“You shouldn’t say that to me.”
“Why not?” Daniel said. “Mr. Gilman already knows what I think. It doesn’t matter if you tell the KGB.”
“I’m not a KGB agent.” Gennady sounded tired.
Suddenly Daniel felt exhausted, and very lonely with the weight of the lies and the truths they couldn’t speak. “Yes, fine. Whatever. I’m stopping at the next motel, all right?”
The next motel was small and dilapidated, and the room itself tiny and grimly Spartan. A single flickering low-watt lamp illuminated twin beds with threadbare blankets. At least the ashtray had been cleaned.
Gennady kicked his shoes off. He lay down on the floor between the beds.
“Gennady, what are you doing?”
“I thought the world would spin less down here.” Gennady’s mouth twisted. “If it were not so unpleasant to be drunk, no one would ever be sober.”
Daniel massaged the bridge of his nose. Then he sat on the floor, too. The thin layer of carpet appeared to be lying directly on top of concrete. “You don’t usually drink that much,” Daniel said. “Why tonight?”
Gennady shrugged. He rested his cheek against the cold floor.
“Is it that bad having to keep working with me?” Daniel asked. He tried to smile as he said it, as if it were a joke, but his voice came out wistful.
“No, no,” Gennady said, and he sounded so surprised that Daniel believed him. “No. It was…”
But he didn’t finish the sentence, and eventually Daniel prompted him. “Did you lose the fight with the mugger?”
“What?” Gennady sounded astonished.
And then Daniel realized: “There never was a mugger.”
Gennady sighed. “No,” he agreed.
He looked at Daniel, a transparently calculating look, and Daniel said, “Oh, just tell me the truth, why don’t you? That’s less trouble in the end.”
Gennady let out a breath. He tucked his chin against his chest. “Arkady hit me.”
“Who is Arkady?”
Gennady glanced at him. “My boss – my old boss. He was angry when he heard I have been promoted out of his department, and he punched me.”
“Is he allowed to do that?”
“No. I know you think we are barbarians, but no. It’s not allowed. But what is allowed in the rules and what a powerful person can do – these are two different things, you understand?”
“Yes,” Daniel said. “It’s like that here too.” He thought suddenly, almost irrelevantly, of John, who had been so popular, the treasurer of the frat. “I’m sorry that happened, Gennady. That’s awful.”
Gennady shrugged. He picked at a hangnail. “I went to gloat,” he said. “Naturally it made him angry.”
“Well, sure it would,” Daniel conceded. “But he still shouldn’t have hit you, Gennady.”
Gennady looked up at him briefly. “I was so happy,” he said. “It was such a good day. I got a promotion, and my new boss was pleased with my work, and our road trip will continue. And then Arkady hit me, and then I felt…” He made a gesture with his hand, like a bomb falling, and a sound effect that must have been the Russian noise for an explosion. “It spoiled everything. And until then I had been so happy.” Another glance at Daniel, even briefer this time. “Are you angry with me?”
“No. Not anymore.”
Gennady’s face twisted, like he really might cry. “I behaved so badly this evening…”
“It’s all right,” Daniel assured him. “I mean, you did behave badly, and for God’s sake don’t go getting us into any more bar fights. But I’m not mad.”
He touched Gennady’s hand. Gennady’s head snapped up. Their eyes locked, Gennady’s huge and gray and wet, and for a long moment neither of them could move; but then Daniel blinked, and Gennady flung himself toward him, his arms around Daniel’s neck, his face pressed into his shoulder.
Daniel’s arms closed around Gennady. “It’s okay,” he murmured, and got a mouthful of Gennady’s hair. He tightened his grip, and felt a sort of relaxation in his chest, because here was Gennady, finally in his arms. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
Gennady was so close that Daniel could not only hear but actually feel his shaking breaths. He smelled like alcohol and faintly of vomit and it should have been repulsive, but Daniel just pulled him closer. Gennady tried to speak, and choked.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Daniel soothed, and stroked Gennady’s hair.
“It’s not the pain,” Gennady choked out. “The pain doesn’t hurt. It’s the indignity – the indignity – you understand?”
“Yes, of course,” Daniel said, not really understanding but willing to sympathize anyway. “Of course.”
Gennady’s whole body tensed like a spring. A sob ripped out of him. “I’m sorry,” he gasped.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Daniel assured him, and kissed his hair, and then wished he hadn’t, because what if Gennady took that the wrong way? But Gennady was still clinging to him, not shaking so badly now, but still trembling, and he didn’t pull away.
“You must hate me,” Gennady mumbled.
“Of course not. I’m used to this, Gennady, honest. Half the brothers in my fraternity came to cry on my shoulder when they were drunk.”
Gennady made as if to speak, and then choked again and let out a whole string of sobs.
Eventually he stopped sobbing. The tension relaxed out of his body. He sagged against Daniel, and sniffed, and rubbed his face on his sleeve. “I’m sorry.” His voice was hoarse.
“It’s all right.”
But Gennady was already slipping off Daniel’s lap. He slid across the narrow space between the beds and drew his legs up to his chest like a shield. His voice was quiet when he spoke again. “You must think I’m pathetic,” Gennady said, half-defiant.
“Gennady. Of course not.”
Gennady twisted the end of his tie between his fingers. “It must seem so stupid to you,” he insisted. “To be so upset over a single punch…”
“No, no. Even a single punch is terrible when it’s someone you can’t punch back.”
Gennady’s mouth dragged down at the corners. “What do you know about it? I bet your boss never hit you.”
“No,” Daniel admitted.
“Not even when he discovered you are a homosexual.”
Daniel flinched. “I’m not.”
“It is a little late in the day to be saying that, my friend.”
“No, no, I’m not saying… I mean, I’m not homosexual because I’m not attracted only to men. I’m attracted to women too. It’s called, um.” His face was flushing, dammit, his shoulders bracing as if in expectation of a blow. “Kinsey calls it bisexuality,” he said, as if Kinsey’s imprimatur made it a real and respectable thing, although that certainly hadn’t worked when he discussed it with Paul.
(“That’s not real,” Paul had snapped. “There are gay men trying to deny their true nature, and oversexed straight men who will satisfy their base urges with a man if they can’t find a woman.”
“So which one am I?”
Paul’s jaw had twitched. “Both.”)
Damn Gennady anyway for prying when he had no right to ask. An equally prying question occurred to Daniel, and he cracked it out like a whip. “What about you?”
Gennady blinked at him. He looked genuinely confused. “What about me?”
“Well, they didn’t choose you to honeytrap me because you’re straight as an arrow, did they?” Daniel said. Gennady still looked puzzled, and Daniel snapped, “They must have had some reason to think you could seduce a man.”
Gennady flushed. “I wasn’t chosen for that,” he said stiffly. “It was after I received the assignment – then Arkady had the idea for the honeytrap. He was angry they were taking one of his agents away, he wanted to turn it to his advantage, to secure a source for himself. But he would have sent someone else if he could. It would have been better to send someone younger and prettier…”
“So the honeytrap wasn’t part of your official mission? It was a favor that your boss asked of you.”
Gennady nodded.
In a way that was comforting. The whole KGB wasn’t gunning to blackmail Daniel, after all, just one venal intelligence officer who wanted to snag his own private turncoat.
And yet Daniel was disappointed, too, in a strange stupid way. “So you’ve never been interested in men at all.”
Gennady sighed. “So, so, so. I’ve fooled around sometimes when I’m drunk.”
Time stopped. Daniel remembered, could almost taste, Gennady’s lips under his, Gennady’s hands on his chest, the little noise that he made as Daniel kissed him.
“But, after all, everyone does that,” Gennady added.
“I don’t think that’s true,” Daniel said.
“And how would you know?” Gennady was scornful. “You barely drink.”
“Yeah, but my frat brothers drank like gangbusters. Don’t you think I would’ve gotten in on the action if they were all fooling around? Kinsey says that thirty-seven percent – ”
“Who is Kinsey?”
“A sexologist. He wrote a book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male…”
“A sexologist,” Gennady scoffed. “What does this Kinsey know, anyway? How does he study this?”
“Interviews…”
“With Americans? How can he say that this is the way that all people are if it’s only Americans he has spoken to? Do you believe your country represents the whole human race? Things are different everywhere. We drink so much more in Russia, of course things are different.”
Daniel wanted to argue. Kinsey’s samples might not be totally representative of the whole entire human race, but it wasn’t like there was any kind of scientific evidence behind Gennady’s belief at all.
Kinsey said that thirty-seven percent of men had some homosexual experience. The number had seemed shockingly high to Daniel when he read it: he would have guessed one in a thousand, one in ten thousand even.
But thirty-seven percent was still a hell of a lot less than everybody.
Daniel bit his lip. What was the point? He wanted Gennady to admit that he was part of that thirty-seven percent, that he was attracted to men, that he was attracted to Daniel – and why?
To assuage his own vanity? That was a damn selfish reason to browbeat Gennady toward a realization that would only make his life more difficult.
Gennady’s mind seemed to be moving on an eerily parallel path. “Life is so hard,” he said, “there is no reason to make it even harder. Wouldn’t you be happier if you still thought you were normal?”
It was as if a whisper in Daniel’s subconscious had raised its head and spoken. He stood up and walked to the window, peering through the broken blinds. Neon lights blinked above the Laundromat across the street. “I’d be lying,” Daniel said, “if I said I haven’t asked myself that question. If I wouldn’t have been better off if I married Helen right out of high school and settled down, instead of going to college and falling for one of my frat brothers and getting my face beaten in.”
Gennady made a small sound. Daniel turned around, glaring preemptively. But Gennady’s eyes were wide with compassion, and Daniel had to look away.
“It was the last day before Christmas break,” Daniel told him. His face was hot. “John and I – that was his name, John. We were the only ones left in the frat house, and we were drinking schnapps in John’s room. Peppermint schnapps. Festive, you know. Just passing the bottle back and forth and shooting the shit, and then he kissed me, and…”
Daniel laughed and gave the Venetian blinds a push that sent them clacking against the window. “I kissed him back. And he rammed my head sideways against the bed frame.”
Daniel turned away from the window and smiled and shrugged, to show it was a long time ago and it didn’t matter anymore. His heart was roaring in his ears. He had never told anyone this story.
“But why?” Gennady asked. “If he kissed you first…”
“Maybe he wanted to make sure I really was a faggot.” Daniel turned away sharply as he said the word, and drew in a shaky breath, and shrugged and laughed again. “Never would have happened if I’d stuck with making out with girls,” he said, and added, acid rising in his throat, “I never told anyone. He was so popular – not just in the frat. A big man on campus. No one would have believed me. Or if they had, they would have figured I deserved it.”
“Daniel…”
The sympathy in Gennady’s voice was unbearable. “I didn’t go back to college after Christmas break. I signed up to go fight in Korea instead, just so I wouldn’t have to go back. Everyone thought it was so brave and patriotic and really I was just running away.”
“It’s good to run away when you can.” The vehemence in Gennady’s voice startled Daniel. “When you are faced with a force so powerful that you can’t fight it, of course you should run. What else could you do? Sit and endure? Save that for when you have no other choice.”
“Do you really think so?” Daniel asked.
“Yes, of course. The only people who don’t think that are the ones who want you to stay so they can keep hurting you.”
This was so wildly divergent from everything Daniel had ever been taught – a real man should stand and fight! – that he didn’t know what to do with it. He tried to speak, and choked on it. At last he said, “I’m taking a shower,” and beat a retreat to the bathroom.
He spent a long time in the shower, although the water never got hotter than lukewarm. By the time he came back in the motel room, Gennady had fallen asleep on the carpet, and Daniel had a hell of a time waking him up enough to get him onto a bed.
Chapter 22
Gennady woke just before dawn, stiff and dry-mouthed and sticky, still fully dressed in yesterday’s clothes.
He slipped out of the room and went behind the motel. There, hidden behind the dumpster, Gennady smoked a cigarette and gave himself a few minutes to collapse.
The alcohol had done its work. It had opened a gap in time, so that everything with Arkady seemed ages ago, a week at least, instead of a few hours. But it had left him with a throbbing head and an aching throat and burning eyes, even aside from the pains of his bruised face and wounded side, and he felt he had disgraced himself, crawling onto Daniel’s lap and clinging to him like a baby monkey.
And Gennady remembered, only it wasn’t so much a memory as a tactile sensation, Daniel’s arms around him, holding Gennady tight against his chest, warm and strong.
Daniel must think less of him now. Americans were so judgmental. It was too bad their partnership could not have ended with the case. Then Gennady could have gotten drunk with Sergeyich, who knew everything, and would have fought in the bar brawl with him instead of cutting it short. And then there would have been no tears and no clinging, none of this, and no conversations about whether normal men fooled around with other men when they were drunk, as if Daniel who barely drank knew a damn thing about it.
The pink light of dawn stretched across the empty lot behind the motel. Gennady’s cigarette burned down. He dropped it in a puddle on the asphalt, and ground it out with his heel, and went back to face the day.
***
Gennady felt terrible all day, all along the long road to Boston. The hangover and the pain from his various injuries made it impossible to overcome his poor spirits, and by the time they checked into a cheap hotel in Boston, he felt at odds with the whole world.
He sat down at the end of Daniel’s bed, as he used to. He wanted Daniel to pay attention to him, to fuss over him, but Daniel ignored him and went right on reading A Separate Peace. Gennady felt, quite unfairly, and he knew it was unfair and nonetheless felt it, that Daniel hadn’t cared a twig for him since he learned about the honeytrap. That had changed everything and they weren’t even friends anymore. “Did you only ever like me because you thought we were going to fuck?”
“Gennady!” Daniel set down his book. He looked so aghast that it was a
little funny. “Do you really think that?”
“No.” Gennady thought about it. “Just because I feel bad.”
“You drank a hell of a lot last night.”
Gennady found the disapproving note in Daniel’s voice unsympathetic. “I got stabbed,” he reminded Daniel.
“You poor kid.” Now Daniel was teasing him, but affectionately, which was better than disapproval. “You’d better lie down.”
Gennady suspected that Daniel meant for him to go to his own bed, but he scooted up to lie next to Daniel instead. It hurt to lie on his stomach, so he rolled over to his back, which still hurt, but slightly less.
The spectacle of Gennady’s awkward floundering awakened Daniel’s sympathy after all. “I’ll get you the amenities of the house,” he offered. “Which aren’t much, I’m afraid. I can get you an extra pillow…” He leaned over to the other bed to snag one, and fluffed the pillows so Gennady could prop himself up against them. “And a glass of water. And maybe some ice for that eye.”
Propped against the pillows, a cup of water in his hand, a washcloth full of ice on his eye, Gennady did feel a little better. He would have liked Daniel to sit down again, and perhaps let Gennady lean his head against his shoulder, but Daniel moved restlessly around the room, finally kneeling to unpack his suitcase into the cheap chest of drawers. This would be a far less peripatetic investigation than their first: they would be at this motel a while.
Gennady’s spirits flagged again. “It’s just that you seem different now,” he said.
“Of course I’m different. I’m not flirting with you anymore.”
“Were you before? I thought you were just being friendly…”
“Well, I don’t know. Of course some of it was just friendliness.” Daniel levered himself to his feet. “I guess maybe I’ve gone too far in the other direction. I just didn’t want to make you uncomfortable…”
Honeytrap Page 20
