Past Perfect (23 page)

“Yes, my two East Germans. What you called my ridiculous long shot.”

“Tell me about them,” Jacques asked. “Who are they?”

“That’s the problem. I can’t remember.”

“And?”

“I was wondering if you might consider helping me find out who they are.”

At least he didn’t guffaw and say, You’ve got to be kidding! “You’re mixing up your acronyms. I was in the DIA, not the CIA. I wouldn’t know about an operation like that, done by another agency.”

“You wouldn’t know, maybe. But you yourself told me you’d heard rumors that they’d brought over Manfred Gottesman. If you heard that —and being in the secret police, Gottesman didn’t have much to do with Defense Intelligence matters —then you might have heard that two other big shots came over also.”

“And if I tell you no, that I didn’t hear about the other two?”

“Maybe I’ll sense you’re telling the truth. Maybe I’ll think you do know but you don’t want to tell me. What am I going to do, turn you over to the Egyptian secret police and have them beat it out of you?”

“Fair enough.”

I waited, and waited some more. Then I realized he was probably used to sitting and staring out at the mountains for hours on end. “How come you agreed to see me?” I asked.

“Because Huff asked me to. He’s an old friend.”

“Oh.”

“He said you could be annoying, but to help you if I could.”

“Huff said that? I’m amazed. Not at the annoying part. I don’t think of myself as at all annoying, but I know he does. I’m amazed that he asked you to do anything more than answer a couple of my questions.”

“Huff is an interesting character. Not unique. He lived overseas year in, year out, keeping secrets, telling lies. Basically, though, a decent man. He’s back now, retired, may do an occasional job for the Agency as a contract employee. And consults for people like you. Huff’s as good an American as you can get, but he’s not at home here. Probably not at home anyplace. He’s the sort who’s at his best, most graceful, when he’s in danger. Put him at a church bake sale and he’d be awkward as hell.”

I traced the wood grain of the table. It wasn’t redwood like most picnic setups. It was the same wood as the house. “That’s an interesting insight. But do you think it’s possible that Huff would have stuck out like a sore thumb at a church bake sale when he was thirteen, and the reason he did the work he did was to get away from all that normality?”

“Maybe.”

“I apologize for being negative. But Spy Guys is always getting accused of romanticizing the espionage business. It does. But sometimes I think the espionage business romanticizes itself even more. Tragic figure. Doomed to wander. No place is home.”

“We do that all the time,” Jacques said. “But whatever he is, Huff told me he heard you might have gotten a raw deal when the Agency cut you loose.”

I pressed the Coke bottle against my head, but it was no longer cold. Feverish. I felt definitely feverish. The heat was radiating from inside me, not from the sun overhead. “Does he know … Did he say why?”

“No. I don’t sense he had much conversation about you when he was thinking about the job on your show. He just had you and a couple of other people at the show checked out. Especially you. He got the okay to work. I suppose in the process, someone who knew someone heard that possibly you got a raw deal.”

“I can’t tell you how—”

“How much you appreciate hearing it. Right.” I gathered Jacques was not a big fan of unreserved gratitude. “This is what I’ll do for you,” he went on. “I may have a memory of something about the other two. I’ll have to reflect. And then I need to find out some more about you.”

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

“I don’t want to hear it from you. I want to hear it from sources I’m sure of. So you have a choice. You can stay here for a couple of days.” I realized what he was offering was more proposition than invitation. “Or go home to your husband and I’ll call you. Either way, you get the same answer.”

So I went home.

LESS THAN TWELVE HOURS to North Carolina and back again, yet as I waited in the taxi line at LaGuardia, I didn’t feel I was home. It wasn’t one of those Ooh, Dwayne, look at the tall buildings! reactions. I wasn’t under enchantment from the green beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sure, as far as mountains went, they were beautiful enough. But the universe I’d moved into didn’t have tourist attractions. It did have Jacques Harlow, however. I couldn’t get him out of my head.

I was like a character in one of Nicky’s fantasy novels; unknowingly, I had tripped through a rip in the fabric of time-space somewhere between Asheville and New York. I was now in a world remarkably like the one I’d left, except instead of normal concerns like global warming, whether to drive or take the subway to Yankee Stadium, and checking out newspaper advice on selecting a good honeydew, this entire universe was about intelligence. Not the intelligence establishment of Spy Guys. Nothing bubbly here. Just information and analysis, loyalty and perfidy and more dagger than cloak—Jacques’s world, or maybe my cockeyed vision of the world that he inhabited.

My alternate world was right next to this one, but I couldn’t quite make it back. It wasn’t that Adam’s greeting was chilly and uninviting. He’d never been particularly adept as a grudge-holder. While he was still upset that I’d gone away without him, we had polite sushi in front of the TV. We switched between the baseball game and Seems Like Old Times, which we agreed made us miss Nicky and his seal-bark laugh as he watched movies with us. Yet all the while, I couldn’t get the three Germans out of my head. I kept recalling the photo Lisa had showed me of Manfred Gottesman before she made him over into Dick Schroeder. I imagined him in a cheesy, pants-too-short communist suit, flying out of whatever country the Agency had stashed him in for safekeeping until all his paperwork was final and he could enter the United States. Not satisfying, so I pictured him flying into Dulles, then changed it to some obscure military airport. Wait: a landing field in West Virginia. He was alone on the plane; he was with a CIA handler; he was seated beside German number two and across the aisle from three.

Between the movie and the Yankees winning, Adam was in a good enough mood that a black nightgown and half an hour would have patched things up. But I was too preoccupied. All I could have possibly responded to was friction, and with Jacques’s “Huff told me he heard you might have gotten a raw deal” echoing in my head, even that was questionable. So I went for yellow gingham, murmured, “God, I’m so exhausted,” and stood on tippytoes to peck him on the cheek—a posture as close to cute as I ever got—before we got into bed.

He took the next day off, and we drove out early to spend the weekend at my parents’ place in East Hampton. We didn’t have to force conversation on the way because he had a CD all ready to slip in, an audiobook on Theodore Roosevelt’s trip down Amazon River tributaries. I said, “Nothing personal,” then blocked it out by pushing in my earbuds as far as they would go and listening to my iPod.

A little more than two hours later, we pulled into my parents’ driveway. The house, set next to what had once been a potato field, had been built in the early twentieth century by a family who’d apparently bred children for farm labor. Bedrooms galore: for us, Nicky, and my sister, with rooms to spare for other guests. Fortunately, there were none. Nearly all my parents’ friends had their own weekend houses with an excessive number of delectably decorated guest quarters, so competition for newly divorced, lost-the-second-house-in-the-settlement-but-splitting-was-still-worth-it friends was intense. Even Flippy and Lucy had their own denim doggy beds in the Mexican-tiled laundry room.

“Did you invite Maddy out?” I asked my mother. We were in what they referred to as their “farmhouse kitchen,” perhaps believing that farm wives routinely cooked on eight-burner restaurant stoves and displayed blue and white delftware in antique Welsh dressers. She wore one of my father’s white chef’s aprons over her white cropped pants and white shirt. Her hair was held back in a banana clip so it wouldn’t get into the food. This is because she was slicing a radish.

“I did ask her,” my mother replied, “but she said she had a million things to do around the apartment.” She couldn’t look at me as she spoke because she was slicing. My father and Adam had gone off early to fish, vowing striped bass and no bluefish for dinner. By default, lunch had fallen to me. As always, my mother wanted to help, but she was slicing the radish with a paring knife as if it were a live patient on her first day of surgical rotation. Her agonizing precision drove me crazy. I made a big deal over arranging sliced turkey on a plate so I wouldn’t have to watch her. At that moment, like some blessed deity descending at the end of a Greek play, Adam strolled in.

“Went to a fish-free zone, I guess,” he said.

My father came in a minute later carrying two paper shopping bags and announcing, “We decided we felt like steak and fries tonight!” My mother and I went to kiss our respective husbands, she going on as if he were a Cro-Magnon man bringing home a winter’s supply of yak. While he went up for a shower and a change of outfits, my mother volunteered to set the table outside for lunch.

I made a pitcher of iced tea while Adam stole a slice of turkey, then rearranged the platter to hide the loss. “Did you have quality man-to-man time?” I asked.

“Nice morning,” he said. My father revered not only Adam’s doctorate and scientific knowledge, but also his ease at what my father thought of as manly, all-American enterprises like fishing, spackling walls, pointing out constellations in the night sky. Adam understood how much my father valued his acceptance. Soon after we’d been married, he pointed out that my father’s wildly enthusiastic embrace of him had little to do with some secret wish Dad had had for a son, but rather a strong desire to transcend his world of cooking and table settings, which he sensed branded him as feminized. “Did you talk to your mother about Maddy feeling so down?”

“I brought it up, but lightly. Well, as light as you can get about depression. I told her major writer’s block is something to get down about, but that I thought Maddy was being honest when she said she’d been a lot worse.”

“Did you tell her all she does is stay home all day thinking about the poems she’s not writing?”

“Yes. And I also said I don’t know how she’s going to pull herself out of this if she doesn’t move from that apartment. It took my mother less than two seconds to suggest, ‘What if I arrange for the two of you to go to a spa?’ She said she was sure you would understand, and with Nicky being away …”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

I kissed him, then re-rearranged the turkey. “You’re such a good guy.”

“I’m okay.”

“But I told her I couldn’t see Maddy and me together at an eight a.m. spinning class. Listen, neither of us are spa people. My mother thinks two hours of aerobics with the stretch class in between and a mango sugar-glow-body scrub is a great way to spend a morning. But the truth is, I couldn’t imagine Maddy and me going away together anywhere.”

“I don’t know. You could go someplace upstate and read.”

“A reading festival in two Adirondack chairs. She’d have a snappy collection of poems about the degradation of women.”

“So what? You’d have a pile of spy books. At least neither of you would be surprised about the other’s reading preferences.”

“That’s true, but I really don’t want to leave you and go away with my sister.”

Adam smiled. “I wish I could take that as a compliment, but it’s pretty hard to, considering that you’d rather be drawn and quartered than take a vacation with her.”

“No. Take it as a definite compliment. Anyway, I said I’d come up with some way to get her out for an airing. But prying her loose from that place — ”

My cell rang. Caller ID read Private. Though my heart picked up a little speed, it didn’t race. Chances were good it wasn’t Lisa. Three-quarters of my friends and colleagues in the TV business blocked their ID, probably in the belief that if they didn’t, they would appear willing to talk to anyone and, therefore, losers.

My fingers, still slightly moist from my sliced turkey collage, almost dropped the phone. “Hello,” I said, a little too loudly.

“Harlow.”

“Just a second, please.” I turned to Adam. Oliver, I mouthed. He nodded and went and opened the refrigerator, looking from shelf to shelf as if he were picking a book in the library.

I took the call in the living room, in the front of the house. “How are you?” I asked.

“All right.” I was hoping he’d say something spyish, like Do you think this is a safe line? but he said, “I have information.”

“By the way, this is a cell phone.”

“No sweat,” he said. “I spoke to the person who informed our mutual friend that you got a raw deal. At the time the raw deal occurred, people around there thought you were doing a good job — as far as anyone can remember. There was surprise when you got the ax. The person couldn’t remember anything more about it other than thinking at the time that someone higher up had it in for you.”

I sat down on the rug and leaned back against my father’s favorite chair, a cross between a wing chair and a throne. “Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

“Do you happen to know what’s written in my file?”

“No. Don’t and won’t.” There was silence. I wanted to fill it, but for a few seconds I couldn’t think of anything to say. Jacques, apparently, was one of those people who paused between sentences because he said, “Who do you think had it in for you?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. My reviews were always positive. I got good feedback about my reports.”

“Who were the higher-ups besides your boyfriend?”

Naturally I wanted to say, Don’t call Ben my boyfriend, but I wanted to seem above his little dig, if that’s what it was, because he could come back with Really? What do you call a man you slept with for three months? “During my time there, Ben was number two in the Office of Eastern Europe Analysis. Archie Edwards was the chief. But I really didn’t deal with Archie. He was kind of snide — ”