Past Perfect (26 page)

Maddy broke in. “Another one died?”

“He was a high-up party official in East Germany. Here he was a salesman for a company in Minneapolis that made brake fluid. He was in his office on the seventh floor of a building. Found stabbed to death.”

“Stabbed?” Too loud. I wanted to shush her, but held on to my shh just in time.

“Yes. There are no leads as to who might have done it. I spoke to the public affairs guy of the Minneapolis Police. The German got the name Bernard Ritter. He was supposed to be a sweetie. Widower, two young kids, everybody liked him, et cetera.”

She was wearing a beige and brown striped T-shirt, and she stretched the neckline under her throat. “Someone didn’t like him.” Her shirt was ugly, but cool in its banality, if shirts can be banal. Maddy had never dressed the way some of her poet friends did, with long, wagon-train-women skirts, or in jewelry that looked composed of bent paper clips and blood clots.

“Or maybe someone did like him, or didn’t care one way or another—just found Bernard’s continued existence inconvenient,” I observed.

“Are you going to tell me three take away two leaves one, and you can also take that one away because the third was lured to his death by Sirens?”

“No. The third is a woman. They gave her the name Maria Schneider. In East Germany, she’d been a secretary to the head of the Presidium.”

“What’s the Presidium?”

“It was kind of like we have a cabinet, but it had more to do with economics, obviously.”

“Obviously?”

“East Germany had a planned economy. I forget exactly what the group’s precise function was, to tell you the truth. And I don’t know what her specific job was. She clearly performed some service people here thought was valuable.” I think we both wanted to interject blow job, but as this was a serious conversation and we hadn’t been jokey around each other for years, we held back.

“She’s alive?” Maddy asked.

“Alive and well, so far as I know. She sells real estate in Tallahassee.”

“Brake fluid. Real estate. And the third man was a candy distributor?” I nodded. “So many people give their lives over to commerce.” Of course I didn’t say, Shut up, or, Like your father, who’s been supporting you and your poetry habit for over twenty years. “Were any of them in touch with Lisa?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I can’t imagine any of them would have stayed in contact with her. For starters, they probably wouldn’t have known her real name. She’d have spent only two or three weeks with them, Americanizing them. Everything from going to a mall to advising them on how not to behave like an officious communist functionary.”

“Did she teach them ‘Have a nice day’?”

“Did we say that then? They couldn’t survive here without it. Anyway, I never thought any of them could give me Lisa’s current whereabouts. I just thought going back to the situation—the people—Lisa and I had spent the most time on while we were working together …” My sister was shaking her head. “What are you saying no to?” I demanded.

“You can’t do this, Katie.”

“Oh, please!”

“Do you want me to explain the difference to you between reality and Hollywood movies?”

“That’s your ex-husband, not me.”

“No, it’s you. Dix is too self-involved to be a romantic. Listen: What if you get to talk to this Maria Schneider? What do you think she’ll tell you? That Lisa told her back in 1990 that you were fired for adding snide parenthetical asides in a report on the Yugoslavian steel industry?”

“That is such a long sentence for you,” I said.

Maddy pushed her bread plate and cup away from her. I was dying to brush the crumbs in front of her into my hand and drop them back on the plate, but I refrained. “You seem to be missing the point. You’ve involved yourself in a dangerous business.”

“You don’t think I know that?” I said.

“You know it, but you don’t appreciate it. Two people are dead, one of them murdered. You can say, ‘This has nothing to do with me,’ but someone who kills may not make such fine distinctions. Someone who kills would say, ‘That Katie Schottland might discover something I don’t want discovered. How should I handle her? Oh, I know. I’ll murder her.”’

“IT’S POSSIBLE,” I SAID, “that whoever killed Bernard Ritter did it for reasons that had nothing to do with all this.”

“It’s possible,” Maddy said quietly. “It’s also possible that this quest you’re on has nothing to do with finding Lisa.”

This was my sister at her most insufferable, explaining what my motives were in a composed voice, while an invisible chorus backed her up with Maddy knows you better than you know yourself because she’s got double your depth and three times your smarts. I once punched her when I was ten because she told me that the only reason I volunteered for the robotics project was because Scott Valadares was doing it. Which happened to have been true. “And you’re going to explain to me what this so-called quest of mine really means,” I said.

“Unless you called me at eight-thirty because you wanted company for coffee.”

“Be my guest. Tell me. I’m listening.”

“It’s a momentous time in your life.”

“Are you about to give me the life-crisis business because I’m turning forty? Because if you are—”

“Lisa was just an opportunity that came along. It could have been anything else, an affair—”

“Give me a break. I would not have an affair and you know it.”

“Or you would have taken up mountain climbing. Climbed Kilimanjaro with a group of women searching for their inner she-wolf.” The waitress poked her head out the door of the cafe and I waved my hand for her to bring the check.

“Listen to me, Katie. You’re looking for an adventure, and for you, what better adventure than something to do with espionage. Not just with espionage, but with your tenure at the CIA.”

“You mean the termination of my tenure. That I’m obsessed with having been fired and I’ll do anything to find out why.”

“No. I’m not saying you’re obsessed. But I think the real issue is your life today. Nicky’s getting older. He’s away for the summer. Adam is Adam and always will be. Not that that’s bad: just familiar. Same with your work. You want some excitement. You want your youth back.”

“Who doesn’t? What are you going to tell me, that I’m getting older and afraid of death?”

“Give me some credit for originality,” my sister snapped. “If you want adventure, make it a worthwhile one. Help rain forests.” I wanted to say, Gee, here you are without responsibilities and your parents supporting you—“subsidizing,” as you would say—and I don’t see you breaking your ass saving rain forests. “Work for PEN’s Writers in Prison committee. Seriously, go visit a country that’s throwing writers in jail, or killing them. That has the added attraction that you’d be visiting a place where the government thinks the best cure for creativity is death. Or just play Russian roulette.”

“Stop it!”

“I promise to be a good aunt to Nicky.”

“Shut up, Maddy! I asked your advice because I respect your intelligence. I can’t believe you’re talking like one of those old ladies who sit on benches and say, ‘Oy! You could get killed crossing the street.”’

“Especially if someone’s trying to run you over.”

I was still seething at my sister as I emerged from the Midtown Tunnel in Queens, although I had to admit that having gotten her to decide I was nuts seemed to have a salutary effect on her. Besides being angry, I was shaken by the thought that she could be right, if only in saying I was looking for adventure.

But she was wrong about me looking for my youth. Nobody could pay me enough to get me to go back to high school. College hadn’t been such a treasure either. Five percent of my time was given over to having sex, 40 to thinking about it. Another 45 went to being miserable about my weight/direction in life/inability to have fun. The final 10 percent was assigned reading.

I was waiting at a traffic light, remembering a quote from somewhere about youth being the Lord of life and thinking, Am I the only one in the world with a memory, the only one who doesn’t sentimentalize being young? when a moment of my youth popped into my head. Technically it might be considered postyouth since I must have been around twenty-four, but it was spring and even though I felt very old at the time, I was very young. Ben had broken off with me a couple of weeks earlier. I hadn’t met Adam yet.

I was trudging through the parking lot after work, thinking that the last thing I wanted to see driving back to my apartment in D.C. from Langley was the cherry trees in blossom. Not that their beauty and promise would make me break down and weep —the sight would just reconfirm that the world that seemed to be working right for other people wasn’t working for me. Suddenly I heard that unmistakable squeak of Lisa’s voice: “Kaaaa-tie!” Since it was nearly powerful enough to shatter the safety glass of all the car windows, I couldn’t ignore it.

She hurried up to me. In a black fedora, black vest, and white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, her look was more Boy George than Annie Hall. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of months, so we had a long conversation about what was going on in our lives, which was, essentially, nothing. We couldn’t discuss our work, so we chatted in the most general terms while the apple in my purse that I was planning to eat the instant I got in my car was calling to me. Suddenly, in the midst of all her blithering, she asked, “What’s new with your boss?”

“Archie or Ben?” I felt a little dizzy, as I did every time I heard “Ben,” even if it was my own voice saying it. Dizziness, apparently, was the post-love affair correlative of the pounding heart that happens during the amour itself.

“Who do you think? Name me one thing about Archie that’s interesting enough to make me ask what’s new with him. You can’t, can you?”

Who knows if I gave myself away in my pretense that while Ben barely interested me, I found Lisa’s “What’s new with your boss?” amusing enough to give the subject a bit of thought. I realized I had leaned against somebody’s Volvo during my few seconds of vertigo, so I stood straight and shifted the strap of my shoulder bag a little higher. “As far as I know, nothing’s new. Why? Have you heard murmurings?”

“I heard he was having a something with someone in your unit,” Lisa said.

I wished I hadn’t moved away from the Volvo. Was she telling me something? Did she know it had been me? I couldn’t detect any of that See, I’m looking directly into your eyes so how can I have any ulterior motives? craftiness. “Lisa, give me a break. He’s always having a something with someone in our unit. Why do you think we have such a great record for egalitarian hires? He’s got to keep up the supply chain.” I guess I was testing her to see if she knew, if she’d say, Come on, I heard about you and Ben.

“Do you know who it was?” she asked.

“No.”

Lisa cleared her throat in the manner of politicians about to say something significant. “I have it on good authority” —a slow blink, fraught with significance—”that he’s in love, actual love, with someone else and he’s leaving the wife!”

“Bad authority.”

“No. Good. As good as it gets.”

“Lisa, ‘as good as it gets’ means from Ben himself. Was it?”

“No, but—”

“Listen, his standard operating procedure is to tell the woman up front that he’ll never leave Deedee, but in every other way he signals that he’s madly in love and that he will leave.”

He had hardly bothered to signal me on the subject, I realized, but I’d chosen to believe he would soon be mine anyway. He also dumped me sooner than most. That was doubly painful, because I knew his pattern. Six months: I only got half that. Seconds before Lisa had called out to me in the parking lot, I’d been thinking about what his other women had that I lacked, that they could hold on to Ben for half a year and make him work to convince them he would soon be theirs forever.

“Well, if you pick up the paper and read ‘One of Washington’s most successful marriage acts is splitting up,’ don’t say you didn’t hear it here first,” Lisa said. “Okay, now, on to the big question.” She adjusted her Boy George hat, but instead of slanting it to a pert angle, it wound up right on top, so she looked like a Hasid. “Do you think he ever sincerely loved her? Or was it all money, all the time, from the get-go?”

I voted for all money, and got away from her by glancing at my watch, aghast, and saying I was late for a dentist’s appointment. As she strolled to her car, the straps on the back of her vest flopping with each step, it occurred to me that she too had a crush on Ben. Not smitten, because she didn’t try hard enough to pump me —as a member of his unit—for information, but she was keen on him enough to get pleasure out of talking about him.

Interesting memory of my youth, Lisa’s youth, I thought. As I made a right onto the street that led to the studio, it occurred to me I had told Jacques Harlow that it was unlikely Ben and Lisa had had much to do with each other.

But who knows what happened in the years after I’d left? Maybe too many questions were being asked about all the female hires in Eastern Europe and he’d had to hunt for girlfriends in other units. Could the two of them have gotten together? I couldn’t picture Ben being able to bear not just Lisa’s lack of discernible intellect, but her voice, high enough to make an ordinary soprano sound like a basso. Nevertheless, if they’d had an affair, I wondered if it lasted more than three months.

Javiero’s dressing room was much larger than Dani’s, not only with room for a couch, but a small chaise across from it. This commodious size pleased me immensely because it galled Dani. Javiero Rojas, as far as I could tell, was a sweet guy. I wasn’t positive because his English was so limited and he, like everybody else, had difficulty comprehending my pre-K Spanish vocabulary. He had come to acting after a successful, though not stellar, career as a singer of Latin love songs. His audience was mostly women of a certain age, i.e., old enough to have significant hearing loss.

He worked with a dialect coach, and learned his lines with a slight, pleasing accent. But having come to the United States from Chile when he was thirty, and with no knack for foreign languages, his untutored English consisted of many nouns and much acting-out of verbs. I was supposed to be getting his notes on the second draft of the script, but since his coach/translator was having one of his mysterious, lengthy sojourns in the bathroom, we wound up discussing our plans for the rest of the summer. So far I gathered that he was taking his wife, who looked like Brigitte Bardot, except blonder, to spend time with his family in Arica, in Chile, then flying to some islands off the coast of Spain where they were renting a villa.