Page 5 of Deck the Halls in Secret Agents

George searched, of course. He ran out into the Great Hall, checking left and right as he hurried to the vast front doors. One door stood open to the night, and a quartet of holiday makers were walking down the steps toward, God help him, an actual one-horse open sleigh. “See you next year!” they cried cheerfully, their voices mingling with the tinkle of harness bells.

“Has Nick been out here?” George asked, urgent. But they looked at him blankly. Who was Nick?

“Nicholas Mellon,” Stephens said, and there was perhaps just the slightest stress on the last name, “has not come out this way.” Then, with a pointed glance at George curly-toed slipppers, he asked, “Would you like to be reunited with your shoes, sir?”

George could have screamed at the delay, but he could think of no reason to refuse. Fortunately, Stephens effected the change with the same swift efficiency as he had handed the revelers into the sleigh, and George resumed his search.

He had cased the exits last night as he and Nick circulated, there were doors at the far ends of each wing, and he ran to each one to check, but no one had gone out either way: the snow was still pristine, no tracks.

Then he plunged into the service basement, which he hadn’t had an excuse to explore last night, but he knew as well as Nick did that any service wing would have exits. “Has Nicholas Mellon come this way?” he asked. “About my age, fair hair, Rudolph sweater?” But Nick would have ditched the Rudolph sweater, of course, that was elementary tradecraft, changed to it for another garish Christmas sweater perhaps, something distinctive so anyone who saw him would remember nothing else about him…

Certainly no one remembered seeing Nick. The party upstairs might be drooping, but down here everyone was still busy: dishes to wash, rooms to clean, mountains of elf costumes to launder.

George came back to the great hall and stopped before the still-smoldering Yule log. Suddenly exhausted, he sat down hard on the couch where Nikolai had sat the night before. A bedraggled tissue paper crown from a Christmas cracker fluttered into his lap.

Nikolai was a master of disguise. He might have gotten out even past Stephens. And if he hadn’t—three floors, and that attic, and probably a wine cellar, and hell, maybe a dungeon to hide in—

George would never find him if he didn’t want to be found.

And he would never see him again. They only ever met up on missions, and there would be no more missions now.

Of course, it was always going to end like this. Field agents were like athletes: they aged out of the sport young. Nice cozy desk job. Learn to use a computer. No chance of running into Nikolai by the water cooler at Langley.

He felt so tired it did not seem possible that he would ever get up.

But at the sound of Biffy’s jovial voice, still distant but approaching, George hoisted himself from the couch. He could not even pretend to be jolly just now.

He had no conscious plan except escape, and found himself with mild surprise back in the attic. He kicked open one of the steamer trunks and roughly began to unload it. More elf costumes. Jesus Christ.

Hell, Nikolai walking out of his life was the best way that it could end. The alternative was one of them bleeding out in the street as the other watched, unable to help, perhaps even the author of the fatal gunshot.

He’d had nightmares about that after DC. Hadn’t slept well for weeks. Then a postcard arrived from Cairo of all places, just wish you were here, no signature. The first of a series. He kept them all tucked away in the back of his grandmother’s recipe box.

George bundled the elf costumes back in the steamer trunk. He couldn’t get the lid to close, so he left it bulging open. Unlikely to find anything with this haphazard searching, of course, and nothing he might find would matter anymore. He might as well just leave.

He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. When he removed his hands, strange colored shapes swooped before his gaze, almost obscuring the attic.

The shapes faded. George returned to the bulging steamer truck, removed the wadded elf costumes, and methodically folded them up. He’d worked at a men’s clothing store once, back in college. There were other things he could do, besides spying.

He’d quit. The resolution arrived full-grown, like Athena from the head of Zeus. He was too old for fieldwork, and there was no point exchanging a job that he had once loved for a desk job he’d always hate.

And he hadn’t loved fieldwork for years, anyway. He’d stuck it out because—well, shit. Because he’d wanted to see Nikolai again.

And he had. And he ought to be grateful, because they so easily might never again have crossed paths.

He wasn’t, though. He felt the numbness that sometimes accompanies a great pain.

It wasn’t just losing Nikolai, either. In a way the dissolution of the Soviet Union had been the goal of his entire life’s work, but no one had ever believed it would happen.

Did Olympic gold medalists feel this emptiness as they stood on the podium?

He had never wanted to win. He just wanted to go on playing the game, forever.

What would he do, anyway? He hadn’t much liked that job at the clothing store.

He returned to the rolltop desk and mechanically ransacked the pigeonholes. So many letters, Angelique lived after all and now it was the hero dying tragically in her arms as she sobbed.

Some sort of outside job. Park ranger maybe. Although probably you needed some sort of degree for that. Or maybe art thief; and for a while, with black humor, he toyed with the idea. Just as exciting as fieldwork, no looming threat of a desk job. No good stealing famous paintings, of course, you couldn’t sell them, but minor objets d’art, jewelry… There had to be hoards of old chateaux in the countryside just waiting to be robbed. Why bother with endless letters about do you need more socks mon frere when he could be poking around the attic for precious snuffboxes?

“You’re still looking for the letters?”

George stood up so fast he almost knocked over his chair. Nikolai was leaning against a wardrobe, hands in his pockets, that preposterous slouch that George had found so attractive when they first met in London. Nicholas Merton leaning in the doorways of pubs with that maddeningly cynical smile.

George shut his eyes tight and opened them again. Nikolai was still there, leaning against the wardrobe, wearing that Christmas sweater with a red pom-pom for Rudolph’s nose.

“Your tradecraft has gone to shit,” Nikolai informed him. “I could have walked right up and stabbed you in the back.”

He spoke with his own accent, that not-quite-Russian burr that George had only heard once before. George took half a step toward him and stopped again.

“You’re still here,” George said hoarsely.

A shrug. “Where did you think I had gone?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t find you. I…” thought I would never see you again. George swallowed the words. In an attempt at a bantering tone, he said, “If the letters are so worthless, why are you still here?”

“Oh, well. I looked around for you, upstairs, downstairs, by the buffet, in the game room—did you know Biffy has a set of pool balls with a snowflake pattern?”

George cracked out a half-hysterical bark of laughter.

“And you weren’t anywhere, and I was about to give up, when I thought, you fool, you know George, he’s as single-minded as a bloodhound. He’s back in the attic trying to complete his mission even though it’s pointless now.”

“Yes,” George agreed. Then: “You stayed to look for me?”

Nikolai shoved his hands in his pockets. He looked, just for a moment, unsure of himself. Then he shrugged and smiled. “Where else is there to go?”

“I’m sure Russia will still need spies…”

“Russia!” Nikolai spat on the immaculate attic floor. “No. I am not going to spy for a bunch of bloody Russians.”

“For Ukraine, then.”

“No.” Nikolai drew in a breath, as if to speak, so George waited, but Nikolai said nothing and then finally huffed out his breath. He sat on the lid of a steamer trunk, marked with an index card that said ELF COSTUMES: SMALL. “We are both too old for this,” he told George.

George sighed too. “Yes,” he agreed, and sank down too on another steamer trunk (ELF COSTUMES: LARGE).

“So?” Nikolai prompted. “You’ll take a desk job?”

“God.” George rested his head on the side of a wardrobe (SANTA COSTUMES: XXL). “I’ve spent my entire life running away from a desk job, and I’m not going to stop now.”

“So.”

They sat awhile. George’s jaw stretched wide in a yawn. He had not realized that he was so tired.

“You’ll go back to the US?” Nikolai asked.

“I guess.”

Another silence.

“I think I’ll stay here,” Nikolai said.

“In this attic?”

“Don’t play stupid.”

“It’s not playing. I really am this dumb,” George protested, which brought just the touch of a smile to Nikolai’s lips.

“I’ll stay in France,” Nikolai expanded. “Good wine. Lots of pastry shops.”

“Mmmm.”

Nikolai rose from the steamer trunk. He went to one of the tall casement windows and stood with his hands clasped behind his back, gazing out, though there was nothing to see in the darkness but the golden oblongs cast by the chateau windows onto the snow. “Plenty of art museums.” Casually, without looking at George, he said, “You could stay too.”

“What?”

Nikolai’s voice had been clear, but George truly thought he might have misheard. But Nikolai’s shoulders tensed, his chin lifting just slightly. George saw that he was too proud to repeat himself, and so repeated for him. “Did you say—” George had to clear his dry throat. “Did you say, ‘You could stay’?”

A shrug. Nikolai continued to gaze out at the snow. “A passing thought.”

“I—” George stood up suddenly and went to stand beside him, not quite touching him, but close enough to feel the heat of his shoulder, the cold right next to the window. “All afternoon I thought I was never going to see you again—”

“How could you think that?” Nikolai interrupted, at last turning to look at George. “I know where you live.”

George shouted out a laugh. “Yes, you do! And you made sure I knew it, too, sending those stupid postcards!”

Nikolai was smiling. “Did you like them?”

“Of course I did! But why’d you take so long to send the first one? I spend months thinking maybe you were dead.”

“But how could you think that?” Nikolai asked. He seemed genuinely perturbed. “Didn’t your intelligence agencies know that I’d survived?”

“Oh, you trusted our intelligence agencies, did you?” George scoffed. “You’re in intelligence yourself, you ought to know better. No, you ass, the last time I saw you, you were bleeding to death, and then you climbed out the window and for all I knew you died in the back of a taxi and got tossed in the Potomac by a taxi driver who didn’t want to deal with the hassle of reporting a dead body!”

“I’m sorry.” Nikolai attempted to sound apologetic, although that maddeningly kissable smirk played at his lips. “We keep track of enemy agents on our soil. I imagined that you did, as well.”

“Oh, shut up,” George said, and they both laughed.

Nikolai moved away from the window. He sat again on the steamer trunk. “It doesn’t have to be France,” he said. “We could go somewhere else. Greece maybe. The wine is not so good, but the food is superb, and the temples, the ruins… I know how you are about art.”

“Do you speak Greek?”

“I could learn,” Nikolai said.

He spoke with the simple confidence of a man who spoke half a dozen languages, and George felt all at once a dizzy rush of affection for him. He felt, indeed, a sense of vertigo so strong that he had to lean against the cold window.

He had always liked being with Nikolai, in every sense of the phrase. Not just having sex with him (though the sex was fantastic), but talking to him, teasing him. Even being silent with Nikolai, there was a crackle, a zing to it that there wasn’t with anyone else.

But that was because they were enemies, maybe. Because their jobs put them on opposite sides, no matter how much they liked each other personally. That had always shaped the relationship between them, and he couldn’t, just yet, envision any other.

He couldn’t even think how to say this out loud, and so took refuge in practicalities. “What would we live on?”

“You’ve put something aside, I hope.”

There was the money from the sale of Grandma and Grandpa’s farm. George had sold it to a real estate developer for a new subdivision. An excellent price, and he hadn’t touched it since. It just sat in mutual funds making money.

“Maybe,” George allowed. “You?”

“Ah,” Nikolai said, and suddenly he was smiling, that little sly half-smile. “Well, like I said, the information about this chateau, it brought in good money.”

“You…” George couldn’t take it in all at once. “You! You! You!” he shouted, lunging at Nikolai, who was cackling with delight as George shoved him off the steamer trunk. Soon George couldn’t grapple either because he was laughing too hard, although sputtering with indignation at the same time. “You,” he gasped, letting go of Nikolai, shaking a finger at him, but unable to stop laughing long enough to scold. “You—you—”

“I sold it to the English also,” said Nikolai, with that choirboy smile. “And I approached the French, but I have no contacts here, no dice, too bad.”

“You madman,” George gasped. “Is there an English spy at this party too?”

“One of the invited guests, maybe,” Nikolai said. “Or Biffy himself,” and they both howled at the prospect of Biffy the spy.

“A fantastic cover,” George said.

“No one would suspect him,” Nikolai agreed.

“I bet it’s Stephens,” George said.

“No, the English are such snobs, they could never bring themselves to use a servant as a cover.”

They were laughing so hard that they fell against each other. They were both sitting on the floor, leaning against each other’s shoulders, their howls of laughter subsiding to occasional snorts. Each time it seemed they were through, they glanced at each other and gasped with laughter again.

At last they stopped laughing. Nikolai nudged his shoulder against George’s. “I picked France,” Nikolai said, “because I knew you were posted in Paris.”

“You hoped they would send me?” George asked. Then, shyly: “I always hope they’ll send you.”

Nikolai nodded. But he didn’t speak, and George didn’t either.

At last, still groping his way forward, George said, “France is so expensive.”

“So. Greece? Find a little island, buy a crumbling house, open a hotel for tourists in search of peace and quiet.”

“Do you know,” George asked, “the least little thing about home renovation?”

“Ah. No.” Nikolai stood again, and returned to stand by the window, looking out into the dark. “It doesn’t have to be Greece,” Nikolai said, and there was something uncertain in his voice that he would never have allowed to show in his face. “We can go elsewhere. The world is our clam, as you say.”

“Oyster,” George corrected automatically.

“Damn.” The word burst from Nikolai’s lips. “Damn, damn, damn,” and on the last damn he stomped a foot like an angry child. “It’s these little things that blow a cover, that’s how you got me in London. Why can I not learn to leave these sayings alone!”

“They’re so expressive,” George protested. He rose too, more slowly, wanting to take Nikolai’s hand or embrace him, but Nikolai was pacing as Nicholas Merton used to pace as he ranted about the injustice of the English upper class.

“It was madness to ask,” Nikolai said. His voice was clipped, as if it pained him to speak. “Please forgive me.”

“Nikolai—”

“It is not your country that has fallen, of course you should go back. It was only—there will be no excuse for us to meet again—”

“Nikolai—”

“And I felt I couldn’t stand that. But of course I can. One can stand anything—”

“Nikolai!”

George had been saying Nikolai’s name with increasingly loudness as Nikolai spoke, but it was only when he shouted it that he at last managed to interrupt. Nikolai stopped speaking, his chest heaving as if he had been running. He lifted his chin and glared at George, that scrappy defiance that George had fallen in love with years ago in London.

“Nikolai,” said George, again. “Nikolai.” He didn’t know what to say, and so repeated Nikolai’s name. “Nikolai Aleksandrovitch Meleshenko.” And then: “Do you even know my last name?”

“Which one, George Delaware Dudley Danvers?” Nikolai shot back. He paused, just a moment, tantalizing, tormenting; and then his lips twitched into his checkmate smirk. “George Ambrose Douglass.”

“Show-off.” George was smiling. “Always one step ahead.”

“Always,” Nikolai agreed, with a vigorous nod of his head.

“Not always!” George corrected himself. “Who caught you out in London, Nicholas Merton?”

“Well, I had been ahead up till the end,” Nikolai protested.

“You didn’t even realize I was the American agent you were supposed to find. You thought I was just some wet behind the ears Rhodes Scholar.”

“I was just on the cusp,” said Nikolai, bunching his fingertips, “just on the cusp of figuring it out.”

“And we got along like a house on fire then,” said George. “Before we were enemies. Before we knew we were enemies,” he corrected himself. He laughed a little, as he did when he had to speak seriously. “We’ve been enemy agents for so long,” he said. “On opposite sides. The clock always ticking in the background every time we met. That brings… a certain zest. Without that,” and he laughed again, “you might get bored of me.”

“Well, so. You might get bored of me, too. If we were always together.”

Again George felt that sense of vertigo, the feeling that he was standing on the edge of a precipice. But this time he didn’t need to grab anything to steady himself. He planted his feet, and said, “I never have before, though.”

“No,” Nikolai said. “In all your incarnations, you are never boring. Not even,” with a gust of a sigh, “when you are dragging me to the National Gallery.”

“You shut up. You loved the National Gallery.”

“They had six kinds of cake,” Nikolai agreed, “six different kinds of cake to choose from in the museum cafe.”

They looked at each other, searching each other’s faces. At last George held out both hands, and wordlessly Nikolai stepped forward and placed his hands in George’s, and George grasped them tightly.

“I have no interest in running a hotel in Greece,” George informed him.

“Neither do I. My God. Did I really suggest that?”

“It was a moment of madness,” George said.

“It must have been. This George, I asked myself, what would seduce him into my arms, and for some reason I thought a hotel.”

“The Greek island part didn’t sound bad. Good food. Fantastic ruins.”

“Oh, well, that’s something.” They were both laughing again, a little giddy, a little shy because this was all so new. Nikolai drew his hands from George’s, reaching up to cup George’s face. “What do you want to do?”

George pulled Nikolai in tight against him. In Nikolai’s ear he said, “I’d like to find that bed again.”

Nikolai kissed him fiercely, almost biting. “And after?”

“Haven’t the foggiest,” George admitted. He still didn’t know, but now he didn’t mind, because he did know the main thing: “We’ll figure it out together.”