Past Perfect (16 page)

My mother, on the other hand, stayed in school, majored in chemistry, and graduated magna cum laude. When they married that August, her parents were as aghast at the union as his were when a few years later he quit his job to stay home with Maddy and me. That was when my mother was twenty-seven and decided to go to medical school. He made ends meet—barely—working every other night plus weekends at a car rental company. But back then, he was the parent at home. My earliest memory was sitting in my high chair, banging a wooden spoon—confident I was helping him—while he stirred something in a pot. In those years, my father discovered not just the joy of cooking, but the potential in keeping cooks in pots, pans, gizmos, and crockery. He became a man inspired: once he was able to go back to work, we went from poor to rich in three years.

I spread my napkin on my lap. “I was telling Mom how I never really got over getting fired from the CIA.”

“What do you want me to say, Katie?” my father asked.

“You mean that you always thought my going down there was a lousy idea.”

“Far be it from me to rub it in, but I told you then: if you go to work for the government, you’re going to be dealing with people who’ll do anything to preserve their little piece of turf. The big three: lie, cheat, steal.” At least he didn’t add four: kill.

“I don’t want to rub it in either,” I said to him, “but how about people who want to serve their country?”

He shrugged somewhat wearily, but then we’d had this discussion more than once, in the mideighties, when I’d decided investment banking was as thrilling as watching alfalfa grow—not that I ever actually saw alfalfa. My father had wanted me to stay in New York and work for Total Kitchen: he’d demanded, “Who do you think I built up this company for, Katie? For me?” Before I could come up with an answer that didn’t sound snide, he added, “Your sister’s too sensitive to have a head for business. You’re not.”

I took a forkful of salad less out of hunger than to change the subject: “Terrific dressing!”

“Not too oily. The older I get, the more I’m moving away from vinegar and back to lemon juice. So listen, honey, like I said, they fight for their tiny piece of turf—and that’s just in departments like Health, Education and Welfare.”

“It’s called Health and Human Services now.”

“Right. Fine. You’re the genius. I don’t know anything.”

“I didn’t say that, Dad. I just—”

I had to get the last word in. As did he. “Katie, I’m only telling you that the CIA does whatever all those other departments do, except they’re smarter. Or they think they’re smarter. Plus most of their work involves sneaking and lying. That’s how they do their jobs. What are they going to do, go to the president of Russia and say, ‘Excuse me’—what’s Putin’s name?”

“Vladimir.”

‘“Excuse me, Vlad, but I need the address of all the nukes you haven’t told us about.’ No, they can’t do that. So they bribe, they blackmail, they lie to get what they need.”

“That’s the Operations Directorate. And they don’t act out of venality. It’s their job to convince foreign nationals that it’s in their best interest to … well, to betray their country. That’s how we get information we need but aren’t supposed to have. But I was in — ”

“You worked for the Intelligence Directorate. I know. The point I’m making is that the CIA does what everybody else in Washington does, except they do it meaner and tougher and so out of sight no one ever finds out. You knew that even before you went down there, from all those spy books you read.”

Then he got all damp-eyed. His tears had always made me cringe until I was twelve or thirteen, when I realized he got that way only in front of the family, about the family. My guess was, no one in his company had a clue that he possessed tear ducts. “Katie, don’t you think Mom and I know what a hit you took?” He sniffled and wiped his nose with his napkin.

“I know you know.” Even now, they had no idea of the extent of it. “Look, it wouldn’t have come up again for me with so much force if someone I used to work with hadn’t called. It made the whole thing seem like my firing happened yesterday. Did Mom tell you about that call?” Of course she had. As far as I knew, the longest they’d ever kept a secret from each other was the time it took for me or Maddy to leave the room.

“She mentioned it.”

I spent the next fifteen minutes going over background and telling my father how Huff had gotten me information on Lisa, albeit reluctantly. As for Ben, I went on, he might have been less than truthful assuring me he would ask some civilians—not in the Agency—if they could check around about Lisa’s whereabouts. However, if Ben had considered me reprehensible, he would never have taken my call. I also told my father about Dick Schroeder, and that with his death, I had lost my chance of learning if there had been anything in my past work with Lisa that had motivated her to phone me.

“Now listen, kiddo,” my father said, “don’t take offense, but this tracking-down-Lisa thing sounds to me like it could be a story for your show. I mean, you’re going off to Cincinnati. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but you seem to be building—”

I finished his sentence for him — twice: “A mountain out of a molehill? Something out of nothing?”

“Katie,” my father said, “tell me. What’s the big deal now? You haven’t been out of work for years. You wrote the book, and now it’s playing on television and nobody’s even breathed a word like cancel. You’ve got a career every single one of your friends would die for.” I was about to list a decorator, two teachers, and a jewelry maker who loved their work even more than I loved mine, when he added, “Let’s just say you’ve got a career that pays you so much you don’t even have to ask me for money.” He smiled, delighted. It wasn’t that he loved me more because I was earning a good living. It was that I now pleased him in a way he’d never anticipated: in the way a son would have. I was holding my own in the world. I was a success. Even the most feminist of fathers, especially those of his generation, lapsed occasionally. “Not that you’d ever have to ask, moneywise, because if you needed it, I can honestly say I think I would know it.”

“I know, Dad.”

“Of course you know. But let me do something for you.” He held up his hand in reassurance. “I’m just going to call Andy. Now you may be asking, what can a corporate lawyer do for me about all this business with the CIA and talk about ‘national importance’ and stuff?”

“Dad—”

“He’s at Greenberg Traurig. It’s a national law firm. I know they got an office in Washington.” He held up his hand again, traffic-cop style. “Hear me out. He’ll call one of his people in Washington he knows and he’ll say, ‘Listen, my friend, I need an attorney—maybe not in the firm —who can do business with the CIA.’ You know, the guys who get documents declassified for different groups or whatever. Probably someone who used to be a lawyer for them. What we need, Katie, is a guy —or I should say a person —who can put the screws on them a little to maybe find out something about what happened to you.” He picked up a piece of mango and held it aloft on his fork. “Would that help make you feel better?”

“It might.”

He got up from the couch and stuck his head out the office door. “Get me Andy on the phone,” he boomed, though his secretary was no more than three feet away. “E-mail him too in case he’s at lunch because he never goes out without his BlackBerry.” Then he looked back at me. “We’ll get somebody good. Andy knows with me money is no object. If you need somebody to do a job for you, hire the best and the brightest. It always pays off.”

He glanced at his watch. It had been thirty seconds and Andy hadn’t called back yet. “So listen, you want to hear about real classified information?”

“What?”

“Relax. My kind of classified. You can’t breathe a word about this. Well, except to Adam. I got a team. An engineer, an industrial designer, and a chemist working on a top-secret project. The ultimate grill pan! How many people would give their right arm to get a grill pan that even in a studio apartment could give something that grilled, kind of charcoaly taste without making the smoke detectors go off? Seriously, with minimum smoke. More like almost no smoke. It’ll be my pan, my patent. Williams-Sonoma will want to shoot themselves.”

NOT MUCH MORE THAN twenty-four hours later, I got a call from Constance Cincotta, the lawyer from D.C. my father’s lawyer recommended. She’d spent a couple of decades in the Office of the General Counsel in the CIA. She told me to forget about getting anything out of the Agency. “Forget the Freedom of Information Act.” She had a rich, opera singer’s voice, but I sensed she was going to give me bad news from the last act. “FOIA is if you want to look at a certain national intelligence estimate, or want to learn about the Agency’s investigation of UFOs from the forties to the nineties.” So far, if there was any drama in this aria, it wasn’t evident.

“I know,” I told her. “It’s not an issue I’m interested in, it’s my own employment record. Or in my case, the termination of my employment there.”

“I understand. Now under the Privacy Act, you could request the Agency’s information on you, whatever is indexed to your name. But I made a couple of calls, spoke to the second-in-command in the information and privacy coordinator’s office, and there is no — repeat—no access to personnel records, other than the fact that you were employed by the agency. That’s all they’ll give out.”

“But they were giving that out back in 1990, the year I was fired. And just to see what would happen,” I went on, “when I was first interviewed by a couple of reporters when I was publishing my novel, I mentioned I knew about the Agency because I had worked there. One of them checked and found out, yes, sure, I had been at the CIA.”

“Well,” she said brightly, “that should have given your book a kind of credibility that a lot of others don’t have.” She cleared her throat. “I tried to find out, as subtly as I could, if I could at least get a sense about whether your termination was a serious matter or simply a question of downsizing or your taking home a box of pencils — ”

“I don’t steal pencils,” I said. “That’s number one, and number two, it was shortly after the fall of the Wall and the implosion of the East German government, so they needed more report writers, not fewer.” I sensed my voice veering out of control, so I added, “Sorry to cut you off.”

“I understand. And I apologize for the box of pencils remark, which was me at my impolitic worst. After twenty years at the Agency, what one gains in discernment one often loses in delicacy.” Maybe she wanted me to say, Oh, you’re not at all indelicate. Maybe I hesitated too long because Constance Cincotta went back to business. “Unfortunately, there was nothing I could find out. The wall of silence. Or rather, the law of silence. I can only say, don’t take it personally. It’s the law for everyone, not just you.”

“Well, thank you. I appreciate—”

She interrupted. Fair play, since I had just done the same to her. “I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing your TV show, but I’ve heard some fine things about it. And I understand you come from a good, solid background. It seems to me, if you’ll forgive my pontificating, that you shouldn’t let your experience with the Agency cast a pall on your life. Whatever happened back then, whether it was some misunderstanding or a genuine miscarriage of justice, you wound up getting off easy. Much worse could have happened and didn’t.”

For an instant, I contemplated telling her about Lisa’s call, and seeing if that would make any difference in her attitude. What she was giving me was not so much a brush-off as a realistic forget-about-it. Perhaps if she knew that some recent event had kicked off my search for answers, she could … What could she do? Let some former colleague in the CIA’s general counsel’s office know they had a rogue ex-employee named Lisa Golding who wanted to blab to the media? Maybe it was something they ought to know. Or it might be something that would set off a chain of events ending … how would His Highness say it? A chain of events that could end in a most distasteful manner.

More likely, I would be the one branded the lunatic, not Lisa. And for all I knew, maybe I was. Maybe they would decide that if anyone posed a threat to national security, it was crazy Katie Schottland and something had to be done about her. No, that was lunacy à la mode. What would happen was that after a functionary in internal security muttered Quel nut job about me, two seconds later I’d be forgotten.

“Well, thanks for your time,” I said. Rather mean-spiritedly, I calculated that time was being billed to my father at about eight hundred dollars an hour and mused that her call to the CIA on my behalf probably had not lasted more than five minutes.

“No problem,” Constance Cincotta said. “I wish you lots of luck. And from now on, I promise, I’m going to TiVo your show!”

For what Adam and I paid monthly for our parking spaces in a garage just west of Broadway, we probably could have rented a pleasant little farmhouse on a hill in Provence. But without a car my commute to the studio in Queens would have taken just under two hours on public transportation. And with the hours Adam sometimes had to put in, he could find himself waiting more than half an hour on a subway platform in the Bronx at ten-thirty at night.

I was coming out of Exquisite Foods, an unremarkable deli a block from my apartment where I’d just bought my lunch, a Muenster cheese, guacamole, and tomato wrap. While most of the cast and crew made gagging sounds whenever I opened my brown bag, I preferred my choices to those at the craft services table at the studio: bologna the diameter of a Dodge Ram tire, salad scented with either preservatives or insecticide; also, it was my belief that while steak might be aged, sliced turkey should not be.

I was halfway across Broadway when I sensed someone tall beside me. Whatever body language was being spoken between us—a slight forward movement of his elbow, a foot in a brown loafer too close to mine—I violated my native Manhattanite’s no-eye-contact rule and, as I put my foot up onto the curb, glanced up.

“Good morning, Katie.” Huff Van Damme.

Obviously he’d expected me to gasp, because his smirk vanished when I said, “Good morning. How’s it going?” Maybe it would have been a goodwill gesture to express shock and awe, but that didn’t occur to me until afterward. In truth, I wasn’t surprised that a retired CIA operative was able to get my address, tail me as I left my building, and keep out of sight while I walked east on West Eighty-fifth, stopped at the deli, then continued on toward my garage. On the other hand, I did think to say, “Good shadowing. I’ll have to write that into some script.”