Past Perfect (32 page)

“A cable from one of your people in Sofia. And some daily briefs from the embassy in Bonn.” Jacques stopped for a minute, then realized I was dazed. He kept going, but more slowly. I think he wanted to make sure I could absorb it. “His complaint against you was on the basis of incompetence.”

“But they didn’t just fire me!” I managed to say. “I was accompanied from Personnel by two guards. They went through everything in my office before I could pack up. Then they took me to my car. A mobile unit from Security followed me until I was actually back on the public road.”

“There naturally was some question whether you actually did shred or—”

“I didn’t!” I understood now why he had chosen the restaurant. It wasn’t noisy enough that you couldn’t hear people at your table, but it was loud enough to keep others from listening, even if you inadvertently raised your voice.

“No one here is saying you did anything. Look, you write stories. Your dismissal was brought about by Mattingly’s story, a pretty good one. He indicated there was some question whether you shredded that material on purpose, not accidentally. He even speculated you might have taken it off premises. The cable and the briefs themselves were relatively unimportant, as it turned out. That was his doing also. The last thing he wanted was to have you prosecuted. He couldn’t have you or a lawyer questioning what had happened or subpoenaing any Agency documents —not that they could have gotten any. He just wanted you out of there. Out and stigmatized. He didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for you. That’s why the guards.”

I had no idea how long we sat in silence. The waiter came with our appetizers. We sat there as if we hadn’t yet been served.

“Why did Lisa call me now?” I was finally able to say. “After so many years?”

“If Mattingly gets nominated for secretary of commerce, there will be hearings. He can’t risk a Clarence Thomas, having someone from his past come up and start accusing him of misconduct in office or worse—and I’m not referring to sexual misconduct. He may have sent Lisa to find out what, if anything, you remembered. It would seem natural. She’d come crying to you with a sad story about something. She’d get around to the Germans and your report in due course. There you’d be, two former colleagues, two women, talking about old times.”

“And then what?”

“Maybe nothing. If her take on you was that you were no threat, that would be it. Whatever story of so-called national importance she had would fizzle. Maybe she’d call you back and tell you she’d found someone to talk to at The New York Times, but thanks anyway.”

“And if she thought I had information? I don’t, but what if all she had was her own paranoia?”

“I don’t know,” Jacques said. “Maybe you’d have an unfortunate accident.”

All my life, I’d gone around imagining so many ways I could die accidentally. Going for a run in the park, I’d routinely picture myself being attacked by a swarm of bees, tripping over a tree root and smashing my head, getting run over by an out-of-control in-line skater. This was the moment I comprehended the difference between anxiety and actual fear: the idea of being killed in a so-called accident didn’t just preoccupy me, it dizzied me. I deeply regretted the Sancerre.

Huff touched my arm. I assumed unspoken kindness until he said, “Something I want to tell you.” He exchanged looks with Jacques, and Jacques shrugged what I took to mean Up to you. “I was married,” Huff said.

Since he seemed to be waiting for me to respond, I managed, “I didn’t know that.”

“She worked for the Agency. An op. Sometimes we got to work together. But in eighty-six, she was in Bucharest. I was in La Paz.” He picked up his spoon and began rotating it back and forth, tapping first the bottom on the table, then the top. “I’ll make a long story short. Mattingly was in Bucharest a few times. I hear he cultivated her, you know, to get something. Probably dirt on the chief of station, but that’s a guess, what a friend of hers thought. He did the usual routine. Charmed her. Slept with her. Got what he wanted. Dropped her. She killed herself six weeks later.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Maybe it had nothing to do with him,” Huff said to the spoon.

“But you think it did?”

“Yeah. I lost her. After that, the icing on the cake is that when your spouse commits suicide, that’s it for your career at the Agency. Wherever you are, that’s where you stay. You’re not going anyplace higher. So let’s say I had a grudge. When I got asked about being an adviser to Spy Guys, I had you and Oliver checked out. It sounded like you could’ve gotten a raw deal, but that’s life. What interested me was that Mattingly was the one who signed your death warrant. So bottom line? I never cared about your raw deal. When you asked me about Lisa Golding, I said to myself, Hmmm. Didn’t mean much, a little strange, but who knows. You worked for Mattingly and maybe in the course of the events, I could find something I could use against him. That’s why I asked Jacques to see you.”

“Thank you for telling me.” I tried to imagine a marriage in which a couple could be split up for a year or more, and what it had been like for his wife to have been stuck in what must have been a hellhole, Ceausescu’s Romania. I couldn’t.

“You’re welcome,” he said. “I didn’t feel sorry for you.”

“Getting back to the subject at hand,” Jacques broke in.

Huff didn’t look as if he thought this was rude. They seemed to be waiting for me, so I asked, “Why didn’t Lisa ever call me back?”

“Could be she was acting on her own,” Jacques replied. “Maybe she lost interest. Maybe Mattingly found out she was trying to get you to tell her what you knew, so he called her off. He might have decided it was better to risk your knowing something than to get rid of you. You might not realize the import of what you knew. On the other hand, you make your living writing a TV show about the Agency. You’re on record saying you worked there. This is an age of conspiracy as well as conspiracy theories. Your accidental death could raise questions that might lead to his name being brought in.”

I took a long, shaky breath. “Do you think it’s likely Lisa was working on her own? Or that she broke with him for some reason and that…” I swallowed.

“That he killed her?” Huff completed my sentence.

“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.”

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?”