Honeytrap Read online

  “Yes, of course. But that doesn’t mean we’re friends.”

  “But that’s what being friends means.” Daniel looked baffled.

  “That’s only the beginning of friendship,” Gennady told him. “Friendship means trust and loyalty and…” How to explain the difference between friendliness and friendship to such a promiscuously friendly people as the Americans?

  Gennady gave it up as impossible. “Listen, Daniel. If we could be friends, then I would want you to tell me all of these things, to pour your heart out to me. But as it is, you should keep your mouth shut and think whether you want the Soviet Union to know all of this about you.”

  That, at least, Daniel understood. His eyes widened again. “You won’t…”

  “No, I won’t, but I am not the only Soviet agent in the world, Daniel. You can’t be so careless about who you kiss, you can’t go around spilling your heart out to just anyone, and especially not to me, when you already know that I am an agent of an enemy state.”

  “But that doesn’t mean we’re enemies.”

  “Daniel.” Gennady was exasperated. “Just because we are enemies doesn’t mean we have to hate each other. We can like each other very much even, but at the end of the day we are still enemies. We will always be enemies.”

  “Always?”

  “Unless you become a communist, I suppose,” Gennady said.

  Daniel released a long shaky breath. “So – always,” he said. His face crumpled abruptly; he shut his eyes tight. “You must despise me. A pervert and an idiot.”

  Gennady cupped Daniel’s cheek and turned Daniel’s face up toward him. “Of course I don’t despise you, Daniil, don’t be silly. It was very foolish, but after all, you are very drunk; and Soviet agents are not so prudish as your Mr. Gilman thinks, I know these things happen.”

  Daniel blinked up at him. His eyelashes brushed Gennady’s palm like butterfly wings. Gennady kissed his cheeks soundly, then pulled him to his feet. “Come on,” Gennady said. “Let’s find a motel. Perhaps you won’t even remember this in the morning.”

  Chapter 17

  Daniel woke up lying on top of a bedspread, fully clothed but shoeless, with a dull headache and a cottony mouth and only the vaguest idea where he was. A motel room, clearly, although he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. The last thing he remembered…

  He buried his face in the pillow as mortification broke over him in waves.

  Kissing Gennady. And Gennady had been so pliant at first, his lips parting, questioning, his hands gentle against Daniel’s chest…

  Until he slammed Daniel against the car. You idiot!

  He had really thought Gennady was going to beat him up. The way he flung Daniel against the car – God, he was strong; slung Daniel like a sack of potatoes.

  Gennady’s hands on his shoulders, the furious glitter of his eyes. Daniel’s heart pounding in his chest, the struggle to breathe. Like John all over again…

  How the hell could Daniel have been so stupid?

  The alcohol had blotted most of their conversation out of Daniel’s memory, but he remembered about the honeytrap. God, Gennady would be in a load of trouble if the KGB ever found out he had betrayed his secret mission to an American agent. Did they still shoot people in the Soviet Union for that sort of thing?

  Not that they would ever find out. Only Daniel knew, and even if he could have told without incriminating himself, he wouldn’t.

  Gennady must hate him now.

  Except… Daniel remembered the affectionate way Gennady had said Daniil, the Russian form of his name. And those kisses at the end of the conversation, one on each cheek. Just kisses of friendship. Daniel had seen the Polyakovs kiss their émigré friends just like that.

  In fact old Mrs. Polyakov used to finish off the cheek kissing with a kiss on the lips with her lady friends, which always made Daniel and his sister Anna giggle (a lady kissing another lady!). But of course Gennady must have known how easily this could be misinterpreted, given the context.

  Daniel sat up slowly. He swung his legs out of bed, and had to grip the mattress to steady himself.

  Gennady had left him a glass of water on the bedside table. A note, too, held down by the corner of the ashtray. Having breakfast at the café across the street. G. I. Matskevich.

  Daniel tucked the note in his breast pocket and smoothed it. Then he drank the water and slowly stood. The movement set his head spinning. All right: no shaving this morning.

  In fact, even changing out of yesterday night’s rumpled clothes seemed too much to contemplate without the aid of coffee. In any case it was already… He checked the clock. 9:58. Shit. Would Gennady even still be at the café?

  Of course he would. Gennady was probably on his third muffin and his fifth cup of coffee, reveling in the chance to linger over a three-hour breakfast.

  Daniel stuck his feet in his shoes and shuffled out of the room. He was, he discovered, in room six at the Sunrise Motel, in the town of… Well, some town in Iowa, probably. Unless they’d made it to Illinois the night before.

  There was indeed a café right across the street: the Westport Diner. Gennady sat reading in a booth by the window, visible from the motel room, and Daniel stood for a long moment and stared at him, mortified all over again. He did not know how to face him.

  Then Gennady looked up and saw him, and smiled, and Daniel melted with relief. He hurried to cross the street.

  When Daniel approached the booth, Gennady pushed a plate bearing a half-eaten cinnamon roll toward him. “Daniel,” Gennady said. “Have you had one of these?”

  It was so characteristic and normal and utterly unchanged from yesterday that Daniel could have cried. “A cinnamon roll? Sure.”

  Gennady gave him a look of deepest betrayal: Daniel had let the side down by not telling him about cinnamon rolls long ago. “They’re very good here. You should get one.”

  Daniel lowered himself into the other side of the booth with a groan that was only partly faked. “I’ll see if I can survive coffee and toast.”

  Gennady’s eyes half-closed, in that look that made him look like a contented cat. “Overhang?” he taunted.

  “Hungover?” Daniel taunted back. He expropriated Gennady’s coffee cup. Gennady snagged it back before Daniel could get a sip.

  “Remember anything from last night?” Gennady asked, his tone slightly mocking.

  But Daniel could see the real question in Gennady’s eyes. Gennady remembered, and he knew Daniel remembered, and he was giving Daniel a chance not to speak of it ever again.

  Daniel, to his surprise, felt disappointed. But it had to be better this way.

  “I don’t even remember leaving the bar,” Daniel said, with his most hangdog expression. “I didn’t sing, did I?”

  “There were bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover all the way to the motel,” Gennady said with relish.

  “Oh no,” said Daniel, and hid his face in his hands, the mortification genuine even though the cause was spurious.

  “Coffee,” he heard Gennady saying to the waitress. “Toast. A cinnamon roll…” Daniel shook his head and groaned, and Gennady told him, “I will eat it if you can’t.”

  Once it seemed likely the waitress was gone, Daniel lifted his head. “We ought to get a move on,” he pointed out. “We’ve got a long drive ahead.”

  “Why hurry?” Gennady said. “It’s Thursday today. We could not get back before the offices are closed on Friday. And no one will be in the office over the weekend, so there is no reason to reach DC before Monday.”

  Daniel stared. “I just thought…”

  He had figured Gennady would want to dispense with his company as soon as possible after last night.

  Gennady stretched expansively. “We should take our time. Now that we’ve wrapped up the case, they’ll reassign us both when we get back.”

  Of course. They had been assigned to work together on the assassination attempt, and now that they had solved it, their partnership woul
d end.

  The waitress returned with coffee and toast and cinnamon roll. Daniel stared at the dark surface of the coffee.

  “Ilf and Petrov had only ten weeks on the highways of America,” Gennady mused. “We’ve had three months. We’re lucky, my friend.”

  “We’ll aim to get into DC on Monday, then,” Daniel conceded. “Is there anywhere in particular that you would like to see?”

  Gennady’s eyes brightened. “Well…”

  Daniel settled in with his coffee and listened as Gennady laid out an itinerary that included the Grand Canyon, the sequoias, and a visit to Key West to meet Ernest Hemingway. “You realize, of course,” Daniel said, “absolutely none of that is on our route.”

  “It’s true,” Gennady admitted, with a sigh. “Your country is too big, my friend. But still let’s see as much as we can. You have to grab happiness when you can find it.”

  Chapter 18

  As it happened, they didn’t drive far at all the first day. Gennady fell asleep about five miles down the road, and when he woke up hours later, he found that Daniel had pulled over in the shade, opened the car windows, and fallen asleep himself.

  Daniel’s cheeks were faintly flushed, his lips parted; the soft breeze ruffled his hair. There was a sweetness to his expression as he slept, and Gennady felt a painful tenderness toward him. He would have liked to touch his face.

  It had been brave in a way – yes, truly brave – for him to kiss Gennady at all.

  And Daniel had been gentle, had been asking. And had good reason to believe that Gennady might say yes: Gennady had led him on for the honeytrap, and anyway Gennady had been drunk and happy enough that he would have said yes, if it wasn’t for the honeytrap. Because people did do these things when they were drunk…

  Daniel woke, and stretched, and yawned. Gennady looked away. Daniel commented ruefully, “Neither of us are going to sleep a wink tonight.”

  “Probably we will.”

  “Probably you need it. Are you feeling all right?” Daniel made a slight movement, as if to touch Gennady’s shoulder, but pulled back with sudden embarrassment.

  Gennady felt bereft. He would have liked Daniel to put an arm around his shoulders in his old friendly way. “I’m fine,” Gennady said, in the approved American style. “Only tired. And hungry,” he added.

  “Let’s find a place to eat…lunch? Dinner?” Daniel checked his watch. “Three o’clock snack. Some chicken soup would be good for both of us. And then I guess we’ll check into a motel and see if we can drive farther tomorrow.”

  The second day was better. They purchased a picnic lunch, and ate it by a stream below one of those enchanting American covered bridges. Gennady had the supreme pleasure of watching a horse pull a shiny black wagon over the rumbling boards. “Do people still drive wagons in America?”

  “Not usually. That was an Amish buggy.”

  “Amish?” And Gennady listened with fascination as Daniel described the Amish, who used very little modern machinery, but lived their lives almost the same as they had a hundred years ago.

  But once Daniel explained the Amish, he lapsed into silence again, and sat tugging at the short spring grass. He seemed downcast now, and Gennady wondered if Daniel’s friendliness before had simply been flirtation – except that Daniel was friendly to everyone, and it couldn’t be that he was always flirting.

  No. Probably he was quiet because he was brooding on the honeytrap.

  Daniel roused himself to smile. “I got a box of cracker jack. You want some?”

  “Cracker jack?”

  “I thought maybe you wouldn’t have had it.” Daniel tossed a small bright-colored box in Gennady’s lap. “Try it. There’s always a prize at the bottom.”

  Cracker jack was like the popcorn balls at Angeline’s Halloween party, popped corn covered in caramel, good and sweet and crunchy. At the bottom of the box, Gennady found a little metal stagecoach. “That’s good,” Daniel commented. “You don’t find the metal prizes much anymore. Mostly it’s plastic these days.”

  Gennady turned the little stagecoach over in his hand. “Do you want it?”

  “Nah. You keep it. Souvenir of your trip to the States.”

  Gennady kept it in his hand as they drove on down the road, holding it tightly enough that the little wheels dug red marks into his palm.

  Early in the war, when Gennady was perhaps six or seven, his mother had made a joke about Stalin without realizing that Gennady was under the table. He still remembered her face when she caught sight of him: his mother who adored him, who recited poems to him when he couldn’t sleep, even though she was so tired herself after her long hours at work that she would fall asleep mid-line. Then, spoiled child that he was, he tugged her sleeve and demanded she go on, and she woke up and smiled at him, and continued as if she didn’t need to sleep.

  But when his mother realized he had heard her dismissive words about Stalin, for a moment she had looked at him with something like hate in her eyes. As if he were a little Pavlik Morozov. They all learned his story in school: Pavlik Morozov, the Young Pioneer murdered by his uncles for informing on his grain-hoarding father. Hero and martyr. An example for all Soviet children.

  And the next day, through God knew what black market connections, Gennady’s mother brought Gennady a chocolate bar. A bribe, although at the time he didn’t understand it as such. Because it was not safe for her to say to her own child, Don’t tell anyone what I said, don’t have me sent to the camps.

  It was terrible, terrible, when parents had to be afraid of their own children, when a worm of terror in every human heart ate away at every good thing. It had found its way even into his friendship with Daniel, who was an American and ought to be exempt – except that now he had the honeytrap hanging over his head.

  If only there was some way to show someone your soul – not with words, which so easily became lies, but some way to let a person know that they could truly trust you not to hurt them.

  But there was no way to show that except time, and Daniel might worry for quite a long time before he would believe that Gennady truly would not tell. No matter how much you loved and trusted a person, even as much as a mother loves her only child, it was impossible to feel safe if that person knew something that could destroy you, when you had no possible means of retaliation, no blackmail to hold over their head in return.

  Well, that at least could be fixed.

  “You know,” Gennady said, “I’ve admired some of the things that Khrushchev has done. Stopping Beria after Stalin died, the Secret Speech, his trip to America. But at the end of the day, really he’s been an ineffective fool.”

  The car swerved. “What?” Daniel said.

  Gennady’s heart roared in his ears. He could taste something sour in the back of his throat. “When he gave the Secret Speech…” Gennady added doggedly. “Did you ever read it?”

  “Yes, it was published in the New York Times. Gennady…”

  “It wasn’t secret really. It was read across the country, everyone was talking about it. And I thought, maybe now things will really change, maybe we will become a normal country. But then less than a year later the tanks rolled into Budapest and crushed the Hungarians and it was like the tanks rolled over any hopes of freedom in Russia, too.”

  Daniel pulled over on the grassy verge. For a moment they sat amid the buzzing insects. Gennady contemplated his imminent demise once the GRU heard about this.

  Well, perhaps not demise. He might be sent to the camps, or simply fired, certainly never allowed out of the country again. The exact punishment really depended on the political climate when they heard.

  Daniel was staring at him. “Gennady, why are you saying this?”

  Gennady felt like a beetle pinned to a card, a stupid beetle who had walked up and stuck himself on the pin because he felt sorry for the man who was having such trouble pinning him. “I thought you might worry less about the honeytrap if you knew something just as damaging about me.”

&n
bsp; Daniel continued to stare. “That’s probably the bravest, stupidest, kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

  Gennady gasped in a breath. He took his flask from his pocket. “Very stupid, yes.”

  “No, I mean all of it, Gennady,” Daniel said. “That was incredibly brave. And it was sweet of you to do it just because… well, of course I have been a little worried. It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just…”

  Daniel hesitated. Gennady took a swig. “It’s just impossible to trust anyone,” he filled in.

  Daniel looked taken aback. “Well, I wouldn’t say that exactly. It’s just… well…” He was silent for a long moment, and then burst out, “I hope you trust me enough to believe me when I say that I won’t tell anyone what you just said about Khrushchev.”

  Gennady was beginning to feel a little better. “Yes, well, so. You’d be very foolish to do it. The point is that now we both have the power to destroy each other’s lives, so neither of us can use it.”

  “It sounds less sweet when you put it that way,” Daniel said wryly.

  Well, maybe it did, but you couldn’t depend on sweetness. Mutual fear was a more reliable deterrent.

  The little metal stagecoach had fallen into Gennady’s lap. He retrieved it, and took Daniel’s hand, and put the Cracker Jack prize on his palm. “You’ll keep it?” he said.

  Daniel’s mouth curved up at the corner. “Of course,” he said. “Thank you.”

  Chapter 19

  On Monday morning they split up outside of a subway station in DC. “I guess this is goodbye,” Daniel said, trying to sound jaunty.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Gennady said. But he too lingered at the top of the steps, in the sunlight.

  “I guess there’s no point suggesting that we should keep in touch?” Daniel said, with some hope that there was.

  But Gennady shook his head. “No, no. They would frown on it very much if I exchanged letters with a known American agent.”

  “Oh. Yes, I guess my government wouldn’t like it if I wrote to a Soviet agent, either,” Daniel admitted. He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’ve never been good at goodbyes,” he confessed. “The big goodbyes, when you might not see someone again…” His voice hitched. “At least for a long time. When I shipped out to Korea, I shouted ‘See you later, alligator!’ to my sister.”