Honeytrap Page 11

  Anna clasped her hands. “Oh, it’s so elegant. It’s almost a shame to put up the ornaments.”

  “Anna!” Daniel protested. “How can you say that after all those years you forced me to pin beads to Christmas balls and cut out snowflakes?”

  Anna laughed. “Of course we’re putting up the ornaments,” she said. “Christmas isn’t about elegance. Christmas is for excess!”

  ***

  Very early the next morning, Anna’s son Toby woke them all running down the hall shrieking, “It’s Christmas! It’s Christmas!”

  Daniel threw off his covers, on the theory that if you had to get up you had better do it at once. Gennady, on his cot, dragged his blanket over his head. “What is happening?”

  “It’s a time honored tradition for children to wake up the whole house before dawn on Christmas morning,” Daniel said, rapidly exchanging his pajama bottoms for a pair of thick corduroy pants. He wished that his mother would embrace the idea of central heating. “Toby wants to open his presents.”

  “At home,” Gennady said, voice muffled by blankets, “we give the children presents on New Year’s Eve, so there is no occasion for this…”

  “Christmas, Christmas, Christmas!” Toby howled.

  “This hullaballoo?” Daniel suggested, pulling on the Christmas sweater Aunt Rebecca had knit for him years earlier.

  “Hullaballoo? Yes. Hullaballoo. The sun is not even up.”

  Daniel dumped another one of Aunt Rebecca’s sweaters on Gennady’s head and smacked his bottom through the covers. “Get up and put the sweater on. No tie today. We’re all very informal on Christmas morning.”

  Gennady groaned in protest. That smack on the bottom had been a mistake: it made Daniel want to drag him out of bed, to mock wrestle on the floor and then…

  Well, obviously in imagination this ended with Gennady making a very different kind of groan.

  Daniel hastily headed for the door. “It’s also a Christmas tradition for Ma to make French toast,” he said as a parting shot.

  Toby was still trying to wake Uncle Oscar with a loud rendition of “Jingle Bells” when Gennady came downstairs. The sweater was a little too large, but the dark green color suited him. “You know I’ll feed you even if you don’t look like a starved waif,” Daniel’s mother laughed.

  Gennady sucked in his cheeks and pulled the sweater sleeves down till they nearly covered his hands. “But you might feed me more if I do.”

  But then Uncle Oscar appeared, affecting loud yawns and grinning as Toby dragged on his hand, and then there was nothing for it but to gather around to Christmas tree to open presents.

  Since Dad had died, Daniel had taken his chair at Christmas, but now he installed Gennady there and stood leaning against the back of the chair. Toby capered with impatience as Anna doled out gifts. Uncle Oscar and Aunt Rebecca sat on the couch, Aunt Rebecca’s knitting needles clacking. Daniel’s mother didn’t sit at all, but floated through the room filling coffee cups and taking photographs with Dad’s old decrepit Brownie camera.

  Suddenly Daniel’s mother came over to Gennady, a tin of cookies in her hands. “Gennady dear,” she said, “I’ve got a present for you.”

  Gennady’s eyes widened. “But I don’t have anything for you.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it! You brought that lovely brandy that I’ll be using to flame the Christmas pudding. That’s a present for us all.”

  Gennady took the tin with both hands. He removed the lid and gazed down at the linzer cookies arranged on top, and smiled with such pleasure that he looked shy when he lifted his eyes to Mrs. Hawthorne. “Thank you.”

  “Oh, it’s not much,” said Mrs. Hawthorne, pleased as punch. “If Daniel had only let me know you were coming a bit sooner,” this with a mock glare at Daniel, “I would have gotten you something nicer, but as it is…”

  “It’s good,” Gennady assured her, “It’s perfect.”

  “If I’d known I would have gotten you something too,” Anna added. “Why don’t you take one of the Dala horses? Whichever one you like best.”

  “And do keep that sweater,” Aunt Rebecca told Gennady. “It’s one of mine, dear, I knit it.”

  “Aunt Rebecca,” Daniel protested laughingly, “you gave that sweater to me.”

  “And I can tell it’s barely been worn!” she said, and shook her knitting needles at him.

  “RAWR,” said Toby, attacking one of Uncle Oscar’s bunny slippers with his new stuffed T. Rex.

  “Thank you,” Gennady said. “Thank you.”

  He was smiling down at the Christmas cookies like he didn’t know where to look. Daniel ruffled his hair roughly. “I got you a present too,” he said. “Anna, can you grab it under the tree there? The one under the purple Dala horse.”

  Anna tossed the present to Gennady. Daniel leaned against the back of the chair to watch Gennady open it. The tips of Gennady’s ears flushed as they all watched him slit the tape with his fingernail, unwrapping the present without ripping the wrapping paper. The Brownie camera clicked.

  At last Gennady removed the wrapping paper to reveal a slim volume of Emily Dickinson, the cover illustrated with a simple spray of pressed flowers. He smiled up at Daniel. “I should buy you a volume of Pushkin.”

  “It’s not like I could read it in Russian,” Daniel pointed out, and Gennady’s eyebrows quirked.

  “The Polyakovs didn’t teach you that?”

  “Oh, hush, you,” Daniel said, and smacked his shoulder. But he couldn’t help grinning. “Merry Christmas, Gennady.”

  Chapter 11

  After Christmas they hit the road again, and for a long time they made no progress in the case. They interviewed Good Shepherd subscribers, they tracked down Mausers, they diligently checked alibis for September 23, 1959. But nothing came of it.

  Gennady’s suspicion that they wouldn’t find their shooter had settled down to a near certainty, although of course he didn’t mention that in his reports to Stepan Pavlovich. His goal had shifted: now he intended to waste as much time and money as possible, so Stepan Pavlovich would get fed up and send him straight back to Moscow when they finally recalled him. That would keep him out of Arkady’s office.

  Besides, he was enjoying the trip. It was winter in earnest now, not a very cold one by Gennady’s standards, but snowy.

  Late one night, as they crossed a park on their way back from a bar, they stumbled on a makeshift ice rink, a sheet of ice surrounded by walls built of snow.

  “We used to make ice rinks just like this in the park in Shinocqua,” Daniel said, his breath puffing like smoke in the moonlight. “We, my Scout troop I mean, we’d set up a booth and sell hot chocolate to raise money to pay our scout camp expenses.”

  Gennady was enchanted. “These ice rinks are common?” he asked, and when Daniel nodded, Gennady said, “I’ll buy ice skates. For both of us.” That would discharge his debt for the Christmas gift of Emily Dickinson. “I’ll put it on my expense account.”

  “Gennady,” Daniel protested.

  Gennady widened his eyes in false innocence. A well-fattened expense account could only aid in his quest for demotion, after all. Not that a couple of pairs of ice skates would be much compared to some of the shenanigans Sergeyich got up to.

  A more pressing concern occurred to Gennady. “Can you skate?”

  “Can I skate?” Daniel scoffed. “I’m from Wisconsin.”

  “Oh, yes. You think that’s very cold,” Gennady said, patronizingly, and ducked when Daniel threw a handful of snow at him. He packed a snowball himself and hurled it at Daniel, and the two of them chased each other around the deserted park in the moonlight, hurling snowballs and insults until Daniel caught Gennady in a headlock. Gennady swung Daniel on his back in the snow, and fell on him to rub snow in his face as Daniel, laughing, tried to shove him off.

  At last he succeeded, and Gennady fell beside him in the snow, panting for breath. Daniel smiled at him, his teeth very bright in the moonlight and his eyes da
rk. One ice-encrusted glove moved to touch Gennady’s cheek, and the thought struck Gennady that Daniel was going to kiss him.

  Gennady sat up. His breath burst out of him in white clouds.

  Daniel sat up too, and began beating snow off his coat. Gennady staggered to his feet and went to sit on a playground swing. “What is the time?”

  Daniel checked his watch by moonlight. “Getting on toward one.”

  Gennady felt disquieted. He must have been wrong, they had not drunk so very much after all, Daniel probably had not been going to kiss him. It was just that Gennady had kissing on his mind because of the honeytrap, it made him see things that weren’t there.

  If Daniel actually threw himself at Gennady, it would be wrong not to report it; a betrayal of his country not to turn over this prime piece of blackmail material on an enemy agent. Or… Gennady twisted on the swing’s chains. Perhaps it was not a betrayal of the USSR, but only Arkady, and who cared very much about that?

  Well, but he could tell Stepan Pavlovich instead of Arkady. If Daniel ever threw himself at Gennady.

  Which Daniel would not do. Everything would be fine.

  The swing set shivered under the weight as Daniel settled in the swing next to Gennady’s. “You okay?”

  “The beer is catching up with me. We should go to the motel.”

  But as they trudged through the snow, he was remembering another snowy day, last winter in Moscow, the first time he had taken Galya out. Such a beautiful girl, he had felt so lucky that he was nearly too shy to kiss her – had not kissed her until they parted in the Moscow subway, until he was riding the escalator away from her, and she shouted after him, “You’ve dropped a mitten, Gosha!”

  And he ran back down the escalator, and took the mitten from her hand, and kissed her just as naturally as if they had kissed a thousand times. But it had been the first, and he had bounded up the escalator and burst out in the bright cold city with the feeling that he was emerging into a new world.

  When Galya stopped writing to him, the cessation of letters had felt distant, like something that was happening to somebody else. Now it broke upon him close and near and almost choked him.

  “Are you all right?” Daniel was peering into his face.

  “Yes,” Gennady said. He rubbed a mitten (the selfsame mitten he had dropped in the Moscow subway) over his eyes. “I was thinking about Galya.”

  Daniel’s face softened. He was pleased, Gennady thought, to see that Gennady was not such a cynic about love after all. “Why don’t you try to win her back, Gennady? Bring her a big present from America. Tell her you were thinking about her. Sweep her off her feet.”

  “Did you try this with your Helen when she mailed you your ring?”

  Daniel groaned. “I can’t believe my mother told you about that. No.” He grew pensive. The snow that had seemed so light and airy when they were chasing each other now clung heavily to their boots. “I was sad when she mailed me the ring,” he said, “but I had fallen in love with – ” A slight hitch in his voice, and his stride as well. “Well, with someone else. But you haven’t,” he added, to Gennady, his tone hovering halfway between a statement and a question.

  “No,” said Gennady. “But, after all, it’s possible to fall out of love with someone, without being in love with someone new.” He wrinkled his nose. “At least, I can. You it seems are always in love with someone.”

  Daniel swept up another handful of snow and tossed it into Gennady’s face.

  It wasn’t all snowball fights and ice-skating, of course. But even the work itself was pleasant. Most people would spill their hearts for a few kind words, it seemed, and so Daniel would sympathize Good Shepherd subscribers into telling their whole life stories, and work his way around to find out where they had been during Khrushchev’s visit. If someone proved recalcitrant, Gennady would wind them up with a few brusque comments – sometimes his foreign accent was enough to get them going by itself – and once Daniel smoothed their ruffled feathers, then they would tell everything to spite Gennady.

  And it was interesting to hear about their lives. Gennady had known of course that American banks were evil, but he learned a good deal more about it, and worked up a good report about the history of farm foreclosures for Stepan Pavlovich. Quite a lot of the Good Shepherd subscribers had lives right out of The Grapes of Wrath, driven off their farms when they fell behind on the mortgage.

  “It’s funny that they are so happy to tell an officer of the Federal Bureau of Investigation how much they hate the federal government,” Gennady mused one snowy evening, as he shot billiards in the corner of a bar. Daniel refused to play pool with him. He wasn’t even drinking beer, but a ginger ale.

  Daniel rolled his shoulders in a shrug. “There’s a fine American tradition of loathing the federal government. It’s practically patriotic.” He sipped his ginger ale. “I suppose Soviet citizens wouldn’t tell a KGB officer how much they hated the Party over tea and cookies?”

  The image was so irresistibly funny that Gennady’s next shot went wild. He leaned against the pool table to laugh.

  “Doesn’t that bother you?” Daniel asked. His brown eyes were bright and kind, his head tilted forward in the very attitude of a sympathetic listener, and Gennady actually opened his mouth, on the cusp of answering, as if he could just say, of course it bothers me, naturally I hate the KGB, as if he could criticize his country to an American agent who would undoubtedly report it right back to the FBI.

  Gennady swallowed the words as they were rising in his throat, and nearly choked on them.

  Well, so this was why the Good Shepherd subscribers all spilled their guts to Daniel. Gennady had seen that the sympathetic listener trick was effective, but it was different to feel its lure himself, like the pull of a rip tide.

  Gennady began to dispose of the pool balls with neat tense shots. “Still trying to gather blackmail material?” he asked lightly.

  Daniel looked dismayed. “It would get you into trouble if you said anything bad about the KGB, wouldn’t it?” he said.

  Gennady wanted to strike him with the pool cue. “Why should I say anything bad about the KGB?” he asked. “The KGB is heroically protecting the USSR from capitalist spies and western imperialist provocation.”

  He didn’t sound quite sincere enough: there was a little bit of a schoolboy singsong, like a child reciting a lesson. But Daniel nonetheless looked taken aback. “I’m sorry.”

  And that apology bothered Gennady more than anything. As if this were something personal, rather than part of Daniel’s job.

  Chapter 12

  In the middle of March, just when Daniel thought he might die of the horrible combination of professional boredom and unrequited love – almost certainly unrequited? Probably unrequited? Oh, it had to be unrequited. As if the Russians would ever hire a queer agent.

  Unless they didn’t know, of course.

  Unless Gennady didn’t know, himself. Didn’t let himself know, the way Daniel had tried not to let himself know for years, until he met Paul.

  Gennady bought them both ice skates, as he’d promised. One night in late February they found another makeshift outdoor ice rink, and skated until there was no one else left on the rink, just the two of them skating in the moonlight. Gennady linked his arm through Daniel’s, and spun him in a do-si-do till they both fell on the ice, where they sat and warmed themselves with shots from Gennady’s flask.

  “Brandy?” Daniel teased.

  “I wanted to try it. It always sounds so good and warming in English stories.” Gennady lay down on the ice, arms stretched above his head.

  “And has it displaced vodka in your heart?”

  “Of course not. But it isn’t bad,” Gennady said, and took another swig. His lips looked wet and shiny in the moonlight, and Daniel nearly leaned in to kiss him.

  But then Gennady wiped his lips and sat up again.

  Maybe, probably, almost certainly it was entirely one-sided on Daniel’s part. Maybe he was j
ust incapable of going very long without falling in love with someone, and Gennady was there to be loved.

  And then in the middle of March, they had a breakthrough in the case.

  ***

  They had stopped at a field office in Cincinnati so Daniel could send in a report. He ought to state it baldly, he thought – “No new leads in months” – and then perhaps Mr. Gilman would shut down the case, and end their partnership, and Daniel would no longer have the opportunity to stare longingly at Gennady’s mouth.

  Instead, he was trying to think how to gussy up his report so the case still sounded promising. Eke out a few more weeks of partnership with Gennady. Torture himself a little more.

  “Agent Daniel Hawthorne?” the secretary said. “We’ve got a message for you.”

  “For me?” Daniel said.

  He felt sick. It had to be a message from Mr. Gilman, closing the case for lack of progress.

  The secretary handed over a slip of paper. “From a Daniel Jones of the Des Moines Police Department.”

  Daniel managed to draw in a breath. Then he read the message.

  Found stolen Mauser in glove compartment of Congressman Abbott’s son.

  ***

  “I pulled Peter Abbott over for reckless driving,” Officer Jones explained. Daniel and Gennady had driven back to Des Moines and met Jones, at his insistence, in a diner rather than the police department. “I asked to see license and registration, and when he leans over to open the glove compartment, there’s the gun. Scared me half to death. So I ask, ‘Have you got a permit for that?’ And then he got real squirrely, and started babbling away about how it’s his father’s gun, and that’s when I connected the last name to our conversation…”

  “Thank God you did,” Daniel said warmly. “This is the first good lead that we’ve had in months.”

  Jones expanded with pride. “So I took him and the gun back to the station,” he explained. “And sure enough, it’s the missing gun. I told my chief, ‘That’s wanted in an ongoing FBI investigation,’ and he says to me, ‘Shit, son.’ Because he’d contacted Congressman Abbott the moment that I radioed in that I had arrested Peter Abbott, and the congressman wanted his gun back.”