Past Perfect (12 page)

“I gave her my cell phone number.”

I waited. She’d never been the kind of mother who posted her agenda in letters the size of the big E on the eye chart. I wanted to see what she was getting to. To be fair, maybe she didn’t have an agenda. Maybe she was just thinking. Her lips were pursed. When she did that, the tiny wrinkles deepened. They looked like a child’s drawing of the rays around the sun. I felt trapped, sitting there on the couch, having nothing to do but look at the lines in her skin. Finally she spoke: “So did she call the next day?”

“No.” Maybe I snapped.

“Did she ever?”

“No,” I said, more evenly. “I haven’t heard from her again. She seems to have dropped out of sight. Maybe she changed her mind about wanting to talk to me. But something could have happened to her. I’m kind of worried.”

“You don’t have a number where you can — ”

“There’s an ex-CIA operative who is Spy Guys’s technical adviser. He gave me her home and cell. I tried them. Nothing. And he said she hadn’t been seen lately at her house.”

“Did you leave a message? Tell her you’re concerned?”

“No. I probably watch too many of my own shows. I called from pay phones.” My mother gave me her sweet almost-smile and nodded: I understand. “I was nervous about… you know. Everything.”

“Katie, is this more about helping someone who might be in trouble? Or is it finding out why you were fired?”

“Truthfully? It has nothing to do with altruism. I need to know why. I was doing good work and thought I was in line for a promotion. What happened to me was an injustice. I want to say ‘gross injustice’ but that’s so overused. How about ‘huge injustice’?”

“Have you asked yourself why it means so much to you? Gross injustice, huge injustice, it happened —what? —fifteen years ago?”

“Mom, can’t you accept that I just need to know?”

“Of course I can accept it.” She paused for so long that in a script I’d have had to write: [LONG BEAT]. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“I’d like your opinion. Do you think Lisa was lying?”

“About what?”

“About anything, for God’s sake.” That was not me at my most pleasant. “Sorry.”

She nodded at the apology. “There’s a pretty good shot she wasn’t telling the truth,” my mother said. “If she’s as inventive as you say she is, why couldn’t she call up Anderson Cooper or someone like that and tell him directly what her matter of national importance is?”

“What do you think she wanted from me?”

“I have no idea. I have no real sense of this Lisa other than that she was fun to shop with and that she lied. Possibly her call was the opening move of some sort of practical joke. But I don’t think so. That’s different from the type of lying you experienced from her in the past. Putting something over on someone in the practical joke sense is an act of aggression. Look, I just don’t know, Katie. It is possible she’s delusional and in this so-called matter of national importance, she’s determined that your having a TV connection means you’re a very powerful person who has entrée to every mover and shaker in the world.”

“Do you think if she believes that she could be dangerous to someone?”

“If she’s delusional? Sure. As a psychiatrist, but more as a mother, I’d feel much better if you stayed away from this Lisa.”

JUST BECAUSE MY LAST glimpse of Benton Mattingly had been of him watching me clean out my office as two security guys stood guard didn’t mean I was to be totally cut off from him, never to hear about him again. Ben was a man in the news, even if it was often in the social columns standing next to Deedee, she of the big decibels and huge inheritance.

Through the years, even after Adam and I moved back to New York, I bought The Washington Post on Sundays, hoping to see his picture. I was also a regular in the research section of the library. Once search engines became a fact of life, I made a macro of “Benton Mattingly” so I could check him out in less than a second. Now and then a day would go by when I’d forget to do it, and I’d feel proud of myself: See? I have so much to do there isn’t time for me to waste being obsessed by a man who had shown zero desire to obsess over me. Later, when Google Alerts came along, Ben’s name would pop into my e-mail whenever it appeared on the Internet.

It’s not as if I thought about him all the time. No one had to tell me, “Get a life.” I had one. TV writer, and not just “Written by Katherine Schottland,” but with a separate credit, “Based on the novel by …” I was an insider in the world of New York-based TV production. I was a wife and, after a few difficulties in the fertility area, mother. I had friends, extended family, two well-behaved (thanks to Adam) dogs, a beagle and a Newfoundland. I belonged to two book groups and was a volunteer math tutor one night a week at a church in East Harlem. So I wasn’t a loser stuck in the past. I wouldn’t turn out to be one of those osteoporotic women at her fiftieth high school reunion still waiting for That Certain Someone to notice her, except Certain never showed because he’d dropped dead the year before.

So I knew that Ben had left the Agency a couple of years after I had. No great shock. No doubt he had finally accepted that the Cold War was kaput. Having been one of the experts who thought it would never end, he wasn’t exactly in line for the Agency’s directorship.

He started a business, Mattingly Associates, advising corporate clients how to operate in the former communist countries of Europe. I tried to believe the company’s name was Deedee’s idea, because a) it was banal and b) it sounded like it was made up of a bunch of people associating with Mattingly, without Mattingly necessarily being around. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, but his name was in the first sentence of every press release. If nothing else, Mattingly Associates was committed to PR.

In 2000, he left to become president of Euro-fone, with offices in Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, and London. I’d thought, Now, with his big corporate salary and stock options, he can be free from Deedee. On the other hand, maybe she’d bought the company for him. One of the articles about him remarked it was no wonder he was in the communications business. He was fluent in seven languages: French, German, Italian, Russian, Czech, Polish, and Romanian. I was amazed, though whether it was true or not was another story. During the eighties, he had gone back and forth to Germany every couple of months for the Agency. But the only time I heard him speak anything but English was when we once had dinner at a bistro. He ordered in French and the waiter understood him. Personally, I thought he sounded a little mushy-mouthed, as if he’d learned the language in a former French colony that had been granted independence in 1953, but the waiter acted as though he thought Ben incredibly cool. Maybe that’s because he came in every six months with a different CIA cutie.

As far as I could tell, even though Euro-fone was based in Europe, Ben got back to Washington fairly often. There was rarely a benefit or gala that did not produce a photo of him and Deedee, or at least their names in boldface. The big Bush administration/social conservative events were not his style, so there was no “Seen on his knees at the prayer breakfast beside the Speaker of the House …” For a political man in a political city, Ben had survived by being smart, charming, marrying well, and remaining nonpartisan. So two months earlier, I’d been more than surprised when I read he was the lead candidate for secretary of commerce after what’s-his-name went back to his money.

Talk about surprised: I was surprised that after having spent nearly an hour with my mother, I still was crazy enough to sit in the parking lot at the studio and call Euro-fone in Vienna and ask to speak with Mr. Mattingly. I asked in the rich three-hundred-word vocabulary I’d managed to retain from German Studies 101 and 104. The woman on the phone replied in English: “Mr. Mattingly is in Prague. I can put you through to his secretary there.” Surprised? I was über-surprised, or however you say that in Czech, when his Prague secretary said, “Mr. Mattingly is late for a meeting.” Then, without missing a beat, she went on: “But he said he’ll call you back within the hour.”

He did. “Katie.” Naturally, he knew he didn’t have to go into a “This Is Ben” song and dance.

While waiting the hour for his call, I’d taped a writing —DO NOT DISTURB!! sign onto my office door and pulled out the jack of the phone on my desk in case anyone didn’t get the message. I’d learned from watching actors work that the best spontaneity is often meticulously rehearsed. I went through my opening a few times so I wouldn’t blurt out Sorry to call you. I know how busy you must be and I hate to disturb you. I wouldn’t even allow myself a I wouldn’t have called you if it wasn’t important. I simply said, “Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. Ben, you knew Lisa Golding, didn’t you?”

There was a slight pause. “Sure. She was in the Welcome Wagon.” Agency employees, past and present, had euphemisms for every aspect of CIA life. For instance, at Langley itself, the Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control unit was called WIN-PAC, but on the rare occasion it was referred to on the phone or at an outside gathering, it was Shangri-la. “She’s the one with that chalk-on-a-blackboard voice, right?”

“Right.” I was so nervous I’d forgotten to chuckle at his remark. Too late now. Too bad. I never knew whether or not he needed it, but people always felt obliged to give Ben positive feedback. Someone else’s marginally amusing statement could remain unacknowledged, but Ben’s would invariably bring out a laugh worthy of a Chris Rock routine.

“Do you know if she’s still with her old employer?” I asked.

“You know I can’t — ”

“Sorry. I should have remembered. I’m out of practice.”

“Don’t tell me that,” Ben said. “I’ve seen your show. Cute.” Cute? A backhanded compliment, WASP understatement? Or a mild slap in the face, barely felt yet still stinging? It was one thing for me to trivialize what I did, another to hear it from Ben. Well, here I was again, in old form, not knowing where I stood with him, afraid to ask for fear of learning the truth. “There’s something up with Lisa?” he inquired.

“Yes. Or at least I don’t know. That’s why I’m calling.” My heart was banging against my chest as if it wanted to get his attention. “I got a call from her a couple of weeks ago. I hadn’t heard a word from her since” —my throat did that involuntary pullback that’s written as GULP! in comic books —“since I left the office. She sounded seriously stressed.”

“Isn’t she rather theatrical?” Ben asked. “If memory serves, I think she had a theater background.” Wow, I loved his voice. Deep, husky, what’s described in espionage novels as a voice “cured by years of smoking Gauloises and drinking Laphroaig,” except Ben had never smoked, and, in a city where breakfast meetings were prized or scorned as the only time of mandatory sobriety, he drank hardly at all. “But I suppose theater people get stressed like everybody else. Did she talk to you about… business?”

I didn’t hear him panting to know the answer. The impression I got was of someone who, having taken a phone call from a person out of the past, was now stuck with being polite. “Well, she said it was about a matter of national importance. I was pretty short with her—I was in a hurry. But I think I let her know I was willing to help.” I didn’t say anything about Lisa being willing to tell me why I’d gotten the ax. “Anyhow,” I continued, “she said she’d get back to me the next day.”

“And you didn’t hear from her?”

“Not a peep.”

“Do you remember who her friends were, or anything about her background?”

I’m not a moron, I wanted to tell him, but instead I politely said, “I wasn’t able to find anything that would lead to her. And as far as her friends went, I can’t remember. She did talk about someone named Tara years ago, but obviously that isn’t much of a help. I’m tainted by having been fired so I have no old colleagues I could call. I took a chance on you.” I took a deep breath and added, “I’m a little surprised you got back to me, Ben. But I’m grateful.”

“Katie, how could I not?”

To avoid going gulp! again and choking on sentiment, I quickly said, “Do you have any way of getting a reading on her or—”

“I can’t use any contacts who are still at the organization to find out where she is. You know that. I do know a couple of civilians, so to speak, who know as much as can be known. I can ask them. But to be brutally honest, Katie, I don’t think she was at a level in the corporate structure that attracted much notice. I’ll do what I can. If I learn anything I’ll call you.”

“Thank you.” Despite all my rehearsals, I hadn’t thought about a way to say good-bye.

“How are you doing, other than being rich and famous?” Give me a break, I thought as I was savoring the remark. “Still married?”

“Still married,” I said. “And I have a ten-year-old son.”

“Great! Okay, Katie, I’ll do due diligence and if I hear anything, I’ll get back to you.” As I was about to tell him I’d heard he was up for secretary of commerce and wasn’t that great, he said, “Bye.” In the old days, even after we broke up and I’d married Adam, he always ended whatever conversations we had with “See you around.”

“Bye, Ben,” I said, but he’d already hung up.

AFTER SPEAKING TO BEN,I got mildly hysterical: a rush of adrenaline—gotta fight, gotta flee—but what actually occurred was that I fused with my office chair, like an extra cushion. At the same time, half the water content of my body mysteriously evaporated. Talk about no sweat: mouth so dry my tongue could have disintegrated into sawdust. Hands like emery boards. I might have sat motionless till I entered menopause, but a production assistant finally knocked on my door twice. Without opening it, she blared, “Katie! The CIA adviser Huff! He’s on the line!”

“Okay.” I tried to sound soothing, or at least soothed.

“What?”

“I said—”

“What? I can’t hear you, Katie.” I stood and opened the door to Toni Wiener, the most conscientious production assistant who had ever worked in film or TV. She had a perfect oval face, a serious expression, long blond hair, and bore a striking resemblance to Botticelli’s famous Venus on the half shell, if Venus dressed in black leather microskirts and scoop-neck tank tops. Unlike Venus, Toni had a tattoo of a monarch butterfly, one wing near the top of each breast, so it looked as if it were flying out of her bra. “I was yelling because your phone’s dead!”