Honeytrap

by Aster Glenn Gray

  “No.”

  Emily cheered up instantly. “Well, I’ll show you then.”

  They were on their second game when Daniel poked his head around the open door. “Emily! Didn’t I tell you not to wake Gennady up?”

  “He woke up on his own, Daddy,” Emily protested.

  “Yes,” Gennady confirmed. “Emily has been entertaining me. She taught me to play fox and geese.”

  “Of course she has.” Daniel looked fond and exasperated. “Well, you’ll have to finish the game later, Em. Your mother wants you to set the table.”

  Emily got up with a great show of reluctance and sidled toward the door. She paused by her father and tugged his hand. “Is he going to stay for dinner?” she asked her father, in a stage whisper that could have carried to the back of a theater.

  Daniel lifted his eyebrows at Gennady, echoing the question.

  “Yes, myshka,” Gennady told Emily. “I am staying for dinner. Now go. Your mother is waiting for you.”

  ***

  Gennady returned the next weekend. It was careless to go two weekends in a row, but he was still sick and miserable, and the lure of having someone to fuss over him proved irresistible.

  It was this desire that prompted him to walk from the station to the house, and sure enough, Daniel scolded him for it. “Gennady! Did you walk all the way here again?”

  “No, I rode a goose like Nils Holgersson.”

  Gennady said this so seriously that Daniel looked at him for a moment in half-belief before he laughed. “Well, your sense of humor is recovering at least,” Daniel said. “Come in. I’m afraid the house is a mess; we had a cocktail party yesterday, and by the time the guests left we were too tired to clean up…”

  Gennady was taking off his boots, but now he paused. “Perhaps I should not have come?”

  “No, no!” Daniel said. “I’m so glad you came, Gennady. I worried about you all week.”

  This seemed excessive for what was after all just a cold, but Gennady’s heart warmed anyway. “If I nap in the den, perhaps that will keep me out of the way.”

  “You’re not in the way,” Daniel said. “But yes, the den would be a quiet place to nap.”

  Daniel sat on the couch in the den with him. He kept reaching down and resting his hand on Gennady’s forehead as if checking for a fever, and then smoothing his hand back through Gennady’s hair before he took up his pen again and began scratching away on whatever he was working on – “Taxes,” he muttered, when Gennady asked.

  Gennady fell asleep eventually. Daniel must have slipped out of the room, because when Gennady woke he was alone, and the air smelled like vanilla and chocolate.

  He followed the smell down the stairs into the kitchen. Daniel’s children sat the kitchen table, eating cookies with tall glasses of milk. When Emily saw him, she catapulted herself from her chair and ran over to him, grabbing his hand. “No one said you were here,” she cried, outraged.

  “I’m sorry, myshka. I’ve been sleeping.”

  She looked up at him, still clutching his hand. “Are you still sick?”

  “Yes.”

  She pressed both her small hands on either side of his large one, and looked intensely up into his face. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Making you better,” she said, and he couldn’t help smiling.

  “I think it’s working, myshka. Keep doing it.”

  Chapter 9

  After Gennady’s illness, he began to come to the house more often. Daniel would have had him down every weekend, but Gennady refused: “The neighbors will talk.”

  “I don’t think they’re that interested in what we do,” Daniel told him.

  “People love to talk about each other, my friend. It is the favorite human pastime. And, after all, you don’t know which one of them might be talking to the FBI.”

  “The FBI doesn’t have a network of informants spying on its agents,” Daniel protested.

  Gennady shook his head like he couldn’t be bothered to argue any further. But he must have believed Daniel at least somewhat, because he continued to visit once or twice a month, generally with a bakery box in tow: a cake or a dozen doughnuts or half a dozen éclairs, which delighted Emily so much that afterward he always brought an éclair just for her.

  “You don’t have to play checkers with her every time you visit,” Daniel told Gennady one evening. It had been a soggy March day, and Emily – cooped up inside by the cold rain – had made a bit of a pest of herself.

  But now Emily and David were in bed and Gennady lay on the couch in Daniel’s den, with his head in Daniel’s lap, and Daniel was stroking Gennady’s hair and squashing his desire to ask Gennady to spend the night.

  “No, I don’t mind,” Gennady said. “And, after all, perhaps it will give you and Elizabeth a break from endless checkers.”

  “As if! The moment you’re out of the house, she starts carrying around the checkerboard trying to get someone to play with her for practice. She’s determined to beat you fair and square someday.”

  Gennady smiled. “She will,” he said. “Someday. She’s a clever child.”

  The fondness in his face struck Daniel. He rested a hand against Gennady’s cheek. “Maybe it’s not such a bad thing if you and Alla get divorced,” Daniel said. “You could marry again. Find a woman who wants children.”

  “No, I’m too old.”

  “You’re forty, Gennady, not decrepit.”

  But Gennady was shaking his head. “No, no, I’m too old,” he said again. “We age faster in Russia than you do in the States.” He pulled Daniel down and kissed him, and swung his legs off the couch to stand up. “I need to get going. The last subway leaves soon.”

  And he kissed Daniel again, and wouldn’t stay any longer.

  There were only a few stolen kisses that winter. “I don’t want your children to see anything, I don’t want them to have to keep our secrets,” Gennady said, adamant. “Children should be carefree, they shouldn’t have to worry about grown-up things,” and Daniel thought about Gennady’s childhood, when the Germans were dropping bombs on Moscow and Stalin was tossing people in jail for telling jokes, and agreed.

  Daniel loved having Gennady in the house. He loved to see him sitting at the kitchen table in the evening, with the snow falling past the windows – it could not really have snowed that much that year, but that was how Daniel always remembered it later – chatting with Elizabeth over coffee while Daniel did the dishes. Once the dishes were done Daniel joined them, dropping a kiss on Elizabeth’s head as he passed her chair.

  He would have liked to kiss Gennady too, and perhaps it was because this scene was otherwise so peaceful and contented that this longing sometimes caused him physical pain, a literal ache in his heart. The quiet evenings at the kitchen table seemed like a glimpse of an alternate reality where Gennady lived right down the street and could drop by every evening, and it would be all right if Daniel kissed him right in front of the open curtains where anyone could see.

  In the real world, all of this was impossible, and Daniel contented himself with a brief hand on Gennady’s shoulder before he took his own chair, and they all talked until Gennady had to leave to catch the last train home.

  “It’s too bad he can’t stay the night,” Elizabeth said one evening. It was an unseasonably warm late March, and they had the kitchen window open.

  “I wish he could stay,” Daniel agreed. He was silent a moment, staring out the window into the darkness. “I wish,” he began, and then he stood and closed the window, not that anyone would be standing outside listening – but just in case. “I wish he would defect and stay here. But he’ll never defect, he’s loyal to the USSR, and it drives me crazy that he’s so loyal to a country that would toss him in the gulag on suspicion of espionage if they found out he was eating dinner at an FBI agent’s house.”

  “The FBI would fire you if they knew you were sleeping with Gennady,” Elizabeth pointed out. “And not just because he’s a Soviet.
They’d fire you just the same if you were sleeping with an American man.”

  “Yes. But there isn’t a country on earth where that wouldn’t be true.”

  This bleak truth silenced them both. Daniel gathered up Gennady’s abandoned coffee cup and set it on the drain board. Elizabeth stood with a sigh. “How long will he be in the US?” she asked.

  “About another year, I think. Give or take.”

  “Well then,” she said, and kissed the side of his head. “Carpe annum.”

  ***

  It was a beautiful spring.

  Daniel had expected that once it was warm enough to go to the cabin again, Gennady would never come to Daniel’s house anymore. In one sense, of course, Daniel had looked forward to going back to the cabin, but in another sense he was sorry. He liked to see Gennady bending seriously over a checkerboard with Emily, or helping Elizabeth maneuver a new big painting into the living room, and then spending the next hour changing all the paintings around so that the light would show each to the best advantage. He hated to lose this feeling that Gennady was one of the family.

  But, as it turned out, he didn’t. Oh, they did start going up to the cabin again, but Elizabeth pressed Gennady so warmly to keep coming round for dinner (enthusiastically seconded by Emily, who had recently augmented her passion for checkers with an interest in cards) that Gennady came to the house almost every other week.

  Easter fell in mid-April that year – American Easter, anyway; the Russian Easter was later, and so Gennady was free to come to Daniel’s house on Easter Sunday. “My sister Anna will be there,” Daniel warned him. “And her husband Nate.”

  “The travel writer?”

  “Yes. He’s sort of quiet, but he’s a great guy. And you’ve met Anna before; you liked her,” Daniel added, because he really wanted Gennady to come. It pained him that Gennady had no public presence in his life, not even as much as Ronald had in Elizabeth’s. Of course most people didn’t realize the true nature of Ronald and Elizabeth’s relationship, but at least he could come to their cocktail parties, everyone knew they were friends.

  Daniel could hardly invite a Soviet agent to a cocktail party.

  He expected Gennady to say no to Easter, too. But Gennady smiled suddenly, looking almost surprised, and he said, “Okay. Why not?”

  When Gennady arrived for Easter, Anna and Elizabeth were already deep in the process of decorating eggs. (Anna’s husband Nate, fulfilling his part of Easter tradition, had taken Emily and David to the park.)

  “Do you remember Gennady?” Daniel asked Anna. “He came to Christmas one year…”

  “Of course!” Anna said. “The year before Joseph and I divorced.”

  Gennady smiled at her. “You’re looking very well.”

  “Yes; getting out of a bad marriage will do that for you.” Anna laughed. She held out her hand, then drew it back. “I’d shake your hand, only I think I’d get black dye all over your fingers.”

  “Why are you painting the eggs black?” Gennady asked.

  “Well, we had to use brown eggs, because Elizabeth forgot to – ”

  “I didn’t forget to buy white eggs,” Elizabeth protested, laughing, “it was all part of my cunning plan – ”

  “ – to force us to paint the eggs to look like ancient Greek red figure pottery,” Anna finished. “What do you think, Gennady?”

  Gennady came over to inspect the eggs. He picked one up, and looked surprised to find it so heavy. “You didn’t blow out the insides?” he asked.

  “Every year I tell them to do that,” Daniel told him, “and every year they decorate hard-boiled eggs.”

  “Oh, but they’re so much more beautiful when they last only a few hours,” Anna objected. “And decorated eggs make the best deviled eggs, too. All the care and affection that goes into the decoration makes them taste better: I’m sure of it.”

  ***

  “But really,” Gennady said later, as he and Daniel walked to the subway stop that evening, “it’s too bad they did not hollow out the eggs.” He lifted the clear plastic bag, admiring the eggs in the slanting sunlight that deepened the rich brown of their shells. “These would be worth keeping.”

  “I’ll tell them you said so. Maybe next year they’ll take it under advisement.”

  “Yes, do.” Gennady shifted the bag from one hand to the other. “Although it will do no good for me: I’ll be back in Moscow by then,” Gennady said, and Daniel felt a disagreeable sensation in his throat. He had almost forgotten – he had refused to remember – that Gennady would not be here forever.

  “Perhaps it is just as well,” Gennady mused. “Hollow eggs are very delicate. It would be very difficult to carry them home without breaking them.”

  Chapter 10

  It all came to an end quite suddenly in early May.

  Gennady took the subway down just as usual. He had brought along a book, but once the subway had emerged from the tunnel he stopped reading, and instead watched the rain splash against the windows.

  The road would be too muddy to drive up to the cabin that day, which was disappointing in a way, and yet Gennady wasn’t unhappy. Emily would be running around the house carrying her red rain boots of which she was so proud, wanting someone to help her put them on so she could go outside and stomp in puddles, while David drew quietly at the kitchen table and complained that his sister was too loud.

  The prospect of éclairs might cheer them both up – and here Gennady smiled down at the bakery box on his lap. Daniel and Elizabeth would like them too. Elizabeth might make hot chocolate, and if she did not, certainly there would be coffee; and perhaps they would light the fire.

  Indeed, a fire already crackled in the fireplace when Elizabeth let him in. She took the box of éclairs with an exclamation of pleasure. “Maybe this will cheer Daniel up,” she said. “He’s in some sort of funk and he won’t tell me why. He’s barely left the den since yesterday.”

  She didn’t sound too worried, though, and so Gennady didn’t worry either. He slipped off his rain boots and hung up his raincoat and headed to the den. The door was closed, so he knocked. “Daniel.”

  “Gennady. Come in.”

  The door squeaked on its hinges. Daniel sat at his desk, watching the rain beat on the window.

  Gennady couldn’t see his face, but his sharp voice and slouched posture suggested that he was indeed in a sulk. “Why are you hiding away like a bear in his den?” Gennady asked. “Come downstairs and splash in the puddles with Emily. That should cheer you up.”

  Daniel swiveled his chair, and Gennady fell silent at the expression on his face. “Here,” Daniel said. He picked up a letter from his desk. “Read this.”

  It was quality stationary, heavy paper with a navy blue monogram at the top of the page: Paul Everard Preston.

  Gennady glanced at Daniel. “Paul…” he began. Daniel gestured impatiently for him to go on reading. The handwriting was visibly imprinted into the page, as if the writer had pressed hard on his pen.

  Dear Daniel:

  By the time this reaches you, you’ll probably already have heard about my suicide. I’ve tried to set it up to look like drugs drove me to it, but I wanted you to know the truth. I’m being blackmailed. The Soviets –

  Gennady felt as if the floor had dropped away from under his feet.

  Arkady. He had mentioned Paul to Arkady. His previous partner kept pawing at him, something like that. Gennady could not recall if he had said Paul’s name, but it didn’t matter, Arkady could have found it easily enough in Daniel’s dossier.

  The Soviets have pictures. That’s my fault: I brought it on myself by going to sordid places.

  Of course I’d rather die than betray my country, so I’m going to shoot myself as soon as I’ve mailed this letter. All my affairs are in order. I’ve enclosed the cufflinks you gave me. I hope you’ll keep them.

  Burn this letter once you read it.

  Paul.

  Gennady read the letter a second time. He didn’t need
to: the letter had burned itself into his soul. He was just buying himself time before he had to look at Daniel’s face.

  But finally he lowered the letter and force himself to meet Daniel’s eyes. “Did you tell them?” Daniel asked. “About Paul.”

  “Yes.” Gennady heard himself as someone else was speaking.

  “When?”

  “Fifteen years ago. When you first told me.”

  Daniel turned away. “They’ve been patient.”

  “They must have been waiting for photographic proof.”

  “I suppose you had a hand in that, too?” Daniel’s tone was snide.

  “No.” Gennady could hear the tonelessness of his own voice. “Pictures aren’t my line.”

  “No,” Daniel agreed. “I didn’t really mean that.”

  They fell silent. Daniel put the letter on his desk and pressed his hands against his knees, clenching his fists in the fabric.

  “Say something,” Daniel said abruptly.

  “I’m a Soviet agent,” Gennady said. “You’ve always known this.”

  “Yes.” Daniel stood up abruptly, and crossed the small room, picking up one of the decorative decoy ducks off his shelf. “It’s my own fault. You told me that I shouldn’t trust you.”

  Gennady stirred. “I should go,” he said.

  Daniel regarded the wooden duck. “Yes.”

  Gennady hesitated, just a moment. “I never told them about you.”

  It felt important that he should say it. But Daniel’s eyes bulged and his skin stretched over his bones so he looked like a death’s head, and his voice when he spoke was barely above a whisper. “Get out.”

  Gennady went.

  Emily caught him while he was still putting on his boots. “Uncle Gennady!” she cried, gleeful as only a small child can be. “Are you going for a walk? Can I come with?”

  “Not today, myshka,” Gennady said, and he managed an apologetic smile. “I’ve got to go back to the city.”