Delivery 8

"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.

"Excuse me? Sorry, I was thinking of the call I just got. That was rude of me. I've turned the cell phone off now. You're much more interesting than the piece of business I was thinking of." I gave him a "interested" smile. My attention needed to zip back to the bar in the Four Seasons hotel. I obviously had been daydreaming when the assignment at hand was to keep the Belgian happy.

The Belgian was leaning into the table. He still was playing with my shin, covered in a silk sock, with his similarly clad foot, but he also had a beefy hand on my knee under the table, squeezing it to the rhythm of the pulsing strings of Christmas lights. He obviously knew I would make myself available to him because I was making no effort to draw away from his advances.

He had been more presentable than I had thought he'd be. The top tier of middle-aged, of course, but I appreciated mature men. In compensation, he was tall, and, although "beefy" answered for him well, he also was muscular and not too heavy around the middle.

He was no beauty in the face, but we wouldn't be in the light for very long, I imagined. I had known European men like him before. Most of them were experts with the cock, and, so, I was looking forward to this evening. Most of them were just a bit cruel too. I'm embarrassed to say that I also was looking forward to that.

"Yes, yes. You have a room here. That's very convenient." Of course I knew he had a room at this hotel; we had booked it for him. We knew just about everything there was to know about this Belgian diplomat, including what he knew that could be of use to us.

"Would you like to see my room?" he asked. "I know it's Christmas Eve and I've already taken up much of your holiday time . . ." I could hear the eagerness in his voice. It was always nice to be wanted. And of course I wanted to see his room. This had all been part of the preplanned package.

"Yes, I very much would like to see your room," I answered, giving him what I'd been told was a special gift of mine—a dazzling smile of not-completely-feigned eager acceptance. "I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing on Christmas Eve."

* * * *

Tyler's apartment wasn't what I expected, at least until I got inside. I expected Tyler and Jenna to live on an upper floor with huge windows in some old high-rise apartment building. There certainly were enough of them around Dupont Circle. Instead, it was an old Georgetown row mansion that had been cut up into apartments. Theirs was commodious, with such amenities of yesteryear as wood paneling, wainscoting, and crown molding.

I also expected their taste to be spare, but expensive and in good taste—I certainly saw Jenna this way. As soon as Tyler opened the door to me and I stepped into the vestibule, though, I knew it was a habitat of "one of us." It was chock-a-block with the same collection of Oriental, European, and Middle East treasures that my house was. Everyone in the business seemed to have decided the exact same acquisitions from these places were treasures they must have—to set themselves apart from everyone else.

It just had a more "stuffed"—although artfully stuffed—appearance than mine did. That wasn't because they had collected more than I had. In choosing to live in the Virginia suburbs rather than in the thick of the trendy district of Washington, D.C., I could afford twice the house they could on a third of their combined salary.

What was notable was that there was no trimmed Christmas tree or any other evidence of holiday decoration.

Tyler was a surprise, though. He looked as elegant as ever, the handsome face with graying sideburns on a precisely cut head of dark hair. Tall and lean. He had on neatly pressed dark trousers, but instead of a shirt, he was wearing a red silk robe—perhaps his sense of a Christmas decoration? It was more a smoking jacket affair that came down to the knees and, while exposing a good bit of his bare, tanned chest, was held together with a black silk sash. He looked formal and casual at the same time in an old money way that he'd been bringing off for years.

He had a cigarette in one hand and a martini glass in another. The cigarette paper was turquoise. Even in this Tyler had to set himself a step above and apart from everyone else.

"I brought the parcel," I said, as I shook snowflakes off my topcoat and onto the black and white-block linoleum tile of the foyer. The declaration was largely irrelevant, because there it was, being brought from under my arm to be extended toward him.

"You can lay it there on the table," Tyler said, not even looking at the package. "Come on through. What's your poison?"

I stood there in indecision for a few moments, having assumed that this would be the same as his office—that I would be held, standing, in his outer reception area until a secretary came to relieve me of the memo or paper draft I was bringing to him.

I had expected that Jenna would answer the door, I'd pass the package to her, she'd thank me for a favor we traded back and forth, there'd be a bit of a chat on where each of us had been in the world that month, and then I'd be gone. I was looking forward to dispensing with the transaction. I also was looking forward to the week without an evening assignment. I could cruise on my own requirements and preferences. I wouldn't have to have any other motives running except the anticipation of personal pleasure.

But Jenna hadn't greeted me at the door for the passing of the parcel. Rather, Tyler, dressed to slouch eclectically and fashionably, as much as Tyler ever did, had answered the door and invited me into his inner sanctum—or at least their entertainment space, devoted, no doubt, to guests who were far more interesting and had far more cachet than I did.

"Well, come on then," Tyler said, turning at the door that I could see led into a well-appointed living room with leather chairs on either side of a fireplace grate. "Just leave the parcel on the center table."

There was, in fact, a round mahogany-wood table in the center of the vestibule, mounted with one of those four-foot-high flower and fruit arrangements that you only saw in hotel lobbies and the pages of

House Beautiful

.

"Oh, and you can just drape your coat on one of the chairs," he called from the other room.

I did as he instructed—I'd always done as Tyler instructed. I left the parcel on the center table and folded my topcoat and left it on one of the four Chippendale chairs set precisely against the vestibule walls between doorways leading off in all directions.

"Perhaps Jenna should open the parcel to ensure that it's what she ordered," I said as I entered the living room. I was self-conscious about being in jeans and a sports shirt; I hadn't thought to dress formal for a package delivery. But, of course, if I'd been thinking on all cylinders, I would have worn an Armani suit.

"Uh, thanks," I then said as Tyler handed me a gin and tonic. I hadn't told him what I wanted to drink, but of course a gin and tonic would have been what I would have asked for.

"Jenna isn't here," he said, as he motioned me to one of the chairs by the fireplace.

There was a fire in the grate, and I could see the snow falling beyond the two windows looking out onto Q Street. It seemed to be falling faster than it had when I'd entered the building. I'd had a hell of a time finding a parking space in this area of town, and I wondered how they—or anyone—could stand living in Georgetown under that sort of pressure. But then, in our line of work, pressure and the luck of the find came as givens.

"Jenna isn't here?" I asked as I sat down. Christmas week and they were spending it half a world apart from each other?

"No, she's in Vienna today. Prague tomorrow, I think."

At least there would be plenty evidence of Christmas were Jenna was.

"She asked me to bring that parcel from St. Petersburg," I said. I was speaking repetitive nonsense. But I always had had the feeling of being slow and tongue-tied in the presence of Tyler. It was that superior-subordinate, love-hate thing. He intimidated me and, at the same time, I had been more than a bit distressed when I heard that he and Jenna were getting married.

I guess before that I'd hoped the rumors were true and that he secretly fancied me. I know I had secretly fancied him for some time. It had almost been a relief when he had sent me off to fuck and be fucked by the Russian in Thailand all weekend. I thought that, perhaps, it being in the open what I preferred that . . . well, that he'd make some sort of move himself. But he hadn't. And, of course, he would have had to be the one to make the move.

He was as ambiguous about sex as he was with everything else.

And then the surprise announcement that he and Jenna would marry. The office scuttlebutt gave that union six months max—we were used to musical beds and marriages in our organization. But that had been three years ago. And, by all accounts, their marriage was working out marvelously—even though one or the other of them was out of the country a good bit of the time.

"Fuck the parcel," Tyler said, which snapped my head up to where I was looking closely into his face. Tyler didn't use profanity. There was a look of weariness, almost distress, in his chiseled, patrician features. "I invited you here precisely because Jenna was in Vienna today and Prague tomorrow. I, in fact, just spoke to her on the phone to make sure she was there."