Honeytrap Read online

  It took a while, and two changes of water, but at last Gennady’s side was clean again. The wound still oozed blood, but the bandages in the first aid kit would be enough to handle it. “You’re a lucky stiff,” Daniel said. “We won’t need to go to the hospital.”

  Gennady huffed out a breath.

  Daniel was feeling sick again. He had put this next part out of his mind, but now he’d have to face it. “We’re going to need to disinfect the wound,” he said, and hoped that his voice sounded calm and steady. “I’ve got the iodine ready. It’s going to hurt, but it has to be done.”

  Gennady closed his eyes. “Make it quick.”

  “I’ll give you one of my belts to bite. They used to do that in the Revolutionary War when the doctors had to saw a soldier’s limb off.”

  “Yes,” said Gennady. “They did this during the war, once the anesthesia ran out.”

  “Oh.” The syllable turned into a hurt animal sound as Daniel said it. He swallowed again, although there was no spit left in his mouth.

  “I won’t scream,” Gennady promised. Sweat glistened on his face. “Someone might call the police if they heard.”

  “Gennady, we really can go to the hospital…”

  “No.”

  Daniel fetched the belt. Gennady shoved it in between his teeth and bit down. The eye-stinging scent of iodine filled the room as Daniel poured it onto a handkerchief.

  “Now,” Daniel said, and pressed the handkerchief to the wound.

  Gennady did not scream. His whole body arched, and his breath came in short fast pants, like an injured animal’s. Daniel could hear his molars grinding behind the belt.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Daniel said, as much for himself as Gennady. “Almost done, almost done. I’m so sorry. All right – all right. All done.”

  There was only a little blood on the iodine-soaked handkerchief. “It’s all right,” Daniel said again, and tossed the handkerchief aside. He taped a bandage over Gennady’s wound, and sat back to look up at him.

  Gennady brushed tears roughly from the corners of his eyes. “Did I scream?”

  “No.”

  Gennady cleared his throat. He sounded hoarse. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” Daniel told him. “Let’s get you a glass of water.”

  Gennady insisted on holding the glass for himself. Water sluiced out of the sides of his mouth, dribbling down his chin, but he got most of it down, and then settled the empty glass on his knee, holding it steady with both hands.

  “Vodka?” he asked.

  “I’ve got brandy.”

  “Give it to me.”

  Daniel measured two fingers of brandy into the glass, and Gennady kicked them back without batting an eyelash at the burn.

  “All right,” Daniel said. “I’m going to get this cleaned up, and then… No. first I’m going to get you a shirt. I don’t want you catching a cold on top of everything else.” He had felt hot while he cleaned the wound, an effect of nerves perhaps, but now he could feel the ambient chill of the room. The damn heater hadn’t warmed it up at all. “I’ll lend you one of my flannel pajama tops. It’s warm and it’s old, so it doesn’t matter if you bleed on it.”

  Gennady lifted his arms so Daniel could slide them into the pajama sleeves, and sat passively as Daniel did up the buttons. “Funny,” Gennady murmured. “They told me you had a lot of experience undressing people, but they said nothing about dressing them back up.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Daniel said, smiling up at Gennady. Gennady smiled wanly back, and Daniel felt a powerful rush of tenderness for him, intense and unnerving, the desire to cup Gennady’s face in both hands and kiss his lips till there was warmth and color in his cheeks again, as if he were Sleeping Beauty and Daniel the destined prince.

  The image was so powerfully urgent in his mind that for a dizzying horrible moment he thought he had actually done it. But then he thumped back to reality, and found that his hands had nearly finished buttoning the pajama top, and Gennady was still smiling, a sleepy distant smile as if he were imagining something nice.

  “Do you want me to set up the pillows so you can sleep propped up?” Daniel asked.

  Gennady looked startled to be recalled to the present. “I don’t know.”

  Daniel bit his lip. “If I got the pajama bottoms out for you,” he ventured, “do you think you could put them on yourself?”

  Gennady’s face took on a look that Daniel could only interpret as please don’t make me. “It’s just that your pants will get blood on the sheets,” Daniel said apologetically. “We’ll have to throw that suit out, Gennady.”

  “Throw the suit out?”

  “I’ll buy you a new one tomorrow, just like Mack said.”

  Gennady’s brow furrowed. At last he nodded. “We can’t get blood on the sheets,” he said. “If you’ll help me with my shoes. And the belt.”

  Daniel took off Gennady’s shoes, and his socks for good measure. The belt was more of a struggle, and he could feel his face flushing, and hated himself for his awareness of their proximity even under these circumstances.

  Fortunately, Gennady managed to effect the change into pajamas while Daniel took the bloodied clothes out to the dumpster. He had moved to the clean bed, and sat atop the cover as if he’d run out of energy to pull back the blankets. Daniel’s pajamas were too big for him, and he looked small and startled and wary as Daniel came into the room.

  “It’s just me,” Daniel said softly. Gennady nodded, and Daniel added, “Don’t you think you’d be more comfortable under the blankets?”

  Gennady’s brow crinkled thoughtfully.

  “Here,” said Daniel, more gently. He folded back the blanket on the other side of the bed. “Why don’t you get under the covers, Gennady?”

  Gennady understood the gesture, if not the words. He gingerly moved himself over onto the sheet, and began to say something in Russian, Ty budyesh – then stopped, and mumbled, “You will be here?”

  He had used the ty form – the informal form. Daniel touched Gennady’s hair lightly. “Of course,” Daniel said. “Go to sleep, tovarisch. Did I say it right that time?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad.” Daniel pulled the blanket up, tucking it gently under Gennady’s chin, and barely restrained himself from kissing his forehead. “You can teach me the proper way to say it in the morning.”

  Gennady’s eyelids flickered shut. Daniel wanted to lie down beside him, to cradle Gennady in the curve of his body and kiss the tender places behind his ears and murmur soft things into his neck; to take care of him and protect him from the world.

  “Prostitye,” Gennady murmured. Forgive me.

  “It’s okay,” Daniel assured him.

  Daniel tossed a pillow and blanket in the narrow space between Gennady’s bed and the wall. Then he settled down alongside the bed, like a faithful dog, to keep watch during the night.

  Chapter 15

  Gennady woke up the next morning dizzy and disoriented and in pain. His side throbbed; his throat hurt; his mouth felt dry as toast.

  He couldn’t do anything about the rest of it, but a glass of water might help his throat. He sat up, and stayed still for a long moment till spots stopped dancing before his eyes, and then very gingerly swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

  His feet connected with something soft, which grunted at the contact. “Daniel,” said Gennady. “Why are you on the floor?”

  Daniel was wiping sleep out of his eyes. “I wanted to be close by in case you needed anything. Do you need something? I don’t think you ought to be getting up.”

  “Water,” Gennady said.

  Daniel disappeared. Gennady rubbed his face, and noticed with surprise that he was wearing Daniel’s pajamas. Oh, Daniel; and Gennady felt a sentimental softness toward him, and a sort of horror at the thought of the honeytrap, a horrible thing to do to someone so good and kind and trusting who deserved only good things in this world. How could he have ever considered
it?

  But of course it had not been his own idea, but Arkady’s.

  That moment in Mack’s office yesterday – that was the sort of excuse Arkady always came up with, “I’d better get a look at that wound,” when really he did not care at all, he just wanted Gennady to sit on his desk with his shirt off.

  Of course Gennady knew really that Mack was not like that, he really had just wanted to make sure that Gennady would not bleed to death in his office. But all the same he had been so grateful when Daniel stepped in, and wished that he could thank him, except it was impossible without explaining about Arkady, which he could not do. Give the Americans a piece of blackmail material against an important Soviet intelligence asset like Arkady Anatolyevich? No.

  “Are you all right?” Daniel asked.

  Gennady looked up, startled, and held out his hands for the glass of water, although lifting his left arm hurt his wound. Still, he managed to drink the water on his own, and only spilled a little.

  “How are you feeling?” Daniel asked.

  “Terrible.”

  Daniel looked startled, then smiled ruefully. “Well, you did just get stabbed. Christ! I’m sorry. Do you want some aspirin?”

  “Yes. Aspirin,” Gennady said, and took three. “It’s not your fault,” he added. “Peter Abbott…” He could not think how to finish that sentence, either in English or Russian. He would have liked to drink a big glass of vodka and crawl back under the covers, but no. They had to go out again, redeem themselves for yesterday’s failures. He stood, and was pleased that he swayed only slightly. “We should get going.”

  “Gennady?” Daniel’s hands were on his shoulders. The touch was very light, but in Gennady’s current state immobilizing. “I think you should lie down again. Take it easy today.”

  “No,” Gennady said, although his head was swimming. “Breakfast. Meat will put iron in my blood.”

  ***

  “Toast and scrambled eggs and sausage,” Gennady told the waitress. “And orange juice.”

  He wished for good strong Russian tea, or at least coffee and a cigarette. But any one of those things would go to his head in this state, and if he weakened even slightly Daniel would bundle him back into bed.

  Daniel looked unhappy enough as it was. “Gennady,” he began, once the waitress had gone.

  “You let Peter Abbott get away,” Gennady reminded him sternly. “We have to find him.”

  Daniel rubbed his hands over his face. He looked tired. Well, that was his own fault for sleeping on the floor. “We have to stop at the department store first,” Daniel said. “You can’t just walk around in shirt sleeves all day.”

  Gennady couldn’t face a department store. The crowds, the queues, the hours on his feet as they waited. “My other suit…”

  “Is at the dry cleaners.”

  Gennady sagged. Suddenly everything seemed too loud and bright: the plates clattering in the back of the diner, the gurgle of the coffee maker, the hot burned scent of the coffee. He pressed his palms against the sticky table. His side hurt.

  “Gennady?” Daniel said. “You okay?”

  Gennady was so tired he wanted to crawl into Daniel’s half of the booth and lie down with his head in Daniel’s lap.

  But then the waitress arrived with the orange juice, and the tart citrus taste cleared his head and awakened his stomach. When the food arrived, he gingerly nibbled his toast.

  The toast went down easy, and even most of the scrambled eggs, but the greasy sausage defeated him. The third time he gagged on a bite, Daniel said, “Just leave it, Gennady.”

  “That’s wasteful.”

  Daniel transferred the sausage from Gennady’s plate to his own. “Then I’ll eat it,” he said. “Waitress? Another orange juice, please?”

  Another orange juice appeared: that magical American service again. It was good, freshly squeezed, and between the juice and the food Gennady felt more alert already. He would probably not faint in the department store queues.

  “So,” said Gennady. “This department store.”

  “Have you been to a department store?”

  Gennady bristled. “We have department stores,” he said. “Our GUM is very famous, very beautiful.”

  “But not an American department store.” A smile spread across Daniel’s face. “I’ll take you to Younkers. You’re in for a treat.”

  ***

  Moscow’s flagship department store, GUM, was a vast arcaded architectural masterpiece, built in the days of Catherine the Great, probably before the United States had even become a nation.

  Gennady clutched this fact to his heart as Daniel led him into Younkers, a seven-story behemoth that bustled with shoppers. It was busy, but not crowded – no queues at all, of course not, this was America, here you did not see people waiting in line for hours.

  If Gennady had been feeling better, he could have viewed Younkers with detached scorn: capitalistic excess, all of it, rows upon rows of unnecessary clothes, probably too expensive for the working people to buy anyway.

  But he was too tired to summon detachment and instead only felt sad. Galya would have loved to shop here; she so loved pretty clothes and bright colors. “You look like a stilyaga,” he once teased her, and she smacked his shoulder but looked pleased, all the same. The stilyagi wore loud ludicrous clothes and listened to American jazz, hooligans, bums and yet – well, they living their lives, at least, you could not say that about everybody.

  Oksana would have loved this department store, too. She hated waiting in lines, and here she would not have to, she could have just walked in and chosen from racks and racks of clothes in every size and style and color, so many choices that Gennady felt overwhelmed. Daniel waylaid a helpful saleswoman – “This chump ironed a hole in his own suit, can you believe it?” Daniel said, big American smile, and the saleswoman smiled back. A pretty girl, soft dark hair, Jewish perhaps, like Galya. “Could you round up a half dozen suits for us?”

  In Moscow this would have earned nothing but scoffs, but the American saleswoman did it with a smile. “This one’s thirty percent off,” she said, and so Gennady took that suit and fled into the dressing room, where he lit a cigarette to calm his nerves.

  It really was too much. Just one style of suits, or maybe two, in all the different sizes – that would have been enough.

  It took him some time to get dressed: he had to move carefully for fear of reopening the wound. But he managed it, and looked at himself in the mirror, and surprised himself into a smile: and as long as he was smiling, he thought, he really might pass for an American, as long as he did not speak. The accent would give him away.

  “You okay in there?” Daniel asked.

  Gennady started, and winced: the movement pulled at his injured side. “Yes. The suit fits.”

  “Come out and let me see it.”

  “I can tell if a suit fits,” Gennady complained.

  But he came out anyway. Daniel sat on a bench across from the dressing rooms, his legs stretched out in front of him, but when Gennady emerged he straightened up and looked him over.

  It was a light gaze, almost clinical, but nonetheless it made Gennady uncomfortable. “Well?”

  Daniel rummaged through the suits. “You ought to try on some of the others.”

  “Why? This fits.”

  “All of these suits will fit,” Daniel said. “You ought to get one that looks good on you. Here.” He thrust forward a charcoal gray suit with a narrower waist. “Try this one.”

  “Do I have to try it on? If you are so sure it will fit?”

  “Gennady.”

  Gennady retreated into the dressing room. He had never thought much about clothes, but once he had changed, even he could tell this suit looked better, trimmer. More attractive.

  Get an American suit, Arkady had said.

  “I like the other one better,” Gennady said.

  “Really?” Daniel sounded disbelieving.

  “More comfortable.”

  “R
eally? Is this one too tight in the waist?”

  Gennady came out of the dressing room. Daniel looked at him, and his gaze grew suddenly bright and warm, and Gennady nearly turned around and went right back inside the dressing room.

  He set his jaw instead and sat down beside Daniel, slouching and crossing his arms over his chest. Daniel started to laugh. “What?” Gennady snapped.

  “You just remind me of my sister. She hated shopping when we were kids. Every time Mom made her try on a particularly darling dress, she’d slouch just like that.”

  Pretty Anna, with holly in her hair. Gennady found it hard to picture her slouching and sulking, and then not hard at all: he could see it as if there had been a snapshot of the scene in Daniel’s photo album, and his heart went out to her.

  “Probably she felt ridiculous,” Gennady said.

  “Do you feel ridiculous?” Daniel asked. “You look good, you know.”

  Gennady looked up. Their eyes met, Daniel’s eyes a warm soft brown, and Gennady wanted quite suddenly to kiss him, and no alcohol to blame it on this time, although of course everyone knew that blood loss left you muddled, not enough blood in the brain.

  “Gennady?” Daniel said softly, and Gennady bit his lip and looked away.

  That was when he saw Peter Abbott, standing in the aisle just across the way, looking at the hats. Come to buy his disguise at the department store.

  Gennady nudged Daniel, just a light rib in the elbows, and Daniel followed his eyes and snapped to attention like a hunting dog. They exchanged glances, a few small hand motions, and then Daniel was up – that hunting dog tension gone – ambling as if he hadn’t a care in the world to cut Peter Abbott off from the far end of his aisle.

  Gennady slid, very slowly, to the end of the bench, watching Peter Abbott from the corner of his eye. The boy remained totally absorbed in the process of choosing the right hat, like a child playing dress-up.

  At last Daniel appeared at the far end of the aisle. “Peter Abbott?” he said pleasantly.

  Peter Abbott dropped the hat. Gennady rose just as Peter Abbott turned to flee, and Peter stopped dead at the sight of him.