Past Perfect (9 page)

I opened the padlock on the storage area. Agency-trained enough not to make the combination something obvious, like the year we got married or the last four digits of an old phone number, I’d chosen 1-8-2-1. That was the year James Fenimore Cooper wrote what was supposed to have been the first spy novel —which he called, with an appealing directness, The Spy. I figured that if Adam and I simultaneously became senile and couldn’t remember the number, we could always look it up by the title.

Except the lock wouldn’t open. I must have been treading along the edge of hysteria without knowing it because I started yanking on it, pulling so hard that my hands became sweaty. I envisioned losing my grip on the lock and falling backward, my head crashing onto the cement floor. Adam would come looking for me sooner (if he wanted sex) or later (if he was in his recliner studying the centerfold of Neuropathology of Primates), but by then I’d be in an irreversible coma. I took a relaxation breath, let it out slooowly, then leaned down to try the combination again. Oh, the little red line was directly above the 2. I moved the dial to the 1 and the shackle popped out. I opened the high, chain-link door and walked into our little storage space.

To look at it, you’d think most of the Grainger-Schottland net worth had been invested in wicker baskets and rattan boxes. They were arranged, unintentionally, into stacks of differing heights, some as tall as I. All they’d have needed to have gone into the window of a funky store in a college town would be a few strands of beads, silver earrings of doves, and those ugly brown leather sandals male graduate students with repulsive big toes insist on wearing.

I saw the baskets with the usual boxes of checks dating back seven years, with Nicky’s first everything—shoes, baby spoon, blond curl from first haircut, Pat the Bunny, Winnie the Pooh potty seat—as if I were planning to make a bizarre collage to replace him in his room when he left home to get his own apartment. I inched my way behind some medium-size boxes and lifted a sheet off an old treadmill I’d given up on. Books and books. Both Adam’s and my sets of Lord of the Rings from high school, our college texts, his graduate school tomes, the novels, classics as well as espionage, I would never read again but couldn’t part with, his books on wilderness adventures, all of which seemed to have titles with colons, like Ice: Recollections of My Year in Ultima Thule with a Rabid Wolf.

The only books I cared about at that moment were my economics textbooks. Following page 107, a number I chose for its arbitrariness, were the notes I had made when I came home each night after working on the final draft of a report for the Office of Eastern Europe Analysis. I’d stuck one page of notes between every few pages of the books. I picked up A History of Economic Thought from Aristotle through Friedman and said to myself, Holy shit, I once actually knew this stuff. Now all I could do was notice that its covers, like those of the other texts, were no longer slightly bulgy by the addition of my notes; over the years the weight of the books on top had pressed them until they’d regained their original shape.

I clutched the book against my chest and, since for two seconds I hadn’t felt anxiety over anything, I started worrying that either my notes or the book’s pages were not on acid-free paper and that I’d leaf to page 107 and find dust. That not being sufficient, I worried that the Agency had traced Lisa’s call to my cell phone and had planted some sort of device in the heels of all my shoes when Adam and I were at work and right now its operatives were looking at a diagram of my building. Seeing me as a blinking red light in the basement storage area, they’d already dispatched someone to kidnap me to a safe house and question me—What do you know about Lisa and when did you know it?—while doing the pull-the-fingernails-out-with-pliers business. Or maybe they’d just kill me in situ.

Since my mother had never berated me for having an overactive imagination, I’d learned to give myself the business. Like now: it was one thing to envision imminent doom, another to picture it in such detail that I could almost see the dirt-blackened elbows of an Agency operative shaking the chain-link gate of our storage area in the crypt to get at me. From there it took only an instant to conjure up the op’s hand pulling metal shears from his pocket, then cutting. Each time a link split, it made a sharp clanking sound.

Stop this craziness! I yelled at myself silently. I wondered whether it was mainly screenwriters who saw their worst, crusted-elbow fantasies in high def, and then felt obliged to add sound effects. Or did everyone with rampant anxiety live their nightmares in such sickening detail?

But then I thought, All kidding aside, it didn’t have to be my hyper imagination. Maybe I was just picturing a very real threat: if Lisa had troubling information, she might have led people to me simply by making a phone call. And those people didn’t necessarily have to be from the Agency, or from the FBI acting on the Agency’s behalf. It could be some rogue op from any part of the U.S. intelligence community. Or an agent acting on behalf of a foreign government. Right then my esophagus decided to do a couple of spasms, causing acid reflux à la my father’s pasta sauce.

Talk about parents. It was so embarrassing: me, the daughter of a shrink, having such banal anxieties. At least anxieties had a nice, normal, urban ring to it, unlike paranoia, which always seemed to me an affliction suffered by people in red states who wouldn’t go to movies with subtitles.

Maybe I was being overly sanguine about the man of my nightmares. He didn’t have to be a representative of any country, like Russia’s KGB or Italy’s CESIS or Turkey’s MIT. He could be Mafia. Or a random maniac with enough technical expertise to trace a call from Lisa to me. Crazy, I told myself.

Crazy. That very instant, I heard a strange basement sound. Oh my God! Footsteps. Clutching an economics textbook against my chest, I held my breath. And heard it again. A shhh sound, like sneakers shuffling over a rug. Except there weren’t any rugs in the basement. Someone breathing through a gas mask then?

I had to laugh at myself. Except I couldn’t. And I couldn’t tell myself that shhh was a mouse noise, unless there were a great, Busby Berkeley chorus line of mice. I would not think, Rats. Cut it out! The sweat from my palms suffused with invisible dust and suddenly the cover of the book felt so slimy I had to set it down.

Was that the sound again? It could be someone with gum-sole shoes on the damp floor of the laundry room, pacing, waiting for me to emerge. Or thinking up a plan of attack. A weapon: that’s what I had to have. I peered around, but we hadn’t stored any tables I could rip the leg off of to use as a bludgeon. I pictured a set of old ski poles, in case I had to stab someone, then remembered we’d decided it was cheaper to rent equipment than buy. What idiocy! Like the stuff I wrote into Spy Guys. Real danger required a real defense, and I didn’t have any. Shhh again, definitely. A real sound, not a product of a fevered imagination. My hands, drenched now, trembling, managed to grab the lock off the gate of the storage area. But there was no gizmo for it to go into, so I couldn’t lock the gate from the inside so he couldn’t get to me.

Frantically, I began shoving my notes back into the textbooks, ripping a few pages as I searched out page 107. Hurry. Put everything back where it was: that made sense. Then I could cover the treadmill, grab a basket of 1999 check stubs, padlock our storage area, and stroll out. Say Oh hi, casually, as I passed whoever was outside the door. Except what if instead of a hi in return, he grabbed my neck with one huge, filthy hand and squeezed. I wasn’t the type to write anything like, “She sniffed the scent of fear rising from her own body.” Except it was rising and smelled like an unsuccessful attempt at roasting garlic.

Enough! I had to face this. Leaving the treadmill uncovered and the gate to our storage area ajar, I headed out. Then I stopped.

The closer I got to the door, the clearer I heard shhh. I was so scared my mind retreated into the safety of blankness. I couldn’t even pray. Maybe I managed a silent Dear God. I yanked open the door, prepared to knee someone in the nuts, or go for thumbs in eyeballs. The corridor outside the crypt was empty. Someone had been in the basement, though. In the laundry room. With each rotation, the drum of the dryer went shhh.

BACK INSIDE THE CRYPT, pretending not to be humiliated, I returned to my old textbooks. I would have taken them up to the apartment to read through my old notes, but I didn’t want to watch Adam’s clear eyes turn opaque as I strolled by him with ten mildewed econ texts. Adam, true, had never known about my note-taking, but with one look at my face he’d know whatever I was after had nothing to do with the ten-pound Macroeconomics and Growth Theory in the crook of my arm. Plus, I’d told him I’d gone for my Len Deighton novels. So I opted for the crypt. Surprisingly, there was cell phone reception in the thick-walled basement, so I called and told him, “I can’t find the damn books. But I got a second wind and I want to straighten up a little—throw out some of the junk I’ve been saving since practically kindergarten.”

I folded the sheet that had been over the treadmill so it became a cushion and sat atop a large wicker box to examine my books. The first two were from the end of 1988 and, blessedly, my notes had not disintegrated, although the paper I’d used seemed to have degraded; its texture was somewhere between The New York Times and regular Charmin. In ’88, I’d spent a lot of time on a project predicting what the effects of the Soviets’ withdrawal from Afghanistan would be on the countries of Eastern Europe. If that was a clue to what Lisa had wanted from me, I couldn’t figure out what it meant.

I found 1989 in one of the books from my seminar “Labor, Industry, and the International Economy,” one of the few bright spots of my final semester at Connecticut College, which included getting rejected from every MBA program I’d applied to. (When I came home for spring break, my mother hugged me excessively, kissed me a lot on the forehead, and called me “my sweetie.” My father told me Harvard and Columbia wouldn’t know a good thing if they fell over it. Maddy shrugged and told me, “If you’d really wanted an MBA, you would have applied to at least one school where you had a shot.”)

As I remembered, I’d been writing up a storm in 1989 at the Agency. Besides all the brouhaha in Eastern Europe, I’d also been doing some editing work for the Office of Transitional Issues between April and June, their writers being overwhelmed by explaining the massacre at Tiananmen Square. I skimmed my notes on that, sadly unable to recall who Hu Yaobang and most of the other names were. Then I tried to decipher what I’d jotted down about my work on the rapidly disintegrating Soviet bloc. Naturally I couldn’t make sense of most of it. In 1989 I must have known what “ert G 2 fin” meant, but all I could do was guess that it had something to do with Germany and Finland, or Germany (East? West?) to finance something or other.

I shivered and rubbed my arms. They felt cold and loose-skinned like an apple left too long in the fruit bin. Our building was older than most in the neighborhood of prewar apartments; ours was pre-World War I. Because of its age, the walls and foundation were so solid that no summer heat could penetrate the basement. I regretted my tank top and open sandals. My bones were chilled as if I’d caught some old-fashioned-sounding illness, the grippe or pleurisy.

I couldn’t concentrate. Besides being cold, I had a Mallomar sitting pristinely on a napkin, waiting for me in the kitchen. So at that moment I decided not to try to figure out every mysterious jotting I had made fifteen years ago. Lisa Golding was my problem. Ergo, I should look for her in my notes.

From what I could gather from them, I’d worked with Lisa twice in ’89. The first instance, in February, was when I’d interviewed her about the daughter of General Corbajram, the highest-ranking general in the Albanian army. I was never let in on what aid or information Drita Corbajram had given that made us decide she deserved to be settled discreetly in the United States. All I was supposed to do was to write a report on why she had wound up running a plumbing supply store in Wilmington, Delaware, instead of being placed, as she’d requested and had been promised, in a fashion-related business in L.A… . and also what we could do, short of a well-placed bullet, to stop her from squawking and going to the media. “You wouldn’t believe that this woman wanted to go into fashion,” I recalled Lisa saying. “I mean, she was so incredibly, incredibly nearsighted that when she put on makeup she had to hold the mirror against the tip of her nose, and she wound up putting on hideous flamingo-colored lipstick like a total spastic. Check with anyone who dealt with her. We had a small L.A. sportswear company and a fabric design place ready to cooperate, but one look at her and they said, ‘Not even for my country. Not even for a fortune in money.’ It took us another six weeks to find another situation, and then we had to practically sell our souls to get the plumbing supply guy in Delaware to even sit in the same room with her.”

I sat on the folded-up sheet on top of the wicker box and tried to think up a way the daughter of a psychotic Albanian general could spring to life fifteen years after being stashed in Delaware to become, even in Lisa’s mind, a matter of “national importance.” I, whose speciality, professionally speaking, was absurd plots, could come up with nothing.

I was so cold that I decided to pass on the Mallomar and instead make a cup of hot chocolate when I got upstairs, which would cause billions of teeny flavanols to launch an immediate power surge in my immune system and stave off any incipient sniffle.

I read on. The second time I worked with Lisa that year was in December, a month after the opening of the Berlin Wall. I was putting together a report on what had become of our “resources” in East Germany, the people in that government who had been working for us. Lisa had been charged with settling three of them.

You would think that by the age of thirty-nine and a half, I’d have figured out how to think, or at least to get myself mentally from A to Z. Or even A to B. Instead, teeth chattering, I kept repeating three East Germans, three East Germans silently, over and over. Was I waiting for my thoughts (like a TV script) to SLOW DISSOLVE and suddenly, there the three of them would be, in focus, doing whatever they did for the camera of my mind? Naturally, nothing came to me except that one of the Germans wound up in Cincinnati. As for what any of the three had done for us, I thought one might have been a double agent, an East German spy who was actually working for the United States.