going to waste my Slavic passions on these two American hussies! Psshwat!  Be gone with them.”

He turned on his heel and stormed out the door into the night. 

The concierge turned toward us. “Everything is alright now. Em, what time do you check out tomorrow?”

We made our way back to our room, and opened the bottle to celebrate our “win” over the Russian mobster. We drank to our success, basking in the knowledge that it is possible for a couple of American nitwits to psych out a more powerful adversary. Had we hid in our room, waiting for him to tire of knocking, or waiting for someone to come to our rescue, we would probably still be there, trapped and helpless—and way more fearful than we were now. 

Still, it was a restless remainder of the night. We were convinced a gang of mobsters would kick down our door  in the middle of the night, ready to exact revenge. Kitt slept with the empty bottle of wine while I kept my shoes on—you know, just in case I had to make a jump for it over the balcony. 

The End.

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….

I don’t know much about the Dead Sea except that it’s been around since Biblical times and, because of all the saline in the water, contains no life whatsoever. Zilch. For most of its history, there has been little life around it. In fact, it’s surrounded by some of the starkest, most unforgiving terrain on earth: rugged mountains made of dirt, baked by a blistering sun, accessible by a lone highway that cuts across a desert from Jerusalem. It’s not an insignificant fact that it’s also the lowest place on earth –1,300 feet below sea level in a geologic fault that extends to Africa. 

Yet thousands of sun-worshippers and those seeking the fountain of youth flock to its shores every year to soak up the health benefits thought contained in its minerals and mud. (The potash in its waters is also heavily mined for fertilizer and shipped all over the world.) Some call the Dead Sea mysterious and mystical. I call it ‘circling the drain.’

Along the rim of the Sea is a lone compound of hotels. The compound reminded me of Vegas – towering, tightly clustered hotels that sprout out of a barren desert. Except unlike Vegas, there was no party atmosphere. Just big, imposing places to eat and sleep—no loud restaurants, no revelers on the sidewalk. Although I did overhear one American tourist—the only one we came across (the tip-off: the huge purse strapped across her chest)—whine to her companions. “It just feels like there should be casinos here.” Indeed, the atmosphere was somber and oppressive. It was the only time in my life I almost yearned for the fake-happy, all-American cheese-fest of a place like Senor Frog’s. Granted, it was March – the low season – so there weren’t that many tourists around, and those that were all spoke Russian. Apparently, Israel has experienced a huge influx of Russian immigrants since the 1990s—they now represent something like 20 percent of the total population—whose Jewish-ness has been called into question by some. It’s rumored that the Russian mafia has been making inroads here.

We checked into one of the less expensive hotels that was, not surprisingly, the furthest from the water – The Tulip Inn – where the doors were kept fastened at night by a heavy chain. The concierge, a young African, carried a gun (it is Israel, after all).  The place was clean but depressing. So we dropped off our bags and left to go have a drink at one of the newer, flashier hotels on the other side of the compound – a luxe monstrosity called The Isrotel, a name so cheesy it made Kitt wonder if we’d stumble across an “Isro-teque” or “Isro-rant” while we were there. 

By the time we made it back to the Tulip Inn, it was late, we were tipsy. We went ahead and cracked open another bottle of wine we’d brought from Tel Aviv to enjoy from the balcony of our fourth floor room, which overlooked the hotel’s outdoor courtyard.

As we were drinking and carrying on, a man stopped underneath our window and turned up to look at us. He was in his mid-40s, reasonably dressed, a slight bald spot shining from the top of his head. He just stood there. 

“He looks Russian,” murmured Kitt.

“Just ignore him,” I said. “He’ll move on in a minute.”

But he didn’t. He kept staring up at us while we pretended he wasn’t; we continued to talk and laugh and act not the slightest bit unnerved.

After a few minutes, he motioned to us by holding up four fingers. 

“What’s he trying to say?” whispered Kitt. 

“I don’t know. Maybe he wants to borrow four rubles?”

“Maybe it’s his Eastern European gang sign.” 

“Wait—is he signaling he wants to have a foursome?”

“Ewww.” 

“Dude, we don’t want a threesome, foursome or onesome,” I whispered. “Just go away.” 

“Gawd, what is it with this place?” She got up to refill our glasses. “Why is everybody so weird?” 

After about 10 minutes of this uncomfortable charade, we looked down and he was gone. The air suddenly felt less stifled. We got up and began taking goofy pictures of ourselves on the balcony.

After 20 minutes or so, Kitt decided to go make a call from a phone in the downstairs lobby that accepted calling cards.

“Watch out for your new boyfriend,” I said as she got up from her chair.

“Yeah—maybe we need a secret knock,” she said in mock seriousness. “Only open the door if you hear this.” She gently tapped ‘knock-knock—knock—knock-knock” on the side table. “Don’t open for anyone else.”

“Gotcha. Seriously, though…if you’re not back in 20 minutes I’m calling the concierge,” I grinned. “He has a gun, you know.”

“Ha ha.” She walked to the door. She opened the door—and screamed. 

Her new boyfriend was standing right outside our door.

To be continued…..