He had once heard a rumor that Stalin used to make his Politburo members waltz with each other. He wondered about it afterwards: if it was purely terrible, to waltz with another man while Stalin laughed at you, or if they found a kind of comfort in it, if it was good to be close to another person even if it was only for Stalin’s amusement, and even though you knew that your dancing partner would denounce you the next day as a counterrevolutionary spy if the Party demanded it, and you would do the same to him.
Perhaps under those circumstances you could only be close to someone if Stalin made you do it.
Gennady tucked his elbows under his body and lay down on his arms like a Sphinx.
“Tell me,” said Daniel. “Did you leave a girl behind in Moscow?”
“Yes,” said Gennady.
But he didn’t want to talk about Galya. Once Arkady had started bothering him, it had become impossible somehow to answer her letters, and eventually she had stopped writing him. His stomach clenched at the memory.
But it was getting better now: time heals everything, it would be all right. Things had gone well, had gone beautifully with Angeline.
But none of this could be explained to Daniel, so Gennady said only, “She’s moved on by now.”
“You don’t think she’s waiting for you?” Daniel sounded startled.
“No, no. All this waiting around for people is a waste of time,” Gennady said. “We’re all basically replaceable people, after all, she should find someone close by.” Daniel regarded him curiously, and so Gennady went on the attack: “What about you? Do you have a girl?”
“Not right now. The job has kept me on the road so much…”
“A girl in every port, then,” Gennady teased.
“No, no.” To Gennady’s surprise, Daniel flushed. “What the hell kind of picture does that Soviet dossier paint of me?” Gennady widened his eyes with false innocence – what dossier? – and Daniel said, “Come off it, Matskevitch. I saw a dossier on you, so I’m sure you saw one about me.”
There was no safe answer to this statement, so Gennady didn’t say anything. At length Daniel let it go with a sigh. “My last steady girlfriend was Janet,” he said. “We started dating while I was at the FBI Academy a couple of years ago.”
“And then?”
“And then I got sent into the field, and she wanted a boyfriend who was home more than once every six months, so we broke up.”
“Ah,” said Gennady, triumphant, and Daniel hit him with a pillow.
“That doesn’t mean people are replaceable,” Daniel said. “It’s just that Janet and I weren’t really in love, that’s all. We liked each other a lot and had a good time together, but when it got tough, we didn’t care enough to make it work. If we had loved each other, it would have been different.”
“Do you believe such a love exists?”
Daniel looked at him strangely. “That’s what love is. The will to be together despite obstacles.”
Gennady shook his head. “Bourgeois romanticism.”
“How would you define love, then?”
“A pretty word for the sexual instinct. A way to deflect the masses’ attention from the misery of their lives by feeding them heightened emotions and focusing their hopes of future happiness on sexual passion.”
Daniel laughed.
“What? Why is that funny?”
“You sound like the movie parody of a Communist,” Daniel said.
Gennady sat up, furious. “Well, you sound like a typical brainwashed capitalist,” he said. “How can you believe in love at your age? A teenager can believe it perhaps, but once first love is past then you know that these things never last forever, and all those heightened feelings were just a sandcastle built on the fact that you wanted to fuck.”
Daniel twitched like a prudish maiden aunt at the word fuck.
“I have noticed that Americans are obsessed with the idea of Communist brainwashing,” Gennady added, “but I think this obsession is because you know in your hearts that your own Hollywood is brainwashing you. How else could you believe that love is all you need for happiness?”
Daniel didn’t reply. Deprived of fuel, Gennady’s anger lapsed. He lay down again on his stomach.
“Well, I don’t agree,” Daniel said at last. “But that just shows the brainwashing is working, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose,” Gennady said. He rolled over onto his back. “You shouldn’t listen to me too much,” he advised. “You’ll be happier if you stay brainwashed.”
“Well, thanks,” Daniel said, and now he laughed. “That’s the key to happiness, is it?”
“Delusion?” Gennady said. “Yes.”
“You don’t believe that ‘The truth shall set ye free’?”
“We are talking about happiness, not freedom,” Gennady objected.
Another pause. “I suppose I always thought they went together,” Daniel admitted.
“That’s also very American. Like your Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…” But this seemed like a dangerous subject, so Gennady shifted the topic. “Did you have Fourth of July celebrations in your town?”
Gennady had arrived in the United States too late for the Fourth. His colleague Sergeyich had described the fireworks and the parades: “Not as good as we have in Moscow for May Day, of course. But worth seeing! Very different!”
“Of course,” Daniel said. “Every town has them. I played the trumpet with the high school marching band and we marched in the parade every year. Boy, did it get hot in those band uniforms…”
Daniel talked on for a while. Gennady relaxed, and listened contentedly, his eyes drifting shut as the sleepy heat of the radiator suffused the room. He roused from his doze when Daniel poked his shoulder. “Matskevitch,” he said, “don’t you think you’d better sleep in your own bed?”
“No,” Gennady mumbled sleepily.
“I think you’d better,” Daniel said. He gave Gennady’s shoulder a shove. Gennady crawled over him, on the grounds that this was the most direct route to the other bed. Daniel shoved him again, and Gennady catapulted over the space between the two beds, and landed with a bounce. He sat up, newly exhilarated, and Daniel laughed at him again. “Go to sleep!” he ordered.
***
So the campaign to get Daniel to trust him, to place confidence in him, was going well. This was fortunate, because their attempt to find the would-be assassin was not going well at all.
In early December, they reached the last Iowa subscriber, who lived in a little town called Dresden, which Gennady privately hoped would yield the shooter. It would please everyone, Soviets and Americans alike, if the fellow turned out to be German. An escaped Nazi, preferably. The perfect scapegoat.
But unfortunately the subscriber, Miss Cora Nelson, was a gentle old spinster with a brace on one leg, barely visible under her long old-fashioned skirts. Polio, she told them. “And I had been the star of the girls’ basketball team at my high school before. Have some more springerle?”
Gennady obligingly took a fourth Christmas cookie. Each cookie had a little scene imprinted on it: this one had a picture of Christ on the cross. “Tell me,” Gennady asked. “How did you come to subscribe to The Good Shepherd?”
Despite the cookie decoration, Miss Nelson did not seem like a religious fanatic. Through their visits to subscribers, Gennady had come to recognize the signs: massive Bibles on the side table, embroidered Bible verses and tacky paintings of glowing golden Jesus on the walls. Certainly Miss Nelson had nothing like that life-size Christ on the cross, splashed with scarlet blood, that had dominated a living room in Sioux Falls.
“Oh, a nice young man was selling subscriptions door to door,” Miss Nelson said. “He was trying to raise money for his tuition at Durrell College, poor thing, and he seemed so disheartened that I bought a subscription just to cheer him up. More coffee, dear?”
“Yes, please,” Gennady said.
Miss Nelson made to fill his cup. �
�Oh, dear. I’ll just make another pot. It won’t be a minute…”
“No, no,” Daniel interposed hastily. “We’ve got to be moving on. We’ve eaten far too many of your cookies already.”
Gennady shamelessly pocketed a final springerle. “Is there a German restaurant in town?”
Miss Nelson brightened. “Oh, yes! You’ll want to go to the Gasthoff. Minnie and her husband own it. She was point guard, you know, on the team.”
At the Gasthoff that night, Gennady nearly ate his weight in sauerkraut and sausages, enjoying Daniel’s growing incredulity as he watched Gennady transfer the mound of sauerkraut into his mouth. “This is like a taste of home,” Gennady told him.
“Lots of sauerkraut in Russia?”
“Oh yes. We love sauerkraut,” Gennady assured him. “Maybe it’s the German influence. Russia is like America in this,” he mused, “both of our countries had many German immigrants. Catherine the Great brought them into the Volga region.” He began to slice up another sausage. “And then Stalin moved them all to Kazakhstan during the war. Like your Japanese internment camps,” Gennady added.
“Those were closed when the war ended,” Daniel shot back.
“Yes, well. When was Little Bighorn? And yet your Indians are still on reservations.”
“Do you really want to play whose country is more terrible chicken, Matskevich? I think we both know that I’m going to win.”
“Why? You are so sure your country is less terrible?”
“No,” Daniel said. “But I’m going to win because I can say that it’s awful and no one is going to throw me in jail for it. Whereas you’ll be up a creek if I put you in a situation where you’d have to criticize Khrushchev, won’t you?”
Gennady eyed Daniel with new respect. This showed a new willingness to fight – well, not dirty exactly, you could not call the tactic anything but fair – but with all weapons at his disposal.
Gennady bowed to inevitable defeat. “Our Nikita Sergeyevich has never done anything wrong in his life,” he announced. “Of course if you criticize him I must defend him from slander and lies.”
Daniel cracked out a laugh, and then looked at Gennady sharply, as if to see if Gennady was joking or not. Gennady sipped his root beer (he had been horribly misled by the name: it was not alcoholic at all) and maintained his poker face.
“Are you serious?” Daniel asked.
Gennady widened his eyes ingenuously. Of course he wasn’t going to answer that: he had no doubt that this conversation would go directly into Daniel’s next report to the FBI.
Gennady didn’t hold it against Daniel. Naturally he would be under orders to scare up blackmail material. It was frankly unfair, though, that all Daniel needed to do was trick Gennady into telling a couple of Khrushchev jokes, whereas Gennady would have to work this stupid honeytrap in order to blackmail Daniel. And it was never going to work, because Daniel never drank. They were at a German restaurant and he was drinking a non-alcoholic soda on purpose.
Daniel had been eyeing Gennady this whole time, as if he thought Gennady might break down and tell him yes, yes that was a joke, Khrushchev has done all sorts of horrible things, he worked for Stalin you dunce. But finally Daniel looked away and pulled a map out of his briefcase. “I think we ought to head north,” he said. “Get northern Minnesota and Wisconsin out of the way before the winter really takes hold.”
“Yes, all right.” Gennady didn’t care particularly where they went as long as they kept going. He had heard good things about the beer in Wisconsin: lots of German influence there, too. Bratwurst, Friday night fish fries.
“Probably we should have started there earlier,” Daniel said, “but I really hoped we’d hit a lead in Iowa. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense for the suspect to come from out of state.”
This line of thought sounded likely to lead them back to Honeygold County, which was much less exciting than driving up to Wisconsin. “Perhaps we ought to go to California to interview Mr. Don Westmark,” Gennady suggested slyly.
Daniel replied, as Gennady knew he would, “No. Why would he drive all the way to Iowa to take a pop at Khrushchev when Khrushchev had just been to California?”
Of course it was a reasonable point. Really Gennady had suggested it mostly because the prospect of California might make Minnesota and Wisconsin sound more palatable to Daniel.
It seemed to work, because Daniel sighed, “We’ll head north. Southern Minnesota is closer to Honeygold than eastern Iowa, anyway.”
Gennady shoved the final bite of sauerkraut into his mouth. “To the land of ten thousand lakes.” Gennady had seen this on Minnesota license plates. “It sounds like a fairy tale kingdom.”
“Yes.” Daniel sounded surprised. “I suppose it does.”
Chapter 8
They really ought to have started in Minnesota back in October and worked southward.
That was what Daniel was thinking as he drove through an increasingly heavy snowstorm in mid-December. The temperature hovered around thirty-two degrees, and the huge wet snowflakes clumped together on his windshield, despite the action of the windshield wipers.
“We’re looking at the possibility of an ice storm tonight. Hope your wood boxes are full, folks. Stay warm out there!” the radio announcer said.
“I really thought we’d find a lead in Iowa,” Daniel muttered.
He was talking to himself: Matskevich had fallen asleep when the storm started to get bad, to Daniel’s baffled amazement. Apparently he was not concerned that they were going to slide off the road to an icy death. But at the sound of Daniel’s muttering he blinked awake and peered at the thickening snowfall, and observed, “We ought to stop somewhere.”
“Thanks, genius,” Daniel snapped. “I’m planning to next time I see a motel.”
“Daniel.” Matskevich’s hand touched Daniel’s shoulder. “Thank you for driving.”
Daniel’s shoulders relaxed at the brief touch. His face heated. He cleared his throat, and said, “I’m sure we’ll find a place eventually.”
“Yes, of course,” Matskevich said. “It will be all right. This snow looks worse than it is.”
“It’s not the snow I’m worried about,” Daniel said. “It’s the ice.”
But just around the next curve, a sign rose up out of the darkness. Bluegill Motel, it said, and in blessed red letters beneath: Vacancy.
The freckled young girl at the desk in the Bluegill Motel greeted them with a sunny, “You got in right ahead of the storm.”
“So we did,” Daniel agreed, although now he felt concerned on her behalf: she looked so young, possibly even a high school student. “Will you be able to get home before the snow hits?”
“Oh, I live here. My mom and pop own this place. They’re out checking on the generator; it’s going to be a lousy night. So I’m holding down the desk right now.” She pushed aside an algebra textbook and heaved a logbook into its place. “Let’s see. Right now we’ve got…” A pause. Her merry freckled face grew worried. “We’ve only got one room left,” she said, “and there’s only one bed. Is that all right?”
Daniel hesitated. Paul certainly would not have taken it. A room with one bed would look bad to Mr. Gilman if he heard about it.
But Matskevich said, “It must be all right. If we press on in this snow, probably we will crash the car and die.”
“All right,” Daniel conceded, and nodded at the girl. “We’ll take it.”
At least the bed was a double. But Daniel felt uneasy, an uneasiness that thickened and fill the room like cigarette smoke as he showered and shaved. He wondered if Matskevich felt it too, or if it was all in his own head and Matskevich was thinking of nothing but a good night’s sleep.
By the time Daniel emerged from the bathroom, Matskevich had already stripped down to his shorts and undershirt. The well-worn undershirt clung to his chest. Daniel cleared his throat, and cracked, “Are pajamas a decadent capitalist invention?”
Matskevich didn’t look up from The
Haunting of Hill House. “Yes.”
Daniel slipped between the covers on the other side of the bed, sliding down till the blankets reached his chin. There must be at least a foot of bed between them. It would be fine.
Matskevich tugged the lamp’s pull chain. The light snapped off. “Good night.”
***
When Daniel awoke, the room was cold.
It was still dark, but lighter than he expected. He sat up, shivering as the cold air seeped through his pajamas, and saw the moonlight reflecting off the snow through the window. The needles on the pines hung like wind chimes, clumped together by the ice.
“The power has gone out.”
Matskevich’s muffed voice came from across the room. He was pulling a sweater over his head.
“It’s an ice storm,” Daniel realized. “Damn. We may be stuck for days.”
He made a move to get out of bed, but Matskevich said, “Stay. Keep the bed warm.”
It was just as well that the room had achieved such a boner-killing chill, because that authoritative voice caught Daniel somewhere low in his gut. Matskevich disappeared into the bathroom, and reappeared with the dry towels thrown over his shoulder and an ice bucket full of water in his hands. “In case the pipes freeze,” he told Daniel.
He settled the bucket of water on the bedside table and tossed the towels over the bed as extra blankets. Their coats followed, and Daniel scrounged his gloves and his scarf from his coat pockets. “Can you bring me a pair of socks?” Daniel asked. “They’re on the left side of my suitcase.”
“Yes, yes. A sweater too,” Matskevich said, and soon after he deposited these things on Daniel’s head.
At last Matskevich slipped back into bed. Daniel expected him to keep to his own side, or at most to lie down back to back. But Matskevich nestled in against him, his arm sliding around Daniel’s chest. “Aren’t you going to buy me dinner first?” Daniel cracked.
“What?”
“Oh…” Daniel considered explaining the joke, then decided that it would only make things awkward. More awkward.
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