“No? No? What do you mean, no?”
“Well,” said Gennady, “I tried, but…”
“Shut up! I don’t need your excuses.” Arkady shoved back his chair so hard that it slammed into the wall. There was a black streak on the paint, left by previous chair-slammings. “How could you let me down like this? Haven’t I always been generous to you, Gennady, didn’t I recommend you to Stepan Pavlovich when this job came up?”
Gennady doubted it. Stepan Pavlovich would have ignored any recommendation Arkady made on the assumption (quite accurate) that Arkady would only ever recommend an agent he wanted to get rid of. “I’m sorry, Arkady Anatolyevich…” Gennady began.
Arkady interrupted him. “How could you fail? Oh, I’ve seen the photograph in his dossier, I know you’re not pretty enough for a man that good-looking, but still, if you got him drunk…”
“I did,” Gennady protested. “But even when he’s drunk, he’s just repulsed by that sort of thing. I couldn’t continue to pursue him without jeopardizing our partnership, and of course the most important thing was to find out who tried to kill our dear Nikita Sergeyevich.”
Arkady’s jaw clenched. “Of course,” he said, through gritted teeth. Then he slammed a fist on his desk. “My God, Gennady! I don’t ask much of you, do I? Was it too much to do this one thing for me? During the war we didn’t accept excuses. ‘Not one step backward,’ we said, and if we were ordered to advance we found a way to do it or we died trying. We defended Stalingrad! We took Berlin! And you can’t even seduce an American?”
“You said yourself it would be better if I were prettier,” Gennady protested. “Or maybe he just likes them younger. Like you do.”
Arkady’s fist swung out too fast for Gennady to even try to duck. It caught Gennady on the cheek and flung him against the arm of the chair, right across the knife wound in his side. Gennady gagged and retched, unable to catch his breath.
When Arkady spoke again, his voice was quite different than it had been before. “You’re injured.”
“No,” Gennady said. He meant the word as a denial, but it came out more like a plea, and when he heard that pleading note in his own voice his self-control snapped and he begged, “No, no, Arkady, please, no.”
“Well, come on,” Arkady said. “I’d better have a look at it, hadn’t I? Come on!” he said, when Gennady didn’t move. “Sit on the desk, take off your shirt. I can’t send you out in the world to die, can I?”
Gennady unbuttoned his suit coat first, left it behind on the chair. He stood, and was afraid he might fall: his knees trembled and his head swam. He made his way around the desk and tried to hoist himself up, but his arms were too weak and his side hurt too much and he could not lift himself.
“Go on,” Arkady said.
Gennady gave up on the desk for now and tried to undo his tie. His weak shaking fingers could not loosen the knot.
“Do you need help?” Arkady asked.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I can do it.”
But he couldn’t, and at length Arkady knocked Gennady’s hands aside and undid the tie himself. This was different, this was wrong, Arkady had never touched him before, usually he just looked.
But then, usually he was not so very angry.
“I’m sorry,” Gennady said, his voice high and small. “Prostitye, Arkady Anatolyevich. I tried, I did, but lots of people don’t like being pawed at by their colleagues, and Agent Hawthorne got more than enough of that from his previous partner, he was appalled when it seemed he had not escaped after all with this new assignment…”
Dirt rimmed Arkady’s fingernails, dark against the white fabric as he undid the buttons on Gennady’s shirt. He untucked the shirt, pushed it off Gennady’s shoulders. The sleeves bound Gennady’s arms and he could not seem to get the shirt off, and Gennady swallowed, close to tears, he could not cry in front of Arkady,
Arkady hit him again.
It knocked Gennady to the floor. He rolled, managed to stagger to his feet, stumbled back against the wall. He fully expected Arkady to follow him, pin him down, beat him up or rape him, Arkady never had before but then Gennady had never been stupid enough to get smart with him –
“Get out!” Arkady bellowed, and only then did Gennady realize that Arkady was on the other side of the room, almost hanging out the open window.
Gennady looked down. Blood bloomed like flowers on his undershirt.
The knife slash had reopened, and Arkady, veteran of Stalingrad, could not stand blood.
Gennady pulled his shirt back up on his shoulders. He redid the buttons swiftly, fingers shaking, and tucked his shirt in. “Out!” Arkady bellowed.
“I’m sorry.” Gennady threw on his suit coat, though his wounded side screamed in protest at the movement. He grabbed up his tie and fled.
The hall outside Arkady’s office was empty, thank God. Gennady retied his tie, and found his hands were shaking. Funny, there was no reason for it; he had escaped now, everything was all right. Vsyo v paryodki. Everything okay. His tie was uneven. Fine, fine.
His wound throbbed. He hoped the blood wouldn’t spoil this nice new American suit. He had been a fool to wear it to see Arkady.
Sergeyich was leaning back in his chair, his big feet resting on top of a low filing cabinet, already smoking one of the Cuban cigars. He must have heard something – Arkady shouting “Get out!” if nothing else – but he seemed as serene as a summer cloud, thank God.
He blew a perfect smoke ring as Gennady approached. “Care for a cigar?”
“No, my friend.” Gennady wanted a cigarette, but if he tried to light one, Sergeyich would see his hands shaking. “They’re your present.”
“Ah! Well, speaking of presents, I found one for you.” Sergeyich lofted a peppermint wrapped in cellophane. “Remember the day we went to that Italian restaurant and filled our pockets with the peppermints at the cash register? Only to realize later that all American restaurants offer bowls of peppermints?”
Gennady nodded, although he wished Sergeyich would shut up and let him go.
“The best gifts are the ones that remind us of the good times in our lives,” Sergeyich sighed sentimentally. He leaned across the desk and solemnly closed Gennady’s hand around the peppermint. “Treasure it,” he advised.
The kind touch steadied Gennady’s hands. “I’ll drill a hole through the center and wear it over my heart,” Gennady promised. He unwrapped the crinkling cellophane and popped the peppermint into his mouth. The flavor exploded on his tongue, bright and intense and sweet.
“There we go. Good lad.” Sergeyich tapped his cigar in an overflowing ashtray. “Ah, Nikolai, I see you hanging around back there again. Don’t be shy. We don’t bite, do we, Ilyich?”
“Only when cornered.” Gennady laughed a little madly, and nearly choked on the peppermint.
Sergeyich pounded him on the back. Pain radiated from Gennady’s side. “There,” Sergeyich told Nikolai. “You see?”
“I was just wondering,” Nikolai said, “if you had finished those forms Arkady Anatolyevich wanted.”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re around here somewhere.” Sergeyich poked vaguely at the stacks of papers on his desk. “Oh, don’t look for them, Nikolai, you’ll only disturb my system. Tell him I have a system, Ilyich, won’t you? He doesn’t believe me.”
Gennady coughed. “He’s always told me that he has a system,” he told Nikolai, “but I’ve never seen any sign of it.”
Nikolai looked at him. His lip curled. “Comrade Matskevich,” he said. “You’ve buttoned your shirt wrong.”
Gennady froze like a rabbit. “Excuse me,” he said, although he did not see how he could speak when there was no air in his lungs; and then he was not frozen after all, but pushed past Nikolai, down the hallway toward the bathroom.
He shut the lavatory door behind him and took hold of the sink in both hands and bent down, mouth gaping, as if he was going to vomit or scream.
He did neither, just grasped the cool po
rcelain and panted. Fuck Nikolai, fuck him, fuck him, this was the worst of it, not Arkady himself but the petty unkindness it bred. You might have thought there would be some solidarity among his underlings but you would have been wrong, they were all ashamed and it made them hate each other, Sergeyich was different only because he was well out of it. He was too old for Arkady, nearly forty, if he had been younger even his ugliness wouldn’t have protected him.
Gennady wanted to rip off the shirt and tear it to shreds and stuff it in the rubbish bin. But that wouldn’t help anything.
He redid the buttons, carefully this time, and tucked the shirt in very gently over his wounded side. He retied his tie three times, pausing between tries to kick the wall, nearly crying with frustration. He shouldn’t have drunk so much at lunch. He could have dealt with his tie then, his own buttons, Arkady would not have touched him, none of this would have upset him so much if he were sober. They said alcohol dulled the pain but it didn’t always, sometimes it just brought everything closer to the surface.
But he got the tie at last, and blew his nose and splashed his face and looked hopefully in the mirror. Perhaps he looked all right now.
There was a bruise coming up on his left cheek.
He would have to explain that to Daniel.
Daniel. Fuck.
He wanted to shrink to the size of a spider, a pinhead, a mote of dust on the air, very still and small and silent, too small to ever speak to anyone again.
But no, no, no. No. It would be all right. It could have come from a fight, that bruise. It might be an honorable battle scar. All he had to do was lie about it, and everything would be fine.
Chapter 21
“Oysters Rockefeller,” Daniel told the bartender, “and a steak for me, and – you want a steak for that eye, Gennady?”
Gennady’s hand stole upward as if to cover the bruise. “For my eye?” he echoed.
“Classic cure for a black eye,” Daniel told him.
“Could just get you some ice for it,” the bartender put in. “Cheaper’n steak.”
Gennady shook his head. “A shot of vodka.” He closed the menu. “Two shots. And a hamburger.”
“Treat yourself, Gennady. Get something fancy,” Daniel told him.
“I like hamburger,” Gennady said, and there was enough of an edge to his voice that the bartender stepped away smartly. “Capitalist nonsense – a steak on a black eye.”
“Probably,” Daniel conceded. “Ma never actually got me a steak for any of my black eyes, mind, it was always a chip of ice off the block in the icebox. There was one year I got in a fight with Jeremy Wojcik practically every week, it felt like, for no reason I could see, until I found out later he had a crush on Helen…”
The bartender delivered Gennady’s shots. Gennady kicked them both back, and held up a finger for another.
“You want to wait on the oysters Rockefeller maybe?” Daniel suggested.
Gennady glanced at him disdainfully. Daniel fell silent with growing mortification. After their parting that morning, the bear hug, that proshai, Daniel had expected Gennady to be pleased that they could continue working together, but instead…
Well, of course Gennady didn’t really want to keep working with the sloppy drunk who had kissed him.
But then Gennady smiled. In combination with the black eye, it gave Gennady’s face a lopsided look that Daniel found strangely heart-breaking. “I’m being very rude,” Gennady said. “This is a celebration, you’re surprised I am not more happy. And I am happy, my friend. It’s only…” He gestured at the black eye. “I got mugged this afternoon.
“Mugged!” Daniel said.
The bartender delivered a third shot, and Gennady drained it and smacked it on the counter and signaled for another. “Anything for you, sir?” the bartender asked Daniel.
“No, I’m not drinking tonight,” Daniel told him, and then to Gennady: “Mugged?”
A shrug. “I was looking at the map, an easy mark, a tourist,” Gennady said, “or so he thought. He ran when I put up a fight. But still, after all, to be interrupted by an attack, just when you are happy because of a promotion…”
“A promotion! I’d better have a beer after all,” Daniel said, and smacked Gennady’s back. Gennady looked startled, almost ill, and Daniel withdrew his hand hastily and said, “To toast, you know. Just one beer. Not enough to get drunk.”
Gennady smiled again. “Yes, of course, a toast,” he said.
He drank his fourth shot as soon as the bartender delivered it. It was his fifth shot that he clinked against Daniel’s beer.
Once the oysters Rockefeller arrived, Gennady alternated oysters and shots. He was in the double digits by the time the bartender brought their food. “Don’t you think you’d better slow down a little?” Daniel said, with the forced jocularity he used to use to try to cajole his frat brothers out of drinking themselves sick.
It had rarely worked then and did not work now. Gennady scowled at him. “It’s hot,” he said, and made to take off his suit jacket.
The movement exposed a cluster of rusty red dots on the side of his shirt. “So,” Daniel said, trying to sound casual, “the fight with the mugger reopened your wound?”
Gennady froze. He jerked the suit jacket back on his shoulders. “It’s fine.”
It must have hurt like hell. That was probably why he was drinking so much. “You want me to look at it again?”
Gennady’s look of fury nearly blasted Daniel from his barstool. “You Americans! You’re all such babies about injuries and pain. When I was eight I broke my arm. Do you think they had painkillers to waste on a child? It was all needed at the front. You just accept the pain and you live with it until it is over.”
Daniel essayed a pacifying smile. “I’m sorry.”
“We’re the ones who did all the real fighting in the war anyway,” Gennady said, his voice far too loud. “Your troops didn’t even make landfall in France until 1944, and the war was practically over by then. And now you swan around like you own the whole world when you didn’t even conquer Berlin. We did! You didn’t drive Hitler to his death. He killed himself to escape our Red Army! Your troops didn’t even make it to Berlin until – ”
A movement in the mirror above the bar caught Daniel’s eye: a man with graying red hair was listening, his face turning red with fury. Daniel interrupted Gennady. “We’re not going to discuss that here,” he said and he got out his wallet and started counting twenties onto the bar.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to get in a bar fight, you moron,” Daniel told Gennady.
But before Daniel could drag Gennady off his barstool, the red-haired man stormed over. “Commie bastard,” he snarled.
Gennady spun himself off the barstool so fast he nearly fell, swinging his arm in a powerful poorly-aimed punch. He missed, and the red-haired man tried to swing back, but his two friends caught his arms. “Easy, Zeke. Easy.”
Daniel grabbed Gennady by the arms and frog-marched him out of the bar. He couldn’t have done it if Gennady were sober, but as it was Gennady didn’t manage to free himself till they were outside in the cool night air. “Get off!” he shouted, and made as if to go back inside. Daniel leaped in front of the door.
“If you want to get beaten up that badly, I’ll beat you up!” Daniel shouted.
Gennady’s face blazed. For a moment Daniel thought Gennady would take him up on the offer. But then Gennady sagged, and staggered, and vomited into the gutter.
He ended up on his knees on the concrete, still retching, though there was nothing left to come up. At last he wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I would have won,” he insisted. “I could have beaten him into the floor.”
“For God’s sake,” Daniel snapped. “Get up and get into the car.”
The reek of booze and vomit filled the close confines of the car. Daniel drove in silence for a while, inwardly seething. At last his rage boiled over, and he snarled, “What the hell were you thinking, l
etting loose with a rant like that in an American bar?”
“You think too much of yourselves! You think you are so great, so amazing, you think everyone wants to be like you. And you have the audacity,” Gennady said, his voice rising, “to show off your beautiful roads and restaurants and big shiny department stores as if they prove your country is better than mine, as if they are a result of capitalism, when really all they show is that you were never invaded. You were sitting pretty behind your two oceans while my country was burned and trampled to the ground by Nazi troops. We’ve had to rebuild from the ground up, and that’s why we’re behind you, but someday we will catch up, and then we’ll bury you just as Comrade Khrushchev said.”
“That’s why you almost dragged us into a bar fight? What the hell is wrong with you?”
Gennady swore at him in Russian, furiously, steadily, a whole string of words that Daniel had never heard from the Polyakovs. Suddenly Gennady’s voice cracked. He stopped, and tried to start swearing again, and choked.
Daniel felt a flicker of sympathy, and set his jaw against it. He had expected a nice night, a celebration, and he’d gotten barely two bites of his fucking steak, and he wanted to stay angry.
Gennady drew in a faint rattling wet breath. Daniel glanced over at him. Gennady had both hands pressed to his face, his shoulders drawn high, his whole body tense, and despite himself Daniel felt sorry for him, after all. Gennady did not usually drink that way. Something must have upset him.
“Were you looking forward to going home?” Daniel asked.
Gennady shook his head.
Daniel’s hands flexed on the steering wheel. It occurred to him that perhaps Gennady had not been as successful fighting off the mugger as he said. Losing a fight could leave anyone with bruised pride and a chip on his shoulder. But it wouldn’t do any good to ask directly, so Daniel just said, “Bad day?”
Gennady gulped again.
Daniel extended an olive branch. “We are damn smug. Americans, I mean. And we’ve got nothing to be smug about, really. Did you know Mr. Gilman told me specifically not to take you below the Mason-Dixon line? ‘Don’t give them more fuel for their propaganda,’” he said, in his best Mr. Gilman imitation. “But it’s not propaganda if it’s true, is it?”
Honeytrap Page 19
