Past Perfect, page 26
“It’s possible,” Jacques answered. “More likely, if he wanted it done, he’d delegate the job. Or Lisa might have just decided to take a powder on her own after she called you. Whatever happened, the intention of her call was not to excite you into getting the truth about why you were fired. In all likelihood, she only threw out the firing idea because you didn’t seem that interested in talking to her. She needed a hook. If that hadn’t worked, she would have gone on to something else. I doubt that she understood how large that firing loomed in your life.”
“It’s funny, though,” Huff said, “how she dropped out of sight.”
“Maybe she was busy checking into how the Germans were doing,” I said. “And isn’t it something? Now two out of three are dead.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
AT FIVE MINUTES before nine the next morning, I sat in my car telling myself I should be happy. I had what I wanted, the reason I’d been fired from the CIA. Happy, but not ecstatic because I had no way to turn injustice into justice. There wasn’t any secret Agency Retirees Tribunal to which I could bring my case against Benton Mattingly and call Jacques, Huff, and all their friends to testify. Except I wasn’t happy.
There I was, stuck in the Midtown Tunnel in a monster traffic jam on the way to work. No inching along. The car was in park, my satellite radio dead, and I was inhaling noxious car exhaust whiae thinking that if I had to put a name to what I was feeling, it would be unsatisfied. What would satisfy me? Ben’s death? My reinstatement with both a letter of apology (“Dear Ms. Schottland, All your friends here at Central Intelligence want to say how darned sorry we are ...”) and back pay? Clearly if I couldn’t put this behind me, I would remain unsatisfied for the rest of my life. Maybe dissatisfied, because I’d always been forgetful when it came to negative prefixes, and I didn’t have a dictionary in the glove compartment.
I started worrying the car would overheat if I sat there with the air-conditioning on, but if I turned off the engine and opened the windows, I could get asphyxiated, plus get disgusting semicircles of sweat on my sleeveless chartreuse tank dress, which was surprisingly flattering, especially with big hoop earrings, although who would care when they pulled my dead body out of the car?
What was I going to do, spend the rest of my life like Huff Van Damme, waiting and hoping for the chance to get even? I wondered how much of his bitterness was aimed not at Ben, but at his late wife—for leaving him that way and, in the process of killing herself, killing his career. Damn it! I hated to be stopped dead in traffic, and of course being stuck in the middle of a 1.3-mile tunnel was a claustrophobe’s nightmare. Not that I was truly claustrophobic, though there were more comfortable places for me than crowded parties and stock-still cars in underground locations.
Of course, in New York, there was always that subliminal whisper of Is something wrong? In threatening situations, it became a howl. Terrorists! I was in the middle of the tunnel, probably a little closer to Manhattan than Queens. Could something have happened at either end? A bomb, then a gradual collapse of the structure, the tunnel caving in on itself like a line of toppling dominoes?
When I first understood that tunnels were built underwater, I was always a little panicky in them, swiveling my head back and forth looking for the dribble that could turn into a flood. I remember being in a car with my father, most likely in this very tunnel, and staring as drops of water went Ping! onto the windshield. “Are you scared?” he’d asked and I flared up, “No!” “Because it’s perfectly normal to be scared,” he went on, as if I’d said yes, “with drops of water coming down. But the tunnel is safe.”
Later I’d learned that a tunnel wasn’t an eel-shaped tube stretched along the bottom of a river. It was built by excavating under the riverbed. Big help. I shut my eyes and tried a breathing exercise I’d read about that was supposed to calm your mind. I breathed in through my nose, making sure the air went down to my stomach. Then opened my eyes. I couldn’t drown in a tunnel, but if I went into some kind of meditative state, I might miss the fun of watching the mudslide that would bury me alive.
Think pleasant thoughts. Fine. I thought about driving up with Adam to see Nicky on visiting day, then Nicky, slimmed down but not gaunt, his gorgeous smile wide, running toward us with arms wide open. And talk about pleasant: Look what I had! Look at my life! A solid marriage versus my sister’s loveless liaisons. Devotion and stability versus whatever Huff had with his wife, giving up the comfort of closeness to serve their country —or maybe their own craving for adventure. Adam and I? How could what we had be compared with Ben and Deedee’s arrangement?
Throughout the tunnel, drivers were honking their horns. Or maybe slumped over on them, already dead. Who knew? At this hour, my father would be playing tennis in his club, my mother seeing a patient, my sister sleeping. But Adam would just be arriving at the zoo. Should I call him and say, Hey, were you listening to the radio? Did you hear about any terrorist attack on the Midtown Tunnel? Then he’d say, No, jeez, let me turn it on now. I’ll call you right back. I’d press redial, but by then all the circuits would be busy and I’d never get to say that last I love you.
How could Ben live with himself? Easily. You can’t feel remorse when you don’t have a conscience. He could tell himself with absolute sincerity that he never led a woman on. He was always up front that he would never leave Deedee. Right after having said that, of course, he would then use all his brains, charisma, and sexuality to announce, much louder, I really don’t mean what I said! But to him, those deceits didn’t count. Neither did lying about me and getting me fired, because that had been in the service of covering up something—I guessed eyebrow-raising expenditures—that might damage his career. No doubt he’d been right up front with Huff’s wife too, telling her, You have such incredible insight into what’s going on at this embassy, along with I don’t want you to tell me anything you don’t feel comfortable telling me. Please [Mary/Jenny/Kelly], don’t feel pressured.
The cars in front of me must have been creeping for several seconds before the ones in back of me started honking for me to move. A couple of minutes later, I was through the tollbooth. All right, I told myself, blasting the air-conditioning. This was it. My search was over. I had found out what I needed to know. Time to put the past behind me. I had to. Think quality of life. What quality did all those Cold Warriors have who still couldn’t cut loose from history, the world’s and their own?
My shoulders ached. I was so tired I wished I could pull over and take a nap. Already I felt as if I’d done a whole day’s work and then stayed up too late straightening the linen closet. One question remained. How could I leave the past behind when there was still unfinished business back there?
What ever happened to Lisa? And what about Maria Schneider? Two down, one to go? Unless Maria had killed Bernard Ritter and Dick Schroeder. But I had trouble picturing a Tallahassee real estate agent, even an ex-commie bigwig, traveling up to Minneapolis, sneaking up to Ritter’s office, taking care to avoid security cameras, and stabbing him repeatedly. Even if she had been one wicked woman with a knife, I didn’t see how that could translate into her having the resources and technical knowledge to come up with some blastomycosis and convey a hit of it into Schroeder.
“Hi, Maria,” I found myself saying to her voice mail when I got into the office. “This is Katie Schottland calling again. I really hate to bother you, but I’m still concerned about Lisa. And there’s another thing that’s come up that might possibly involve you. I’ll be brief, but I really would appreciate hearing from you. The sooner the better.”
“I don’t get it,” Jacques said. I’d called him at his hotel. He sounded hungover enough to make me curious about what he’d done after our dinner the previous night. His voice was hoarse and muted, most likely because any loud sound could make his headache press even harder against the inside of his skull. “You called Maria?”
“Yes,” I said patiently. “She didn’t answer. I left a message.”
“All right, if I were you, this is the extent of what you should do. If she calls back, maybe pussyfoot around a little, see if she’ll open up about how come she and the other two were the lucky ones who got a new life here instead of prison there. But going down to meet her? No.”
“Why not?” I asked. “Do you think she’s dangerous?” I tried to speak clearly, but the phone kept slipping. The twenty-seventh screenwriting program I’d bought in my life was on my desk and I was trying to get the plastic wrap off the jewel case without the use of teeth.
“Dangerous?” repeated Jacques. “I actually wasn’t thinking about her being dangerous. I’m figuring that if Gottesman didn’t die of natural causes and what’s-his-name was stabbed to death, that would increase the likelihood that Maria herself is in danger. It’s bad policy to stand next to a target. Don’t they teach you that in New York?” I was tempted to scream Yes! to really throw his headache into high gear. But I needed him to be able to think. I gnawed an opening in the plastic and peeled it off. Jacques, meanwhile, did some throat-clearing business, along with a couple of coughs—fortunately without anything in the audible expectoration department.
“Girlfriend talk on the phone is fine if you’ve known somebody forever,” I explained to him, “but I can’t imagine someone I’ve never met opening up about her deal with the Agency —or her dealings with Ben and the U.S.A. —to a stranger.”
“You’re probably right,” he said.
“Probably?” I set the CD aside because slicing or peeling off the killer adhesive strip from the top without breaking the plastic case required my full attention.
“If you know so much, you don’t need any suggestions from me.”
“Relax, I was just joshing you a little. You North Carolina guys know from joshing, don’t you? Anyway, I would appreciate any suggestions you have.”
“Meet her in a public place where there are a lot of people. I’m not talking about something that’s so crowded you can’t move. Restaurant, coffeehouse. A busy store is okay, but not a supermarket or store where there are aisles.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Can you take a little crudeness?”
“You just pointed out I’m from New York.”
“Right. Watch your ass. And don’t get into any cars with anybody, especially her. For a pro, a moving target is easy pickings.”
Jacques’s warning came so close to the dialogue I wrote for Spy Guys that it was too comfortably familiar to frighten me. His “a moving target is easy pickings” was a little bit country for either of my characters, but His Highness and Jamie were always admonishing each other to be careful: Keep your eyes open for bolo machetes, or cyanide in the marzipan tart.
Only two things held me back from wanting to go see Maria. I knew that, unlike my trip to Washington, I couldn’t sneak this one by Adam, though it would have to be a fast trip because we were going up to visit Nicky at camp. Another thing: July in Tallahassee wouldn’t be April in Paris, and New York was oppressive enough for my taste. Still, when Maria called back at the end of the afternoon, I made sure not to give away too much. I still hadn’t heard from Lisa, I reported, but now I had a bigger worry. I really couldn’t discuss it over the phone, but two of her colleagues from the class of ’90 were dead—and I had certain concerns about her own welfare because of that.
“Do you mean—” she began.
“I don’t think we should use names.”
Naturally, if anyone was tapping her phone and had an IQ higher than mayonnaise, he would know I was talking about Hans-Bernard and Manfred-Dick. However, having a minor familiarity with listening in because I’d researched it for a couple of scripts, I knew that the chances of 24/7 monitoring on a tap were unlikely. I also recalled from some of the reports I’d written at the Agency that, on occasion, the designated listener indeed does not have a higher IQ than mayonnaise.
“If you could just give me a little more information,” Maria said. I heard concern, but no panic. Still, I wanted an invitation to Tallahassee, though I realized there was a chance that she had been brought over separately from the other two. Ben may have run all three of them as separate operations, possibly because he’d negotiated different deals for each of them. They might not have even known each other in East Germany, though with Manfred-Dick in the Stasi and Hans-Bernard as the party’s point man on the criminal justice system and the courts, I felt the two of them probably had been acquainted. Maria was a different case, because her job description as secretary to the head of the Presidium was so unclear.
“I really can’t talk about this on the phone,” I said. “I’d like to meet you. You can pick any public, reasonably busy place and I’ll be there. I want you to feel comfortable.”
I solved the Adam problem by being direct, if not completely honest. The details of my talk with Jacques could come later. I told him there was a former East German official the CIA had brought over in 1989. She was now a real estate agent in Tallahassee and I needed to speak to her face-to-face for a couple of hours. That was it, my last attempt to clarify what had happened to me. If nothing came of it, I gave him my word of honor I’d drop my search. I also invited him to come along. And blessedly, he said he couldn’t get away. I’d been counting on that.
A park right near the Florida state capitol sounded like a good idea. I pictured lots of guys in white shirts and a few southern gents in seersucker suits and Panama hats that they would tip when a lady passed by. As usual, reality had little to do with my fantasy life. While the air was not hot enough to scorch the lungs, I seemed to be the only person nuts enough to be sitting on any of the benches along the curved path.
Well, there might have been a sniper hidden behind the giant privet hedges twenty feet back, but if that was the case, he/she and his/her Uzi submachine gun were out of sight. However, the privets looked extremely inviting. Even in the noonday sun, they offered a strip of shade. Nevertheless, Maria had said, “I’ll meet you at the benches,” and I had to play by her rules. Since I couldn’t imagine her belonging to the kill-her-in-broad-daylight school of preemption, I assumed she had chosen the spot not only because she wanted to see me in bright light, but to make certain I was alone.
And vice versa. Jacques had warned me Maria might be a target and to be cautious. But he’d said it on the phone. I’d called him from my office desk, where I did most of my work on Spy Guys, so his words had a make-believe ring to them, as if they were dialogue. A thing spies say to each other. Thrilling, menacing, great entertainment. Now, under the feverish Florida sun, I tried not to think that I was a sitting duck.
Then I spotted a person who had to be her—no one else was around —strolling down the path with a brisk, long-legged stride as if it were an autumn day in New England. Dove gray cotton pants, a white, crocheted-looking cap-sleeve shirt, heels, and, unlike me, a sensible straw hat on her head. She carried a pink straw tote. From her walk alone, I decided she couldn’t be much more than fifty. “Katie?” I stood and smiled, hoping it was in an ingratiating manner. “Of course! Who else would it be?” she asked. “Sorry to have picked this spot. Mad dogs and Englishmen, or whatever that saying is. I’m not one or the other, but I’m outside every chance I can get.”
“Happy to meet you anywhere,” I said, trying not to gasp from the heat. We shook hands. A firm but not bone-crushing grip, a shake perfect for a real estate agent: it said Neither overbearing nor lacking in confidence.
“Do you mind sitting here?” In person, she had even less of an accent than on the phone. She was pleasant-looking, with light skin and light brown hair that hung straight down from under her hat. Her brows kept her from blandness. They were dark and unplucked, and reminded me of Hillary Clinton’s college picture.
“No. This is fine,” I lied. I’d probably find out what I wanted to know. Then, as I got up to leave, I’d die of heatstroke.
We sat. She reached into her tote bag and pulled out a small plastic shopping bag that said DELI DIVINE. “I bought sandwiches so we could picnic. Turkey or cheese. So many people are vegetarians these days.”
“I’m not, but I’ll take the cheese if that’s okay.”
“No problem.” She handed me an overlarge sandwich wrapped in white paper. “It’s on seven-grain bread.”
“This is so nice of you.”
“Please, it’s the least I could do,” Maria said. “You flying down here.”
“I’m glad to do it. Let me give you a little background.” While I told her about having been at the Agency—though not about how I’d left it—she brought out two bottles of Evian and a few packets of mustard, yellow and Dijon. As she took out a wad of luxurious, thick paper napkins, I gave her two sentences about writing the Spy Guys show. There was a distant quality about her that made me want to work to get on her good side, so much so that I had to squelch the temptation to lie and promote myself to writer-producer. While I unwrapped the sandwich, I decided hers was a cool that came from self-confidence. She didn’t have to sell herself and she knew it. I didn’t get even a whiff of arrogance. “Lisa helped you get settled here and you remained friends, right?”
“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes we didn’t see each other for a few years, but if not, we would visit on the phone.”
“It struck me as surprising that Lisa kept up a friendship with you —it being against Agency rules. She must have valued your company.”
“We value each other’s company,” Maria said. “And I think we both had a sixth sense right from the first, that we could trust each other. In the world I was in then, that was worth more than gold.” A drop of sweat made a slow slide from behind her ear down her neck, but she didn’t appear to notice. “I don’t know you, but I feel that about you. You have a nice openness about you. So completely American.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Did you know the other two men who were brought over when you were? One was in the Stasi, the other was a big shot in the party.”
