“Diddlysquat,” Matskevich echoed, pronouncing the word carefully, as if he were tasting it. Then he added, “What was it your Thomas Edison said? We have now found nine hundred and ninety-nine ways not to make a light bulb?”
“I bet even Thomas Edison got frustrated along about the 950th attempt,” Daniel said, and then made a face. “We haven’t been working on the case nearly that long. It’s just…”
He wanted to solve the case – to prove himself worthy of this second chance that Mr. Gilman had given him. But he could hardly discuss that with Matskevich, so instead he took up his menu and began looking over its offerings as if it might not have the same thing as every other damn diner in the entire Midwest. He was so tired of diner food.
“Hey fellows. My name’s Angeline, and I’ll be your waitress. Do you know what you’ll be having, or do you want my recommendations?”
Daniel looked up, and the sight of Angeline blew his troubles out of the water. She was gorgeous, with long red ringlets and a shirt just tight enough to make a peek-a-boo gap between the buttons just above her breasts. Her perfume wafted over them: Shalimar, floral and citrus and musk.
“I always like to hear a lady’s recommendations,” Daniel said, casually resting one arm along the back of the booth to show off the breadth of his chest.
“Well, generally I say the veal,” she said, “although our burgers are real good too, and sometimes a burger is the only thing that’ll hit the spot, you know? And of course you’ve got to try the milkshakes.”
“What flavors of milkshake?” Matskevich asked.
Angeline’s gaze, hitherto friendly and polite, lit up about a thousand watts. “Oh my gosh! What a cute accent!” she cried, and then blushed red and hid the lower half of her face behind her ordering pad.
Daniel promptly fell a little bit in love, and simultaneously accepted defeat. When a girl looked at your buddy like that, it was useless to try to compete.
“Um, I mean we have chocolate and vanilla like everyone,” Angeline said, “but Peggy, that’s my boss, she owns this place and she’s the cook too – she’s always trying new flavors. We had a cherry one last summer which was to die for. Right now it’s cranberry, which – ” she lowered her voice – “I don’t think is quite as good, but it’s sure better than the pumpkin we had last Halloween.”
“I’ll try it,” Matskevich declared. “And the veal, please.”
“The same,” Daniel said. Angeline left, and Daniel leaned across the table and punched Matskevich’s shoulder. “I think she likes you, champ.”
Matskevich shook his head. “American girls are always so friendly.”
“Really? American girls are always coming up to you and crying ‘Your accent is so cute’?”
A smirk briefly escaped Matskevich’s control. “Better luck tomorrow, my friend.” He glanced after Angeline, whose red hair was visible above the swinging door into the kitchen, then leaned across the table and asked, “What is cranberry?”
“Cranberry! Oh, you’ve had it before. It’s the fruit they use in mors,” Daniel said. The Polyakovs used to make the Russian fruit drink for Daniel and Anna.
But Matskevich looked at him strangely: it was an odd thing for an American to know. “I used to take my girlfriend Janet to a little Russian place in DC,” Daniel explained, which was true, although the place hadn’t served mors. “Got fond of the food.”
“It’s better than American food.”
“Hey now,” Daniel protested. “Don’t judge us based on the diners.”
“Take me to a nicer restaurant, then. What else do we have an expense account for?”
“Not to waste taxpayers’ money on caviar,” Daniel sputtered.
Fortunately, Angeline forestalled further argument by returning with their milkshakes. “Here you go,” she said. “I put extra maraschino cherries on,” (she had, politely, adorned both milkshakes, although she addressed her remarks to Matskevich), “except I know not everyone likes them so I won’t be offended if you take them off.”
“I love cherries,” Matskevich assured her. He stirred the milkshake with its long spoon, and looked up at her, not smiling exactly, but with a warmth and intensity in his gaze that was almost more beguiling than an actual smile.
She bit her lip. “If you don’t mind me asking,” she said, “where are you from? I’ve never heard an accent like that before.”
The brightness went out of Matskevich’s gaze, as if a candle had been doused. “Poland.”
“Oh! Gosh, I shouldn’t have asked, should I?” Angeline cried. “It probably brought up bad memories. I’m so sorry. My mom is always telling me not to pry, and here I am – ”
“Angeline!” a woman shouted from the kitchen.
Angeline gave a little hop. “And that’s Peggy. Be right back with your veal!” She fled, her red curls bouncing against the back of her green checkered uniform.
They both watched her go till she disappeared through the saloon doors into the kitchen. Daniel raised his brows at Matskevich. “What? No ‘There I was, trapped in the glare of this German policeman’s flashlight like a deer in the headlights’?”
Matskevich scowled at him. “No, of course not. This is not a story to tell a pretty girl who has nothing to do with the case – no.”
Daniel, abashed, twisted a maraschino cherry on its stem. “Of course,” he said, and set the cherry aside. He had always thought maraschinos were too sweet, anyway.
***
Angeline dropped off their veal without a word, her cheeks crimson with mortification. But at the end of the meal, she brought them two slices of chocolate pie they hadn’t ordered: “I really am so sorry,” she told Matskevich. “It must be an unhappy memory, how you escaped, right? I mean, getting past the Iron Curtain, and all that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Matskevich told her. “It was not so bad, really, only I don’t like to talk about it.” He pressed a hand over his heart. “The family left behind…”
“Oh,” she gasped, a hand over her heart too. “I didn’t even think of that. I was just thinking about the difficulty getting across the wall.”
“No, no, don’t worry about it,” Matskevich told her, and now he really did smile. “I’m here now, and this is the important thing.”
“Yes,” Angeline agreed, and for a moment they gazed at each other. Daniel sighed inwardly and began to eat his pie.
Angeline gathered up her full skirts and slid in the booth next to Matskevich. “Let me make it up to you. I’m off shift in fifteen minutes, and I’ve got to go to this Halloween party at Sigma Phi tonight, so… would you like to come?”
Matskevich’s face lit. “A Halloween party?”
“You’ve never been to one?” Angeline clasped her hands. “Oh please, then you’ve got to come, then. It will be so much fun!”
“Yes, of course,” Matskevich said.
A shout from the kitchen: “Angeline!”
She darted a kiss on Matskevich’s cheek. “Fifteen minutes,” she said, and dashed away, leaving Matskevich to gaze after her, his face still lit from within like a jack-o-lantern.
Daniel abandoned his chocolate pie. He slid out of the booth. “I’ll just leave you to take care of the check, then,” he said, and left with all due haste.
***
Daniel went back to the motel room, and tried to settle down with The Brothers Karamazov. He couldn’t concentrate, and went for a long walk instead. The motel room was still empty when he returned, and he tried to read The Brothers Karamazov again. At last he gave up and turned on the television to immerse himself in the soothingly anodyne world of Ozzie and Harriet, all old married couples and boy-girl love affairs.
He jumped up to turn off the television when he heard the key in the lock, then hastily turned off the light, just in case Matskevich had Angeline in tow.
But Matskevich was alone. Daniel switched the light back on as Matskevich toed off his shoes by the door. “Did you have a good night, Poland?”
“It must’ve been pretty good,” Daniel said. “You’re – are you smiling?” He lifted a hand over his eyes. “Stop, stop. I’ll be blinded.”
Matskevich tossed his suit coat over the back of a chair. He sat cross-legged on the foot of Daniel’s bed, wafting before him a faint whiff of Shalimar. “We went to her Halloween party,” Matskevich said. “Have you ever been to a Halloween party? Of course you have,” he answered himself. “It was in a fraternity,” he added, pronouncing the word with relish, “carved pumpkins lit with candles all along the rail of the porch, and apples floating in a barrel, and everyone all dressed in bright costumes. They asked what my costume was, and I told them I was dressed as a Russian spy.”
“Matskevich!”
Matskevich grinned. He looked like an imp, with his rumpled hair kicked up like little devil horns. “It’s best to hide in plain sight. Like ‘The Purloined Letter.’”
“You’ve read – ? Of course you’ve read Edgar Allan Poe. Did you read every American author you could get your hands on?”
Matskevich ignored this. “So we stayed a long while,” he said, “and ate brownies and popcorn balls, which are popped corn covered in caramel. But at last it became clear her old boyfriend wasn’t coming – this is why she needed a date this evening, so he could see she has moved on. What is wrong with this man, that he lets a girl like that slip through his fingers? And so I walked her home, and I put my arm around her because it was so cold…”
“Oooh.”
“I thought it was only American men who wore stupid coats because you think it looks manly, but her coat was too thin, too,” Matskevich mused. “But even so, we stood a long time talking on her porch. She lives in a little house with three other girls. Is this common among American college students? And then…” Matskevich’s toes curled. There was a hole in the toe of his right sock. “She kissed me.”
“You’re supposed to kiss her, you lummox.”
“I was going to,” said Matskevich, unperturbed. “She kissed me first, that’s all. And then…” He paused, savoring Daniel’s impatience, and finally saying, “and then she went inside to go to bed, and so here I am.”
“Matskevich,” Daniel moaned.
“She’s a nice girl,” Matskevich said. “She didn’t want to wake her roommates.”
“You could’ve brought her back here. I would’ve pretended not to wake up.”
“Oh no,” Matskevich said, and wagged a finger at Daniel. “I’ve heard about your reputation.”
Daniel’s heart stopped. “My reputation?” he echoed, and felt like a slug under an upturned rock, a filthy slimy voyeur who wanted his partner to bring a girl to the room so he could listen in. The creaking bed, the squeaking bedsprings, heavy breathing, giggly half-stifled moans.
He felt a painful awareness of how good Matskevich looked like this, sitting on the bed in his shirtsleeves, his hair rumpled, his eyes bright with the excitement of kissing a pretty girl.
Jolie-laide. Ugly-pretty, a term Daniel had learned in high school French: a person who seems plain till their features are lit by emotion, animation. The other boys in his class had trouble understanding the term, and Daniel had pretended he didn’t get it either, although like the girls in the class he got it at once. It gave him a queer uncomfortable feeling that there was something wrong with him, a streak of girlishness that shouldn’t have been there.
Matskevich didn’t notice Daniel’s guilty silence. “Oh yes,” he said. “That Daniel Hawthorne is a terrible womanizer, they told me. If you do manage to seduce any women,” he added, in a tone that suggested he doubted any woman could have taste so poor, “you will have to get a second motel room. I need my rest.”
Daniel’s blood had begun to flow again. He sounded creditably snide when he said, “And I suppose you want me to put it on my expense account?”
“Of course. This is what an expense account is for.”
Daniel shoved Matskevich’s shoulder. “Go get a shower,” Daniel told him. “You smell like her perfume.”
Matskevich grinned like a Cheshire cat, and left. But the scent of Shalimar, bergamot and rose, lingered after he had gone.
Chapter 7
The next day, Gennady and Daniel hit the road to talk to the Good Shepherd subscribers.
They started with the western Iowa subscribers, following Daniel’s theory that the shooter must be a local. But nowhere did they find the magic confluence of Good Shepherd and Mauser and person without an alibi for September 23.
The interviews struck Gennady as useless, and he settled comfortably into the assurance that they would be on the road for two or three months. It was pleasant, anyway, this chance to stop in such a wide variety of American homes, and hear the inhabitants tell their life stories, which they generally proved happy to spill in return for Daniel’s sympathetic nods.
Gennady could have scoffed at them for talking so eagerly, but he felt that ease himself, and often ended the day sitting on the foot of Daniel’s bed, or even lying beside him if the bed was a double. This was partly a sop to Arkady’s honeytrap assignment: he could easily work it up to sound much more seductive than it was. I was lying on his bed, Arkady Anatolyevich! I can’t imagine why it didn’t work.
But mostly it was pleasant to bother Daniel. It was nice to take off his suit coat in the overheated American motel rooms, and lie on his stomach and kick up his feet and pester Daniel till he put down The Brothers Karamazov and began to talk.
Gennady liked particularly to hear Daniel talk about his childhood: reading the crime magazine True Story on the sly (“we weren’t supposed to read it, but everyone did”), taking a paper delivery route to earn money to buy a proper baseball glove, buying an orange Ne-Hi cola (never grape, he noticed) and going down to the creek to fish…
Gennady sighed with contentment. This was the America of Ilf and Petrov. “Did you live out in the country?”
“No, Shinocqua’s a small town. If you went a couple blocks north of my house you’d hit countryside, but if you walked a few blocks in the other direction you’d strike the downtown. A gas station and a drugstore and a movie theater… The theater’s closed now; television’s killing the small town theaters. I used to head downtown after school sometimes to the newspaper office where my mother worked.”
“I thought American women didn’t work.”
“It’s more common than you’d think from the magazines,” Daniel said. “I suppose your mother worked.”
“Oh, yes,” said Gennady, momentarily eager. He would have liked to brag about his mother, who had been posted as security to Yalta near the end of the war, during the great conference between the Big Three powers.
But of course this was impossible: he could hardly say that his mother and his father and his grandfather had all worked at the GRU, given that he was supposedly not a Soviet intelligence agent at all, although the Americans would have to be dim to believe it.
Gennady fell back on generalizations. “Most women in the Soviet Union work. But they are very good mothers, too,” he added. “My mother recited poetry for me.” And in the interest of setting the conversation firmly on another path, he sat up and recited Pushkin’s “Ya vas lyubil.”
It worked: Daniel looked fascinated. “That’s beautiful,” he said. “I have no idea what it’s about, but even so.”
Gennady could not resist bragging. “When I was in school, I won a volume of Pushkin’s poetry in a recitation competition. Our poets,” he added, “are the best in the world.”
“Oh? Have you read any American poets?” Daniel asked.
“Are there any American poets?”
Daniel hit him with a pillow. “I’ll lend you my copy of Walt Whitman,” he said, then looked aghast. “No, wait. I don’t think Whitman is a good place to start.”
“He isn’t very good?” Gennady teased.
“Um�
�� He’s a little obscure. It would be better to start with Emily Dickinson or Longfellow. I can still do ‘Paul Revere’s Ride,’ though not as well as you do Pushkin.”
“Let’s hear it, then.”
So Daniel stood and recited, and Gennady lay down again and listened with his head on his crossed arms. “There’s a galloping rhythm to it,” he said, enchanted. “That’s very American, isn’t it? A poetry of movement.”
“Yes,” said Daniel.
But he looked at Gennady so strangely that Gennady said, “What?”
“I don’t know. Most people aren’t interested in poetry, I guess,” Daniel said, and then clarified, “Most men, at least.”
“Poetry isn’t manly?” Gennady scoffed. “Like wearing a coat that is actually warm enough isn’t manly? Poetry is…” How to explain? “When there is nothing else, when all the world has gone mad, you recite poetry to hold things together, to give life order and meaning. The world is shaking, but poetry is steady.”
Daniel was nodding. “I was in a rear unit in Korea,” he said, “and we only got bombarded a few times. But it was still terrifying, and I recited ‘Invictus’ over and over in my head. ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.’” He grinned. “Strong words for a man who might get blotted out by a bomb at any moment.”
“Well, of course. In such times you need strong words.”
One evening, in one particularly warm motel room, Gennady rolled up his sleeves to his elbows. They had been chatting for some time when Daniel put his hand on Gennady’s bare forearm, emphasizing some point that he made, which Gennady couldn’t remember afterward because when Daniel touched him, he froze, mentally even more so than physically.
It was a brief touch, just a second perhaps or even shorter, and after Daniel took his hand away Gennady wanted it back. If that was all he was going to do, after all, that was pleasant, and it had been a long time since someone touched him – since someone he wanted to touch him had touched him.
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