Honeytrap Page 13

  “No, no, you’ve been a lot of help,” Daniel said. “Is there anywhere on campus to eat? Snack bar or something like that?”

  “They do good burgers at the Grill in the Union. It’s just across the quad – the building with the turrets. You can’t miss it.”

  ***

  “She liked you,” Daniel said.

  They were sitting at a corner table at the Union Grill. Gennady was carefully rearranging the onions on his burger for maximum coverage, and did not look up at Daniel. “She is young, she is bored, she is just passing the time. Flirting is a pleasant way to do that,” he said.

  “She would’ve gone out with you if you asked,” Daniel said, feeling rather as if he were picking at a scab.

  “Or with you,” Gennady shot back. “Go ask her. A date will be good for you.” He waved a hand, as if shooing Daniel away to go get laid.

  Daniel slouched. “It’s not a good idea to ask witnesses out of dates.”

  Gennady huffed out a sigh and took a pointedly enormous bite of his burger. Daniel toyed with a fry, hating himself. He felt like a bizarre funhouse reflection of Paul and he did not know how to stop.

  Gennady swallowed. He took a swig of soda. “Hurry up and eat. How can you be so slow when we are finally making progress?” Gennady tried to steal a few of Daniel’s fries. Daniel smacked his hand, and Gennady withdrew with an exaggerated show of pain. Daniel snorted and started to eat his fries himself.

  After all, Gennady had a point. Not about Sylvia Winfield, of course, it really was a bad idea to date a witness, but in general. It had simply been too long since Daniel had gotten laid. His own fault for mooning over Gennady, of course. He should have spent those endless winter evenings in bars scoping out the available ladies, instead of watching Gennady’s hands on the pool cue, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, displaying his lean muscled forearms…

  Ah, fuck.

  “Who is Ed Gein?” Gennady asked.

  “A murderer,” Daniel said. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Gein came from Wisconsin, and Daniel could not help feeling that this was a point of shame for his home state. “Everyone in his hometown thought he was just this harmless ineffectual loner until they found out that he had killed some people pretty gruesomely.”

  “Mmm. A Peter Abbott type.”

  “You can see why he came into Sylvia Winfield’s mind.” Daniel took a bite of his club sandwich. “When’s Peter Abbott’s next class?”

  Gennady opened the registrar’s folder to check. He made a face. “Tomorrow morning. Well, so we will have time to prepare. Or perhaps he will come in for a snack?”

  He looked up hopefully, as if Peter Abbott might magically materialize. Peter Abbott did not, so Gennady stole another one of Daniel’s fries (Daniel let him this time), and bent the study the transcript. The sunlight slanted down through the high window to light on his hair, his hands.

  Daniel caught himself looking, and tore his gaze away, fixing it instead on the door to the Union Grill, just in case Peter did appear. The place was quiet at this hour, and only a few people came in: a young couple holding hands, a knot of girls in plaid skirts, a professorial type who looked around as if baffled to find himself in this place, and walked back out.

  “How do these grades work?” Gennady asked.

  Daniel looked back over at him. “The highest is A. The lowest is F.”

  A pause. Gennady tapped one finger on the table, as if counting up. “Is there an E?”

  “No. I guess E slept in the day that they were inventing letter grades.”

  Gennady made a face at him. “So Peter’s grades,” he said, pushing them across the table to Daniel. “They are bad, and getting worse. Last spring, about the time he took the Mauser – two Fs. Do you think he planned to shoot himself?”

  “Maybe.” Khrushchev’s visit to America hadn’t even been planned yet, let alone announced, so Peter could not have planned to shoot him when he first took the gun.

  “But then he chickened?”

  Daniel looked away. “Or he thought better of it once he actually had the gun. That might have made it feel more… real, I guess.”

  Daniel had thought about killing himself after John beat him it. It was not the injuries that drove him to it, his bruises had almost healed by then, but the prospective shame if John told everyone that Daniel had kissed him. Rumors flying across campus, whispers everywhere he went, expulsion from the frat, expulsion from the college maybe, and if his parents found out…

  Daniel had crept down the stairs and slipped into the library to open the top left-hand drawer on his father’s desk, and take out his father’s service revolver. But the shock of the cold gun against his skin, the weight of it, had jolted Daniel back to reality. If he shot himself that was it, the end, his life burning out like a reel halfway through a picture, so you never did find out how the story ended; and he did not want his story to be over. There had to be another way out.

  And three days later, an army recruitment poster suggested a solution. He could enlist to fight in the Korean War. A good, solid, patriotic escape.

  Peter Abbott, on the other hand, had gone back to college. Of course it was not exactly a parallel situation, but nonetheless…

  “I feel kind of sorry for him,” Daniel admitted.

  “Do you?” Gennady sounded disdainful.

  Daniel felt startled – almost hurt. “Don’t you? He’s sort of pathetic.”

  “If his bullet had hit our Nikita Sergeyevich,” Gennady said, “there would have been war. Nuclear war, probably, perhaps an end to all life on earth. And for what? Because a rich boy is sad he is too stupid to follow the path his father set out for him? If he had shot himself for that reason – that would be pitiable. This…” Gennady shook his head. “He is sad, so the whole world should end? No. This is evil, and it will be good when we catch him.”

  Chapter 13

  In truth, Gennady felt that he had better nip this talk about feeling sorry for Peter Abbott in the bud: he did not need any such thing to find its way into his dossier. You felt sorry for the dog who tried to shoot our Nikita Sergeyevich? Traitor! Scum! Ten years in the camps!

  It didn’t matter anyway how Daniel and Gennady felt about him. Peter Abbott had to be caught, so it was better to feel nothing at all.

  After they finished their late lunch, they meandered toward Peter’s dorm, and wandered through the parking lot behind it, where they found the Thunderbird. Daniel took the precaution of letting the air out of Peter’s tires. “A terrible thing to do to such a fine car,” Gennady said.

  “All’s fair in love and war,” Daniel told him.

  They knocked on Peter’s door, but no one answered. Daniel chatted for a very long time to with housemother, who complained at length about the hoodlums on the fourth floor while Daniel nodded and made small sympathetic noises.

  “Was this a good use of our time?” Gennady complained afterward, when they went to try Peter’s door again.

  “She told us he’s still on campus,” Daniel said. “His daddy hasn’t spirited him out of the country to Montenegro. That’s something.”

  “If we ever manage to meet him face to face.” Gennady knocked sharply on Peter’s door.

  But once again, no one answered. “Why don’t we hit the campus bar?” Daniel suggested. “It’s a Friday night. Maybe Peter’s out drowning his sorrows.”

  Peter was not in the campus bar, but Daniel and Gennady got beers anyway, and settled down in a wooden booth scarred with carved hearts and initials. They had not eaten since their lunch at the Union Grill – the housemother had not offered so much as a cracker – and by the end of his first beer Gennady felt mellow. “I’m getting another.”

  “You wanna slow down on the drinking?”

  “No.” Gennady slipped out of the booth and patted Daniel’s head clumsily.

  He did buy a snack to go along with his beer: a basket of fries, the only food that the bar served. It disappointed him slightly. He had hop
ed for something exotic, like the pickled pig’s trotters they found in a southern Indiana bar. He had not particularly liked those, but still it was something to have tried them. And now his time for trying American foods was running out, because they were closing in on Peter Abbott, and their trip was almost over…

  The fries were hot and crisp and salty, very pleasant with the beer. Gennady ate a handful and asked Daniel, “What is a drive-in movie theater like?”

  “What?”

  “Sylvia Winfield said that Peter took her to one. Way out in the country. What is the point of driving so far when you could see the movie in a regular theater close by?”

  “The movie isn’t the point,” Daniel said. “The point is to climb into the backseat and make out.”

  Gennady stared at him. Then he started to laugh.

  “What?” Daniel snapped.

  “Was this your plan?” Gennady asked. “Last fall, when we drove from DC to Des Moines, and you were sad the drive-in theaters were closed? Were you going to – ?”

  “Shut up!” Daniel hissed. He lunged across the table, as if to put his hands over Gennady’s mouth, but Gennady batted his hands away easily.

  “Were you? Were you? Did the FBI tell you to honeytrap me? And when this did not work, you shrugged your shoulders and said, ah well, better try a strip club, he is more likely to respond to a woman anyway?”

  Daniel fell back in his seat. “No, you moron,” he said. “Not everything’s about blackmail, you know. And making out isn’t the only reason people go to drive-ins. Haven’t you ever heard of an exaggeration? That’s just why couples go there on dates. Helen and I used to go to the drive-in outside of Shinocqua to make out in the backseat.” His eyes grew far away. “That’s where I lost my virginity.”

  “At a drive-in?” Gennady was scandalized – it sounded so public! – and yet oddly delighted.

  “Not at the drive-in. In the backseat. We drove out to the Point – it’s a lookout over Lake Michigan, so you could see the water and the stars and the lighthouse way off on the rocks…”

  Gennady balled up a napkin and tossed it at him. “You’re a romantic.”

  Daniel grinned sheepishly. “We wanted to do it on the beach,” he admitted. “But it was too cold, so we went back to the car.”

  “Too cold? Did you take your girl to the beach in January?”

  “It was July,” Daniel protested.

  “And you thought it was too cold? Americans!” Gennady stabbed a French fry at Daniel. “It is too cold to go to a drive-in now, though. You’ve lost your chance.”

  Daniel buried his head in his arms. “Gennady…”

  Gennady did not for a moment believe that Daniel had been sent to honeytrap him, but the idea gave him an unholy glee, and he could not resist needling Daniel about it. “You should have gotten me drunk. I would not have minded.”

  Daniel lifted his head to stare. “Really?”

  “Didn’t I tell you that you are very pretty?”

  “Gennady – ” exasperated.

  Gennady laughed. “Of course the blackmail – that part would have been unpleasant.”

  “Gennady! Do you really think that I’m out to blackmail you any way I can?”

  Daniel sounded so genuinely pained that Gennady grew serious. “No,” Gennady assured him. “No, my friend, I’m only teasing. It was just funny, the way you said – about the drive-in theaters – ” He started giggling again.

  Daniel groaned.

  Gennady smacked his back. “No, no. I don’t believe you are plotting evil against me. Even in the beginning, when you suggested the strip club, it was just exuberance of spirits, wasn’t it? But I didn’t know you yet, it would have been wrong to be too trusting. Don’t look so sad,” he added, because Daniel still looked truly pained. “After all, you would only be doing what you are told to do. What is that saying? About love and war?”

  “‘All’s fair in love and war,’” Daniel said, and then added, “But our countries aren’t at war.”

  “No. This would be a bad place for me if we were: in the middle of the United States, with no way out.”

  They fell silent. The noise of the bar rose up around them: the clink of pool balls, the clatter of glasses, a collective whoop from a group of young men.

  Gennady’s light-hearted mood fell away from him. He drained his beer. “I do not think Peter will come here tonight.”

  “No,” Daniel agreed. “That would be too easy.”

  On their way out, they passed a countertop littered with flyers and magazines. They had passed it on their way in, too, but this time Daniel paused, and after a moment’s puzzlement, Gennady saw why: half-buried amid the welter of magazines lay half a dozen copies of The Good Shepherd.

  “The Durrell student,” Gennady remembered. “Selling the magazine door to door to pay his tuition. He must have left his extras here.”

  Daniel plucked one from the pile. “Well,” he said. “Guess that explains how Peter got a copy.”

  ***

  The next morning, Gennady and Daniel took up a position perhaps twenty yards from Peter Abbott’s Applied Mathematics classroom. Gennady leaned against the wall below the windows and watched the students as they came: mostly young men, but a few girls too, all too intent on their own conversations to do more than glance incuriously at Daniel and Gennady.

  Except for Peter. If Peter had kept moving, Gennady might not have been able to pick him out from the crowd; but when Peter saw Daniel in his snappy FBI suit, he stopped stock still, and his blandly handsome face paled.

  Then Peter turned tail and bolted, disappearing down the stairs the way he had come. Gennady made a move to go after him, but Daniel put a hand on his shoulder.

  Gennady subsided against the wall, but he objected, “What if he tries to run away?”

  “He’s not going to get very far in the Thunderbird. And you’d be surprised how few people try to run anyway,” Daniel said. He folded his arms over his chest. Only a few last straggling students were into class now. The classroom door closed, and the hall was silent. “Paul and I caught more than a few guys just by hanging out till they confessed. They knew why we were there and eventually their nerves cracked.”

  “With Peter Abbott this might take one interview.” Any doubts Gennady had harbored about Peter’s guilt had evaporated: not just because he ran, but because unlike all the other students he had noticed them, and knew at once why they were there.

  ***

  Peter did not show up for his next class that afternoon. “I do not think he can afford to skip class, with his grades,” Gennady said, disapproving.

  “I bet he’s too nervous to study, too,” Daniel said. “Probably quaking in his boots somewhere.”

  “Quaking…?”

  “Hiding. Shivering in fright. Peter Rabbit,” Daniel said, and his mouth flipped up in a half-smile. “I bet he’s been saddled with that nickname more than once. Did Beatrix Potter ever make it to the Soviet Union? Children’s stories about naughty rabbits getting shot at by gardeners?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Gennady said, and he felt a sort of relief as he said it. It was odd, he had always been so eager to devour the pieces of American culture that made it to the Soviet Union, and yet now that he was in America, it distressed him a little to see how little Soviet culture had come to America in return.

  They went back to Peter’s dorm, and knocked on his door again. This time someone answered, but only Peter’s roommate, Kenneth Price, as the nametag taped to the door proclaimed. “Peter’s gone to class,” Kenneth Price said, in response to Daniel’s question. Then he added, as if he couldn’t quite believe it, “You want to see Peter?”

  “Is that unusual?” Daniel asked.

  “Well…” Kenneth eyed Daniel’s suit doubtfully. “What do you want him for?”

  “Just to chat,” Daniel said, with a smile.

  Gennady peered past Kenneth into the room, hoping to see a photograph of Khrushchev with a target drawn on
it, or perhaps a bulletin board headed “Assassination Plans.” Sadly, Peter was not so careless. “Was Peter a Boy Scout?”

  Kenneth looked startled by Gennady’s accent. “Um, I don’t really know. We’re not exactly friends, I just got assigned to room with him because my previous roommate graduated early… What’s all this about?” Kenneth half-closed the door, shutting off the view of the room.

  “We just need to ask him a few questions, that’s all,” Daniel said, flashing another all-American smile. He removed a card from his breast pocket. “In connection with…”

  “Classified matters,” Gennady rapped out, unsmiling.

  Kenneth looked between them, and then slowly, as if Daniel might bite, plucked the card from his hand. “I’ll let him know.”

  “And if he tries to run for it,” Daniel said, smiling even more widely, “you’ll give me a call, won’t you, Kenneth?”

  Kenneth’s voice rose slightly. “What’s all this about?”

  “Don’t worry,” Gennady told him, still unsmiling. “He’s no danger to you.”

  Kenneth looked not at all reassured. He nodded slowly and shut the door.

  ***

  Their web of circumstantial evidence grew. They discovered that Peter had indeed been a Boy Scout, and attended Camp DuBois five years in a row. They found a filling station owner on Peter’s route from Honeygold who remembered the turquoise Thunderbird on the fateful day. “Just the car, though,” Daniel complained as they drove away. “Didn’t even look at the driver. That’s filling station operators for you. A defense attorney could rip that apart in court.”

  “We still have the speeding ticket,” Gennady reminded him.

  He felt that it was not so much frustration with the filling station owner that made Daniel grumpy, anyway, but a more general frustration because they could not get an interview with Peter Abbott. He was never in his dorm room (“I think Kenneth kicked him out,” Daniel opined. “Doesn’t want to be murdered in his sleep”), and he turned tail and ran whenever he saw them.