Past Perfect (8 page)

From the start, Huff made me nervous. I was never sure what he knew about me, other than at one time I had been a writer at the Agency. Had “writer” sounded so boring that he never checked me out? Or did Huff know everything, especially all that I didn’t? Every time I spoke to him I was dying to ask, What happened to me? Do you know? Can you find out? Except I always remembered my mother telling me in fourth or fifth grade, “If you think somebody’s a little creepy, don’t tell yourself he’s not. Stay away from him. Trust your judgment.” So I had never asked what he knew because I sensed there was something strange about him.

Huff ran his tongue back and forth over his top teeth. The mannerism was especially disconcerting because operatives were trained to suppress any personal characteristics that might hint of discomfort. I’d assumed he was made of sterner stuff. “Fine,” he said. “What do you want me to get on her?”

“Anything you can. I’d like to get in touch with her.”

“Why?”

“Why?” I repeated. Why was he asking “Why?” Curiosity? Hostility? I flashed a girly smile. “I want to contact Lisa because she’s material,” I started to explain, talking too fast, smiling too broadly. “She dealt with brave people who risked everything they had for the Agency. And she probably dealt with others who were the scum of the earth, but who we owed big-time. I want to get in touch with her because she’s capable of noticing even the smallest detail of a person’s style. And most of all, because she would make a terrific minor character for the show.”

Huff shrugged. “I’ll make a few calls.” But I could see from the way his mouth pulled to the side that he knew something was odd with this assignment. He just had no clue as to what it was.

The remote possibility of being deprived of his annual fee as well as his personal panorama of the Dani Barber boobs must have posed a sufficient threat because Huff called that evening, minutes after I got home.

“Your Lisa Golding is out of the Agency,” he said.

“As of when?” I had started to set the table, so I stood in the middle of the kitchen with a phone in one hand and a bouquet of knives, forks, and spoons in the other. I was about to set down the implements on the counter, but I didn’t want Huff to hear the housewifey clink of silverware.

“She left in December, a year and a half ago.”

“Retired or fired?”

“Retired. Not working anywhere else as per the latest info.” His words were so clipped he sounded like an early version of computer-generated speech.

“Do you have an address for her?” He gave me an address in the Adams-Morgan section of Washington, an area that had gone from decaying town houses/has potential when I’d lived there to unequivocally hip. When I’d known her, she’d lived elsewhere, in a great house in an up-and-coming neighborhood just outside Georgetown. Obviously she still had a sense of style and real estate smarts, plus money far beyond a CIA salary to indulge these gifts. “Do you know if she rents or owns?”

“Owns.”

“What about a phone number?” He gave me her home and cell numbers. “Did you happen to pick up any news or gossip about her?”

“Just that she doesn’t seem to be in her house. And nobody has a clue as to where she is.”

IF A PERSON from your past suddenly reappears and offers to change your life, or at least your understanding of it, you’d expect that person would be someone who’d been important to you. Like that witty, silky-haired boyfriend from senior year who dropped you for a lute player from the High School of Performing Arts. Or to jump ahead ten years, like Benton Mattingly.

What you don’t expect in the coming-back-into-your-life department is someone who didn’t mean much in the first place. Like Lisa Golding. She was one of those people who had been stuck between acquaintance and friend. Someone with a discerning eye to shop with. Someone eager to go to the theater—and it didn’t have to be a Kennedy Center revival. Someone whose tales of being propositioned by powerful men were either amusing lies or tiny naked truths bedecked in outré clothes. Someone you would never open your heart to.

Lisa had come back into my life pleading urgently for my help.

Then she’d said, “It can wait till tomorrow.” I’d been straining to recall something more I could use to track her down: who her parents were, where she’d grown up, names of friends. All I could come up with was that once she’d told me she’d been an army brat and had lived all over the world. However, another evening, at a bar with a bunch of people from the office, I’d heard her talk of her father, who had been a highly paid international troubleshooter for American-something-Airlines, Express—and that her family had moved some ridiculous number of times —thirty or forty— by the time she’d been sent off to boarding school in Switzerland at age fourteen.

Again I Googled, this time like a woman possessed, which I guess I was. All I was able to come up with was more of the same, an impossibly long list of Goldings —military Goldings, American Express Goldings, American Airlines Goldings, American Standard Goldings, Bank of America Goldings. There were Goldings all over the world who might or might not be related to Lisa.

A couple of days after my meeting with Huff, the name Tara floated into my consciousness. Somewhere in Lisa’s genial babble, there was Tara the gourmet cook, brilliant golfer, daredevil skier, and the sweetest, most loyal friend a person could have. But I’d never met Tara and had no idea what her job or her last name was. I sat at my computer for about ten minutes staring at “Tara” in the Google box, trying to bring up another association, sensing that “amazing swing” wouldn’t get me far. I squeezed my eyes shut to concentrate. When I opened them, it hit me that Lisa could have created Tara, the way kids invent imaginary friends. Then I tried the phone numbers Huff had given me. All I got were generic recorded messages to leave a message.

So I finished making dinner for Adam and me. I was still as far from finding Lisa as ever. Farther, because now I knew from Huff that she’d dropped out of sight. Had she phoned me with someone holding a gun to her head? Or as part of some crackpot scheme she cooked up? Should I be as frightened for her as I was beginning to be? Should I be frightened for myself?

Well, at least I could agonize and not give any thought to dinner. The advantage of being married to a guy whose mother served green Jell-O mayonnaise squares with radish and carrot circle “surprises” as the salad course was that Adam appreciated simple cooking. My salad was baby spinach from a bag and sliced mushrooms from a box with a thirty-second lemon juice and olive oil dressing. I defrosted a container of my father’s Bolognese sauce, dumped it over a bowl of fettuccine. Voilà, dinner was served.

Sitting across from Adam, I knew that if I continued to flake out about what Huff had told me about Lisa, my husband would pick up my remoteness. Either he’d be annoyed or start wondering if I’d gone from obsessed to unglued. He was eying me as I tossed the salad with excessive gaiety. My vivacious act wasn’t playing.

So I went into my genial bit—smiling with an excessive number of teeth. I also crinkled my eyes adorably. “You know what I need from you?” I asked him.

“What?” Cautious, looking at my smiley face almost the way he would at an orangutang trying to cadge another banana.

“I need advice about something for the show.”

“Oh.” A slight upturn of the right side of his mouth told me he was pleased, or maybe just relieved, that what I wanted had nothing to do with Lisa or my years at the CIA. “What kind of an animal could someone use who’s trying to terrify His Highness —not that he’s terrifiable.”

“I don’t know. Depends. A lion, a — ”

“No. Something small. They have to sneak it into his bedroom. Like the scorpion in James Bond’s bed in … I think it was Diamonds Are Forever. Except obviously it can’t be a scorpion.”

Adam pierced a few leaves of baby spinach with his fork but was too busy thinking to actually eat them. “How about a vampire bat?”

I nodded. It was a good idea, but now, being in possession of actual information, I’d have to write it into a script.

“The common vampire bat can walk, which looks pretty strange,” he said. I nodded. “But there was something recently published, from Cornell, I think. They can run too. Like this.” He demonstrated by elongating his arms. “See, my arms are the forelegs. They’re strong. Vampire bats run more like a gorilla using its arms. Not like a dog that uses its back legs. It would be nice and creepy.”

“Great! It’s just what I needed.” What was great was that suddenly it also came to me that there might be one more lead to Lisa.

I kept nodding and smiling and half listening while he told me how vampire bats have a bum rap, that they’re kind of shy. Nice to each other too: after a new baby is born, other bats help by feeding the mother.

When he finished I thanked him profusely and served up the pasta. “I think that old box of Len Deighton novels is down in the crypt,” I muttered a few minutes later. “I’ll need to run downstairs for a couple of minutes.”

“Okay.”

Everyone in our co-op called the storage center in the basement “the crypt.” Each apartment came with a caged-off space about the size of a prison cell where they could keep anything from a camp trunk to an old dining room set they’d loved until the new decorator informed them that sets of anything were middle class. Adam lingered over his usual dessert, two Mallomars. Each night, he’d patiently lift off a segment of the thin chocolate coating from the marshmallow cushion with his front teeth. As I left, he made a few grunts I interpreted as, I’ll load the dishwasher.

Forget the Len Deighton novels. I was after something else. I took the elevator to the basement and walked through the long corridor past the laundry room. The lights in there were out now. The washers along the right wall and dryers on the left stood like opposing armies waiting for dawn to attack. The comforting baby-powder scent of fabric softener lingered in the damp air, but as always, the basement was spooky. As I turned the corner and walked down the long corridor toward the crypt, I started singing “Born in the U.S.A.,” which had always been my have-courage anthem, even after someone informed me it was meant to be ironic. The song drowned out the creaks and squeaks that came from behind the old brown-painted walls as well as the gurglings in the pipes that ran the length of the ceiling; those squeals and glub-glubbing always sounded to me like someone whose head was being forced underwater.

When I opened the heavy fire door to the crypt, the baby-powder scent was overpowered by the storage room’s perpetual stink: dead mouse, or rotting wood from some tenant’s flea market side chair. The super had hung air fresheners —plastic pineapples —on several of the chain-link walls of the storage area, but they merely made matters worse. The freshener/stink combo became what’s usually described in horror and mystery novels as “the sweet stench of rotting flesh.” I prayed I wouldn’t inadvertently tread on a dying mouse.

I began to breathe through my mouth, which effectively ended my “Born in the U.S.A.” bravado. What was really scaring me was what I’d come to the crypt to find —my notes on the reports I’d written for the CIA. Stupid to have done something like that? Illegal also? Sure. Yet I’d come home to my (later Adam’s and my) apartment in D.C. from Langley and two or three nights a week jot down short summaries of what I’d worked on during the day. The question did occur to me at the time: Are you totally insane? Yes, though not totally. But at least 90 percent. Before I’d settled on home scribbling, I’d even pondered tearing a rough draft of my reports into sections of ten pages, Scotch-taping them to the small of my back, and saying, “See you tomorrow!” or “Have a great weekend!” to the security guards who checked through our handbags and attaché cases as we left. But I worried that the computer paper had been treated with a chemical that would sound alarms throughout the building, or that there was a secret meter that measured how many printer pages a person had used and then either passed along or shredded. Besides, a random crinkle of paper during no-coat season could give me away.

Was that what had gotten me fired? Did someone sneak into my apartment in Washington and find my summaries? Almost definitely not. To the best of my knowledge, no one ever looked, much less discovered what I was doing. If they had, I wouldn’t have just gotten fired. I’d have been interrogated and prosecuted and they would have confiscated the pages.

I was never completely clear on why I was doing it. Years later, after I’d written Spy Guys and the TV version was in development, I decided it had been my artistic ego that compelled me to make those notes. Deep down, I wasn’t a spook, I wasn’t a geopolitical analyst: I was a writer. Okay, a writer, not an author. My work at the Agency wasn’t going to make F. Scott Fitzgerald turn over in his grave from jealousy. I was merely a CIA word wiz, clarifying and occasionally enlivening other people’s communiqués and ideas.

However, the key word was I. Or to use the possessive pronoun, mine. Mine, the way a three-year-old clutches a toy to her chest and shrieks the word when another kid gets that acquisitive gleam in her eye. Yet, my report, “In Transit: The Likelihood of the Hungarian Government Opening the Border to East German Refugees,” was not mine. I knew that. Yet it was mine, although my name never appeared. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board would never put down the report and sigh, Geez, that Katherine Schottland sure made that paragraph on the inferior quality of East German diesel fuel come alive! Even though I understood the reports really weren’t mine, I couldn’t let them simply disappear into the great government information maw.

I knew then that if I asked my mother her opinion about what all this mine business was about, she’d turn around and pose a few questions in her offhand, I’m-just-a-curious-mom way. (It was a point of pride with her not to be intrusive, i.e., crazy, like other psychiatrist-parents with their Let Me Tell You What You’re Thinking games. Of course, she loved to tell us what everyone else was thinking: just not the family.) Anyway, I’d wind up giving her a few off-the-cuff answers and suddenly I’d know something about myself I didn’t want to know. So I never asked her opinion.