"Sorry about that. I didn't realize it had been on. I'll turn it off."
I reached into my tux jacket pocket and dragged out my cell phone. The Belgian diplomat sitting across the cocktail table from me in the Bourbon Steak Lounge bar of the Four Seasons Georgetown Hotel lifted his hands in a "no problem" shrug and gave me a pleasant smile.
We had stopped here for a drink after taking in a concert by the Royal Band of the Belgian Guides regiment at the nearby Kennedy Center. It was Christmas Eve and the whole city was at least pretending to be festive. So was I. It had been my idea to come into the bar when I'd brought him back to his hotel, beckoning him to follow me into the gaily decorated bar, its pulsing red and blue strings of lights bathing the lounge area in the spirit of the holidays.
When I looked at the caller ID, though, I had to change my mind. "Sorry again," I said apologetically, "but this is from a few rungs above me in the pecking order. Since it won't switch over to my inbox now, I'd better take it."
"No problem." Again that hooded-eyes smile that had a touch of something more than just friendliness to it. A slight licking of his lips as he gazed at me. If I'd thought getting tickets on short notice to the concert featuring a group from his own country would be the highlight of his evening, I obviously was wrong.
He liked the concert, but he wanted me. I was not unaware that he had his foot out of his shoe with his sock-clad toes rubbing my ankle under the hem of my trousers leg. The rubbing took on the rhythm of the pulsing Christmas lights, which added to the sexual overtones of the act.
It always gave me a little thrill to know I could still have this effect on men.
"Hello, Tyler," I spoke into the phone. I kept my voice neutral. He should know I was working.
"Where are you now, Craig? Are you busy? Jenna wanted me to check on whether you'd brought back her parcel."
"Yes, Tyler, I have it," I answered. "Not with me, though, and I'm not free at the moment, I'm afraid. I can get it to her—" I was taken aback that Tyler would even know about the parcel. For some reason I'd thought Jenna was keeping it a secret from him—like, perhaps, it was a Christmas gift for him.
"Oh, I forgot. Working? Is it the Belgian?"
"Yes, it is," I answered. "I have it and I can—"
"How about eleven tomorrow night then? I should have remembered the Belgian. But now that I see your schedule, I see you should be off for a week after this. Eleven, shall we say? You know where the flat is, don't you? Off Dupont Circle—Q Street."
"Yes, I remember." I hesitated at the word "flat," but it was so like Tyler to use that word rather than "apartment." I'd never been invited to Tyler and Jenna's residence here in D.C. before. I wasn't on their A list by any means. But I had tracked down the street address just because I was curious where they lived. I'd meant to check the place out on Zillow, but I hadn't gotten around to that yet.
Tyler sounded a bit tipsy on the phone. I'd never known him to be the slightest out of control before. The summons I recognized, though—it was quite a slip on his part for him not to have remembered that I was on the hook to entertain the Belgian diplomat tonight—even though it was Christmas Eve. But it was very much like him to have everyone's schedule within reach. And it also was very much like him to expect everyone to drop whatever they were doing to do his bidding.
It was sort of a love-hate relationship between Tyler and me, with me being kept off guard because I never was able to gauge just how he felt about me. And it was important that I know.
In many ways Tyler had been my mentor and had helped at strategic junctions to keep me moving ahead in the organization—which was especially hard, considering what my superiors knew about my preferences, not to mention that I often liked to tread my own path rather than the company road. And then there was the inexplicable physical attraction—at least on my part. Inexplicable, because Tyler was really everything fake, but successfully so, that I resented.
There had been hints about Tyler's own preferences around the organization, but they had mostly been stilled when he'd unexpectedly married Jenna, twenty years his junior and no older than or more senior at the time to me in the office.
Of course, Jenna had risen faster than I had since that time. I didn't resent that. We'd trained side by side; I knew she was better and smarter than I was—and was far more able than I was to remain on the company road while bending it in her chosen direction. She would have risen that quickly anyway. Marriage to Tyler, though, had made it a sure thing.
I wondered why Tyler, instead of Jenna, was calling me about delivery of what I brought back from St. Petersburg for her. The two usually kept their business separate, and Jenna had been quite careful not to pull Tyler's rank on anything or to try to use him as her go-between. I don't think that would have worked even if she had tried, though. I'd even half thought that what I'd picked up for her in Russia was meant as a surprise for Tyler.
Tyler rarely praised me or my work to my face or within my hearing. I had worked as his deputy in Bangkok, where he'd sent me off to Phattaya Beach for a long weekend with a Russian industrialist the office wanted information from.
From that assignment, given and taken without question, I realized that he not only knew my proclivities, but also was willing to use them for office needs. And back here in Washington he was two steps above me, but in the same analysis office.
I had made enemies in the organization—among others as ambitious and opinionated as I was and in the management rung above me—and yet I had gotten a cushy analysis management position for my stint back in the States. I knew Tyler had done that. God knows there were peers of mine who made sure I knew Tyler had done that for me. But he hadn't yet told me to my face that my work was superior—or even adequate to his expectations, which was the same thing as being superior.
Tyler was largely a cipher to me. But I was somewhat afraid that the imperial distance he kept from me stemmed from him not being enough of a cipher to me. In Bangkok I worked with someone who downright despised Tyler and his imperial ways and gleeful filled me in on Tyler's murky past.
"Imperial" is, I think, a perfect way to describe the face Tyler showed to the world. He had a graduate degree from Harvard and had gone on to Oxford and made sure we all knew that—even though, in our business, most everyone else also had graduate degrees from a prestigious university or two. My educational degrees were better than his, for instance, but no one in the office would have guessed it—or would acknowledge it even if the comparison was dangled under their noses.
He feigned a slight English accent to go with the degrees and dressed elegantly as an English don could be imagined to do. He had the tall, thin, yet well-formed body and classic Roman nose slightly pointed toward the sun and sharp, witty tongue to carry it off.
No one in the organization wanted to be the butt of a Tyler joke. The jabs invariably bit right through the recipient's armor, which was all the more galling because Tyler's own public persona was so screamingly fake. In total, he came across as everything an elitist Agency senior officer was in the era of the 1950s. That was sixty years ago, though.
I knew from the coworker who had no love for Tyler whatsoever that Tyler was raised on a rural farm in West Virginia, the backwater state where his undergraduate degree had also been taken, and that there wasn't a genuine patrician bone in his body. He had made it to and through Harvard and Oxford and up the ladder in his career by mental brilliance, sterling gamesmanship, and by being able to pass himself off as being part of the Washington inner circle. His first name wasn't even Tyler. It was Earl. Tyler was his middle name and had been his mother's maiden name.
Unfortunately, Tyler knew I knew that, and I'd made the mistake of referring to it in public some years early. His retort had been glib, swift, and brutal, but we both knew it had wounded him and chipped at his façade.
So, what could have either gone to friendship or hatred remained in a limbo of Mexican standoff. I knew his origins were Hicksville and he knew I was, at best, bisexual and, more honestly, gay.
There was respect on my part, because he was pulling his part off admirably, if maddeningly. I just couldn't be sure whether there was respect on his part. There must have been some semblance of that, though, or he wouldn't be mentoring me from behind the curtain as he obviously was—while standing off from me in person.
Unless, of course, he had some plan in his back pocket to use me down the road.
At least Jenna had remained as much the Jenna I trained with as the Jenna who was now married to "the man." We had always been friendly, while still competitive, and I sensed no change in her attitude upon having acquired the edge of being married to one of the titans of the office.
She wouldn't give me a hint of what he really thought of me—or whether she even knew. Indeed, she gave the impression that he completely compartmented from her what he thought of her coworkers. I gave her credit for not discussing her peers with him; some of our colleagues who I knew she really didn't like were prospering in the office when a little bit of effort from Tyler could easily have sidelined them.
On the whole, despite what some others whispered, I believed that he got, by far, the best part of the deal in the marriage. He needed others to take care of him; he wouldn't stoop to any work that would soil his hands and cause him to break into a sweat—or even to bother to read the directions on how to assemble anything. My vision was of Jenna quietly taking care of him into his old age with a caring, low-key, steady hand—and doing so no matter what feathers he ruffled, including hers.
This just doubled the question running in the back of my mind of why Tyler and not Jenna had called me about the parcel I had retrieved for her in St. Petersburg—and why he wanted me to bring it their apartment rather than take it to her at the office. What, in fact, was urgent to have it delivered at Christmas if it wasn't a Christmas gift from Jenna to Tyler.
"I said this is the hotel I'm staying at. I have a room upstairs." The Belgian was talking at my inattention. Bad tradecraft on my part.
