A SPY CAN BE IN LOVE by Andrej Koymasky (C) 2008 written on March 4, 1992 translated by the author English text kindly revised by Will Hawkins
USUAL DISCLAIMER
"A SPY CAN BE IN LOVE" is a gay story, with some parts containing graphic scenes of sex between males. So, if in your land, religion, family, opinion and so on this is not good for you, it will be better not to read this story. But if you really want, or because YOU don't care, or because you think you really want to read it, please be my welcomed guest.
CHAPTER 10 - A promise kept
Over the eight days since Roger left, Yuri frequently took long walks on the beach and went swimming, both to keep in good shape and to make time pass more rapidly.
While he was at the beach he had met some local boys and girls, so at times he went with them to a pub or to the movies - the boys of that small town liked the thought having a Finnish boy, as Yuri said he was, for a friend.
Yuri got the feeling that one of the boys was discreetly coming on to him, but he not only did nothing to encourage the boy, even though he was handsome and likeable, but even avoided being alone with him. Because Yuri's mind and heart were so full of Roger, there was no room for anyone else.
The weather was rather fine and the days were sunny, even though at times a cold wind blew from the north-east. But Yuri was used to cold weather, so this wasn't a problem for him.
One morning he was doing some jogging along the shore, as he was accustomed to, and was thinking he would have liked to have his Roger at his side running with him, when he heard a voice calling his name.
"Yuri!"
He froze without turning.
"Yuri Dudaev, wait for me!" the voice called again, in Russian.
Yuri turned slowly, his heart in his mouth, his temples pounding furiously. He saw a young man, tall and well built, walking towards him, wearing a wool beret, dark glasses, and a shoulder bag.
Yuri felt lost. He nervously looked around but at that moment there was nobody else on the beach. He thought of running away, but realized that there was no possibility of finding shelter. They had found him! What would happen now? The guy walking towards him had called out his name but hadn't shot at him... he could have done so without any difficulty on that deserted stretch of beach.
The guy came up to him and took off his sunglasses. Yuri recognized him at once.
"Nikolaj!" he murmured.
His former Academy mate answered him with a ghost of a smile, "You haven't forgotten me..." he said in a low voice.
"You... you came to... they sent you to..." Yuri almost stammered, feeling like there was a vise wringing his guts.
"Yes, I was sent here under orders to... to liquidate you. But I haven't forgotten the promise I made you those years ago. Don't worry. I'm not here to kill you; I couldn't do such a thing... When I got the order to look for you and kill you, I remembered what you told me, that I had better to pretend to accept, in order to be able to save you. So, here I am."
"Nikolaj, how did you find me? I thought that the KGB lost all trace of me."
"They told me to look for you here in Bridgewater. From what I understand, they really did lose your trail, but they followed that of that Canadian guy, of that Bertheau... they guessed that where he was you would be also. They linked your disappearance with the fact that he left Moscow..."
"So, then, Roger is also now in danger!" Yuri said, alarmed.
"No, not he, from what I know. They are not interested in him. But they want you to die to make an example of you to the other agents... to make them understand what happens to a traitor. It was years ago that I promised I would not kill you, and I will not. But you have to disappear again as soon as possible. I can tell them that I wasn't able to find any trace of you here... but they would just send another agent if they think I've failed... But you have to tell me why... why did you betray your friends. I would never have believed you could..."
"Who gave you the order to liquidate me? Korobilo? Jusichev?"
"Who are they? I never heard of them. No, the order is signed by my chief, Major Karamazin, and initialled by Colonel Zhitnikov."
"Nikolaj... does the KGB know my new identity?"
"No, I don't think so. And I don't want to know it. But as long as you are near that Canadian, they can track you down, and you know that the KGB never leaves any open account. But you haven't yet explained to me why you betrayed us."
"Nikolaj, it wasn't a betrayal... or at least I don't see it that way, but I'll leave you to judge. Yes, I ran away from Russia, but I have never revealed any secret to the agents of any other country, so I think I can say there was no betrayal."
"But why did you run away?"
"For love, Nikolaj... for love. You see, a spy can be in love, and when you're in love a new loyalty is born... and then you have to choose between the loyalty you owe to the person you love and the one you owe to the state... It's not an easy choice, but... I chose the person."
"I don't believe she is a Russian girl, if you had to flee abroad. Did that Canadian guy help you escape? Is your girl living here also?"
"No Nikolaj, it's rather complicated... I don't know if it's wise to tell you everything, in that case I would have to tell you secrets that even inside the KGB not everybody knows. But you are a friend and I have already broken my oath of loyalty to the KGB anyway, therefore... therefore if you want to know, I'll tell you everything. But only if you ask me to..."
Nikolaj scratched the tip of his nose in his typical gesture, and then said, "Let's go sit somewhere, where we can't be overheard. I think you are going to have to tell me quite a long story."
Yuri took him to a pub and they sat in a quiet corner where they could safely talk in Russian without being overheard, and he told his friend about the NOD, and about his falling in love with Roger. Nikita went from astonishment to amazement.
"No, we knew nothing about the existence of this NOD... And I didn't even suspect you were... homosexual. Yes, I can understand your choice; I would have probably done the same, if I had the guts. And I agree with you, if all you told me is true, I don't think that what you did can really be seen as a betrayal."
"I didn't lie to you, Nikolaj. It is all true, exactly as I have told you."
"I believe you... and at this point... well... I think I can explain something to you. You see, when we both were cadets and you helped me with my studies... I wasn't just grateful to you. I, well... I was in love with you..."
"You, Nikolaj? You mean that you too are... that you too are like me?"
"Possibly yes."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, you see, I tried to hide it, not only from the others but, on the whole, also from myself. So I had a few girls, but never a boy... I never tried it, I was scared... and I felt ashamed..."
"I think we have nothing to be ashamed of, as we are born this way. But do you like girls?"
"Well, yes, I feel attracted to them... but at times I feel attracted also and just as much to boys..."
"Well there are people who can be attracted in the same way to both boys and girls. Roger explained to me that in this matter not all persons are the same... that nature makes us all different - so some are attracted only to women, some by both women and men, and some, like me, only by men. Possibly you are in that middle group."
"Be that as it may, I was attracted to you..."
"I was attracted to you too. And I too was scared at the thought somebody would discover it. So I always did my best to hide it. It is just the fact I was enrolled in the NOD that helped me to come to an acceptance of my sexuality."
"And are you happy now with your Roger?"
"More than happy, ecstatic, and so much in love"
"What is he like? Do you feel like telling me?"
"With pleasure, you know, when you're in love with a person, you would like to talk about that person with everybody..." Yuri said with a dreamy smile and started to tell Nikolaj all about his Roger.
Later Nikolaj resumed the conversation about the reason they had met.
"Yuri, I can say I couldn't find you. But probably they would search more deeply, and send somebody else in my place. So you have to disappear again and above all your Roger has to change his identity if he doesn't want to be tracked down and so put you in danger again. Or else the two of you have to part, to never ever see each other again. But I doubt you will choose that solution, if it's true you are so much in love..."
"I have to talk about it with him, to decide with him. How long do you think you can say you are still trying to find me?"
"Just a few days. Every once in a while, about once a week, I have to report to an agent at our Embassy in London to tell him of my progress in finding you... And I have no idea how they will react when I tell him I can't find you. I don't know if they will just tell me to search some more, if they will put some other agents with me, or if they would just relieve me of this task and give it to another agent. I can wish you good luck, Yuri but... don't rely too much on luck."
"Would there be consequences to you, if you tell them you failed?"
"Possibly, but nothing really serious; I wouldn't be either the first or the last agent who failed in a task assigned to him."
"We can never meet again, Nikolaj... I would like being able to do something for you, to thank you..."
"No, you already did a great deal for me when we were cadets. I also think we will never meet again. But I'm happy I met you today, and especially happy to have been able to keep the promise I made to you that day years ago... Now it's better I go. Take care of yourself, my friend."
"Goodbye, Nikolaj."
"Goodbye, Yuri, my friend." the young agent said and went out of the pub without looking back.
Yuri went back to his apartment immediately. He had to disappear again and fast, of course, but how could he, until Roger came back? He didn't even know how many more days it would be before his man returned. Waiting too long, staying there could be dangerous, especially if the KGB sent another agent to look for him - he could be found again just as easily as Nikolaj had found him.
He then remembered Roger's friend, the one his man told him to contact if he had any trouble, a Walter Muybridge who lived in Bristol. He decided to call him, but not from home, for safety's sake. He had to call him from a public telephone.
He went out to a telephone box and dialled the number - he heard the ringing tone but nobody answered. Yuri looked at his watch and decided to have his lunch at a nearby self-service. He was feeling nervous, but not really scared. After lunch he tried to call again, with the same result.
Later he tried to call once more and finally, around seven p.m. a voice answered the phone.
"Muybridge speaking. Who's on line?"
"I am Ilmari Janson. May I talk speak with Mister Walter?"
"On line, boy - is there a problem?"
"I don't know if I can tell you on the phone, but... yes, there is a problem."
"Something urgent?"
"I think so."
"Okay, I will be at your place in an hour. Wait for me at the apartment."
"Do you know where..."
"Yes, I know. When I knock at your door, I'll say the name of your first contact... is that clear?"
"Yes, clear."
Yuri went back home and waited. Time seemed to pass ever so slowly. But he finally heard a knock at his door and in spite of that being what he was waiting for, it gave him a start.
"Who's there?" he asked from behind the door.
"I'm Monika's father." a voice answered.
Yuri opened and saw a man in his fifties, a little fleshy, with a great mane of grizzled brown hair and a wide smile.
"Come in..." Yuri said gauging the man.
"I'm Walter, Roger's friend who found you this apartment. You are Yuri, right?"
"Yes. Roger told me you know everything about us..."
"I think I know almost everything, at least the essential points. So then, my boy, what is the urgent problem you have?"
"I'm sorry for having disturbed you, sir..."
"No problem and no sir either."
"Well, you see, this morning I met a person, a KGB agent sent here to kill me..." Yuri started to tell him all about his conversation with Nikolaj.
"You are so fucking lucky, my boy, so lucky! Just think what would have happened if they had sent somebody else... They probably chose Nikolaj because he would recognize you easily. If they had sent another agent I am sure you wouldn't be here to tell me about it. Do you think you can trust this Nikolaj?"
"Oh yes, I trust him."
"Good, this gives us some breathing space. Anyway I totally agree with what your former classmate told you - you have to disappear from here and Roger should not to return to you using his true identity, or else it all can start again..."
"Excuse me, Walter, but... are you too in the secret services?"
"I used to be in Her Majesty's Secret Service, but now I have been retired for three years. I teach Chemistry in a High School. I met your Roger years ago, when we carried out a joint mission. He saved my life. So when he asked me to help you two, I was more than willing to make myself useful. But we can talk about that later, over the next few days. First of all, you have to disappear at once from Bridgewater, without leaving any trace. Prepare your luggage, hurry up; you will come away with me. I'll take you to Bristol, to my home. And I will inform Roger not to come to the UK unless he has a different identity."
"Will you be able to contact him easily?"
"Almost certainly. I will use one of my old unofficial channels. Anyway if he gets here in Bridgewater and doesn't find you, he will surely contact me..."
"But if he is followed, if they are keeping a tail on him, they could trace him to you, and so to me also."
"Roger is anything but a greenhorn. If he comes here and finds this apartment empty, he will at once understand that there is a problem and he knows how to contact me without running any risk himself and without having you and me run any risk either. Anyway I am almost certain I will manage to contact him before he comes back to England. Cheer up, my boy, and pack your bags."
They got at Walter's house that night. The man took Yuri to the guest room and told him to put his belongings away while he fixed supper.
While they were eating, Yuri asked him, "Roger told me that your boyfriend was a former school-mate of his who came to study here in England... but you told me that you and Roger worked together as secret agents..."
"Yes, it's a peculiar story. When I met my Raymond, I didn't know anything about Roger, nor he about me. Only later, after we worked together, after that time when Roger saved my life as I told you, I invited him to my place for supper, to thank him, so my Raymond and Roger met and at once recognized each other... This world is really small, and fortuitous events occur when you least expect them."
"Roger told me that you lost your companion two years ago..."
"Yes... He got Aids... He wasn't a promiscuous man, believe me. He had strayed just once... without using a condom... just once... As soon as he discovered he had been infected, he wanted me to have a check-up immediately. I was HIV negative. And that small adventure had been the only time he had sex with another person... Fate was cruel to him. I would have preferred to die in his stead, but destiny decided it differently..."
"Were you in love?"
"Oh yes, so very much in love! Neither Raymond nor I ever had sex with another person, after we were together... except for that one time. We were at a party in the villa of some gay friends, we all drank too much, and we were both drunk... I don't know how it happened, but we ended in a bed in a threesome... Just think, I don't even know who that boy was... One of the many guests..."
"Perhaps it would be better if we... we talked about something different..."
"Oh, it doesn't bother me so much now. At first I was not able to resign myself... to make my peace. When Raymond saw he had been infected but not I, he didn't want to have any more sex with me, out of fear of infecting me. But I persuaded him we just had to take the proper precautions; I absolutely wanted him with me, as nothing had changed for me... The only thing I can now be glad of is that I remained near him until his last breath and that he went away serenely..."
"That's why you retired from service three years ago?"
"Yes, to attend to him, to be near him when he most needed me."
"It was terrible for you seeing him... fade away so."
"Terrible, yes, above all because I could do nothing to help him. I could just stay near him, be near him to the last."
Yuri could feel the intensity of pain in the man's words, but he could also read strength in his eyes, and felt he would have liked to be able to do something to alleviate that pain, but he knew he too was powerless just as Walter had been for his Raymond. Thus when he asked himself what would happen to him if one day his Roger died, he felt a pang in his heart, like a iron grip that made him almost lose his breath.
They ended the meal in silence, each immersed in his own thoughts.
Then Walter said, "But life goes on - has to go on... So my Raymond will go on living inside me, inside my heart, in my memories... Of course, the scar remains, I think it will never go away... but life has to go on."
"Do you like teaching?" Yuri asked him, hoping to divert their conversation onto a different subject.
"Yes, I do. I was a teacher even before becoming an agent... I just resumed my ancient job. Teaching helps me to survive, to survive spiritually. Helping my boys to grow up, gives meaning to my life."
"No regrets about your period as a secret agent?"
"No... After all it isn't such adventurous and exciting work as they show you in the movies. You are just a mixture of a travelling salesman, an actor and a pencil-pusher."
"How did you start doing it?"
"One day in my school one of my colleagues started to tell me odd things... then they just contacted me and simply proposed for me to become an agent... I thought it would be fascinating, so I accepted. Well, as I said, it turned out to be much less fascinating than I thought, but at that point I was in... You know, at times one goes on, just by the sheer force of inertia."
"When will you try to contact Roger?"
"Tonight. It will not be a simple thing, but I hope to manage. You see, officially my hobby is being an amateur radio operator, a ham. Thanks to that I still am in contact with some people, here and there in the world, with whom in the past I had a... working relationship, so to speak. We have a code that I hope the Russians don't yet understand. Anyway I don't think they can eavesdrop on all the transmissions of all the radio-amateurs. Anyway I won't use Roger's real name but his code name."
"Do you know that he never told me his code name?"
"I don't know if he still uses the one he had when we were working together."
"If Roger gets your message, when do you think he will answer?"
"I've no idea. But I hope soon."
After chatting some more of this and that, they decided to go to bed. Yuri was happy having met Walter; he thought he was a likeable and trustworthy person. He had to be trustworthy if Roger told him everything about them and evidently trusted him. The boy fell asleep, thinking of his man...
The following morning Walter told him he had sent his message to Roger. Then the man went to school to teach his classes. Out of prudence, Yuri stayed at home, as they didn't know if and how much the Russians were still searching for him. All morning long he watched TV, both to pass the time, and to improve his English. The man came back for lunch and prepared the meal they ate together.
Five days elapsed then one night Walter went to wake Yuri up, "Roger answered... Wait I'll put his message in the clear." the man said and went to the living room, took the tape where he had recorded the communication and started to transcribe the text. After half an hour, during which Yuri became more and more impatient, Walter finally handed him a sheet of paper.
Yuri read, "Got your message. Preparing set new papers for both. Need more days than foreseen. Looking for new destination, here probably too risky. Greetings to you and a hug to you know who." Then Yuri said, "He doesn't say when he will be here..."
"No. Possibly he too doesn't know yet, he can't be sure about a date. But I think we don't have to worry. Anyway I'm happy that my old channels still work. If he has more messages to send us, he can do it the same way."
"But you can't sit all the time at the radio. How can you know when a message comes?"
"Ever hear about a coded carrier wave?"
"No, at our school I never heard about this system."
"Well, it's a somewhat obsolete system, but still a good one. My radio-receiver is always tuned in to a predetermined wavelength. When a special signal containing a certain code arrives, the receiver switches on a recorder to record the message, and activates an optical or acoustic alarm to give notice to the operator that a message is being received. The message is coded in groups of five letters transmitted by Morse code, super-compressed so that if by chance another radio was tuned on the same wave length, they would just hear static. The code changes according to the day of the year, so it has 365 variants. Of course with modern means the code could almost surely be broken, and this is why as you saw, in Roger's message there were no names, no dates, nothing that an alien could understand."
"But even if you don't work as an agent anymore, are you still a part of the service net?"
"Not really. I can no longer use the official channels. But any good agent, in the course of years, has developed personal contacts, friendships, acquaintances that in some cases can still be of use to him... as you see. Your kind of job was way different and, after all, you carried it on for only a limited time... At times old friends ask you for a kindness, even if you are no longer in the net; at times we can count on old friends to give us a hand."
Yuri continued to stay at home, waiting for news of Roger. He could see boys going to school from the windows, housewives running errands, everyday normal life going on... and he was becoming more and more restless. Walter, to help him to wait, at times brought him home some rented or purchased videotapes and on the week-end took him to visit the beautiful university city of Oxford. Yuri enjoyed the man's company, but being far from Roger and not getting any news, was more and more wearing.
Finally a new radio message came, announcing Roger's imminent arrival, and this gave Yuri a charge of new energy and optimism.
Then one day Walter came back home with a wide smile on his lips. As soon as he saw Yuri he gave him the good news.
"This morning Roger called me at school. In the afternoon he will come here, to my home. He said that everything is ready for your final relocation."
Yuri brightened up, "What time will he come?"
"On the 3:14 p.m. train."
"Will we go to fetch him at the station?"
"No, he will come here directly. Are you happy, Yuri?"
"I'm longing to embrace him!"
"I can guess that. I too am eager to see him."
The hours passed slowly; Yuri often looked out of the window hoping to see Roger arrive.
Finally the doorbell rang. Walter looked through the peephole and giving Yuri the thumbs-up, opened the door. Finally Roger was in the apartment carrying two suitcases and a big bag, over-heated and tired but with a happy expression on his face.
As soon as he had greeted Walter, Roger and Yuri threw their arms around each other and kissed full of joy and passion. Walter took the luggage to the living and called out to them.
"Finally, Roger! Did everything go well?" Walter asked him after signalling him to take a seat.
Yuri and Roger sat on the sofa, half in an embrace, and Walter on the armchair facing them.
"So, then Roger, tell us what you have managed." Walter said.
"Everything is ready; I have new documents for both Yuri and me. I studied different places in the world and found where we can go to settle. A friend from Canberra will send to us through his bank all my savings once we have settled..." and he went on explaining to them his plan in detail.
CONTINUES IN CHAPTER 11
In my home page I've put some more of my stories. If someone wants to read them, the URL is
http://andrejkoymasky.com
If you want to send me feed-back, or desire to help revising my English translations, so that I can put on-line more of my stories in English please e-mail at
andrej@andrejkoymasky.com