Past Perfect (36 page)

“Give me a hint.”

I felt so sick I didn’t have the strength to hold back, so I could think about how to present it to Adam. The words just fell out. “Benton Mattingly. He wanted me out of there for reasons that had nothing to do with my work and everything to do with hiding the fact that he was —I can’t think of what to say.”

“Not like you,” Adam said.

“I know. Okay, duplicitous and traitorous. An unmitigated shit. It’s too much to go into now. I think I’m still overwhelmed that someone I worked with on a daily basis could betray me so easily. Anyway, I’ll tell you more tomorrow. Please, I have to get some sleep.”

“Water first.”

I was about to say good-bye, but something popped into my head. “Fine. One quick question. On allergies. Did you ever hear of an allergy to pine trees? I never did.”

“Animals have a broad range of allergies, and I’m pretty sure pine is up there. Are you talking about in Florida? I could check it out.”

“Not in animals. In people.”

“You want it now?” I heard the click of his keyboard, so I knew he wasn’t waiting for an answer. After some seconds he said, “Yes. Down there, Australian pines are an issue.”

“This woman says she takes shots, but she was still coughing.”

“Well …”

“Why?”

“Wait, let me get it back up on the screen. Okay, tree pollen season generally runs from mid-December through early spring, and Australian pine can come again in early fall. So it’s probably another allergen. Don’t worry about her. Worry about your needing water and getting some rest.”

I woke up at four feeling better, though not enough to face Maria, to say nothing about Maria’s steak, which I sensed would taste like a flip-flop with garlic salt. Instead, I turned on the TV to see if they had any good spy movies.

They didn’t, so I watched a few minutes of a dreadful one that was mostly about people chasing each other through the backstreets of Hong Kong, with carts being overturned so melons would cascade over the street and trip the bad guys, Asians, all of whom were poorly costumed and looked as if they’d been yanked out of one of those anti-Japanese World War II yellow peril movies by a lazy casting director and put into a 2004 production that had been made solely to take advantage of a tax write-off.

I switched it off before its conclusion, which no doubt would have had much balletic swinging from clotheslines and shooting, and went out to a bookstore. Forty-three dollars later, I was driving back to the hotel when my cell rang.

“Katie, are you still in town?” Maria, sounding hopeful.

I told myself that no matter what, I would not go to her villa and eat rubber steak. “Yes. I was afraid I wouldn’t make my plane in time, so I’m leaving in the morning.”

“You’re welcome to stay here. I have so many guest rooms and — ”

I stopped her. “That’s really nice of you, but I’ve already checked in to a hotel. I had a little too much sun today and — ”

“I feel terrible. I should have realized, but when you said a public place, the park was what came to mind.”

“How’s your allergy, by the way?”

“Better, thank you. How about this? I have two more houses to show and then I can meet you at my villa. Forget the wine. We can have a nice meal together and get to know each other a little better. Girl talk. No DDR, no death. I promise you’ll be back in your room by nine at the latest.”

I wanted to get into bed with my books, but I realized this could be my chance to convince Maria that getting even with Ben Mattingly was better than … I could hardly say, Ultimately, ruining his chances for a cabinet post will give you more satisfaction than blackmailing him, plus, if you can afford to live in a villa, you don’t need the extra pocket money. Naturally, I wouldn’t use the word blackmail. I would talk in a very high-minded manner about revenge —no, I’d call it justice. So I said, “I may not be an enthusiastic steak eater because my stomach is a little off, but I’d love to spend some time with you.”

“Great! I’ll meet you there at… Let’s see. Would seven be too late for you? I’m sorry but I can’t get rid of these clients and get home earlier than that. If you have an appetite, the steak is defrosted in the refrigerator and the gas grill gets hot in no time.”

“No problem,” I assured her.

Except there was a problem, I realized after I returned to my room. Maria herself. For someone who had been tough and shrewd enough to make her way in the upper reaches of the East German power elite, she had been surprisingly open with me about Manfred and Hans blackmailing Ben. Open about being Manfred’s lover as well. And how come she’d told me about her friendship with Lisa, a relationship that probably violated three-quarters of the Agency’s regs and rules? The conversation that had seemed so natural in the park, one woman opening up to another about her life, felt wrong in the air-conditioned, room-deodorized, comfortable artificiality of my hotel room.

And talk about feeling wrong, why had she agreed to see me in the first place? In my normal life, I would have come up with reasons: She was worried about Lisa. She was still gaga about Manfred-Dick and figured anyone who knew about Lisa might have a lead to him. She was lonely and the prospect of a visit, even from a stranger, was appealing. But this wasn’t my normal life and Maria wasn’t your typical real estate broker. I’d known enough women in the business to recognize that most of them didn’t have “important functionary in corrupt communist government” on their résumés.

Then what could Maria want from me? Information. There was something she wanted to find out about Lisa. Or about Ben. Stop it! I told myself. What else could I possibly know that would be of interest or value to Maria Schneider? If I had been with anyone, I might have made the effort to chuckle over my own silliness. But I was alone. So I went down to the gift shop and bought two bottles of water. Keeping my fingers crossed that Maria really was taking clients to two different houses and wouldn’t be home until seven, I left the chill of the hotel and walked out into the late-afternoon inferno.

The little map Maria had drawn on the back of her business card was easy to follow, so much so that I got there in less than fifteen minutes. To me, the word villa conjured up something venerable, an old farmhouse rising from the earth on a hill in Tuscany. The houses on Plantation Way looked as though they’d been built within the last ten years and that the sole aesthetic criterion had been Big. Some were pretty. There were Spanish houses with red-tiled roofs, houses so closely modeled on Tara that they lacked only slave quarters, and one New Englandy place with shingles and shutters. The rest were a strange fusion of styles; California redwood with Hamptons cantilevered modern, Western ranch in white-painted brick.

It was a long street and a prosperous-looking neighborhood, more hilly than the endlessly flat South Florida I was familiar with, and had as many deciduous trees as palms. There were some piney-looking things that might have been Australian. Having been raised in Manhattan, I wasn’t very good at estimating acreage, but while the houses on Plantation Way didn’t appear to have enough land to grow cotton, each had sufficient space that it stood proudly independent of its neighbors.

The end of the street was a cul-de-sac. Maria’s place took up most of it. At first glance, my reaction was, Well, this is some residential style I’ve never seen before. At second glance, I thought, God almighty, is this ugly! Stone, stucco, and an ironwork pattern on the doors and fence that looked like ovaries attached to fat fallopian tubes. The walls had black timbered beams, the kind in Tudor houses, but they seemed to have been placed by the whim of someone who had never actually seen even a picture of a Tudor house or, for that matter, studied architecture. I was surprised Maria had chosen it because, except for her white, porn-nurse high heels, she seemed to have okay taste. Maybe she’d gotten a terrific buy and was about to start work on curb appeal. Or maybe her taste in houses equaled her taste in shoes.

A long drive of some yellowed version of cobblestone led to the house. The ride was bumpy enough to rattle my teeth. A fountain stood in front, a great round stucco thing with a lot of curly ironwork rising up into a teepee shape. The water was having some problems, spurting on and off erratically. It only rose about three inches before it gave up. I got out of the car for a second just to look at it. What a mess! The outside of the fountain itself wasn’t stucco but—I looked closer—beige-painted concrete that was chipping, so there were small patches of gray. The house, I saw, was suffering from the same problem. The inside of the fountain was so clogged with algae that it looked lined with green velvet.

Major mistake, coming here, I told myself as I walked up the five steps to the front door. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t home, so I rang. No chime. A buzzer that had a crude honk, like some guy on the subway blowing his nose. No answer. I waited a courteous minute, then rang again. I decided to take a quick stroll, which turned out to be not so quick because the house itself was an example of suburban sprawl. The entrance to the garage was just around a curve in the drive, to the side of the house. I peered into a garage window. Empty. I contemplated trotting back to the car, bumping down the driveway, and flooring it, then calling to leave a message that I wasn’t feeling well. But that wasn’t the way to persuade her to help me bring Ben to justice.

What the hell had made me come here? I had to ask myself. It’s not like I have some plan to break into her house. I strolled to the car and took out my tote bag, recalling I still had some yogurt-covered nuts and raisins I’d bought at Kennedy Airport that morning, convincing myself that it was a healthy snack. I was getting hungry and I couldn’t wait until seven, when she’d return home and offer me hideous hors d’oeuvres, probably olives stuffed with marshmallow slivers. Immediately following that thought, I felt guilty for reacting in the snotty manner that Adam suggested was the reason half the country hated New York. The cheese sandwich Maria had given me was a perfectly fine cheese sandwich if you liked Jarlsberg, which actually I didn’t. I strolled toward the back of the house.

If the fountain had been gross, the back could have qualified for federal disaster relief funds. There were hunks of grass here and there, indicating there had once been a lawn. Now it was bare, brown ground. Way off in the distance, I could see metal outdoor furniture. A table was upside down and two of the chairs lay on their sides. They looked forgotten, as if blown over by a hurricane the year before.

Then I made the mistake of looking in through a bay window into what was Maria’s breakfast nook. A round table was covered with place settings of food-encrusted dishes, in various stages of disgustingness, looking as if they’d been there for days on end—she’d set a place for herself, never cleared it, and just moved on. I saw egg yolk on a blue plate and a tablespoon in the middle of the table covered in what was probably cottage cheese. A cereal box lay on its side, the flakes scattered about it. On the floor was a piece of toast with one bite taken out and an empty, twisted Equal packet. I averted my eyes, afraid of seeing the famed Florida version of the New York cockroach— probably around the size of Maria’s size seven shoes—enjoying cocktail hour.

Suddenly it hit me: Maria was insane. Admittedly, insane wasn’t a diagnosis that could be found in my mother’s volume of the DSM-IV. But it was accurate. This wasn’t a messy person’s home. What chilled me was that she had seemed so normal at first, except for the sun worship. Then slightly off. But I had found her interesting, admired her even. Believed what she told me.

Did Maria comprehend what her place looked like? Had she invited me over in order to scare me? One thing was certain: if what I was looking for was a way to help me find justice, this was not the place to find it. For all I knew, maybe it hadn’t been Hans-Bernard or Manfred-Dick who had been a threat to Ben Mattingly’s ambitions. Maybe Maria had been in on it all along.

Had I been so sunstruck or focused on myself that I hadn’t seen there was something profoundly wrong with her? The chaos and neglect in and around her villa was like a sign proclaiming WACKO! Smart and canny, maybe, but here was a woman who had been the mistress of one of the top men of a despised secret police force that had been famous for its viciousness. Here was the former secretary to the head of the Presidium, who had probably been intimately familiar with every sort of repression. She’d said to me, “He gave me some of his responsibilities.” She might have done everything from typing out the death warrants for her fellow citizens who were trying to escape to the West to signing his name on them. Take away her power, take away her lover, bring her to a strange country and give her freedom—and what would she become?

I’m out of here. The last thing I wanted to do was deal with a person who might be crazy enough to want to sign my death warrant.

On the other hand, she wouldn’t be back for more than an hour. If she was so demented and disorganized, maybe she hadn’t thrown away … What? Information that could lead me to Lisa. Ridiculous. But maybe, and I did have a safe three-quarters of an hour. No, safer, thirty minutes. Then I could leave without risking passing her driving home —having been stood up by a client—along Plantation Way. What I would do with that half hour was another issue. Considering that her algae fountain smelled like year-old spinach salad, I didn’t want a whiff of her breakfast nook. Not that I was about to break in. She probably had a burglar alarm anyway. I had once had my character Jamie take her shoe and carefully knock out several panes of glass along with whatever those crisscross bars that separate the panes are called. That way, the window frame remained locked while she cautiously climbed through the opening she’d made. Of course, the windows Dani Barber broke were made specifically to shatter safely, and did so on the show with a nice, satisfying, Foley artist-generated sound. Also, even with her giganto implants, Dani could get through a smaller opening than I.

Just for fun, I pulled my shirttail out from my pants and sauntered over to Maria’s solid-looking wood back door, with four panes of glass set into the upper part. I turned the knob with my shirt covering my hands and fingers. Naturally, it was locked. Only then did it occur to me to look around to see if I could be spotted by neighbors. No, from the villa’s setting on the cul-de-sac, no other houses were even in sight.