Kurt had pulled over and watched Dravko delay going inside. He sensed the general was building up the nerve to enter the arcade, and once he did, Kurt was right behind him. He found Dravko staring at the doorbell. “You’re in the right place,” he said. “At least I hope you are!” He reached past Dravko and pressed the button. A chime rang deep in the building.
“Tak?” a man said over the intercom.
“I’m the black guy who’s been here a few times,” Kurt said in English. “You’ll recognize me, and I’m bringing a friend.”
“I remember you. Too bad about the friend.”
A buzzer sounded and they went inside and descended stairs to the check-in counter. The attendant had red spiked hair and a clinging T-shirt that left no ripple unrevealed on his sculpted young body. He set out a couple of towels and dropped a loincloth on each.
Dravko held his loincloth aloft. “I am supposed to wear this?”
“It’s that or nothing,” the attendant said.
“Just leave it,” Kurt said. “How about a couple of extra towels? My friend is shy. Follow me,” he said to Dravko. “I’ll show you the ropes.”
“There are ropes?”
“Not those kind! Don’t get excited. We change in here.”
Kurt opened the door to the locker room and followed Dravko in.
“Is this your first time here? Where are you from?” Kurt asked.
“Yugoslavia.”
“You speak good English, or at least good enough to understand me.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m a long way from home, too, and kinda like it that way. Get away from the wife and all and have a bit of fun. I call this relaxation, and hell, it ain’t like I’m cheating on her.”
“You are also married?”
“You too? Shit, it’s like we were destined to meet! It’s safer that way, you know, sticking with married guys.”
Dravko didn’t know; he had entered an unknown world. And there he was, speaking to a black man, too.
“Do you always stare at strangers like that,” Kurt asked, “or are you getting ready to say something?”
“Where are you from?” Dravko stammered.
“America, can’t you tell by the skin?”
“By your skin, I think Africa.”
“Maybe my great-great-grandfather two hundred years ago, but I’m from the land of the free and home of the Braves: Atlanta, Georgia, where there’s more peach-this and peach-that than a teenager’s got zits. You ever tasted peach puddin’?”
“I don’t understand you,” Dravko confessed.
Kurt flashed him a big, friendly smile. “Talking too fast, huh? That’s what my wife says, I’m always too fast! I’ll slow it down for you. What’s your locker number? Isn’t that how it always is: with all these lockers, they give us two right next to each other. It’s like they want us to bump into each other!”
Dravko surreptitiously watched the black man undress. It startled him to be so close to one. As the clothes came off, he noticed the scars on his upper chest. When he first saw the scars on Kurt’s face, he wondered if they were tribal markings, but with so many on his chest, he worried it might be a disease.
Kurt saw his worried expression and rubbed a hand over his scars. “I know, they’re not very sexy. At least they don’t hurt, if that’s what you’re worried about. They hurt ten years ago but not now.”
“They are not a disease?”
“Don’t worry. I’m healthy.”
Kurt, naked, locked his locker and put his foot on the bench to face Dravko, who gulped at the African’s solicitous pose. “Hey, take a breath. What, you’ve never seen a naked black man before? I’ll be goddamned! That should make tonight special!”
Dravko never had seen a naked black man before, nor had he been in a place where gay sex was guaranteed, and the mere anticipation of it kept him in a state of semi-arousal. A little dazed, he stripped off his briefs without thinking to conceal himself.
“Well, aren’t you looking friendly!” Kurt said.
The general held his shorts in front of him.
“Hey, there’s no reason to be shy. We’re all here for the same thing. But bring a towel. No need to show off to everyone. Ready?”
“For what?”
“Well, we have three options. Dry sauna, steam room, and Jacuzzi and showers. Personally, I’m up for steam.”
They entered a dingy corridor and passed through a tiny bar area where a handful of men lounged around, towels and loincloths askew or missing, watching a three-way in a porn movie. Dravko paused to take a look, but Kurt said, “Let’s keep going. The real thing is better. So what brings you to Warsaw? Business?” He gave a look at the general’s paunch and added, “Naw, you’re too trim for a businessman. I bet you’re in the military. Army?”
“How did you know?”
“Army was a guess, but military for sure. Just look at you. Broad shoulders, strong arms, okay, a little soft in the gut, but you’re allowed. Heck, what are you, forty-two? Forty-four?
“Forty-four,” Dravko replied, shaving five years off the truth.
“I bet your wife’s a real looker, too.”
“A looker?” Dravko knew his English was halting, but this man seemed to use words that came from another language. Maybe it was a Swahili word.
“Pretty, that’s what I mean. Handsome guy like you oughtta have a pretty wife.”
Had Ulia ever been pretty? Dravko had married her not for love but because he deemed her suitable, embodying a pedigree wholesomeness that would serve as a model for Mother Serbia. Unfortunately, she had failed to produce children. He couldn’t recollect when they had stopped trying: her body, when he tried to recall it, was like a forgotten landscape seen on a foreign journey. Now he thought of Ulia always in the kitchen, skimming fat from boiling pots that permeated her clothes with rancid steam. The men in prison, too, smelled of rancid steam, and fear so pungent that only their deaths cleared it away. And now he was walking next to a naked black man who had his own smell: fecund, like plowed earth.
“Here we are,” Kurt said.
The door exhaled steam when he opened it. Their lungs briefly stung from the scalding spray and their eyes took a moment to adjust. White-tiled benches rose to the right. A few blurry men were scattered on them. They picked a spot and sat a little apart. In the numbing heat, Dravko closed his eyes, and a new film started to run in his mind’s eye. He was visiting his honor guard in their barracks, who were all in some state of undress, resting together on a hot summer day. When they recognized him, they cheered, and Dravko opened his eyes to realize the sound was only steam chuffing into the room.
The African had inched closer, or had he? And his towel had fallen open.
Was it the heat, or the closeness of the African that made Dravko short of breath? Beads of sweat ran down the black man’s arm, and as he followed them with his eyes, he took in all of him: his hard muscles, his long limbs, his cock suggesting playfulness. He trembled when he reached to touch it. Kurt reciprocated, sliding a hand under the general’s towel. Before things went too far, he said, “Let’s make it special, and private. Not here. You, me, hotel.”
“You don’t want?”
“I want! But not here, and not so fast. Let’s get you into a cold shower and calm you down.”
He steered Dravko to a room with a bank of shower stalls and propped him in one. He turned on the cold water before stepping into the adjacent stall, where he could hear Dravko sputtering. He had met too many men like Mladic: uptight, guilt-ridden, married, who ventured into the clubs and other haunts of gay men, declaring their fidelity to a different manhood while seeking the very pleasures they decried. Once bedded, they were balky mates, and once mated, quick to dress and leave, slamming the closet door behind them until overcome again by unforgiving desires. He had learned to recognize these men and ignore them, unwilling to join battle with their adolescent consciousness when there were too many willing partners. But Kurt had no in
tention of ignoring Dravko. The general’s diplomatic status protected him from search warrants, but nothing stopped Kurt from a look inside his room if invited there. And he planned to be. He would use the general’s Achilles heel to make sure he was.
Kurt stepped from the shower. “How are you doing in there?” he asked and slid open Dravko’s curtain. He appeared not to have moved. “I’d say you had enough.” With one hand, Kurt reached for the faucet; he slid his other hand down Dravko’s belly. “Rumor has it, Yugoslavian men are very sexy.”
“Sexy?”
“Mmm. Let’s dry off and get out of here.”
The spiked-hair boy at the counter grinned at Kurt when they left. “Coming back?” he asked.
“Not tonight.”
A freezing rain greeted them outside.
“My car is just there,” Kurt said.
They got into it, and he started the engine. “Which direction?”
“Where is your hotel?”
“My hotel? No can do. My company rents an apartment, and I’m sharing it with someone who’d call my wife if I brought back a man for sex. Especially if I didn’t share!” Kurt playfully touched Dravko. “And I’m not sharing.”
Dravko pushed his hand away. “Don’t. It’s too public here.”
“That’s why I’m suggesting someplace private.
“It’s impossible.”
“Do you have a uniform in your room? Because I have kind of a fantasy.”
The general said, “It’s impossible.”
“Is there a mirror?”
“A mirror?” Dravko thought about the dozens of mirrors in his room. “More than one mirror,” he said.
“Then you’re really going to like this. If not, we’ll find a hotel room, because you, me, somewhere tonight.”
Kurt lied, saying he found men in uniform especially sexy. Maybe the general had the same fetish, which would be fun, because Kurt liked to wear uniforms, too, and watch himself in the mirror. Dravko took the bait. Over the years the local CIA operation had learned from escorts about the mirrors and the general’s strange obsession with wanting to appear to make love to himself. As Kurt hoped, he instantly saw the opportunity to turn the situation around to set up that scene.
Minutes later, they entered the former communist lodge’s foyer illuminated by dusty fixtures that were missing some bulbs. The heavylidded hotelier stirred behind the counter and handed over a key. Blue veins traced the depressions of his bulbous nose, which he plucked with his thumb before settling back and letting his eyelids droop.
Dravko guided them around a corner and down a second hall where the threadbare carpet had been poorly repaired. Once inside the room, he relaxed and asked if Kurt wanted a scotch, and Kurt did; in fact, he needed a refill to launch into his full subterfuge. The room’s red-papered walls, resplendent with mirrors of every shape and size encircling a yawning bed, so conformed to Kurt’s notion of a whorehouse that he felt a pang of guilt for prostituting his sexuality, but sex was the oldest trick in the world, and he would use it every time he could when the stakes were this high. There was no moral equivalency.
Kurt didn’t have to look very hard to see everything in the room. It was small and tidy. The only place to stow anything appeared to be a closet with double louvered doors. If what he was looking for was there, he wagered it was behind them.
Dravko handed him a shot of scotch. They touched glasses before knocking them back.
“Another?” Dravko asked.
“It’s that kind of night, isn’t it?”
Dravko poured another round.
They downed the second round, then a third, both men numbing their anxieties with liquor and using idle talk as a preamble to their little escapade. Dravko knew Warsaw well, he told Kurt, and Kurt replied that he had become a frequent visitor, too, alluding to business dealings without elaboration. No, he had never been to Yugoslavia, was it nice? Dravko waxed poetic about its sun-drenched beaches and lavender fields. His talk of home reminded him of Ulia, made more attractive—or at least more loving—by the alcohol, but Kurt steered him away from talk of his wife, knowing it would lead to guilt and self-recrimination, and likely an excuse not to consummate their encounter. The first move had to be his, and he lifted a hand to touch Dravko’s cheek. Dravko flinched but didn’t pull away. “You’re a handsome man,” Kurt said, and pulled him into a kiss. At first tentative, it became deeper, and Kurt moaned amorously. He opened his eyes enough to see the general watching himself in the mirrors. Kurt’s plan should work.
He stepped back from the general. “Wait. I gotta take a piss before we get started.”
He went into the bathroom and closed the door behind him. He didn’t piss; he didn’t need to. He hoped the general might take the hint and use the bathroom, too, so he could take a look inside the closet. He let a minute pass, flushed the toilet, and ran water in the sink.
Stepping back into the room, he said, “Next.”
Dravko obliged and dutifully shut the door behind him. In two steps Kurt was at the closet pulling open the louvered doors. He spotted the steamer suitcase and lifted it to feel its heft. Roughly thirty pounds. He set it back down just as Dravko opened the bathroom door.
Kurt whirled around, holding his uniform on a hanger. “You didn’t say dress whites. That’s even sexier.”
When they had undressed, Kurt slipped on the uniform’s coat. “Pants, too?” he asked.
“Yes, but leave it hanging out.”
“I can’t help that it’s black.”
“I won’t see it.”
Dravko dropped to his knees to search for the perfect angle where he wouldn’t see Kurt’s head but only his body dressed to look like him, and of course he needed to see himself kneeling before his stand-in cock. When he found the right spot, he took Kurt into his mouth. They played like that for an hour, moving around for Dravko to find different perspectives on the same selfish orgy. At one point he landed on the idea of using a condom to make Kurt’s skin appear white in the mirrors, which sent him into a frenzy that ended with his finally being spent, too. Kurt already had enough, having feigned a third orgasm, pretending to add to what had already fallen on the general’s bare shoulders.
He helped Dravko to his feet. “Wow, you’re something,” Kurt said, already taking off the uniform. “You’re more than something. Did I look like you?”
“Yes.”
“Good, that was the point.” Kurt got dressed while Dravko watched. “Are you staying in Warsaw a few more days. Because I am.”
“I don’t know.”
“In case you do, I’ll look for you at the Arena.”
They shook hands, because some farewell was necessary, and despite what had transpired between them, at that moment any other gesture was too intimate.
CHAPTER TWENTY
BLINDLY JAY SWATTED AT THE telephone, wanting to turn off an alarm. Not until the fourth ring did he rouse himself enough to lift its receiver.
As he did, Lilka said drowsily, “It’s the telephone.”
“Yes, Jay, it’s the telephone,” Ann Rewls repeated into his ear. “Who is that?”
“Good morning, Ann.”
“Not talking?”
“I’m not awake yet. You should have room service deliver coffee if you want my complete attention.”
“I doubt if that’s possible at the moment,” Ann said tartly.
“I hope there’s a reason for this call other than harassment because I’ll call security.”
Lilka asked sleepily, “What time is it?”
Ann answered, “It should be about seven thirty your time.”
“Seven thirty,” Jay mumbled.
“Oh, I’m late,” Lilka complained idly, not yet willing to scramble from bed. Lazily she draped an arm across his waist.
He said to Ann, “It must be the middle of the night there.”
“I have breaking news.”
Lilka had started to be playful.
“News that I need to h
ear right now?”
“I’m not calling to have you listen to the Noise Machine.”
“Who is it?” Lilka asked, preoccupied.
“A crank call.”
“I resent that,” Ann said.
“Hold on,” he told her, and covered the mouthpiece to say to Lilka, “I’ll join you in the shower.”
“What’s the breaking news?” he asked Ann.
“You said you’d join her in the shower, didn’t you?”
“Why do you think you know all my lines?”
“Because they’re the captions on cave paintings. You thought you invented them?”
“I hope Ned’s not planning on having breakfast in bed this morning, because it sounds like he might be it. What have you learned?”
“We got a direct hit on your houseboat man. The name on the envelope was easy to trace. Originally, he was—is—Tomasz Tomski from Chicago. He has aliases everywhere. From Tommy Turner in Las Vegas to Tommy Thompson in Atlantic City.”
“What is he, a gambler?”
“With a bigamy problem. Make that trigamy. He has three wives.”
“How the hell does he manage that from coast to coast?”
“Keep telling a woman you love her, and she’ll believe almost anything you tell her, but you’ll have to ask him how he managed the logistics. There’s a bench warrant out for him in Chicago. One of the wives traced him there. He’s got a string of charges against him. The latest: failure to pay child support.”
“Is that extraditable?”
“What planet do you live on? That’s the kind of thing that would help mostly women.”
The Fourth Courier Page 17
